The 2026 election has officially started

What Tuesday's wave of blue wins says about turnout, enthusiasm, and the 2026 math.

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Republicans are in shambles. Tuesday night’s elections were a wipeout.

Democrats chalked up wins across the map with statewide victories in the Virginia & New Jersey governors’ races, Pennsylvania court seats going blue, California voters approving Prop 50, and multiple unexpected flips in Georgia. Even more surprising, Mississippi flipped enough state house seats to break the Republican supermajority in their state legislature—a sign that the Blue wave wasn’t only in state-wide races.

It was a Democratic sweep across nearly every contested race, and if Republicans don’t take the results seriously, they’re setting themselves up for a complete decimation in 2026.

Tuesday night was really the opening shot of the 2026 midterm elections, and what’s on the line must be understood. If Democrats take back the House in 2026, Trump becomes a lame-duck president. Everything he wants to do for the last two years of his presidency will die in Congress. The agenda is dead—no chance of major legislation, no more controversial appointments sailing through.

Democrats will control House committees. They will control investigations. They will control the floor. Trump’s presidency effectively ends two years early. And what’s important about that is not only stopping Trump specifically, but also diminishing his power to choose an heir apparent—maybe JD Vance or someone else—and to maintain momentum into the 2028 election. And the thing is, Democrats don’t really need that much.

Even Mike Johnson said this himself in a press conference the morning after the election. They are scared.

The Republican House majority right now is very thin. The exact number of seats that will need to be flipped depends a little on how districts are redrawn. It could be five to eight seats. The reason it’s a little complicated is that Texas has redrawn its maps, California passed Prop 50, and other states have moved to redistrict ahead of the 2026 election. With the redistricting battle of both red and blue states expected to balance out, Democrats will be in position to take back the House with relatively few flips.

So now let’s look at what happened on Tuesday. In Virginia, the state swung 17 points toward Democrats from where Glenn Youngkin won in 2021. New Jersey swung ten points with the same Republican candidate running as in 2021. If those swings held in competitive House districts across the country, dozens of Republican seats are suddenly in play. Seats that looked safe six months ago are going to end up as toss-ups; seats that were toss-ups might lean Democratic. The fundamentals are working in Democrats’ favor.

We are now thirty-something days into a government shutdown. Trump is admitting the shutdown hurt Republicans. Since Tuesday night, he’s been posting to Truth Social about ending the filibuster and reopening the government. By ending the filibuster, Republicans in the Senate could pass their continuing resolution with a simple majority vs. the 60-vote requirement typically needed in this situation. They have a simple majority (51 votes) in the Senate without needing a single Democratic vote. It’s their shutdown. Voters are furious about SNAP benefits being cut, federal workers not getting paid, and the general chaos that comes with a government shutdown.

If the shutdown continues, or if there’s another one before the 2026 midterms, this is going to be an anchor around the neck of every single Republican running. Now, add Trump’s tariffs hurting the economy, add the enthusiasm we saw in turnout across a most of these races, and there are some real structural advantages for Democrats going into next year.

But we have to be ready for how MAGA responds. They’re not going to accept losing. We’ve seen Trump calling to terminate the filibuster, demanding voter ID, calling to end mail-in ballots. When they analyze these results and see the momentum Democrats have, they’re going to get even more aggressive about voter suppression. They’re not going to get more thoughtful about how to win the hearts and minds of voters.

What we’ll see is Republican-controlled state legislatures passing more restrictive voting laws: making it harder to vote by mail, harder to register, harder to vote early, purging voter rolls, and closing polling places in Democratic-leaning areas. They’ll be ready to make it harder for the coalition that showed up Tuesday night to show up again in 2026.

They’ll call it “election integrity.” They’ll call it “voter reform.” And then Trump will post about it. He’s already said multiple times in the 48 hours following Tuesday’s election: we’ve got to get voter ID, get rid of mail-in voting, make it harder for people to vote.

So Democrats have momentum. Democrats have enthusiasm. Democrats have some fundamental and structural factors favoring them. But this is going to be a real fight. MAGA is going to throw everything they have at suppressing the vote and making it difficult for Democrats to win, even if that’s the will of the average voter. The question is whether Democrats can maintain the energy of the past week for the next 12 months. Not an easy thing to do.

Can Democrats fight back against voter suppression? Can they actually turn the momentum into House seats in November of 2026? If they can, Trump’s presidency is over and the agenda stops. He’s powerless for two years. He’s diminished in his ability to pick a successor successfully. That is why the 2026 election starts right now. I don’t remember higher stakes for a midterm election in all the time I’ve been doing this. I think both sides know it. That’s why it’s going to be a full year of this election. Tell me if you disagree, but I think it’s already started.

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