https://www.texastribune.org/2026/11/04/texas-democrats-blue-wave-no-spaces-short/
Gov. Greg Abbott, the most powerful and well-resourced governor in modern Texas history, was unseated by Gina Hinojosa.
Attorney General Ken Paxton, who in past elections cast off impeachment, indictment and infidelities, fell to James Talarico in his bid for the U.S. Senate.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the iron-fisted ruler of the Texas Senate, went down to a little known state representative.
Republicans lost the attorney general’s office, one of the most influential conservative legal positions in the country. The new congressional map Republicans drew yielded them no gains — in fact, they lost one seat overall.
…nothing could have prepared either side for what happened Tuesday night — a full flip of statewide political control on a scale unseen in this state since Reconstruction
I’m going to remind everyone and you should also remind your friends that we had that “Blue Wave” in 2018 too, elected Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama, everyone and their mother was “Generational change!”, “The South is going Blue”, etc.
One election cycle later, we have Tommy “Name three branches of government” Tuberville elected right back in and remains there to this day.
You aren’t going to keep these seats if you don’t actually try to keep your promises to the electorate and conflate this win as a endorsement of Democrats and Progressives instead of a repudiation of Republican policies and actions.
To be fair, that was a special election in 2017. Not part of the blue wave in 2018. It was the only race on the ballot there. And Doug Jones only barely won because the GOP put up a literal pedophile who had been removed from office multiple times to run against him, and that guy got virtually no party support until a week before the election when Trump endorsed him.
And I remember back then almost everyone saying that it would only be temporary and he’d likely lose the seat the next election as long as they ran someone halfway decent against him. Which is what happened. They ran the former head coach of Auburn lol.
That’s a little different than pretty much the entirety of Texas government swinging blue. Governor, Lt governor, Senator, they picked up seats in the House that were gerrymandered to give to republicans, the Texas state House… that’s a much bigger and fundamental shift than a single off year race against one of the worst GOP candidates in history.
Sure, I can agree there about the special election and not officially being part of the whole 2018 blue wave thing. I also remember saying it wouldn’t last because I already had my doubts because come on, it was Roy Moore. Still I do remember the media and tons of people inside and outside of social media saying all these things I stated above.
As for this is different, man I really don’t have outlook given how fickle we’ve seen the American electorate is. Sorry but I really see this nation as a nation of idiots, reactionary, and made up of adults that always took the marshmallow as a kid. I mean we are a nation that has a that on average reads at or below a sixth grade reading level, we’ve shown that we’re just as susceptible, worse even, to populist bullshit propaganda when we elected Trump and Republicans in non-consecutive terms.
But hey, I’m still hopeful that this will be a permanent change, I’d like to believe, but just color me skeptical.
One election cycle later, we have Tommy “Name three branches of government” Tuberville elected right back in and remains there to this day.
There’s a real fundamental difference between the fluke election of 2018, where Republicans nominated an actual out-and-proud pedophile for Senate and he underperformed every other candidate on the ticket.
Democrats in Texas won across the board. Every statewide office flipped. Dems took the Texas House for the first time in decades. All Four state SC judges flipped. Dems hit a high water mark of 5.4M votes - more than in the Presidential election of 2024. Dems were winning in Bastrop. In Jefferson. All over the valley.
This wasn’t a bunch of moderate Republicans skipping on field on a ticket. This was a sea change built on the back of successively better Dem turnout going all the way back to the disaster of 2014 (1.4M Dem votes) to now.
More Democrats voted in Texas than in California (5.1M) this year.
Also re-gerrymander Texas
How about no gerrymandering at fucking all and requiring all states to redraw there maps before the next election to un-gerrymander everything.
Only works if you can cement the process against a Republican wave election that flips everything back to gerrymandered again.
This is why Ranked Choice voting, maybe even a full conversation to Parliamentary elections, is what you really need as part of electoral reform.
Just redrawing districts one more time won’t cut it. This is a systematic failure, not a Bad Maps problem.
? The Texas Senate will still be Republican-controlled, and both the house and senate need to approve legislation for it to be passed. The Democrats don’t have power, and neither do the Republicans. It’s a bad system, not just because the Senate is fundamentally undemocratic, but also because the whole legislature ends up being paralyzed when a different party controls each body. Unicameral legislatures are superior.
Did they seize power, or were people finally angry enough that the gerrymandering stopped working?
Regime change in an oil rich oligarchy under the banner of liberal democracy?
I guess we’ll give it another shot.
Republicans waking up this morning:
First thing Gina should do is end the declared state of emergency that Abbott still had in effect at the border. You know the border he bragged about “fixing” so often? So why the state of emergency you ask? Oh because with that in effect it allowed him and his allies to hand out no bid contracts.
Yeah we didn’t talk about thst enough.
Her victory speech specifically mentioned an end to no bid contracting.
End it and have Abbott investigated
Roll his ass straight to prison
Elections in the US aren’t about if people like one candidate over the other as much as they are about attendance. Dems outnumber republicans. But republicans show up, Dems don’t.
If the Dems turn out, republicans loose.
So the rule of GOP evil for years has been keep their misdeeds subtle and dismissible. Crank up the heat gradually. Then trump came along and blew that up since he’s about as subtle as a tornado in a trailer park.
Now everyone understands the GOP tactics, the Dems have enough power to fight back, and many of the red voters won’t fall for the same tricks anymore.
The GOP just died.
The GOP just died.
The GOP isn’t any more dead today than it was in 2008 or 1992. No more than the Dems were dead after 1994 or 2016.
One thing must be very clear: if the democrats fail to substantially improve living standards, the president after the next WILL be republican again.
They have a pretty clear path forward. They can’t fix everything easily but there are some huge wins that are easily doable and noticeable in this state. From there, it’s just a matter of chipping away at him over the rest. Considering the number of surviving republicans looking for a way to sell redemption to their constituents, the Dems are likely going to get plenty of cooperation this time around.
When the GOP falls, it’s not going to be a one party system, at least not for very long. What’s more likely to happen is the momentum from this election will want to pull Dems back to the left, eatablishment Dems will refuse and it wall cause the party to fracture.
Hard disagree, to improve living standards there are some very tough fights that need to be won - including a wealth tax (or any other form of redistribution of top .001% wealth), or breaking up of various monopolies. To achieve this, Democrats will need to make some very bold, very swift changes, the moment they install their own president.
Ending the war, the tariffs, and investigating trumps enablers rather than going at him head on are all doable
The problem is that Trump pissed the rest of the world off so much that the rest of the world isn’t going to prop you up anymore. Over the next few years you’re going to lose your central role in international banking, your military contracts, your media dominance, etc. Things are going to be rough regardless of who’s in charge, and while we’re aware that that will mean that you’ll just elect another variety of populist authoritarian, we’ll be ready for it next time.
Exactly. They are putting pressure on us to deal with our shit rather than enable its bad behavior. Exactly like they should be doing.
The GOP just died.
Woah, that same thing was said back in 2008 when dems won the senate, the house, and the white house. They clearly didn’t die, the evolved to become even worse.
The current iteration of the GOP did, at least. Trump is toxic politically, but they’ve all been riding his dick for 10 years now. They’ll have to figure out a new way forward.
Yeah. It was initially thought that the collapse in 2008 was going to be similar to the ones in 1932 and 1968, but it turns out that the shift from Republicans to Democrats were more tied to demographics. A demographic cause to a shift in political power has generally been more dangerous to the republic.
Dems back then also still claimed repubs were blocking them from being able to do anything. It was pathetic.
…but it was true? Democrats did not have filibuster proof majority, except for a few months or something like that. And that only by the slimmest possible margins, with Joe Lieberman acting as spoiler sabotaging Obamacare.
The GOP just died.
Doubt.
They have a bad habit of coming back from the dead in an even more horrific version.
They have a serious lacking of candidates with any charisma left. They’re too ghoulishly out of touch.
Trump was their most charismatic candidate (lol), and when he’s gone they have a bunch of unlikable dweebs who don’t even know how to pretend to be relatable.
The Republican party was in a very similar position in 2008, with Bush being toxic. Yesterday’s election is in fact being compared with the wipeout in 2008. And yet, the Republican party did not die in 2008.
Bush II campaigned on “no foreign adventures” and “no nationbuilding”, then went into Iraq and did exactly that. Along with all kinds of corruption and incompetence.
Don’t get me wrong, the Republican party absolutely deserves to die - anybody who votes for them is evil and an idiot. But recent history teaches us that pronouncing their demise can be premature.
It’s a little different now though because of how Trump committed various political sins. He was unapologetic. He doubled down. He was a dismissive jackass and a bully. He pulled every political trick republicans have always used, but the execution was so poor even his own base knew started to recognize what he was doing, like sexualizing candidates to make them seem more desirable to dumbfucks.
But he’s so loud and obvious there was never any chance to launder those behaviors into anything other than “Trump is a dumbass.” So next time the republicans try this shit, it will compared to Trump and dissected immediately.
Trump ruined it for all of them by being the worst political magician imaginable.
But he’s so loud and obvious there was never any chance to launder those behaviors into anything other than “Trump is a dumbass.”
