The Democrats have taken the House and Senate — flipping seats no one thought possible even just a few weeks ago.
On election night, Times Opinion asked nine columnists and contributors to look back on these midterms and explain what mattered most. Some said tariffs, others gas prices. But what’s clear is that the American people were angry — and ready to repudiate the president and his policies. “Decency won,” one of our columnists wrote. “In an era of grubby corruption under a president who reveled in wanton cruelty, Americans have chosen a new path.”
What mattered most
Binyamin Appelbaum Antipathy toward the president trumped everything else. But for Democrats, winning was the easy part. Memories of this election cycle will be shaped by what Democrats do with their power. And they made a mess of their recent opportunities.
Josh Barro Donald Trump promised to bring down inflation and avoid new foreign wars. Instead, he launched a war that drove energy prices up (while failing to achieve its strategic purpose) and imposed tariffs that raised the cost of living. Trump claims he kept more promises to American voters than he made. Like so many things he has said, that’s a lie, and voters punished him and his party for it.
Jamelle Bouie The thing that stands out most to me was Vivek Ramaswamy’s closing argument, an ad that hinged on attacking his opponent Amy Acton for being the victim of sexual assault. An astoundingly poor decision.
Michelle Cottle This is what happens when a political party allows itself to be hollowed out and wholly defined by one man. When the public sours on that man, the party falls right along with him.
David French The state-level changes may ultimately be as consequential as the House and Senate races. Democrats may have a chance to control the entire Texas government. We haven’t begun to consider the long-term implications of that outcome.
Jean Guerrero The president wasted billions on foreign wars and waged a brutal assault on immigrants here at home. On Tuesday, voters woke up from the delusion that Trump’s an ally of working people.
Daniel McCarthy Americans supposedly don’t vote on foreign policy, but they certainly vote on its domestic consequences. The Iran war knocked down two pillars of the Trump coalition by raising fuel prices and alienating everyone opposed to more Middle East wars.
Tressie McMillan Cottom MAGA will end one day. The election results last night suggest that it could be sooner rather than later. Texas elected a Democratic governor. Georgia elected a Black female governor. North Carolina flipped innumerable contested races blue. This repudiation of Trump’s small, racist, profoundly unserious vision of America needed to win decisively. And it did.
Lydia Polgreen To borrow from Marxist thinking: We are watching the revenge of the material. You can’t lie to people about the price of a gallon of gas or the price of a pound of ground beef or the price of a ton of fertilizer. Tariffs and the lunatic war on Iran have clobbered ordinary people while Trump and his billionaire cronies have lined their pockets.
What surprised you
Appelbaum The strength of Southern Democrats. Newly elected senators like Annie Andrews and James Talarico certainly benefited from their cartoonishly objectionable Republican opponents. But the part of the South where Democrats can’t possibly compete suddenly looks a lot smaller.
Barro In states like North Carolina and Texas, Democrats are winning races for the House and in state legislatures where they did not even expect to compete. Democrats have shown that they can win back the working-class voters they had lost. To keep them, Democrats will need to maintain a focus on affordability — including keeping energy prices down.
Bouie The thing that mattered most was the vast unpopularity of the president’s core agenda: mass deportations, trade wars, actual wars and attempted cultural transformation. The headline results of the night reflect the public’s anger with each of these.
Cottle A blue Texas?! That stuns like a snowstorm in Laredo.
French The House popular vote margin, without question. If projections are accurate, it was the biggest popular vote rebuke since the post-Watergate elections in 1974.
Guerrero Xavier Becerra will become California’s first Latino governor in more than 150 years. But in his campaign, his identity as a Latino wasn’t a major talking point. That seemed to reflect a dying confidence in Latino identity as an organizing political force.
McCarthy The Carolinas, Texas and Georgia together show that the South now offers Democrats the kind of opportunity that Trump found in the Rust Belt. This shouldn’t come as a complete surprise to anyone closely watching long-term trends, but the implications are stark. Southern states won’t stay red just because of their strong economies.
McMillan Cottom Keisha Lance Bottoms’s election surprised me. Stacey Abrams had two brutal losses in 2022 and 2018. That had tempered my hope.
Polgreen Trump, king of the vulgar spectacle, won the presidency twice, though never with an outright popular majority. But this time, decency won. The Democrats who scored major wins include a megachurch pastor and a seminarian, a pediatrician and at least one public health official. In an era of grubby corruption under a president who reveled in wanton cruelty, Americans have chosen a new path.
Most memorable moment
Appelbaum The arrival of artificial intelligence ads, which used manufactured or manipulated imagery in attempts to trick voters. Many were crude, and they didn’t have discernible impacts on the results, but the tactic is likely to become more common — and more dangerous.
