A democratic tsunami sweeps through republican strongholds and punishes Trump forcefully

WashingtonA divine punishment for a president who boasts of being God's chosen one. As if they were the seven plagues of Moses, the great Republican strongholds have been succumbing one after another to the Democratic wave that threatens to sweep the Senate. North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Iowa and Kansas have already turned blue. Still without knowing the result in other critical races for the upper chamber, such as Michigan and Alaska, the Democrats are already projected as the new majority. It is not even midnight in the United States, and everything points to the Republican losing control of both houses of Congress.

It was enough for South Carolina to fall, something that was not even foreseen in the electoral projections, for Trump to disown himself. After spending the entire campaign asking his followers to vote as if he were on the ballot, now the Republican has distanced himself from his own words. "I was not on the ballot. If I had been, we would have won in the interior of the territory," he wrote on Truth Social shortly after the defeat of Republican Darline Graham in South Carolina against Democrat Annie Andrews was confirmed.

Although the drama reached its peak when two more Trumpist strongholds fell: Texas and Kansas. The unlikely candidate formula that Zohran Mamdani premiered in New York has worked again. The most unthinkable candidates for the Democratic Party, two pastors, have achieved results that were unimaginable: Presbyterian pastor James Talarico will be the first Democratic senator in the southern state in 38 years, and Methodist chaplain Adam Hamilton has become the first Democrat to win an election in Kansas since before the Second World War. As the saying goes, misfortunes never come alone.

The Democrats have managed to capitalize on the unease with Trump's unfulfilled promises. Although during the primary cycle many of the new candidates managed to once again inspire a part of the electorate that had felt orphaned during the 2024 presidential elections, the weight of the Republican as a mobilizing factor remains undeniable. The pendulum is shifting back to the other side, but the engine that makes it move remains the same: the desire for change, a promise that seems to never quite arrive.

The night had already begun with bad indicators for the Republicans in Florida, where two hours after the polls closed, the Democrats were already giving battle in Trump territory. This state was one of the first where the president's party was expected to win comfortably, and the two Republican candidates, Ashley Mood for the Senate and Byron Donalds for governor, had to sweat to secure victory. Meanwhile, the Democratic vote was coming out strong in Georgia, and around two in the morning (Catalan time) the Associated Press had already declared Jon Ossoff the winner for the Senate. The reelection of the Democratic candidate secured the first step of the path the Democrats had to travel to manage to control the upper chamber.

Of the four seats the Democrats needed to flip to control the Senate, North Carolina provided the first. Roy Cooper has managed to change the color of this territory where Trump won in both the 2024 and 2020 presidential elections. In fact, 2020 was the only swing state where the Republican managed to prevail.

Michigan is a swing state where in 2024 Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris by a margin of only 80,000 points. With more than 10 million inhabitants, it is the tenth most populous state in the country, and this makes it a primary laboratory for how a more left-leaning and markedly populist agenda might work in the rest of the USA. 

The mobilization in early and mail-in voting—with nearly 60 million ballots cast—already predicted high turnout in the elections favorable to Democrats. In the United States, early voting is usually mostly Democratic, and the percentage of votes cast in these elections compared to 2022 pointed toward a higher mobilization of the progressive voter, especially in critical races for control of the Senate. In Texas, for example, early voting has increased by 41% compared to 2022. Likewise, in North Carolina, a key race for control of the upper chamber, the percentage of early voting has increased by 29% compared to the past midterm.