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America knew the score early Tuesday night — because nothing was close. 

Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, California, even swingy Pennsylvania: The outcomes of all these contests, as well as others of less prominence, were clear within minutes of polls closing, revealed by both exit polls and early vote counts. It was, as the headlines blared, “A Democratic Sweep” and “A Stunning Rebuke of Donald Trump.”

With nearly all votes counted, here are the margins of victory for the “Democratic side” in the key statewide races:

New York City 8.9 (50.6% – 41.7%)
New Jersey 13.4 (56.4% – 43.0%)
Virginia 14.6 (57.3% – 42.7%)
Pennsylvania 23.2 (61.6% – 38.4%)
Maine 25.4 (62.7% – 37.3%)
Georgia 25.6 (62.8% – 37.2%)
California 28.2 (64.1% – 35.9%)

All Democratic wins, with the exception of Zohran Mamdani’s in NYC’s mayoral race, were by double digits, verging on blowouts. Trump has unceasingly called his 1.5 percent popular vote margin in 2024 a “landslide”; what, I wonder, would he call these margins?

In each of the statewide contests, the Democratic candidate or Democratic position on ballot measures ran well ahead of Kamala Harris’s performances in 2024 — dramatically so in swing states Pennsylvania and Georgia, won by Trump in 2024.

Even galaxy-class MAGA spinmeisters, though they tried mightily, were at a loss to find a credible shred of silver lining for their party, president, or cause.

These numbers continue and expand upon a pattern of dramatic Democratic overperformance in special elections since Trump reentered the White House. They also significantly exceed polling-based expectations.

Reactions among pro-Democratic and pro-democracy (with Trump’s dictatorial behavior, the two have become less and less distinguishable) observers were typically swift and joyous. Substacker Aaron Parnas exulted:

This was more than just a good night for Democrats. It was a political realignment, a reaffirmation of their power, and perhaps the beginning of a new era in American politics.

Even more neutral commentators led with the obvious. Matthew Yglesias and Halina Bennet lamented in their takeaways’ teaser: 

A Democratic sweep so total it’s hard to make a lot of smart points about it.

The scrupulously nonpartisan Nate Silver called it: 

A 10/10 night for Democrats.

And it was. Even galaxy-class MAGA spinmeisters, though they tried mightily, were at a loss to find a credible shred of silver lining for their party, president, or cause. 

Trump, true to form, carried on about mail-in ballots and illegal voters, demanding an overhaul of an election system that could produce such unfavorable results. He added that the disaster happened because of the shutdown and because, well, the biggest factor, according to unidentified (aka fictitious) pollsters? He wasn’t on the ballot. He said he “was honored that they said that.” Of course.. 

Missing from Trump’s sombre post-mortem: the East Wing, the Ballroom, the Great Gatsby shindig on the eve of the SNAP cutoff, the Caribbean snuff films, Argentina’s billions and beef, the pardons, the ICE goons, the urban troops, Epstein, the tariffs, the grifts, etc., etc. The kinds of tone-stone-deaf, monarchical things that get you No-Kinged and a sub-40 percent approval rating — from identified pollsters. 

It’s worth noting that Trump “won’t be on the ballot” in November 2026, any more than he was on the ballot on Tuesday. That is to say he will very much be on the ballot — along with whatever happens to be his approval rating a year down the road.

Which is not great news for Republicans trying to maintain their grip on Congress and statehouses and state courts. Democrats now have the big “mo”: The demoralized will be inspired, the beaten down will rise up, the meek become mighty. Donors will be reassured. A few MAGAs just might begin to wonder. Even the Supreme Court may take the hint.

No Kings might be dismissed as the 7 million lefty kooks who always hated Trump just getting artistically creative and getting some air, and the polls ridiculed as “fake” or “lame” — but Tuesday’s thumping was delivered by millions of real voters, including key demographics like Latinos and the young, and not all in blue states.

A Cloud on the Horizon

OK, there’s your punchbowl. Drink up, because here comes the turd. 

Things would be looking up indeed — for the Democrats and for democracy — if the midterms could be counted on to be free and fair. 

I’m afraid they can’t.

The habitually optimistic Robert Reich joined in the anti-Trump “Ding dong…” celebration, but sounded a very sobering note of caution:

The sleeping giant of America is up and roaring.

On October 18, more than 7 million of us demonstrated against tyranny. Today, we stood up for democracy.

Will today make Trump and his Republican sycophants even more determined to hold on to power in next year’s midterms at any cost? Or will they see the writing on the wall and moderate their assault on democracy and the rule of law? 