He was no different in 2016, yet the Republicans still kept him as their chosen candidate and put the full weight of the party behind him for the 2020 and 2024 elections.
The GOP had multiple opportunities to ditch Trump, but they willingly stuck with him for a decade.
They kinda haven’t had the ability to ditch Trump after 2016, the key problem here is that Trump basically took over the Republican party so they couldn’t really excuse him lest the base turn on them. Personally I suspect that the post 2012 analysis they did will come true wherein once the party loses the Trump cult they’ll be left with a microscopic base of corpos and christofascists before mode or less imploding.
McConnell has an opinion on this he’s unable to express…for reasons.
The GOP was dead when they stood behind Trump in his first impeachment. We just have to hope it completes dying before America does.
It will be interesting to see what they do between now and next year. Trump has his entire party looking for a redemption arc so the knives are out, nobody is doing him any favors now.
There is no final victory, just like there is no final defeat. We are fighting the same battles our parents fought and our children will struggle with the same. Just as it is important to learn from the past, we need to prepare the future as well.
Declaring victory is how we got Obama betraying the working class, which ultimately lead to Trump and the MAGA Republicans gaining power. We won the battle for the House and Senate, and now the battle will be between the Progressive and Centrist Democrats. If the Progressives are unsuccessful in making things better and holding MAGA accountable, the pendulum will once again swing back to fascism.
There is no final victory, just like there is no final defeat.
Yes and no. Democracy require never end vigilance, obviously. But specific dangerous political movements do actually often die. In Europe, political parties die and new are born all the time. The US is an anomality, with the current static 2 party system.
That’s why the #1 strategy of the GOP is voter supression. The easier voting becomes, the more they lose.
A Democratic woman won in Texas yoohoooo I can’t believe so many good news this year!
- Orban out
- Vucic out
- Bolsonaro defeated again
Lt. Gov. Vikki Goodwin will oversee the Senate, a role Dan Patrick has wielded with an iron fist. But Republicans are expected to maintain a majority of that chamber, and already, there’s talk of finding ways to curb her authority on crucial roles like deciding what legislation to bring to the floor of the chamber.
Don’t try and govern or make things better for your constituents. Instead use parliamentary bullshit to ignore the voters and continue down the path that got you here today.
If you turn politics into a team sport its more important that your team wins then actually doing the job. Its repulsive.
They’re pulling from the neolib playbook
not sure why you’re being downvoted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism describes the US Republican Party pretty well
Probably because I was wrong and the neolibs are pulling from the Republican playbook. Not enough coffee yet, although it was partly a tongue in cheek comment.
The new congressional map Republicans drew yielded them no gains — in fact, they lost one seat overall.
It still allowed them to minimize the loss to only one member of the House; of their five attempts, they successfully flipped the 32nd district Republican.
It’s a little more complicated than that. It’s not just a matter of net gains and losses of seats, it also is important to consider which races were one by Democrats. They were all in very important districts in the states. Not to mention that the losses were within a hair. They were all extremely close, not something we had in 2024. It’s a very strong indicator that the entire country is swinging back to the left.
Take Florida for example: Democrats lost both the governor’s race and the Senators race, but they were very very very very close. The last time those seats were up for election, there was a pretty big gap between Democrats and Republicans. Not so much anymore. Plus, in Florida, we picked up three Democratic house seats, two of which were in gerrymandered districts, yet Dems won anyway.
I remember the last time Florida was a blue state… It was a much better place to live. And although we have a GOP governor and senators, the rest of the state is definitely shifting back to the left. A lot. 2028 will be extremely interesting indeed.
Swinging back to the middle at best
Florida does seem headed back to where they were in the 90’s when I left for which I’m glad. I’ll probably end up buying some property down there to retire and it would be nice if the state was sane again
I lived in Orlando from 01-07, and it was a pretty cool place. artsy with a good night life and LGBTQ scene. I moved back from NYC a couple of years ago, and wow is this place dead. Ron Desantis and his particular brand of Trumpism has had a huge impact on the culture of the city.
Fascism can’t stand diversity, culture, humor, education, complexity or empathy. What makes a good night life? The very things they can’t stand and will actively work to destroy. Sorry to hear that Orlando went dark in the face of oppression.
Most people don’t know how Berlin in the 1920’s was a hub of progressive politics, culture, and was even very pro-LGBT for it’s day.
Similar things happened there under the Nazis.
You’re spot on. The first Nazi book burning was in Berlin. The focus was on materials about LGBTQ+ research at the University:
“The first burning consisted mainly of LGBTQ books from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexual Research), founded by the pioneering Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld as the first medical center devoted to the study of gender and sexuality.”
