Ka-BLUE-y! Election 2026 Hot Takes

In the exciting days before any Presidential or midterm election, I always allow myself a few moments to dream:  to fantasize of a scenario where my party wins everything in the battleground, expands those wins to the periphery of the battleground, and maybe even reimagines the agreed-upon battleground to score some wins in those place.  I got a taste of this kind of perfect electoral storm in the 2006 midterm and the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections, but even then it never rose to a daydream fulfillment scenario.  As November 3, 2026, approached, I speculated that conditions could be right for a "daydream fulfillment scenario", and I'll be damned if I didn't get it.  

I really doubt there will be another election in my lifetime quite as amazing as this one.  Politics and election nights are two different beasts, and for me and presumably millions of partisans like me, election nights are a sport just as football, hockey, and water polo are sports.  And for this sports fan, the 2026 midterm will go down in history next to the euphoric dopamine volcano of the Minnesota Twins taking out the Atlanta Braves in Game 7 of the iconic 1991 World Series.

With that bluster in mind, here are some of my insights in the 24 hours after the polls closed:

Sun Belt Tsunami--While the Democratic landslide of 2026 was comprehensive in nearly all 50 states, it was the American South and Southwest where the tsunami charged in from Trump's "Gulf of America" with such ferocity that it deserves to be categorized as a named tropical storm.  The carnage was unthinkable from Texas to North Carolina and most places in between.  Republicans that did hang on often hung on by low single digits.  It looks like Democrats are gonna get 260+ seats in the House but if the storm had just been just one or two points stronger, the South alone would have given Democrats 275+ seats.  It's still not fully clear what happened.  There was clearly a black voter surge, partly or mostly inspired by the gutting of the Civil Rights Act.  Hispanic voters clearly snapped back to Hillary-era levels even if the national exit polls don't fully show that.  And clearly plenty of white conservative Southerners were too demoralized to show up.  But it seems like that still falls short of telling us the full story given the breadth of the landslide.  It seems as though a healthy contingent of Southern MAGA voters changed their opinion about Trump enough to cast a ballot of no confidence against him.  Time and deeper analysis might give us more insight on the truth of this hypothesis, but if white Southern Trump supporters were legitimately compelled to change their minds about Trump in the numbers that it seems they did, it's hard to argue that that isn't the story of the night.

Blue Wave or Red Undertow?--The latter...definitely.  When I saw Hakeem Jeffries' charisma-free press conference late last night, I couldn't help but thinking that I doubted too many Victoria Broderick voters cast their ballot with this guy in mind.

Exit Polling Was Too Bearish--Some years, the national and state-level exit polling is on the nose.  Not this year.  I expect the final tabulation to decisively exceed the D+9 national electorate reflected in the 5 p.m. early exit poll release.  Similarly, I checked out the state-level exit poll releases at poll closing times and was convinced Darline Graham and Cindy Hyde-Smith had mid-to-high single-digit victories forthcoming.  As the tabulated vote came in, it was considerably more blue.  I'll still look at these early exit drops every cycle, but I won't draw conclusions from them as I did back in the late 2010s and early 2020s when they were much closer to right. 

"Polarization" Is Never as Rigid as We Think--Ever since the 50-50 election of 2000, the story in American politics is that we're a nation that's evenly and bitterly divided.  This narrative never really holds up even when elections are close because the partisan coalitions are constantly shifting.  The 50-50 electorate that chose between Gore and Bush was dramatically different demographically than the 50-50 electorate that chose between Harris and Trump nearly a quarter century later.  The 2024 cycle was a good first reminder that the dynamism of our electorate exceeds the rumored recalcitrant polarization, and the 2026 cycle's outcome was an even more neck-snapping second reminder.

Recency Bias is Blinding--Most of us in the election analysis game overvalue what's happened in the last few cycles and undervalue the power of historical patterns. Voter behavior is stubborn until it's not.  The act of governing tears apart coalitions and disperses voter enthusiasm unevenly, but that can be hard to fully internalize because recent history trains us to think voter behavior at the polls will mimic what it's been in the recent past.  I'm as guilty of it as the next guy, and my predictions vastly undershot election day results as a consequence.  It shouldn't have come as such a shock to us that a crabby midterm electorate flipped nine Senate seats from blue to red back in 2014.  And it shouldn't have come as such a shock to us that a crabby midterm electorate (probably) flipped nine Senate seats from red to blue in 2026. 

