My highlights from the election
A week later, the counting still isn’t entirely done. Two Senate races and about 20 House seats are still open, and some of the numbers below will move. But the shape of Tuesday is clear enough to say it plainly: this was a wave, maybe even a tsunami, the kind people will talk about for a generation. Here are the results I am personally STOKED about.
Hear them roar! Young people showed up and made a massive difference
When young people vote, they are heard! Tufts University’s CIRCLE estimates that 27 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 voted on Nov. 3, the second-highest youth turnout in a midterm in the past 30 years, behind only 2018. In the battleground states, it was about 30 percent. Obviously, 27 percent is still far too low, but this is a relative kind of thing.
Youth turnout was only about about 20 percent in 2010 and 2014 mid-terms. Since then, its estimates have run 31 percent in 2018, 27 percent in 2022 and 27 percent again this year.
Young voters backed Democrats by massive margins: Democratic House candidates 66 percent to 31 percent, a 35-point margin that matches 2018’s and is up from 14 points in 2024. Young women went 70 percent Democratic and young men 59 percent. In Mississippi, where the Senate race is still too close to call, CIRCLE estimates 76 percent of young voters backed the Democrat, compared to 46 percent of older voters.
And in the very surprising Texas Senate race won by James Talarico, the youth vote went for the Dem by 60 points!
A Congress for the history books
As of Monday, Democrats had won 254 House seats, including 44 seats flipped from Republicans, with 20 races still uncalled. They lead the national House vote by 13 points, the largest midterm margin since 1974. It’s their largest House majority since 2008. In the Senate, Democrats flipped seven seats — including Texas and Kansas, which elected Democrats to the Senate for the first time in decades — and hold 54, with Alaska and Mississippi still counting.
Both of those are still nail-biters. In Mississippi, Scott Colom’s lead over Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith has grown to about 2,500 votes with 97 percent counted, up from 65 on election night, and counties must certify by Friday. Mississippi hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1982. In Alaska, Mary Peltola leads Dan Sullivan by about 2,500 votes with 76 percent counted. Neither candidate is above 50 percent so far; if that holds, ranked-choice tabulation begins Nov. 18. That race has turned bitter: on Nov. 10, Trump called it “rigged” over a second, unrelated Dan Sullivan on the ballot, after the New York Times reported that operatives aligned with Peltola helped recruit him, and Gov. Mike Dunleavy has ordered a criminal investigation.
What a Democratic Congress can actually do
For two years, Trump dismantled agencies, imposed sweeping tariffs and rescinded funding Congress had approved while the Republican Congress mostly looked the other way. That ends in January — and the first test is already here. Congress came back Monday for a lame-duck session, government funding runs out after Dec. 11, and Democrats are weighing whether to use that deadline to pressure Trump to end the war in Iran. Come January, House Democrats get subpoena power, and Hakeem Jeffries has named four priorities: reversing the Medicaid cuts, extending the Affordable Care Act credits, restoring Congress’s authority over tariffs and stopping the war with Iran.
The biggest lever is the power of the purse. The Constitution says no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but by appropriations made by law, and Democrats will now control the appropriations committees in both chambers. Top Democrats said before the election they would move to cut funding for the Iran war. A defense bill could carry a clause barring money for hostilities against Iran, and a veto would mean blocking pay for the whole military, too. That’s real leverage over foreign policy, not just domestic.
In fairness, “stop” is too strong a word for most of this. Trump told a podcast last week, “I’ll veto everything,” and Democrats don’t have the votes to override him. The administration can keep spending money already allocated for military operations, and he will keep leaning on executive orders. The right word is check. After two years without one, a check is a very big deal.
Clean energy incentives: coming back, eventually
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act ended incentives for wind and solar projects by the end of 2027 and ended the credits for home installations like rooftop solar and batteries. I’ve never understood why you would end incentives for energy people were already building, at a moment when power bills are rising.
Democrats are ready to bring them back. In March, 122 House Democrats backed the Energy Bills Relief Act, which would restore the Inflation Reduction Act credits, reinstate the clean energy grants the administration terminated and put $2.1 billion toward the transformer shortage. E&E News reports that Democratic leadership is dead-set on reviving the wind and solar credits, and our own Sen. Brian Schatz, set to become the Democrats’ whip, dismissed the developers who say the credits aren’t needed. There’s interest on the other side, too: House Republicans introduced their own bill to restore the wind and solar credits, and one analyst said it may find support if Democrats won the House or Senate. They won both. On Monday, Democrats promised again to push clean energy to bring down power bills, while Trump says he’ll use his veto aggressively.
I’d love to call this a sure thing. It isn’t. Any restoration still needs Trump’s signature or a veto-proof majority, and even sympathetic sources call it an uphill battle. The likeliest path is a deal folded into must-pass legislation, which means it will depend on what Republicans want in return.
Disclosure: I’m president of the Hawaiʻi EV Association, I have rooftop solar and I run a rental car business with EVs in its fleet.
The statehouses turned blue
This may matter even more over the long run. Democrats are on track to control 51 of the 99 legislative chambers, up from 39, ending 16 years of Republican dominance of America’s statehouses. As of Monday, they had flipped more than 500 legislative seats and 12 chambers, with only the North Carolina Senate and both Alaska chambers still undecided. If current leads hold, 53 percent of Americans will live in states where Democrats hold the governor’s office and both chambers. The Democrats’ state legislative committee called it their best performance since Watergate.
