Winning the Midterms Was Not Enough

Democrats and Congressional Checks on the Trump Administration

The Fox News channel calling the Texas Senate Race for James Talarico. As you might imagine, the hosts reacted very normally to this.

Voters in the 2026 midterms forcefully repudiated Donald Trump and his authoritarian agenda. And it was beautiful, for several reasons.

For one, the scale of the victory is still difficult to comprehend, and the victories have historic importance. Several important pickups included Abdul El-Sayed, who recaptured the Democrats’ Senate seat in Michigan despite outsize resources spent to defeat him. In Texas, James Talarico defeated Ken Paxton, itself enough of a surprise. But he did so by a considerable margin: he received more early votes than Paxton did total votes. Paxton had already lost by election day. Democrats even won a Senate seat in Kansas — something that hasn’t happened since 1932.

When Keisha Lance Bottoms is sworn in as Georgia’s next governor, she will become the first Black woman in American history to have that job. Georgia’s transformation from a Republican stronghold to a Democratic-leaning state is the result of a long, strenuous effort by voting rights activists to register and mobilize new voters in the state. That it has finally resulted in two Democratic Senators and a Democratic governor is extraordinary, a true testament to the power of grassroots mobilization.