The Night MAGA Died
By Keya Vakil
Have you heard of Paul Barringer?
Barringer is projected to be the next congressman from North Carolina’s 13th District. He’s a Democrat who just flipped a seat that was on absolutely no one’s radar as competitive.
Until about midnight, I hadn’t heard of Paul Barringer either (no offense, Paul, if you’re reading this), and it is literally my job to follow campaigns and cover elections across the country.
But Barringer, like dozens of other Democrats, flipped a deep-red seat on Tuesday, driving a stake through the heart of the Republican House majority, even with gerrymandered congressional maps in states like North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.
Let’s be clear about one thing: Tuesday wasn’t a wave. It wasn’t a tsunami. It was a once-in-a-generation bloodbath, and a complete and utter repudiation of the Trump administration, the MAGA movement, and the modern Republican Party.
Democrats didn’t just romp through the House, where their majority is on track to top 250 seats, bigger than the one Republicans won in the 2010 Tea Party wave. They demolished Republicans in Senate races, too. Look at some of these margins:
- Roy Cooper won North Carolina by about 20 points.
- Jon Ossoff won Georgia by about 18 points.
- Chris Pappas won New Hampshire by about 14 points.
- James Talarico won Texas by about 12 points. I repeat: A Democrat won Texas by 12 points.
The list goes on. Sherrod Brown won Ohio by 5 points, Adam Hamilton won Kansas by 5, and Annie Andrews won South Carolina by more than 4.
The closest race is in Mississippi, where Democrat Scott Colom leads Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by just 43 votes. That’s not a typo. If Colom wins, he’ll be the first Black candidate elected to statewide office in Mississippi since Reconstruction.
The damage reached all the way down the ballot. Democrats won trifectas in Minnesota, Nevada and Pennsylvania, with Arizona and Michigan likely to follow. They also won control of the state House in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.
From top to bottom, Tuesday was a wipeout for Republicans. After campaigning in 2024 on lowering the cost of living and avoiding pointless wars, Donald Trump started a pointless war that sent the cost of living soaring. After vowing to drain the swamp, he became the swampiest, most corrupt president we’ve ever seen. After promising to focus on deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records, he built a Gestapo-like, masked paramilitary force that has torn communities apart, snatched people from schools and hospitals, deported tens of thousands of peaceful, hardworking immigrants, and shot and killed U.S. citizens and immigrants alike.
Turns out Americans really, really hate all of that. And no amount of money, not even the nearly $500 million Elon Musk spent on his own, could paper over it.
So where do we stand if we zoom out? MAGA is, for all intents and purposes, dead. What comes next won’t be the Republican Party of old, but something that hasn’t been born yet. The GOP’s civil war over the next two years, with Trump as a lame duck unwilling to let the party move on from him, will be something to behold. Speaker Mike Johnson has already said he won’t seek to lead House Republicans in the minority. Expect many more changes.
But it’s not all rosy for Democrats, either. They won handily, but real divisions remain in their party. They fielded remarkably strong Senate candidates across the country, and those candidates drove these victories, but party leadership remains deeply unpopular. The 2028 presidential primary will be nasty, as factions jockey for power and push their preferred candidates.
One thing is crystal clear: Voters are angry. They’ve been angry for two decades, and nearly every election in that time has ended in a “throw the bastards out” swing of the pendulum.
If Democrats don’t use their new majorities to do everything they can to lower prices, take on corruption and hold the Trump administration accountable, they will soon face the same backlash Republicans faced on Tuesday.
They must fight the hard fights. They must take on ICE. They must take on money in politics. They must take on attacks on Black voting rights. And they must take on the D.C. foreign policy establishment, also known as “the Blob,” that keeps pushing us into foreign wars and writing blank checks for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and occupation of Lebanon.
Most important, they must have a robust, competitive presidential primary heading into 2028, one that produces the party’s strongest nominee since Barack Obama, with a clear, ambitious agenda to materially improve Americans’ lives.
Democrats cannot rest on their laurels. They must seize the moment, with an agenda that doesn’t just Build Back Better, but builds something new altogether.
