After Democrats ran the table in Tuesday’s elections, Mike Johnson said on Wednesday that the catastrophic losses for Republicans did not say “anything about Republicans at all.” Hallelujah! Let’s hope that all Republicans continue to tell themselves that lie all the way to the ballot box on November 3, 2026.
Republicans went down in flames on Tuesday because they refused to acknowledge that “We aren’t in 2024 anymore.” Instead, they remain hopelessly stuck in the 2024 election results, believing that the temporary gains Trump made in some constituencies in 2024 are permanent.
Wrong! Election Day 2025 proved that the ground has shifted dramatically—like the transition from monochrome to Technicolor as Dorothy and Toto stepped into Oz. But instead of saying, “Toto, I don’t think we are in 2024 anymore,” Mike Johnson and Donald Trump pretended that “Nothing has changed; the results have nothing to do with Trump; we won’t change our message or agenda.” Indeed, Trump reacted to his drubbing at the ballot box by threatening voters with a shutdown of air traffic! Smart move, Donald! That will make voters like you more. (Not!)
While we can’t count on Republicans to defeat themselves, if their strategic response to the shellacking on Tuesday is to pretend that it is “business as usual” in the Trump regime, they are granting Democrats a generational gift that we should exploit to maximum advantage.
But regardless of what Republicans do, Democrats must continue their chosen path, which proved to be a winning message on Tuesday: Defending democracy and protecting the health, economic security, dignity, and personal liberty of all Americans.
I was speaking to a friend on Wednesday who said that my newsletter after the election was more “measured” than that of other commentators (an observation, not a criticism). I hope that my effort to place Tuesday’s victories in the broader context of our year in the wilderness did not detract from the rightful joy and pride that Democrats should be experiencing at this moment.
The victories were tremendous. They were so overwhelming that Trump could not muster the gall to claim that the results were “rigged.” Instead, he blamed “Republicans,” forgetting that he is the dark overlord of the Republican Party who enforces message discipline with cold-blooded vengeance. There were many winners and losers on Tuesday, but the biggest loser was Donald Trump.
In a pathetic attempt to escape responsibility, Trump noted that he was “not on the ballot,” implying that the results would have been different if his name were on every ballot. Not so. Even Trump’s corporate cheerleader, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, wasn’t buying what Trump was selling. See WSJ Editorial, Trump Really Was on the Ballot.
Per the WSJ Editorial Board,
President Trump on Wednesday blamed Tuesday’s Republican election defeats on the government shutdown and the fact that he wasn’t on the ballot. If he really believes this, the GOP is heading for bigger problems in 2026.
The victories were so significant that they “changed the electoral landscape,” Robert Hubbell, Today’s Edition, November 5, 2025.
What did I mean by that statement? Republicans are busily redrawing congressional districts in an effort to gerrymander their way into retaining the House in 2026. But their depraved scheme is based on a logical fallacy: They are revising the 2026 congressional districts based on 2024 electoral results. That is a mistake. A big one.
Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo identified the Republican dilemma in her analysis, In First Chance For Voters to React to Trump II, All Kinds of Democrats Steamrolled Republicans.
Riga wrote,
The risk in drawing aggressive gerrymanders, as Republicans did in a few red states and plan to do in several more, is that your candidates inherently get put in more competitive districts. In wave elections, those newly vulnerable lawmakers can get swept away. [¶]
If Tuesday is a sign of where the midterm winds are blowing, the Republican gerrymanders may lead to bigger Democratic gains — on top of the big Democratic (Gavin Newsom) win, as voters approved a defensive California gerrymander by almost 64 percent.
Using the 2024 results to slice and dice congressional districts makes sense if the coalition Trump built in 2024 is a permanent one. It is not—as Tuesday’s results showed.
First, as many commentators have noted, the scale of the victories was remarkable. Turnout was high, winning margins were high, and enthusiasm was high. Those factors suggest that a “safe” Republican district leaning “R+8” in 2024 might be a “toss-up” in 2026.
But it gets better for Democrats and worse for Republicans. Much.
Second, swing voters shifted decidedly in favor of Democrats. See Vox, 2025 election results: The VA and NJ races point to a nightmare scenario for the GOP.
Per Vox,
Polls had anticipated Democratic victories in Tuesday’s major gubernatorial races. But they drastically underestimated the scale of the Democrats’ success. The party appears to have both engineered exceptionally high turnout among its base for off-year elections — and won a significant number of swing voters.
Third, Latino voters have also shifted strongly against Trump—fueled by a mixture of regression to the mean, revulsion at the inhuman treatment of Latino immigrants by ICE, and by a sense of betrayal over Trump’s failed promises to improve the economy for people who work for a living. See Vox, Republicans may have a Latino problem (again)
In no place was that more clear last night than in New Jersey, where exit polls suggest that Democratic Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill won nearly 70 percent of Latino voters, compared to the 31 percent who sided with Republican Jack Ciattarelli.
That’s a huge reversal: Trump got within 6 points of winning the state in 2024, largely with the help of Black and Latino voters who swung for him across the state.
Latino voters seemed to have turned out at higher-than-expected rates, and mostly returned to the Democratic side.
See also, NYT, Republicans Point Fingers After Their Losses, but Not at Trump,
[E]arly county-level results suggested that Republicans did not hold the gains that Mr. Trump made in 2024 with young men and Latino and Black voters. Places like Perth Amboy, N.J., a heavily Hispanic city Mr. Trump lost by just nine percentage points last year, delivered a 50-point margin for Ms. Sherrill.
As noted by the Times, there was a 41-point swing away from Trump/GOP in 2024 to Mikie Sherrill/Democrats in a “heavily Hispanic city” in 2025. The plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” but the evidence is mounting that Trump’s gains among Latino voters in 2024 are evaporating.
Fourth, it is not just Latino voters who are reversing their 2024 shift toward Trump. As the NYT article above notes, the same shift was observed among “young men and Black voters.” See CNN, The most striking stats of the 2025 election.
As explained by CNN, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won among men under the age of 30 by strong margins—15 and 14 percentage points, respectively. In 2024, Trump and Kamala Harris split the under-30 male demographic evenly. A 15-point swing in favor of Democrats in 2025 is significant—especially given the high turnout in both races.
There are more shifts in the electorate that will become clearer as exit polling is released over the next few days. However, here’s the key takeaway: On election night 2025, Trump’s gains among independents, Latinos, males under 30, and Black voters disappeared by substantial margins in high-turnout elections. Given that Trump’s victory in 2024 was razor-thin, the collapse of his winning coalition bodes well for Democrats in 2026.