I hope for the latter. I fear the former. (emphasis mine)

I share Reich’s fear — far more than his hope. We’ve seen virtually no signs to date of Trump settling down and just governing. He has his own power-flexing, rule-defying momentum and, his TACO moniker notwithstanding, he appears to be locked into his dictator’s doom loop trajectory. It’s truly comical how much he waffles — he was, for example, momentarily for “affordability” in the wake of Tuesday’s shellacking, before going back to being against it — but the vector sum of all his zigs and zags keeps pointing toward authoritarianism.

I’ve already made the case that Trump has shifted from the ordinary politics of popularity, coalition building, and base expansion to a new game of power, domination, and control. My best guess is that there will be, and perhaps can be, no going back.

The Logic of Desperation

Team Trump knew the electoral game was lost before Tuesday’s grand slam. If all eligible voters are permitted to vote and all votes are counted as cast, they know they don’t stand much of a chance in 2026.

So it is reasonable to conjecture — given that we know who Trump & Co. are and with what contempt they regard democracy and its protocols — that a fair number of eligible voters will not be permitted to vote and/or a fair number of votes will not be counted as cast. 

Enough to keep Trump/MAGA in power and the president himself safe from a third impeachment. 

I suspect that — as much as Trump seems to relish terrifying, squashing, or blowing up his perceived enemies — his first line of anti-Democratic, and anti-democratic, attack will be red thumbs on the electoral scales.

Some have speculated that Trump will find a pretext for cancelling or nullifying the midterm elections — turning, if necessary, to his repurposed military and the use or threat of deadly force. These scenarios are no longer unthinkable. 

But I suspect that — as much as Trump seems to relish terrifying, squashing, or blowing up his perceived enemies — his first line of anti-Democratic, and anti-democratic, attack will be red thumbs on the electoral scales.

You may well ask where those red thumbs were last night. If elections are as vulnerable as I suspect to both overt (voter suppression and intimidation) and possibly covert (vote count manipulation) thumbs, why were those thumbs nowhere to be seen as Democrats dominated and ran the table? And doesn’t their absence last night serve as a resounding “all clear” for 2026?

Think Like a Card Shark

I seem to get asked that question every time Democrats win, even when, as in 2006 and 2020, their victories are anemic and underwhelming relative to expectations: If their opponents could cheat, why didn’t they? It’s a reasonable question, but a dangerous one.

My response: To understand the very dirty politics of election theft — to come to grips with schemes aimed at subverting democracy and ensuring, in Karl Rove’s infamous formulation, “a permanent Republican majority” — it’s necessary to think like a card shark.

You’ll never get anywhere hustling poker by winning every hand. If the marks don’t win their share, they’ll think you’re cheating and stop playing. If you don’t want them to pick up their chips, you’d better be selective with your sleeved aces.

The question to ask is whether, for all the stir it has caused, Tuesday’s election was the right time to cheat. Was it, in other words, a big hand or a small hand, a big or a small pot? 

First, consider the huge margins of Democratic victory. The spreads in the contests with pragmatic national impact — California, Maine, and Pennsylvania — were all north of 20 points, not rational targets for rigging because, put very simply, the bigger the rig, the bigger the risk. 

You can purge or otherwise disenfranchise only so many voters, or mistabulate only so many votes, before either too many people notice and raise a serious stink or the results themselves are so “off” from consensus expectations that somebody gets serious about demanding some sort of forensic examination of the whole process. 

Virtually all of Tuesday’s results were, from a risk standpoint, rig-proof.

Now let’s look at the reward side of the risk/reward equation. Aside from the passage of Prop 50 (enabling the redistricting of California to neutralize Trump’s requisitioned redistricting of Texas), the rejection of stricter voting requirements in Maine, and the retention of the Democratic state Supreme Court majority in Pennsylvania, none of the Democratic wins will have much nuts-and-bolts impact on national politics or Trump’s path forward. 

The governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, the Public Service Commission of Georgia, and the mayoralty of NYC are nice prizes but, in big-picture political terms, small ones. 

One might even argue that the mayoralty of Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist with what passes in this country for a radical agenda, may turn out to be a political gift to Trump. 

So before we go trumpeting “a new era in American politics,” at least let’s consider the fact that most special elections and Tuesday’s odd-year election are quintessential small hands — and not be shocked if the midterms fail to be played the same way and follow the same script. 

They are a quintessential big hand, and that’s when the aces come out of the sleeves.

Texas Hold-em

The one state that seemed untouched by Tuesday’s blue tsunami was Texas. There, all 17 ballot propositions — most furthering a right-wing agenda on matters such as taxation, law enforcement, and voting eligibility — passed, most by wide margins, significantly greater than Trump’s 14-point statewide margin in 2024. 

