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.
Many Republicans—notably George W. Bush’s former adviser Karl Rove—recoiled in horror at the openly racist sentiment. Others, particularly posters on X and podcasters, rallied to French’s defense. Governor Greg Abbott inched away from the comment without actually condemning it. It was the clearest indication yet that the party elders knew themselves to be caught between a party base that was entirely too eager for that kind of message and a wider electorate, including many conservative-leaning Asian-American voters, who were disgusted by it.
But even more significantly, the post—and French’s whole racial crusade—was entirely irrelevant to the actual job he was running for. It was not only bigoted, it was stupid to the point of nihilism. It was the bitter fruit of a period of single-party dominance in the nation’s second-largest state, a period so extended and seemingly total that it allowed freaks and dumb hobbyists to rise to positions of real power and consequence. It was such a shocking incident that I felt obliged to mention it in a sermon, which I am usually disinclined to do.
I was surprised, in the end, at how poorly Abbott himself did; he had always struck me as pretty savvy. But I smelled trouble when he posted that his challenger Gina Hinojosa—a Latina Catholic—would institute “Sharia law” if she won, the kind of bizarre claim you make when you know you are losing and you need to juice your turnout among the kinds of voters who might believe it. And when it came, his defeat wasn’t even especially dramatic. Republican dominance in Texas just collapsed in an evening, and I went to bed with the odd, effervescent feeling that I no longer lived in a red state.
Arthur Miller himself could not make a gray ward-heeler like Abbott into a tragic figure, let alone someone like French. But the Texas story, like the story of the election nationwide, is one of hubris going before a fall. Republican governance in Texas was, not long ago, straightforwardly successful in some respects. But parties tend to assume that recent trends will continue forever. Leaders imagine that electoral dominance can turn a state, or a country, into a resource that can be endlessly mined for wealth or a laboratory for the fixations of their most ideological supporters. Our lieutenant governor wanted to pull funding from school districts that had Gary Paulsen’s adolescent classic Hatchet in their libraries. He lost last night, too.
What has been washed away is coming into view. What has been left behind is still to be determined. Democrats newly empowered in Washington and around the country will face plenty of challenges–and temptations–of their own. But everyone, wherever they live and however they vote, has had one of those lessons democracy sometimes teaches: Things really can change, faster and more drastically than anyone expects. There’s a sermon in that, too.