Trump's Travel Schedule Told Us Everything--We should have known things were extremely dire in the GOP polling world when Trump set foot in South Carolina and Mississippi in the last two weeks of the campaign.  Republicans were blowing smoke up our butts about how even their most embattled races were "in the margin of error", but there's no way Trump's handlers would have sent him to Mississippi if they weren't picking up on something terrifying.  That's something to keep in mind for the cycles ahead.  If we have an incumbent President making a campaign stop in Rhode Island a week before the midterm, we shouldn't try to rationalize it away.  We should brace ourselves that we're about to be annihilated by voters in a forthcoming wave election. 

"Candidate Quality" Doesn't Matter as Much as We're Told in a Bad Environment--Ashley Hinson was thought to be running the best campaign of all of the Republicans in battleground Senate races, but in the end, it didn't help her any more than Roger Marshall and Darline Graham who ran two of the worst campaigns.  You just can't overcome a tide this strong with charisma or cult of personality.  That's why, in the aftermath of digesting these results, I now suspect James Talarico would probably have still beaten John Cornyn this year....and Tim Walz would have probably been reelected Governor of Minnesota if he had run.  I'm not even convinced Ralph Norman would have beaten Annie Andrews given the comprehensive pattern of partisan backlash we saw yesterday.

AI Backlash--It seems one of the few unifying themes in American life today is that most people either hate or are scared of AI.  That's especially true if they fear a data center is gonna be constructed in their backyard, but people's antipathy extends to its more general application to the future of our species, and for very good reason.  Since Trump won the 2024 election, the AI backlash has manifested itself against him and the incumbent party.  I suspect if Harris had won two years ago, the shoe would have been on the other foot and Republicans would be the pitchfork populists rallying opposition to the technology.  This is likely to be the biggest story of the last two years of Trump's term.  For both economic competitiveness and national security reasons, AI is too big to fail.  Policymakers are gonna feel obligated to keep their foot on the gas and continue expanding the infrastructure to enable more AI so that they don't fall behind economies that are enabling more AI...and they're gonna do it whether voters like it or not.  This is really likely to be a conundrum for our nation's Governors, 30 of whom are Democrats after last night.

There Was More Going on Than the Price of Gas--One of my biggest frustrations about coverage of this election was that the Democratic wave was said to be almost entirely the byproduct of the price of gas and groceries.  Had that been true, the would-be prairie populist revolution would have reared itself in farm country, where Trump's tariffs and the price of diesel has had the heaviest impact.  Looking at those county maps of the Midwest, however, it seems as though the agricultural heartland was one of the few places where the Democratic wave largely bypassed.  That's not to say "the economy" wasn't still the largest issue, but back in 2018, Democrats had a D+9 generic ballot nationally at a time when the economy was really strong.  The election was a referendum on Trump's character and fitness for the job.  I suspect the 2026 midterm cycle was also a referendum on Trump's character and fitness for the job, only this time with the additional headwind of self-induced economic dysfunction.

Alito Retirement--My hope is that Samuel Alito at least waits until I post this before he gets the jump on me and announces his retirement, enabling the fast-tracking of his replacement by Republicans during the lame-duck session.

Republicans Got What They Deserved--Part of me laments the loss of Republicans like Brian Fitzpatrick and Mike Lawler as our two-party system needs reasonably good-faith actors from an opposition party who can withstand wave elections and make governing possible.  No tears for them this year though.  Donald Trump is such a uniquely malignant force in American politics that a full purge was in order.  A price had to be paid.  If Fitzpatrick wants to run again in two years, maybe he can be forgiven and serve a useful role in governing, but he needed a censure from voters first.  Actual patriots in the GOP like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger paid a much steeper price.  So even though Democrats inherited some driftwood and will undoubtedly find that our new caucus has some new soldiers not ready for the mission, voters absolutely made the right choice by installing them at the expense of the party who's spent the last two years (at least) providing cover for the reprobate in the White House.

In a few weeks, expect to hear from me again with my biennial state-by-state post-election deep dive.