This countertrend is significant because Texas has been particularly aggressive in passing and implementing measures aimed at suppressing the vote of and/or intimidating typically Democratic constituencies such as legal immigrants, voters of color, students, urban residents, frequent movers, and renters.

Texas, therefore, gives us at least a partial window on what to expect in other red, and some swing, states as Trump and his Department of Justice flog the kinds of “reforms” that appear, based on Tuesday’s results, to be already working for MAGA in the Lone Star State.

Red Sleeves?

We should further note that these are overt tactics, on display. More covert schemes, involving interference with the vote counting process itself, are by their nature not restricted to the states and counties where MAGA/GOP exercises political control. 

Rather, they would depend on the vulnerabilities of and access to the vote-recording and -tabulating equipment itself — whatever its location, red or blue.

Considering this, the quiet sale of Dominion Voting Systems — the second leading vendor of voting equipment in the US, after right-affiliated Elections Systems & Software (ES&S) — to Republican Scott Leiendecker and his newly chartered Liberty Vote should be seen as ominous. 

I will be guiding a trip down that rabbit hole in the weeks to come, the legendary opacity of US voting equipment vendors notwithstanding.

It is far from clear what can be done to safeguard our upcoming elections. Nothing, of course, at the federal level, where the push is on to force states to hand over voter information with the aim of federalizing elections and purging millions of the very kinds of voters who made Tuesday a blue wave. 

I will be covering those schemes in future articles, as well as state- and local-level efforts to protect voting rights, shield voters and election workers from intimidation and violence, and improve transparency and verification protocols for the elections of 2026 and beyond.

Cringe Now or Cry Later

I’m all too aware that most of us would rather take our punch from a turd-free bowl. Having made a career of it, I know all too well just how uncomfortable it is to raise and attempt to document these issues. I share the concern that has been expressed about the impact on “voter confidence in our elections” and, potentially, on turnout.

I’m not sure what to say to all that except that more than 20 years of study have persuaded me that the vulnerabilities, and the danger that they will be exploited, are real. And everything I’ve seen of Trump and MAGA tells me that they have no intention of letting democracy and its bedrock protocols, like voting and vote counting, bring them down. 

This is a potentially deadly combination. It is also not our first rodeo.

We’ve been “shocked” before (2004, 2016, 2024) and done — nothing. We thought that modeling good behavior — showing our faith in the process — was the right response. 

But Donald Trump was not interested in our model or in good behavior. Refusing to accept defeat in 2020, he launched Stop the Steal and eventually an insurrection. 

That was modeling bad behavior, but he had a point: Why should anyone trust a process they can’t observe, a process that takes place in the pitch-dark of cyberspace, a process with audits and verification protocols that experts will tell you are manifestly inadequate?

The Insurrectionist-in-Chief was right in at least one claim: Our electoral system, as presently constructed, falls seriously short of proving the accuracy and legitimacy of the results it so confidently spits out.

Trump’s problem was that he had no evidence, either hard or soft, of a “steal” — certainly nothing that would stand up to even the lightest scrutiny. 

I know, because I spent months poring over the data, the polls and the vote counts, looking at the patterns from every imaginable angle. And in fact, all the statistical indicators, as I demonstrated at the time, pointed to just the opposite of Trump’s claims: If anything nefarious did occur during Election 2020, its impact was in his favor, and in favor of Republican candidates up and down the ballot. 

But the Insurrectionist-in-Chief was right in at least one claim: Our electoral system, as presently constructed, falls seriously short of proving the accuracy and legitimacy of the results it so confidently spits out.

Tuesday’s election told us a great deal about where the people of America stand, but it told us very little about where Trump and his regime stand, how they plan to go about ruling and staying in power. I’d be shocked if Tuesday’s results cause them to, as Reich put it, “moderate their assault.”

So, for now, we have something big to celebrate — but also something even bigger to start protecting. 

Next year — if Trump’s disrespect for facts, including numerical facts, and his contempt for democracy guide him — we may learn what happens to suckers who assume all hands, small and big, will be played alike and played straight.

There will be a lot to protect against, all sorts of schemes to keep Trump’s unpopularity from translating to electoral defeat and loss of power: everything from voter suppression and intimidation to ginned up emergencies and martial law. 

We need to be prepared — as a public and institutionally wherever possible — for each of them.

We can begin by demanding electoral transparency — via hand-marked paper ballots and serious, upgraded, observable audit protocols — and preparing to act on that demand. 

It is, if you think about it, the one demand all voters — blue and red, Lib and MAGA — should be able to agree upon.