Well, here’s a huge dose of hope and optimism to start your day!

I texted a Mississippi friend early this morning in seeing the news that a Democrat is currently leading by just the tiniest handful of votes in a US Senate race. “My flabbers are gasted,” she wrote. “Be on the lookout for pigs in the sky today!”

It will take much of the rest of the week for the full picture of the Democratic shellacking of Trump’s MAGA politics to come into view and the full list of superlatives to be assembled, but here’s a starting point:

Americans elected the nation’s first Black female governor, in Georgia.

The nation elected its first gay male senator, from New Hampshire.

Its first Muslim senator, from Michigan.

A new Black woman will serve in the US Senate from Illinois, just the sixth in the nation’s history.

The country elected its first female Native American governor, in New Mexico.

Minnesota elected the first Native American woman to the US Senate ever.

Texas elected its first Latina governor. Ohio, its first female governor.

California, its first Latino governor.

There are a million smaller personal superlatives too: In Georgia’s 13th district, the first Black woman with a STEM PhD won election to the US House. Robert Garcia, the first out gay immigrant elected to Congress, was reelected and is set to be the chair of the House oversight committee — his message to the Trump administration was blunt last night: “Lawyer up.” Nevada elected its first Black governor, my friend Aaron Ford, as did Wisconsin and Florida. A trans woman won Alabama House District 25, outside Huntsville. Colorado’s Melat Kiros will be the first Gen Z woman to serve in Congress; New Jersey elected its first Muslim to Congress, and New York its first Native American, Nebraska its first Hispanic.

Bentley Hudgins became the first out transgender and nonbinary state lawmaker in Georgia, winning election to the State Assembly. Kansas reelected Rep. Sharice Davids, one of the first two Native American women elected to congress and the first out LGBTQ+ person elected to Congress from Kansas. Similarly, Michigan elected its first out LGBTQ+ congressman in 11th district winner Jeremy Moss, who will take the seat vacated by Haley Stevens.

It appears that for the first time, more than 100 women will serve in the Democratic caucus in the US House simultaneously.

So much history was made last night — and so much was deeply colored and shaped by the 250 years of American history that came before.

The lede of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is worth quoting in full: “In 1860, an enslaved man named Sheppard Peek was listed among the possessions of William Peek, a white man in Crawfordville. His value was placed at $1,400. On another surviving document, Sheppard signed his name with an X. More than a century and a half later, Sheppard’s great-great-granddaughter, Keisha Lance Bottoms, was elected governor of Georgia.”

Coast to coast, after a period of white supremacy politics by the Trump administration unprecedented in modern politics, the country elected the most diverse set of leaders it has ever seen.

In Arizona, voters flipped a Republican House seat, electing JoAnna Mendoza, an openly LGBTQ+ former Marine drill instructor veteran who served during the military’s shameful and discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” era.

The Democratic victories were broad and deep — Kansas elected its first Democratic senator in nearly 100 years. James Talarico wasn’t even born the last time Texas sent a Democrat to the senate. North Carolina. South Carolina, where a Everytown for Gun Safety volunteer — the first elected to the Senate — walked onstage for her victory speech to the music of Dolly Parton’s 9-to-5. Democrats came within a few percentage points of defeating Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee. At least Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan will start next year with new Democratic trifectas. North Carolina flipped both legislative chambers; Democrats won every statewide in both Georgia and Texas. The Texas Tribune’s lede was short: “Everything has changed.”

Virginia enshrined abortion in its constitution and, 124 years later, overturned its Jim Crow-era lifetime voting ban for felons.

The list goes on.

Political scientist Seth Masket wrote, “I'm not sure how to phrase this exactly but Dems are winning races they haven’t won since they were the white supremacist party.” This time, though, the party won it for being explicitly NOT the white supremacist party, winning in places where voters were angry and fired up and had had enough of the GOP’s voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the rollback of the Voting Rights Act.

