Democracy and decency won a very big victory on Tuesday.
The Trump administration tried to suppress the vote, employing every tactic they could dream up, from gerrymandering to threatening local election officials to encouraging hate-filled propaganda. That effort was backed up by the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into Republican campaigns by tech billionaires and a trillionaire named Elon Musk.
Despite all that, American voters turned out in record numbers in state after state and turned the midterm election into a blue tsunami of historic proportions.
Democrats were given control of the House of Representatives with a substantial majority. In most of the districts that had been redrawn by GOP legislatures to favor Republican candidates, the tinkering failed. Gerrymandering lost big.
Democrats also gained an unexpectedly solid Senate majority with victories in states no one would have thought were remotely winnable just a few weeks ago, including South Carolina and Kansas.
Perhaps the most stunning results came in Texas, a state that has been in the solid grip of Republicans for decades. Democrats handily won the U.S. Senate race and the governorship, and also looked likely to win other statewide elected offices, including attorney general.
The Texas shift is tectonic. If the Lone Star State votes as strongly blue in 2028, the Republican presidential candidate will find it nearly impossible to gain an Electoral College majority.
A majority of voters all over the country were apparently ready, at last, to punish the once great Republican Party for its descent into fearmongering, moral cowardice and tolerance of corruption in the service of President Donald Trump.
The Texas election result was the clearest expression of this revulsion. No candidate embodied all the worst aspects of Trump’s GOP as completely as Ken Paxton, the venal Republican Senate candidate. Paxton’s ambitions got crushed by the vote total of the Democratic candidate, James Talarico.
The Democratic Party victories were so expansive that Trump did not scream about a rigged vote. Instead, he claimed the drubbing handed Republicans had nothing to do with him, since he was not on the ballot.
This is just one more Trumpian delusion. During the campaign, he repeatedly pleaded for voters to imagine he was on the ballot — and voters did just that. This election was an unambiguous repudiation of Trump — his corruption, his amorality, his cruelty, his war, his tariffs, his incompetence, his dictator worship, his absurdity, his betrayals.
The majority of Americans have been aching for a way to put a check on Trump’s abuses of power and, on Tuesday, they found it. It turns out the best defense of democracy is the exercise of democracy itself.
We can only hope that we have turned a corner in America, a change of course that would validate the words of Talarico in his victory speech: “A politics of division is no match for a politics of love.”
See more of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey
View other syndicated cartoonists at: st.news/cartoons
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