Texas. Kansas. Maybe even Mississippi.
Democrats’ surprising midterm victories in states that had long seemed out of reach for them have dangled a fundamental question in front of both parties, one with major implications for the 2028 presidential election and maybe for the country’s understanding of itself: Could America’s political map, long defined by tribalism and calcification, be changing?
Since the Obama era, just seven states have really been battlegrounds in presidential elections. In the Senate, red-state Democrats and blue-state Republicans became endangered species. State lawmakers narrowed the amount of competitive House seats through redistricting. The nation was dug in.
But last week, six of Democrats’ seven Senate flips came in states that their party has not won in a presidential election since 2012. In two other historically red states, Alaska and Mississippi, Democrats are narrowly ahead but the races are uncalled. Democrats flipped House seats in districts President Trump won by more than 15 percentage points two years ago. They won every statewide office in Texas, broke the Republican gerrymander of North Carolina and even won two statewide races in deep-red Indiana.
Now, some Democrats are calling for an expansive reimagining of their party’s geography of power.
“We would be foolhardy to ignore the lessons of this week,” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, a Democrat, said in an interview.
Mr. Warnock is calling for his party to double down in Southern states with growing populations and a Democratic base of Black voters that helped deliver major upsets. Other Democrats now believe places like Ohio and Iowa could be put back in play as swing states.
And just about every Democrat who wants the party to win the White House is hungrily eyeing Texas’ 40 electoral votes, which on their own are nearly as valuable as Democrats’ rickety old “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. While James Talarico’s victory in the Texas Senate race is by no means a guarantee that the state will go blue in a presidential election, which typically turns out a greater number of voters, a truly competitive Texas could transform the map and spell deep problems for Republicans.
This midterm election could well be a blip specific to the unpopularity of Mr. Trump’s second term, the war with Iran and the elevated prices caused by the conflict and tariffs. But some Republicans warn their party not to count on that.
“If the Democrats can discipline themselves to listen to the American people,” said Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker and the architect of the 1994 tidal wave that became known as the Republican Revolution, “they could create a new majority that could govern for quite a long time.”
‘It Begins With These Kinds of Elections’
Just two years ago, Republicans thought they were on the right side of a major shift after a coalition of young, Hispanic and white voters lifted Mr. Trump to victory and won the party control of the Senate.
Now, amid sustained anger over high prices and a backlash to the war with Iran, Republicans are reeling.
“It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas wrote on social media last week. “It was a Watergate-level repudiation.”
American political history is dotted with sudden political shifts. There was 1877, when Reconstruction collapsed and Southern Democrats locked in their power. There was 1893, when a financial panic cost Democrats 125 seats in the House the next year. There was 1974, when a flood of so-called Watergate babies were elected to Congress, upending Washington.
“Overnight,” said Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University, “what once was is no more.”
But not all waves are created equal.
In 1946, the year after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death and Harry Truman’s ascent, Republicans swept Democrats out of the House and Senate — only to see their power ebb again two years later when Truman, a Democrat, won a full term.
Nearly 50 years after that, Mr. Gingrich’s wave became part of a bigger shift in the balance of power. Republicans’ gains in the South, the Plains and the Midwest in 1994 were an early sign of the troubles Democrats would face after the Bill Clinton era, and they set the stage for Republicans to hold power in the House until 2007.
The most important election of that period, Mr. Gingrich said, was not in 1994. It was in 1996, which ended up showing that House Republicans had staying power even as Mr. Clinton was re-elected.
“We had not won two consecutive terms since 1928,” Mr. Gingrich said, referring to Republicans, “and if we could win a second consecutive term, we might break out of the system, which is what we did.”
True realignments are exceedingly rare, and they often unfold in slow motion, over decades.
Sometimes, a wave can signal the beginning of a realignment, but it’s not always one that favors the victor of the moment. In the 1964 election, during the civil rights movement, Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrat, won 44 states and Washington, D.C. But a band of states in the Deep South backed Barry Goldwater, that year’s Republican presidential nominee, and those states, from Louisiana to South Carolina, have often stuck with Republicans ever since, especially when it comes to presidential elections.
“If you’re using the South going Republican as an example, it’s a three-decade process before it really is what we know today to be — or we knew today — to be the Republican South. But it begins somewhere,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton. “It begins with these kinds of elections, and that’s, I think, why it’s interesting and exciting for Democrats to see this.”
‘None of This Is Permanent’
In 2016, Democrats thought the map was on their side. With two polarizing candidates on the ballot, Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump, the party believed its “blue wall” was enough to save it — until Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania all backed Mr. Trump that fall.
This year, it was Republicans who essentially made a bet on the map. They redrew House districts to stave off — or at least mitigate — the expected midterm losses. And they counted on a Senate map that long seemed to offer Democrats few opportunities to go on offense.
In multiple red states, Mr. Trump supported Senate candidates with obvious shortcomings, like the scandal-plagued Ken Paxton in Texas or the inexperienced Darline Graham in South Carolina. In others, the party’s incumbents, like Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, had little muscle memory for a rigorous campaign.
But in the end, the map wasn’t enough.
“The lesson is that the patterns change, that none of this is permanent,” said Pete Buttigieg, a Democrat who served as transportation secretary in the Biden administration. “I think when something is true for five or 10 or 15 years, it starts to feel totally permanent. When the reality is, if you zoom out to a slightly longer view, that’s not the case.”
Doug Sosnik, a White House political director for Mr. Clinton, watched a slow-motion realignment play out in the 1990s and 2000s, when Southern and Midwestern states like Arkansas, West Virginia and Tennessee became seemingly impossible for Democrats to win once Mr. Clinton was no longer on the ballot.
It’s possible, but by no means certain, that a slow-motion change is underway, Mr. Sosnik said. Southern states like North Carolina and Georgia have grown quickly, with transplants from the North bringing their political beliefs to shiny new suburbs.
“These fast-growing states skew nonwhite and they skew younger, and people who skew younger are less partisan because they think both parties suck,” Mr. Sosnik said.
Democrats, he said, have an opportunity to be competitive in rural areas longer term, to hold onto Hispanic voters who swung away from them in 2024 and to harness the anger of Black voters who believe they have been disenfranchised by the erosion of the Voting Rights Act.
None of that guarantees an advantage to either party, he said. But it introduces something that feels rare: uncertainty.
Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, said he believed the presence of new Democratic governors could turn some of the red states that flipped this year into presidential battlegrounds in 2028.
“I believe that Iowa and Ohio are definitely in play for the presidential,” said Mr. Beshear, who is widely seen as a potential 2028 candidate.
“I think Kansas may well be in play, too. James Talarico is saying Texas is in play,” he continued.
But all Democrats have, he said, is an opportunity.
“I believe this will be a major realignment if Democrats govern well, and governing well is about focusing on our American families and getting results for them,” Mr. Beshear said.
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