The election results are all the more astounding because of how unfair the GOP had tried to ensure the electoral landscape would be. They last year gerrymandered four Florida House districts — only to lose them all last night. Rep. Shomari Figures held onto his gerrymandered seat in Alabama.

As one GOP consultant wrote in the middle of the evening, “I had a worst case scenario. A doomsday scenario. I never thought to have a zombie apocalypse meets thermonuclear apocalypse with zombie invasion from the sun scenario.”

Punchbowl’s headline this morning described the election results as an “extinction-level event for Hill GOP.”

WIRED’s headline was blunt too: “Democrats sweep Republicans in nearly every race that matters.”

As my favorite pollster G. Elliot Morris wrote: “This is shaping up to be the biggest House popular vote victory for any party since 1974. This is a Watergate-level repudiation of the party in power.”

But beyond the diversity of Democratic victories, there was a more fundamental point too.

Authoritarianism lost, bigly.

One Austinite posted video of the downtown, filling with cheering and honking horns, commenting, “Austin, Texas sounds like an Eastern European city that just overthrew a dictator.”

And in a way, we did.

Hispanic voters, who just two years ago Republicans believed had been key to a historic electoral realignment, turned out not to appreciate themselves and their families being racially profiled, assaulted, and rounded up in mass arrests.

Donald Trump, with the complete assent of the GOP-led Congress, tried to speedrun an unwinding and descent into authoritarianism last year — and failed. They failed not because of the strength of institutions — many of which actually capitulated, twisted themselves, and kowtowed to accommodate Donald Trump — but because of the strength of individuals, many of whom stood up to the terroristic attacks of Border Patrol on ICE on America’s streets at great personal risk.

“I Voted” stickers were left in Minneapolis on the memorials to Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and in Texas more than 1,000 “I Voted” stickers blanketed a memorial to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Jon Ossoff won handily in Georgia on a platform that boiled down to basically: “I don’t like Nazis.”

The “No Kings” protests mattered — and were real.

So much for the Thousand-Year Trump Reich.

While the top line is a clear rejection of authoritarianism, to me there’s a clear and relatively simple recipe for Trump’s collapse: Corruption mattered. Up, down, and across the country, the nation rejected kleptocracy, oligarchy, and Silicon Valley’s new era of techno-fascism. Data centers lost coast to coast.

History will record that Trump’s speedrun to authoritarianism failed in specific places at specific times. ABC’s forced retreat from taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air last September after Kimmel criticized Charlie Kirk broke the fever of institutional collapse and “chilled speech” that had settled over the country in the first half of 2025; ICE’s failed invasion of Minneapolis, and to a lesser degree Chicago, ended what was supposed to be the Trump administration’s signature domestic agenda item and its ticket to steal future elections; the Iran war ended its vision of remaking the world order in Trump’s image. At home, the controversy and cover-up of the Epstein Files collapsed the support of Trump’s base, and the combination of the Iran War and Trump’s capricious and illegal tariffs allowed inflation and the cost of living to spiral out of control.

In the end, one of the most shocking aspects of yesterday’s election was how normal it was. There were no ICE checkpoints on the way to polling places. No attempts by FBI agents to seize ballot boxes. The Justice Department sent a 1000 polling monitors out across the country, to all 50 states for the first time, targeting minority districts, and … nothing happened. Lawyers were ready — and never got called.

Also, in the breadth of victories yesterday, the 2028 election got a lot harder to steal.

Ohio and Georgia both flipped their secretaries of state to Democrat.

Other states, potentially like North Carolina and Texas, might be able to undo their GOP gerrymandering. It’s possible — possible — that Democrats now control enough state houses that they could secure the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and do away legislatively with the electoral college. (Huzzah!)