Barro Lacking a strong argument about how they had governed well, Republicans leaned into name-calling: Talarico was “Talafreako.” Andrews was “Trannie Annie.” Acton was a drunk liar whose mother hates her. Republicans apparently assumed that every voter shared their contempt for Democrats. Their attacks weren’t just juvenile and unpleasant; they made Republicans look as though they had lost sight of voters’ top concerns: the cost of living and a pointless war.
Bouie For me, the most surprising outcome was the scale of the sweep in Texas. These victories might fundamentally change the trajectory of the state’s politics, and it appears to rest on deep anger among Hispanic voters. If you wanted to liken it to the fallout from California’s Proposition 187 in the 1990s, you would not be off base.
Cottle In the Rio Grande Valley, in a district Trump solidly carried in 2024, I talked with a Hispanic voter who had taken a chance on Trump two years ago because of his economic promises but now felt taken for a ride. She and her husband were voting blue this time. Clearly, they were not alone.
French When Darline Graham said, “National security is not my thing,” during a primary debate, she demonstrated a remarkable disrespect for her own voters.
Guerrero I was struck by how proudly Abdul El-Sayed campaigned on abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Our government spends billions on an agency that operates outside of the law to terrorize our neighbors,” he said in an ad pitching himself as “the only Senate candidate for abolishing ICE.” With his win, he showed that “Abolish ICE” is not a position that alienates many voters anymore.
McCarthy The most telling moment came from someone who wasn’t even running. The day before the elections, the departing Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said on Sirius XM that the Iran war was a “big, big drag” and warned Republicans against being the party of Big Tech and data centers.
McMillan Cottom The Democrat Angie Nixon’s Florida campaign really stuck with me. Florida is not just red; it is Trump’s political home base. Nixon ran as a democratic socialist, and while she fell short, she lost by less than 3 percentage points, with a huge financial deficit — which suggests that the Democratic brand is being remade and the whole map is in play.
Polgreen Nothing appalled me quite so much in these midterms as the brazen double standard applied to El-Sayed, who will become America’s first Muslim senator. At every turn he was faced with baseless accusations of antisemitism and made to answer for the statements of people who supported him. His Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, was not held to anything close to the same standard. Indeed, his supporters engaged in gleefully Islamophobic tropes throughout the campaign. It was a painful reminder that bias against Muslims is not just tolerated but even celebrated and not just in the Republican Party.
Something small but important buried in the results
Appelbaum It was a big night for Democratic candidates who talk publicly about their faith. That’s an important development for a party that needs to find ways of connecting with a broader cross-section of the American people. In future elections, Trump won’t be on the ballot.
Barro Florida voters appear to have approved a constitutional amendment that will severely restrict property taxes in the state, which already lacks an income tax. Property tax revolts around the country are undermining a revenue stream that supports important local government services. State and local officials need to do a better job convincing voters that government is efficient and worth paying for.
Bouie This is not small, but it is important: the suburban G.O.P. collapse that turned Virginia blue and made North Carolina and Georgia competitive is extending beyond those states into South Carolina, in a trend that threatens the Republican Party’s ability to build national majorities.
Cottle I am a relentless nag about paying attention to down-ballot races, so let me take this moment to cheer the Dems’ big gains in the Texas Legislature. Well played, President Trump!
French It looks as though Scott DesJarlais might lose his race in Tennessee. He was a pre-Trump version of Trump, and it’s fitting that DesJarlais’s sun would set alongside Trump’s.
Guerrero Texas is undergoing the same shift California had in the 1990s. In response to racist, rabid immigration raids, voters are souring on Republicans. That includes Latinos, whose 2024 red shift turned out to be temporary.
McCarthy Voter ID ballot initiatives succeeded in places like North Carolina and Ohio, showing that passing a key piece of legislation Trump pressed on Senate Republicans — the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would expand ID requirements nationwide — could have given Republicans a desperately needed boost.
McMillan Cottom Women did not give up. That didn’t get enough attention. MAGA is a movement built on men’s grievance about women’s economic and political advancements. Democratic women ran historic races this year. The women who stood out ran on economic issues without demonizing gay, trans or poor voters.
Polgreen The culture war was a dead end in this election cycle for Republicans. Conservatives like to refer to liberal causes like transgender rights and support for Gaza as luxury beliefs, disconnected from the values and concerns of ordinary Americans. But this time around, it was Republicans who seemed out of touch. No amount of scaremongering about boys in girls’ locker rooms could motivate voters in red states where transgender people have faced draconian laws that made their lives hellish. Threats of a migrant invasion fell flat when Trump had basically sealed the border and was hunting down anyone who looked foreign in the streets of American cities. It turns out that the Trump agenda may represent the true luxury beliefs after all.
Binyamin Appelbaum is the lead writer on economics and business for the Times editorial board.
Josh Barro and Jean Guerrero are contributing Opinion writers.
Jamelle Bouie, David French, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Lydia Polgreen are Times columnists.
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion.
Daniel McCarthy is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a columnist for The Spectator and the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
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