The Blue Wave Is Real

Midterm elections typically go poorly for an incumbent president’s party. But the 2026 election delivered the kind of resounding rebuke that feels more like a reckoning. Across America, a blue wave has crested deep into red territory, washing through many of President Trump’s formerly safe spaces, endangering his preferred candidates and putting his presidency—and his broader MAGA coalition—at risk of a historic collapse.

If this is America’s response to what has been almost two years of a president flouting norms, driving up prices, breaking promises, raking in billions of dollars, and running roughshod over ethical guardrails, it is an unmistakably emphatic one. Democrats, independents, and Republicans turned out in massive numbers to showcase their displeasure with Trump and his party, flipping the Senate and making the GOP sweat even in contests that were not previously considered competitive.

An easy win by Senator Jon Ossoff, in what was once expected to be a tough race, was an early sign of what was to come throughout Election Night. “The American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed lame-duck President Donald J. Trump,” the Georgia Democrat said to raucous cheers at his victory party. “The first light of dawn is on the horizon.”

Ossoff’s victory itself wasn’t a particular surprise for Democrats, but the fact that his watch party could celebrate to the strains of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” before 8 p.m. set the tone for the night. The deluge of Democratic gains quickly flooded across the South. In South Carolina, which has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1998, Annie Andrews prevailed over the incumbent Senator Darline Graham. Andrews’s ascendance was a sign of how quickly the political winds have shifted in Democrats’ favor just two years after Trump’s victory left the party rudderless and despondent. “It’s about the pain people are feeling, decisions that are being made in Washington, D.C., that have resulted in record high gas and diesel prices,” Andrews told my colleague Madeleine Carlisle on Election Day.

Across the border, Roy Cooper won his race handily in North Carolina—a state Trump carried in 2024. The state’s former governor had run perhaps the most boring and low-key campaign of all Democrats vying for the Senate in competitive states. Cooper’s victory appeared so assured that top Republican super PACs shifted their spending away from the contest toward defending seats in traditionally solid-red states, including  Kansas, in early October. Just shy of an hour after polls closed, Cooper posted a video on social media to thank voters: peaceful scenes from across North Carolina, with no spoken words except Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.”

[Read: The beginning of the end for Trump]

From there it was on to more challenging targets, including the elusive dream of turning Texas blue. Supporters of the Senate nominee James Talarico gathered at a performing-arts center on the banks of the Colorado River, with sweeping views of the Austin skyline. They ate street tacos and ice cream from food trucks, and drank beers from a bar as news coverage played on a giant screen. The screens were on CNN when the race was called and cheers of “USA! USA! USA!” broke out, followed by “Tal-a-rico! Tal-a-rico! Tal-a-rico!” About a minute later, the governor’s race was called for Gina Hinojosa. The screams grew even louder. People jumped and hugged. Others had tears in their eyes. “I’m feeling great! We’re winning!” Mario Jimenez, a 54-year-old salesman who drove four hours from Laredo with his wife, said. He kept repeating exclamations. “This is great. Fantastic. Amazing. It’s a true blue wave!”

As the depth of the Democratic victories sunk in, Republicans looked for a scapegoat, with some turning their attention toward the man who has reshaped the party in his likeness over the past decade.

“It’s hard for me to think of a White House that has done more to sabotage their own fellow members than this one has,” Marc Short, former chief of staff to Vice President Pence, wrote on X as the result trickled in. The election results showed, he added in another post, that “voters don’t like” global tariffs, the government taking stakes in private companies, and price controls.

Trump tried to put his thumb on the scale in unprecedented ways for this election, asking that voters to pretend he was on the ballot, and they repudiated him. He pushed out Republican incumbents he considered insufficiently loyal and replaced them with acolytes who lost. He urged Republican states to redraw their congressional districts years before the decennial census, an attempt that appears to have backfired. He dismissed Americans’ concerns about inflation and called the skyrocketing cost of living a “hoax,” even though groceries and gas got even more expensive after he started a war. In the closing week of the election, he spoke in great detail about his efforts to redecorate the nation’s capital and an Ohio senator’s physique.  

Even so, Democrats were in shock when the results came in, seeking to make sense of how their party, so despondent just two years ago, had managed to become a force in so many parts of the country. Trump had seemed unstoppable after winning in 2024, barreling into traditionally Democratic territory and then governing with a maximalist approach to presidential power. “Chaos, corruption, a failing economy, a catastrophic war: Donald Trump is historically unpopular, and Republicans are paying for never standing up to him,” Joel Payne, the executive director of MoveOn, told me.

But a decisive victory doesn’t mean that legislating will come easily under a president who gives Congress little credence and has said that he plans to circumvent a body controlled by Democrats, labeling himself “Mr. Veto.” Speaking on Fox News on Election Night, Trump laid out his vision of how a divided government would work over the next two years. “They’ll send over things that are insane, and I’ll veto them,” he said, predicting that Democrats would eventually negotiate after “a couple months of vetoes.” Before any of that can happen, the party must also deal with its internecine battle between progressives and moderates, which will not be put to rest by an Election Night that saw members of both wings of the party elected.

On Tuesday, none of that mattered, at least for a night. In Phoenix, pop music blared and Dos Equis flowed at the Arizona Democratic Party’s watch party. Senator Mark Kelly told the crowd that Democratic gains reflected just how fed up Americans are “with the chaos, the corruption, the rising costs and a wanna-be-dictator in the White House.” Dora Cruz, a 69-year-old retiree who worked in customer service and wore an American-flag scarf, exuded joy as she watched the results. The outcome gave her hope that she was “getting our flag back. It’s just been so ugly with all this division, corruption.”

[Read: How the Democrats beat Trump]

In Alaska, three federal employees asked a waiter at 49th State Brewing in Anchorage whether he could change a television showing a college-football game to the election results. The women worked for an agency that had been gutted by the Trump administration. The three women, all Democrats, were feverishly refreshing their phones. He looked at their faces and turned the channel.

Now they were watching what seemed like a seismic victory. One woman noted the New Mexico governor’s race. Another mentioned the Georgia victory. “This is huge,” she said.

The Alaska results still hadn’t come in, yet. “Is it too early for us to celebrate?” one of them asked the others. It was not. The Senate was called for the Democrats soon after.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Madeleine Carlisle, Kevin Sieff, and Elaine Godfrey contributed to this report.