Some of the flips are startling. Democrats took the Texas House for the first time since the 2002 election, the Arizona Senate for the first time since 2000, the Pennsylvania Senate for the first time since before 1994, and both Wisconsin chambers for the first time since 2010. They won six new trifectas: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada.
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Here’s one consequence that’s just starting to get attention. The National Popular Vote compact, which would elect the president by national popular vote, has 222 of the 270 electoral votes it needs. The five states where Democrats won new trifectas on Tuesday that haven’t joined yet hold 61 electoral votes. Legislators are already lining up: a Wisconsin Democrat says it will be something they’ll “prioritize early in the session,” and a Michigan Democrat says “the time is right.” Winning control isn’t the same as passing a bill — Nevada’s Democratic governor vetoed one in 2019, and Michigan’s last Democratic trifecta didn’t get it done — but for the first time, the math to end the Electoral College’s grip on presidential elections is sitting right there.
Voters vs. data centers: 40 for 41
This one surprised even me. Across 10 states on Tuesday, voters decided 41 local ballot measures on data centers, and restrictions won in 40 of them. The only exception was Harwood, North Dakota, where voters rejected added regulatory review for industrial projects. According to Ballotpedia’s tracking, 82 percent of these measures got there through citizen petitions — people organized, gathered signatures and forced the question.
Ohio was the epicenter, with 21 measures across 18 jurisdictions. Ashville voted 82 percent to halt a data center campus that was already under construction, and bans on data centers over 25 megawatts in Granville, Pataskala and Sunbury passed with at least 74 percent. In Piqua, voters recalled three city commissioners the same night they approved a ban. In Wells, Maine, 82 percent approved a 180-day moratorium.
I’ve argued for a while that data centers are a winning issue here in Puna. The mainland just ran the experiment 41 times.
A massive Green Party win on Maui!
Closer to home, Pāʻele Kiakona won the West Maui seat in the state House as the Green Party nominee, with 2,991 votes to Democrat Sne Patel’s 2,884, and 1,236 for incumbent Elle Cochran, who had switched from Democrat to Republican this year. He’s the first Green Party member ever elected to the Hawaiʻi Legislature, and the first third-party lawmaker to serve in it since 1904, when Hawaiʻi was still a territory. He’s also only the fifth Green Party state legislator in U.S. history. The count becomes final after today’s deadline to fix signature problems on 151 District 14 ballots, and the Star-Advertiser called it unlikely that Patel could gain enough to overtake him.
Kiakona led Lahaina Strong after the fires and sits on the Maui Board of Water Supply. Analysts credited his win to strong grassroots backing combined with union endorsements. There’s a lesson in that for all of us: in Hawaiʻi, a candidate outside the usual pipeline can win when the community already knows and trusts him.
Direct democracy had a very good night
Voters in seven states affirmed their power to make laws themselves, approving protections for citizen initiatives and rejecting efforts to restrict them:
• Missouri approved Amendment 6, making the initiative and referendum a fundamental right, by 20 points. Montana approved Initiative 133, a similar right, by 30 points.
• North Dakota and South Dakota rejected 60 percent supermajority requirements for constitutional amendments, by 14 and 16 points.
• Utah rejected Amendment B, which would have required 60 percent to pass certain tax initiatives, by almost 25 points.
• Idaho rejected a ban on initiatives legalizing marijuana and other controlled substances, 66 to 34.
There were wins on voting itself, too. Massachusetts approved Election Day voter registration with about 57 percent. Alaskans appear to be keeping ranked-choice voting a second time, with “no” on repeal ahead at about 52 percent with about three-quarters of the vote counted. It isn’t called yet; the 2024 repeal failed by just 737 votes.
Not every reform passed. Massachusetts voters rejected all-party primaries, and here on Oʻahu, voters rejected ranked-choice voting for Honolulu’s mayor, council and prosecutor with 56 percent of the vote in the second printout.
And digital direct democracy? Not so much
The honest answer: no big advances that I could find. A Missouri initiative to allow electronic signatures on petitions was cleared to circulate but didn’t make the ballot, and a similar Florida effort didn’t either. Utah remains the only state that allows e-signatures on initiative petitions.
But the idea is crossing party lines. A conservative group, the Prosperity for US Foundation, has built a platform for verified digital petition signatures, arguing it would cut costs and fraud, and it counts more than 100 bills in more than 15 states this year that would limit some part of the initiative process. That’s the fight in a nutshell: legislators keep trying to make the 20th-century tools harder to use, and voters on Tuesday told them no, loudly, in seven states. The next step is building the 21st-century tools.
What I take from all of it
People showed up, and when they did, they won — in Congress, in the statehouses and on the ballot questions they put there themselves. Tuesday was a referendum on power: who has it, and whether ordinary people can still use it.
In Hawaiʻi, our challenge is different. We’re already about as blue as a state gets, and our fight is with entrenched incumbents and low turnout, not with the other party. But the lessons carry. Organize. Gather the signatures. Back the candidate the community trusts. And keep pushing for the tools that let people govern themselves between elections, not just on Election Day.
What were your highlights? Tell me in the comments.
[Claude helped to write this]
