TPM’s Untitled Live Show (Name TBD) returns today at 2 p.m. Eastern. If you think everything to be said about the midterms has already been said, you might be right, but we’ve got thoughts and analysis nevertheless. We’re going to pay special attention to the non-politician winners and losers from Tuesday night. I hope you’ll join Nicole, Hunter, Derick, and myself this afternoon on YouTube.
I wanted to flag this critical data point: across the Deep South (AL, MS, SC, LA, GA) the percentage of the electorate made up by Black voters rose dramatically — by 3% in all those states except for, Alabama where it rose by 4%. For instance, in Mississippi, it rose from 30% in 2024 to 33% in 2026. Put differently, Black voters turned at out at 96% of their 2024 turnout whereas white voters managed only 71% – especially in Senate races in South Carolina and Mississippi. This was needless to say critical to Democratic victories throughout the region. Paradoxically the increase was greatest in Alabama which didn’t have a Senate race and lacked a high profile governor’s race judged by national attention, though Democrat Doug Jones made it a much closer race against Tommy Tuberville than most anticipated. There was a closely watched House race where Rep. Shomari Figures (AL-2) retained his seat despite an attempt to gerrymander him out of it. These numbers compared to a stable share of the electorate in the Northeast and Industrial Midwest. So much of 2026 was a rebellion against Donald Trump and MAGA. Here it’s at least slightly different: all the evidence we have tells us this as a reply to the Callais decision in which the corrupt Court majority essentially struck down what remained of the Voting Rights Act and unleashed a string of rushed gerrymanders to eliminate Black majority districts across the region. How different this is is hard to say: SCOTUS is pretty much MAGA at this point. But it’s a distinct wave or tsunami within the larger one.
I’ve seen a few comments over the last couple days to the effect that our system turned out to be more robust, stronger than some of us feared. Trump tried to tamper with and rig the 2026 election. But he mostly failed. I would put it a little differently. We turned out to be — the American people — stronger, more robust than many of us feared. This may seem mawkish or merely semantic. But it’s more than that and the difference speaks directly to the current debates about accountability and how it should shape the next Congress and the next two years.
The singular lesson of the Trump Era has been that no system can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow and enforce the rules that govern it. It’s worth sitting with that for a moment. No constitution or system of laws and protections can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow the rules that govern it. Trump was faced with the big challenge that states control the administration of elections. But the White House came up with numerous quite ingenious angles to overcome those obstacles. It took an immense amount of work by voters, elected officials, judges, lawyers, countless Americans in myriad positions and professions to stop it. A governmental system provides a framework, a playing field. But as the authors of the federal Constitution debated and largely decided: there is no machine that runs of itself. It lives or dies, degenerates or perseveres, based on the people, the citizens who make it up.
The clearest signal from Donald Trump at the moment is the lack of any signal. His public comments have ranged from resigned to cooperative to boasting. His affect is disorganized, enervated, sometimes light. It’s one of the few times we’ve seen Trump seemingly unable to figure out how to react. This appears to apply to the whole White House.
We’re seeing Republicans wrestle their way toward a first reaction to Tuesday’s genuinely historic electoral collapse. We saw it most clearly, with a heavily “nationalist” tinge, in JD Vance’s Tuesday sleight of hand about Trump’s Iran War. Vance’s argument is that Trump Two was basically going great, both substantively and politically, until Trump launched his war on Iran back in February. So the problem isn’t Trumpism but not sticking to Trumpism with enough resolve. They only went wrong with the Iran War and even more Israel.
Let’s start by noting that Vance’s gambit is just warmed over TuckerCarlsonism, or TuckCarlsonism without all the charisma. That is, racial/religious nationalism which has a specific beef with both Jews and Israel as part of a broader argument that America is a white and Christian country where non-whites and non-Christians are at best guests. You see this in Vance’s frequent references to “heritage Americans” and attacks on “ungrateful” Blacks and non-white immigrants who should be kicked out of the country if they don’t express gratitude clearly enough. This is a reality that deserves a lot of attention from Jews who are rightly concerned about antisemitism of various sorts on the left. Vance is not only clearly an antisemite personally but he is signaling that he plans to use that animus as a central lever of his drive to power.
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There’s a point of diminishing returns on non-definitive updates on the still outstanding Mississippi Senate race. But I’ve kept looking at the mix of outstanding votes, where they are, historical precedents, etc., and I’m pretty confident that Scott Colom is going to win this race and be the next senator from Mississippi. If it were callable it would be called. And it may take days or even a week to get a final verdict. But I just can’t find any argument that the remaining ballots don’t heavily favor Colom and he’s already up by almost 2,000 votes. (The AP numbers which most sites use are out of date.)
Assuming that is true we’re likely looking at a 56-seat majority for the Democrats — technically 54 seats plus the two independents who caucus with the Democrats, if you want to be picky. That’s not only good news on its own for Democrats. It puts them in a good position to hold the Senate majority through the remainder of this decade.
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