The beating President Donald Trump and Republicans took in the midterms was national, but it was the South that delivered the knockout punch.
As the results rolled in on Tuesday night, it became increasingly clear that Democrats would comfortably win the majority in Congress by flipping several seats in red states that Trump won handily two years earlier. And rather than acting as a fire wall to stall Democratic gains, the South succumbed to the blue wave. Some outcomes were expected, such as Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) winning reelection in Georgia and former governor Roy Cooper (D) flipping North Carolina’s Senate seat by nearly 20 percentage points. But many were historic upsets.
In Texas, Democrats Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico were elected to the governor’s mansion and the Senate, respectively; in South Carolina, Trump-endorsed Sen. Darline Graham (R) — appointed to the position following the sudden death over the summer of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham — lost to Annie Andrews (D); and former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) became Georgia’s governor-elect by almost 10 percentage points.
And that’s just to start. Over the past year, Republican governors and state legislatures across the South gerrymandered their districts in an attempt to keep Congress. The Supreme Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais weakened voting rights protections, particularly for minority voters in the South, by making it harder to challenge congressional maps that dilute voting power. The White House reports that in the month leading up to the midterms, Trump visited 20 states and held 30 events to drum up support for Republican candidates; more than half of those events were in the South.
But Democrats won four of the five U.S. House seats targeted by Republicans for redistricting in Texas, three in Florida, and the single seats in North Carolina and Alabama. Trump’s directive at every stop was for voters to act like he was on the ballot, and it seems to have hurt more than helped. Ultimately, Republican dummymanders — the political science term for when partisan redistricting efforts backfire — and the historically unpopular president’s insistence on being the center of attention boosted Democratic gains in Congress.
Beyond the South, despite Trump and MAGA’s fixation on rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the so-called DEI candidates still had a record night.
Until this week, only three Black governors had been elected in the nation’s history, but five states elected Black governors in the midterms: Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Nevada and Wisconsin. Governor-elect Bottoms is the first Black woman in the nation’s history to win a gubernatorial race, and Byron Donalds in Florida is the first Black Republican ever elected governor. There will also be six Black senators in the next Congress, the most ever — from Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey and South Carolina — and depending on the outcome of Mississippi’s race, which remains too close to call, that number could reach seven. For perspective, when Barack Obama was elected in Illinois in 2004, he was just the fifth Black senator in U.S. history.
These candidates did not win because of DEI, affirmative action or identity politics; they won because of partisanship and because they were better candidates than their competition. That is, they will take office next year because voters cared more about their party and views than their race. And the end result is that Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) is poised to become the first Black speaker of the House. It’s a national repudiation of MAGA’s anti-DEI overreach and scapegoating as well as a rejection of Trump and his attempt to distract from corruption and poor governance.
Trump characteristically passed the buck for the loss, announcing on social media, “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Voters disagreed, treating the election like the president was running everywhere, just as he asked. The blame rests largely with Trump, and it was a haymaker from the South that flattened the field of Republicans.
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