President Trump has spent the past two years trying to subvert American democracy. On Tuesday, voters stood up to him.
In the face of the president’s many attempts to manipulate the midterm elections — through extreme gerrymandering, false claims of voter fraud, efforts to block mail voting and more — tens of millions of Americans responded by turning out and rejecting the Republican Party that has enabled him. Democrats retook control of the Senate and are poised to retake the House as well. The repudiation was broad enough to overcome America’s political polarization. Republicans lost races even in traditionally deep-red places, including Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas. They lost because many independents and even Republicans consider Mr. Trump’s second term to be a failure.
The outcome creates a crucial check on Mr. Trump’s autocratic behavior. It empowers Democrats to investigate his corruption and law breaking and pass legislation that offers an alternative to his counterproductive agenda. The country already feels changed, and it will in fact be changed in January.
The country still faces many long-term problems to which neither party has offered clear solutions. And over the next two years, while Mr. Trump remains president, Congress and judges will need to be prepared to counter further attempts by him to undermine the constitutional order.
Nonetheless, this is a day to feel pride. Aspiring authoritarians often use legislative elections to cement their power and further undermine democracy. In 2026, the American people refused to allow Mr. Trump to do so. The system has held.
In addition to voters, three groups deserve particular credit: election workers, legal advocates and judges.
Election workers did their jobs this year in the face of relentless pressure from Mr. Trump. He has long claimed that widespread fraud decides American elections, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. Election workers across party lines responded to these lies by doing their jobs as diligently as they long have, helping people cast their ballots and counting those ballots.
In many states, election officials took specific actions to stop interference from the Trump administration. Last year, the Justice Department demanded that states provide the federal government with voters’ birth dates, driver’s license information and partial Social Security numbers. Officials, including several Republicans, refused to comply.
Among the standouts were Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson; Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson; and West Virginia’s Republican secretary of state, Kris Warner. Each refused to comply, each drew a lawsuit from the administration, and each won in court.
Their ability to resist the president underscores an advantage of America’s decentralized government. They could refuse because the president has no power to overrule them. The elections clause of the Constitution lets each state decide how its elections are run. This federalism proved a bulwark against Mr. Trump’s authoritarian instincts.
A second group that stood up for democracy this year were legal advocates. When Mr. Trump tried to interfere in the elections — through executive orders that sought to complicate voter registration, bar states from counting some mail and direct the Postal Service to decide which voters would receive mail ballots — advocates quickly responded by filing lawsuits.
The advocates included the Brennan Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and Democratic attorneys general. Some prestigious law firms have been afraid of confronting the Trump administration’s legal abuses over the past two years, making the work of nonprofits all the more important.
The lawsuits frequently succeeded because of the third group: federal judges who insisted on following the law and upholding the Constitution despite intimidation efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies. Judges appointed by presidents from both parties, including Mr. Trump himself, blocked key parts of the executive orders concerning election rules. In 27 straight district court rulings, judges rejected the Justice Department’s demands for state voter rolls.
The Supreme Court deserves both credit and criticism. The court was wrong to issue rulings that made possible Mr. Trump’s extreme partisan gerrymandering and his administration’s efforts to create a national voter database. But the justices did act to protect Americans’ ability to cast votes this fall. In September, it upheld a lower-court ruling that barred the Postal Service from taking steps that could have restricted mail voting.
That ruling was a reminder that this court does have its red lines about elections. After the 2020 election, the justices refused to hear cases with Mr. Trump’s false claims about election fraud. The justices may need to swat down similar claims in the weeks ahead.
But the challenges ahead should not overshadow what Americans accomplished. This year, election workers, lawyers and judges defended the rules that protect the vote. And tens of millions of Americans went to the polls to exercise their most fundamental democratic right. Americans showed that the power to choose their leaders belongs to them. Now they must remain vigilant until officials certify every race and the winners take office.
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