Nothing lasts forever. A few days ago the United States held highly consequential midterm elections- a round of the cycle held every two years by which all members of the House of Representatives, a third of the Senate, and a number of state governors are elected.
Important as it is, the election remains an ordinary exercise of democracy, and experience has taught us that every election has its circumstances and its heroes, just as it has its issues and its casualties.
In my estimation, President Donald Trump had not been expecting these results. Indeed, I would almost swear that many Democrats, politicians and supporters alike, did not dare take such an optimistic view of what their candidates actually achieved across the length and breadth of the country. The Democrats were not content with changing the balance of power in Congress by seizing the majority in both the House and the Senate; they also won striking victories among state governors, including surprising political and cultural "breakthroughs."
In the House, as of yesterday evening London time, the Democrats had won a landslide: 252 of 435 seats, against 162 for the Republicans.
There had been signs before polling day that they would take the House, but the margin exceeded expectations. So did the Senate result, where they secured 54 of 100 seats against 44 for the Republicans, with the official results from Mississippi and Alaska still to come.
The shift in Congress was mirrored in the governors' races, where the surprise was arguably bigger, and more painful for the Republicans. They lost the governorship of Texas, their greatest stronghold of all and the apple of the right-wing trillionaire Elon Musk's eye.
In Texas, a state with a long history of hostility toward its "neighbor" Mexico, the right-wing Republican governor Greg Abbott- one of the "heroes" of Trump's campaign and of the MAGA movement against illegal immigration from Latin America- lost to his Democratic challenger, the Latina progressive Gina Hinojosa.
Texas, the second most populous state after California, also gave another young "Latino" candidate a national platform: the new senator James Talarico, who won one of its two Senate seats.
To appreciate what Hinojosa and Talarico achieved, consider that Musk had come to see Texas as a "safe haven" for tech oligarchs' investments fleeing "California taxes," and that the last time a Democrat won a Texas Senate seat was in 1970. That year Lloyd Bentsen, the future senator and cabinet minister, defeated George Bush senior, who nonetheless went on to win the presidency, as did his son George W. Bush, a former governor of the state.
Trump's plan for a "separation wall" along the Mexican border has also suffered a painful setback: the Democrats now control all four border states, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
As for the broader picture, which may or may not shape the 2028 presidential race, women made a large and influential showing. Among the winners was the physician Annie Andrews in South Carolina, who took the seat of the late Republican senator Lindsey Graham, while two Native American Democrats won a Senate seat in Minnesota and the governorship of New Mexico.
The Democrats now hold 28 governorships to the Republicans' 20, including most of the largest states- Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Georgia, alongside Texas- as well as their "impregnable strongholds" of California, New York, and Illinois.
A clear majority of "Latino/Hispanic" voters also turned against the Republicans this time, reversing the pattern of the presidential election two years ago. And a cohort of young Democratic leaders has emerged, some of them radical "progressives" from ethnic and religious "minorities," led by Georgia's new governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first African-American woman to govern the state.
Overall, the Democrats won the popular vote by nearly 13 points, the largest margin for either party since 1976. Yet some argue that their real test begins now.
In politics, where there are no certainties but plenty of paradoxes, the Democrats will soon face two real problems, both rooted in the divide between their young radicals and the "old guard" led by Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House.
The first is that Schumer and Jeffries are men of "compromise" and of "lobbies," the "Israel lobby" foremost among them, which will make it easier for the Republicans to exploit their differences with a generation of radicals among the young, women, minorities, and LGBT people.
The second is that President Trump has chosen to stand up to the "Democratic hurricane" rather than bow before it, appointing Stephen Miller, the closest of his hardline advisers, as White House chief of staff.
The days ahead will bring a great deal, in peace or in war.