It is an incredible statement of where we are that we need to think like this — and it should be a warning about the next stage of where we go as a country. Barack Obama called overnight for “a politics that brings people together rather than divides them.” Hakeem Jeffries demonstrated how out of touch he is with the country’s mood this morning by saying, “The American people don't want us to get even; they want us to get things done on their behalf.” I disagree. America needs to ensure that MAGA never rises from the electoral grave it was buried in last night. Impeachment, prosecutions, investigations, subpoenas — Democrats need to spend these years ahead focused on ensuring justice.

That doesn’t mean NOT focusing on making Americans’ lives better, but a key part of making Americans’ lives better is ensuring that our country can be more just, more equal, and more free. And that involves burying MAGA for good.

This wasn’t about a few bad candidates — a la Ken Paxton or Vivek Ramaswamy. This wasn’t “just” about the cost of eggs or diesel. As Brian Buetler wrote this morning, “No one wins a historic realignment election because inflation is slightly above trend. The public wants an end to the scourges of tyranny. Deliver it.”

There is a better path ahead. And Democrats should embrace this as a broad mandate to deliver a better future, more just, more equal, and more free. Already today the DC media and punditocracy will try to pretend that this is not as huge a mandate as it is.

These election results are a chance to rewrite the future of America.

The sheer terror of ICE and Stephen Miller has opened a window and pathway for a pro-immigration politics. Greg Sargent saw this coming last month, in the strength of James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed. America — contrary to the rhetoric of Fox News and worse — likes immigrants. In Sargent’s interview with El-Sayed, the Michigan candidate said, “People like [JD] Vance think America is too small for some of us. I think America is big enough. America has been big enough include people whose families came, were here before anybody else showed up, or who were brought here despite themselves. His view of America is small -- small like him.”

That to me is the hope in this moment we should embrace.

I’ve spent this last year working on this new book about the story of progress and retrenchment in American history, about how progress is never linear nor guaranteed. My thesis is that the great beauty of the American experiment, despite the fact that we’ve never achieved our Founding creed, is that each generation takes up the challenge and works the hard work of making our country better, of making our imperfect nation a more perfect union.

In the introduction, I quote historian Joseph Ellis saying, “What Martin Luther King, Jr., called ‘the arc of the moral universe’ is really an undulating up-down syndrome.” And I write about how “the success of the forces of progress often provoke backlash, retrenchment, and sometimes even bloodshed. There were a hundred years in between the promises of Reconstruction and the moment that pieces of that vision became reality with the Civil Rights Movement. Heather McGhee, in her book on America’s history of structural racism The Sum of Us, recalls that her parents ‘were the first generation of Black Americans to live full adult lives with explicitly racist barriers lowered enough for them to even glimpse the American Dream.’”

That same generation that McGhee writes about had watched their rights steadily eroded over the last decade across the South — and then last night fought back, vigorously and in places where Democrats themselves were surprised. Democrats came, it appears, within about a point of winning the Louisiana senate seat!

We timed the book to come out right after the midterms because we hoped that it would inspire Americans to pick up the mantle of progress and recommit themselves to the hard work of making America better.

This is that moment.

This is that hope and optimism.

As historian Nicole Hemmer wrote this morning, “2026 sets the stage. It puts Democrats within striking distance of a world where, with a Democratic president, they could set to work on the fundamental reconstruction of democracy in the U.S. That's the work of the next two years: building both the vision and the blueprint for that reconstruction.”

I don’t pretend to know what the next two years bring. American politics continues to surprise me.

But I do know this: Thanks to last night the unfinished project of America has a better chance. 

Reconstruction — with a capital “R” — is possible. “Reconstruction” — the first — is Chapter 3 of my book, our third national revolution. We can hope that the years ahead will enshrine a “Second Reconstruction” as America’s 26th revolution.

GMG

PS: No, seriously, if you liked this essay, you’ll love my new book AMERICA IN 25 REVOLUTIONS. Preorder here and get an amazing set of coasters drawn by POLITICO cartoonist Matt Wuerker: