I remain astounded by the midterm results, and so were many other voters and pundits on the night of Nov. 3, 2026. Among elected officials, nearly everything went in Democrats’ favor. The blue wave, a metaphorical term coined to represent sweeps of democratic wins across the country, does a victory of this scale no justice. Hell, a blue tsunami probably doesn’t even go far enough.
To put that in perspective, Democrats gained at least seven new U.S. Senate seats on Tuesday night and are projected to reach close to 260 seats in the House of Representatives. 2018’s midterm, often considered the blue wave of this century, doesn’t come close to the blue dominance witnessed this past week. This landslide has the potential to be a redefining moment for the progressive movement, a shock that feels decisive for the future of Democrats led by fresh faces, amid a declining MAGA sect on its way out of D.C.
Some bigger names in the Senate race that college-age voters in Claremont might know best are Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Texas’s James Talarico, two young faces mobilizing their states to lead their respective movements. But it would be remiss not to mention the states, some even redder than Texas at the 2024 election, that flipped to vote for democratic candidates like Kansas’s Adam Hamilton and Iowa’s Josh Turek. Mississippi, a perennial red state, has a Democratic candidate leading by 0.13 points as the state counts its final 20,000 ballots at press time. Lastly, Maine’s Troy Jackson ended Senator Susan Collins’ 30-year career as an invincible Republican, and North Carolina’s Roy Cooper crushed his opponent by nearly 20 points in a purple state that voted for Trump in 2024.
The victory was just as massive in the House. At the time of print, Democrats have already secured 253 seats to Republicans’ 157, and with 25 seats still to be called, Democrats lead in eight, meaning that as things stand, they’ll enter January with over 260 members.
Voter trends also reflected deep dissatisfaction with the GOP: voters aged 18-29 shifted +42 toward Democrats, and every race shifted toward Democrats by over +20, except white, which shifted +4 toward Republicans.
For most at the Claremont Colleges, this was students’ first or second election, and we had really only known life under Trump and the polling errors associated with the defeat of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. To the pollsters’ credit, however, they quickly assuaged most Democrats’ anxious optimism, hitting the mark on most major tossup races — with near-perfect accuracy. And when the pollsters were wrong, they were wrong in favor of the Democrats, a rarer sight for young voters given recent trends, with South Carolina’s Annie Andrews defeating her Republican opponent in a state that voted for Trump two years ago by nearly 18 points.
To be fair, midterms are almost always a down year for the party holding the executive branch. But this, combined with Trump’s historically low approval rating for a president two years into their second term, meant even his most outspoken supporters anticipated some damage to the share of Republicans in both chambers. Nearly a 10-seat advantage for the Democrats in the Senate and a House with over 250 Democrats is likely an unexpected defeat, though, leaving Republican leaders scrambling to figure out what the next two years will look like.
The fractures within the MAGA movement have since begun to show. Trump called Fox News on Tuesday night to claim that the wreck was not a stain on him, a 180-turn from the message to voters during rallies for weeks that they should “pretend [he was] on the ballot.” Given his approval rating, however, maybe voting as if he was on the ballot was precisely what yielded such a crush for the Republicans. Speculation aside, the call ended with the Trump-classic finger-pointing about Fox News’ polling mechanisms.
At this defeat’s core is not only a clear misdiagnosis of Republican policy woes in even the loyalest of red precincts, but also Trump’s bad-fruit candidates that made the win especially easy for Democrats. Even before the primaries, Trump spent weeks coordinating his slate of endorsees — ranging from Ken Paxton of Texas to Darline Graham of South Carolina. These candidates then faced the dilemma of how far to distance themselves from a deeply unpopular president, and most couldn’t decide what stance they should take before the polls tanked.
Trump bullied candidates who refused to campaign at rallies with him, overly praised the ones who showed commitment to MAGA and leveraged his power to primary relatively popular incumbents who were wishy-washy on his politics. To almost no one’s surprise, his slate was defeated miserably, once again highlighting Trump’s ‘Minus Touch,’ a term I coined for how nearly everything he supports or invests in fails.
This panic had clearly set in for the rest of the party by Wednesday morning. The Senate was decided by Tuesday night, and most woke up to a small lead for Alaskan Democrat Mary Peltola and an even tinier lead for Mississippian Democrat Scott Colom. In what felt like a blowing up of X feeds and social media algorithms over the blue tsunami, Vice President J.D. Vance attributed the large defeat to the war in Iran’s negative externalities, along with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson preliminarily giving up his position. Vance’s concession was especially rare, as the administration, including him, had been staunchly clear about its presence in Iran.
That concession may characterize how the latter half of Trump’s second term unfolds. This administration is a sinking ship. Despite what felt like a clearly doomed trajectory ever since Trump’s 26 executive orders were signed on inauguration day, Vance, other cabinet members and allies are clearly already thinking deeply about how to weigh the no-longer-so-successful endorsement of a lame-duck Trump against the chance of preserving their future political career post-Trump. If Vance, Marco Rubio or anyone else chooses to distance themselves to set themselves up for the 2028 Presidential Election, the second dilemma then will be to strategize how they can untangle themselves from the countless harms committed by this administration. Whether complicit or directly involved, this administration’s actions can’t be attributed only to a senile Trump; everyone around him must soon decide whether they sink with him or grab their lifeguard vests.
The glue holding the Republican Party together seems to be peeling apart, but the Democrats will enter next January with a different concern: that their movement had little glue to begin with. The left has long worried about its factions, but the rise of democratic socialism, tariffs on goods and increasing healthcare costs produced a new class of first-time candidates, both establishment and populist, who won by running on issues they knew best. From multi-generation blue-collar workers, MD-PhD-holding doctors and War-on-Terror veterans, this first-year class was certainly diverse. As of print, voters elected six DSA-backed representatives, and over 40 flipped seats are expected, with more moderate candidates needed to appeal to Republican and independent voters. The infighting they’ve been historically characterized for will need to reconcile with the unpopularity of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, while also balancing the interests of moderates and democratic socialists.
The Democrats, who are known to be serial complainers with very little concrete governing to show for it, now hold both the House and the Senate by a sizable margin for the first time during both of Trump’s presidencies. Democrats found themselves frequently telling their constituents there was simply nothing they could do to stop Trump’s warfare against immigrants and the American people; the numbers after Tuesday make preventing Trumpian chaos much more feasible. There is significance in having the numbers to draft legislation of any sort, get it passed and place it on Trump’s desk, even if it is vetoed in the end.
If the left wants to build anything beyond the high of midterm results, they must waste no time starting their own, ethical version of Project 2025. Trump is the weakest he’s ever been, both cognitively and politically, and the leverage he holds against the legislature and the American people is negligible. Republicans will spend these next two years scrambling to minimize Democratic presence in the legislature, while distancing themselves enough from Trump to escape the loyalist label in order to keep themselves employed beyond this forthcoming cohort of Congress.
The Democrats face a bigger, longer-term battle. This year’s popular vote, and the swing toward the left from key demographics such as nonwhite, non-college-educated or young voters, provide a cautiously optimistic insight into what a 2028 victory can look like for them. While planning for that future must begin soon, for now, they must also be all hands on deck through January. Democrats spent six years under Trump’s two terms complaining that there was nothing they could do to stop his rogueness, but that guardrail is finally gone for his last two years. This past Tuesday must be treated as just the start — onward, it is time to signal to Americans who gave Democrats a chance that they’re willing to govern.
Jun Kwon PO ’28 enjoyed libbing out this week, but that ends now. Still, he is excited to see the rise of progressive leadership in Los Angeles, from various City Hall offices to Congressional District CA-34.