FOR THE RIGHT, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, UNEXPECTEDLY

I don't have to tell you how big a win this was for the Democrats -- a flip of seven and potentially nine seats in the Senate, the possibility of the largest House majority either party has had in this century, a sweep in Texas statewide races -- senator, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general (and the demise of the most overtly bigoted candidate in America, Bo French, in the race for Texas railroad commissioner, as well as wife-beater Max Miller in his Ohio House race and Brandon "AK Guy" Herrera, a gun-fetishizing content creator fond of Nazi jokes and misogyny, in a House race in Texas). Lauren Boebert is losing! Virginia Foxx trails her Democratic opponent by 99 votes! It was an amazing day.

What happened was something that seemed impossible for most of recent U.S. history: the Republican Party and the American right were held accountable for their actions.

Here's how American politics has tended to work in recent decades: Republicans gain power and make the rich richer while forcing the non-rich to run twice as fast just to stay in place. Republicans start endless wars that accomplish nothing for the American people. Republicans (with the help of the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party) empower large businesses even at their most reckless, sometimes with devastating consequences for ordinary Americans. Republican jurists restrict the voting rights of non-whites, seize reproductive rights from women, and allow the super-rich to spend unlimited money in order to buy elections.

And even when voters get fed up with Republicans, the response of voters often seems muted, especially in the past decade. After four years of Donald Trump, Joe Biden won a decent-size popular-vote victory, but he needed to eke out wins by an eyelash in several swing states in order to secure the win. In 2022, Democrats were able to prevent a Republican wave election after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, but Trump, who appointed three of the justices responsible for the Dobbs decision, came roaring back two years later.

It's quite possible that yesterday's shellacking of the GOP will be reversed in two or four years' time, but for now it feels good. It feels good because we can draw a straight line from the actions of America's worst supervillains to so many of the Democratic wins.

Trump's brutal immigration crackdown largely targets hard-working Hispanics rather than criminals. The people who chose this approach -- Trump himself along with Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Greg Bovino, Markwayne Mullin, and the worst of them all, Stephen Miller -- outraged Hispanic voters so much that they turned the red state of Texas purple, and for the moment more blue than red, in one election cycle.

Republicans on the Supreme Court overturned the final provision of the Voting Rights Act that protected Black voting power. In response, Black voters in the South turned out in large numbers, leading to big victories in Georgia, the Carolinas, and possibly even the Mississippi Senate race.

Trump himself gets the blame for the pointless and inflationary war and the pointless and inflationary tariffs. The strikingly unpopular Elon Musk stands in for the entire arrogant tech oligarchy; James Talarico singled Musk out as a villain and won by double digits.

Voters chose Democrats because they hate data centers and hate Flock cameras. They chose Democrats because they hate the way Trump, his sons, his son-in-law, and all their friends have enriched themselves in the past two years. Jon Ossoff and other Democrats made that a major issue and won big.

What's gratifying is that this doesn't seem like just a "thermostatic" win for Democrats -- the normal adjustment to a win by the other party two years earlier. It's much bigger than that, and it's for obvious reasons.

The Trump administration thought it could get away with assaulting rural hospitals, making health insurance more expensive, allowing infectious diseases to spread, cheerleading an AI boom that's threatening jobs. The Republican Party thought it could shout "Sharia law!" and "Men in women's sports!" and voters would ignore Trump's obsession with the ballroom and the arch and the Reflecting Pool, along with his proud indifference to ordinary people's pain, economic and otherwise. Republicans thought their usual playbook -- portraying themselves as the only true Americans while demonizing their opponents -- could get them through anything. It didn't work. That's deeply satisfying.