America’s political map looked pretty calcified — until last week.
Democrats’ surprising midterm wins across red states — including Scott Colom’s victory over Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi — have raised new questions for both parties that will matter a lot for 2028 and beyond.
Was this all a blip, specific to this particular moment? Or could America’s political map be changing in a bigger way, putting longtime Republican strongholds in play for Democrats?
Tonight, let’s dive into the biggest question coming out of the midterms.
The map
Since 2016, just six states have actually swung between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. In the Senate, red-state Democrats and blue-state Republicans became endangered species. And the map of competitive House districts grew ever narrower.
But Democrats’ big Senate flips last week mostly came in states that haven’t backed their party for president in years.
“When you start losing Mississippi and Maine simultaneously, then you clearly have lost popular sentiment,” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, told me.
He would know. In 1994, he led his party to make enormous gains in the House, a “Republican revolution” that set the stage for the map we know today. And he believes that Democrats’ wins last week just might be the beginning of a rare political realignment, depending on how they govern.
“If the Democrats can discipline themselves to listen to the American people, they could create a new majority that could govern for quite a long time,” he said.
The history
There is no guarantee, of course, that any wave election will become more than a one-off. In 1946, the year after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death and Harry Truman’s ascent, Republicans swept Democrats out of the House and Senate — only to see their power ebb again two years later when Truman, a Democrat, won a full term.
And in 2006, Democrats captured both the House and the Senate as the public tired of George W. Bush, then deepened their control of government with the 2008 rise of President Barack Obama. Then, of course, came the “shellacking” of 2010, when Republicans picked up seats in the Senate and gained control of the House.
But sometimes, a wave election can signal the start of something more long-term.
Take 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrat, won 44 states and Washington, D.C. It was a Democratic landslide. But a band of states in the Deep South backed Barry Goldwater, that year’s Republican presidential nominee, and those states have mostly stuck with Republicans ever since, especially when it comes to presidential elections.
And look at the presidential map in 1996. Two years after Gingrich first won power in the House, you can see the last gasps of Democratic dominance in Southern states like West Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee — states that became seemingly impossible for the party to win when President Bill Clinton was no longer on the ballot.
The path forward
Democrats believe they now have the opportunity to reimagine their party’s path to power, which in recent presidential elections has run through the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. A party that can compete in the South — or even just in Texas, which has 40 electoral votes — has a lot more ways to win.
I called Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who believes that this is the moment for Democrats to go all in on winning in Southern states, which have not in recent years been seen as critical to what he called “the math of our majority.” Now, he said, they should be.
“The South is the fastest-growing region in the country,” Warnock said. “It’s the only region in the country where we’re seeing population growth for every age group. And when you look at the base of the Democratic Party and its most loyal voters, Black voters, the South is where the big and valiant struggle for our voices is being waged.”
Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky told me he thought red states that just elected Democratic governors, like Ohio and Iowa, could remain competitive in 2028.
“Democrats were looking in ’28 and ’32 at a shrinking map with very little margin of error,” he said. “Now they’re going to be able to go and campaign in states, lean on Democratic governors that have won in those states, and know how to turn out voters.”
It’s much too early to know what the 2028 map is going to look like. But the uncertainty about the nation’s political geography is new, and could shape the contest in unpredictable ways.
quote of the day
“I’ve grown extremely tired of culture wars.”
That was Hunter Patterson, a police dispatcher in Montgomery County, Texas. A “libertarian independent,” he said he usually voted Republican but no longer considered himself one after the party’s sharp turn to the right in recent years.
Patterson said he disagreed with James Talarico on many things, but still voted for him for Senate.
The question of what independent-minded voters like Patterson do in the future will go a long way to determining whether states like Texas snap back to red, or stay purple.
The last frontier … of tallying Senate races
One Senate race has yet to be called: Alaska’s.
Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee, is narrowly leading Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican, and an analysis of ballots by The New York Times found that she is likely to prevail. But the state’s ranked-choice voting system means that tallying votes there is extra complicated.
My colleague Christine Zhang, a reporter on our Election Analytics team, has been watching the count closely, and is here with a quick update.
Christine, what’s happening in Alaska right now? Why is their count taking so long?
Alaska has reported 86 percent of the votes so far. The remaining ballots are mostly mail-in ballots, which need to be reviewed before being included in the count. It can also take a long time to transport mail ballots through the state’s remote, inaccessible regions. Officials will count ballots that arrive up to 10 days after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked by Nov. 3.
How much longer do officials there have to count?
They have until Nov. 18 to count all the remaining ballots. That’s also the date when ranked-choice tabulation will begin if the top candidates in the statewide races have not cleared the 50 percent threshold needed to win outright.
During this process, whoever is in last place will be eliminated, and the votes for that candidate will instead be awarded to each voter’s next choice still in the race. That goes on until two candidates are left, and the one with more votes wins.
OK. Is Nov. 18 when we might officially learn the winner of the race?
Well, there’s a chance that the Senate race could be called sooner, if it doesn’t go to ranked-choice tabulation at all. The remaining vote is from areas favorable to Peltola, so we’ll have to see how it goes in the days ahead. But yes, if the race is decided by ranked-choice tabulation, we will most likely know on Nov. 18.
in the states
The blue wave didn’t reach ballot questions
In 2024, voters in states like Arizona and Missouri backed abortion-rights measures even as they supported candidates like President Trump who had celebrated the fall of Roe v. Wade.
This year, the reverse has happened. As Democratic candidates won statewide races, several high-profile conservative ballot measures prevailed. The dissonant results show that voters do not always move the same way all at once — even in a wave election.
California narrowly killed a measure for a wealth tax on billionaires.
Arizona handily passed a Republican-backed referendum to require transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms aligned with the sex listed on their birth certificates. Voters in three more states, including Colorado, passed similar measures.
Voters in seven states, including Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio, passed measures to ban noncitizen voting or require voter identification — ideas long pushed by conservative groups.
Two more Republican bright spots:
ONE LAST THING
He died months ago. He’s on track to win his California election.
Bruce Giudici tried for years to win a seat on the board of supervisors in Calaveras County, Calif. Then he died. But his odds of winning the seat are looking better than ever.
On Aug. 30, his campaign said, he was out door-knocking when he fell. Giudici, who was 68, died the next day. His campaign pushed forward anyway, and its grass-roots politicking seems to have paid off: Giudici has posthumously received 57 percent of the vote in his race.
Taylor Robinson and Christine Zhang contributed reporting.
