My personal election-results decision desk is projecting “blue tsunami” as the enduring political shorthand for the events of the last two days. Even as I write, having obsessively followed the midterm elections from early voting through race call after race call overnight and into the morning, I find myself in shock at the scale of what has happened. It’s not just Democrats flipping seven Senate seats (with Alaska and Mississippi potentially to follow), or breaking a North Carolina gerrymander, or consolidating control over state governments in states as varied as Minnesota and Arizona. It’s the wild convergence of developments unexpected by professional prognosticators not long ago.
A Republican congressman credibly accused (though never convicted) of domestic violence lost a heavily Trump-voting district (and another, the odious Scott DesJarlais, is trailing by two tenths of a percent as I write). Black turnout exploded across the South, perhaps in response to the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Latino voters swung hard against Republicans after moving sharply toward Trump in 2024, busting attempted gerrymanders in Texas and Florida. Mainline Protestants made their faith part of their case while winning tough races in Kansas, Texas, and Iowa. Georgia elected the nation’s first Black woman governor. New Hampshire elected the nation’s first openly gay male senator. Alabama elected a transgender state representative.
A full accounting will be months in the making. The thing about a tsunami is that it transforms the landscape where it crashes. But if the story of the 2026 election were being told in the manner of a sprawling 19th-century novel, the key moments that signaled what was coming would, I think, be set in my home state of Texas. And they would not concern our stupefyingly expensive and inescapably high-profile Senate race between fresh-faced James Talarico and scandal-caked Ken Paxton. In an election cycle full of outlandish moments and unexpected twists, the one that will always stand out to me will be the decision in September by Bo French, nominee for the usually obscure office of railroad commissioner, to post a photo of some University of Texas students of apparent South Asian ethnicity celebrating their football team’s surprise victory with this comment: “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” The “problem,” of course, being people who aren’t white engaging in the most Texan activity imaginable, cheering for their football team.