They are the enemies of art and see it only as a means to more money.
Florida does seem headed back to where they were in the 90’s
Except the sea level. Don’t buy there, that place is done in the not so distant future.
Reading this as a permanent realignment is wrong-headed. This is one election where the electorate punished an extremely unpopular president. It’s unlikely we see another democratic win like this for some time.
What this tells me about Florida is that it is a far right state now. It’s about as red as South Carolina, Mississippi, or Montana. In an election where republicans aren’t as hated it will not be close.
I think I explained pretty clearly how the politics of states like Florida are anything but permanent and shouldn’t be taken for granted as such
I don’t see that in your comment at all but ok. My bigger point was the state isn’t swinging left, it’s continuing its shift to the right, that longer term change is just being masked by a temporary left electorate that came out this year.
You are factually incorrect. and it’s not just Florida that made a massive shift to the left… It’s pretty much the entire country.
FYI, the original source for that graphic was the AP, a very reliable source
what do you mean by “flipped the 32nd district”? district numbers have no consistency after each redistricting. they just numbered a completely different district that happened to be Republican the 32nd.
‘Flip’ wasn’t the right word for it, but they ultimately still succeeded in replacing what would have been a Democratic member of the House with a Republican one.
no, the original area it covered became the 33rd and still sent a Democrat to the House
Size power implies the opposite of what happened. The people chose.
That’s true, but look at the source. The texas tribune always implys bullshit to manipulate the dumb fuck gullible old people there.
Those dumb fuck gullible old people unfortunately include my parents and extended family
what do you mean by this? Texas Tribune is considered one of the most reliable Texas outlets. it is non-profit, has no paywall, and thought to lean liberal
It’s thought to lean liberal to extremist maybe.
how?
I agree with the semantics, but this is the term media uses to describe election wins, this isn’t specific to this paper or this story
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2026/texas-election-results/
James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa secured state-altering wins while the Democrats seized control of Congress
What a weird nit to pick.
You can seize power legally. Just because it can also be done illegally or by force, doesn’t mean it has to imply that.
Technically, sure, but I still don’t like the connotation so I won’t be using it that way.
A revolution is when the people seize power.
A red wave wouldn’t be described the same
That’s the part about American politics that always sounds wrong to me.
The news are all Democrats this, Democrats that, blablabla like the party leads and staff did something extraordinary, but they really didn’t.
People didn’t vote Dem because they like the Democratic party, they did it because even the most brainwashed inbred idiot sees that their life is getting worse and worse, and it needs to change.
If the “establishment Dems” miss this AGAIN and think people love them again, we’ll be back to square 1 in a few years.
Say what you will but Texas turned blue because diesel was too expensive.
Hating Ken Paxton is pretty non-partisan. Fuel prices weren’t even mentioned in like 90% of campaign ads here.
Corruption is a MUCH bigger issue than this race acknowledged. We will NEVER get our country under control until this out-of-control corruption is ended, and that will only happen with the end of MAGA. One of the reasons Ken Paxton lost is because he’s a Great Value version of Trump, so voting against him felt a lot like voting against Trump. It didn’t help that Talarico was the kind of candidate that people WANT to vote for.
Well, part of the reason for that is you don’t need to buy ads to tell people gas is expensive, they already know that. There’s a sign up every gas station, you can’t not see it every day.
sure, but so is hating Cruz and yet…
Cruz isn’t as blatantly corrupt. Paxton being impeached by his own party was a huge factor in the election. Hell, they even had Republican state representatives campaigning against Paxton.
Exactly, and that’s the reason the entire country flipped. Not wars, not support for Israel, not abortion rights, nor even all those Nazis dragging brown people into busses without cause. It was because of the price of diesel and all the cost increases stemming from that.
This is the good news people could have consistently and all over, when enough people show up to vote for the platform that has most policies people want when polled. Don’t fall for propaganda against healthcare for example, or fall for the fear about minorities and vote against healthcare. Stop doing that every other time or ever ideally, and stay the course for long-term stability with proven policies people want.
Do it again in two years. Call your new representatives. Regularly. This is only the beginning. The work starts now.
Can’t I email them instead? Seems so much less of a hassle.
Calls get logged and delivered to reps daily. Emails dont get much weight because they can be spammed. It’s assumed a call is a real person.
Tell that to all the spam calls I receive
Do you have a paid staffer whos job is to log every call and what everyone said and then present it to you every day?
No, but what’s stopping a spam robocall from spamming the paid staffer in the same way as an email?
The only thing Republicans know how to do is blame trans people and immigrants. They never answer for their own failures. Their platform starts and ends at hate.
First order for Texas, fix the power grid before they freeze again this winter.
