The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

In the Trump era, catching election night results on television became a dreaded task, watching democracy go up in red flames. Not so at the end of the Trump era, when America voters showed up in huge droves to repudiate the damage he’s done to our country and make him a lame duck overnight.

In state after state, as the talking heads droned on, Democrats, independents, college educated Republicans and people of color showed up to vote against Trump and his far right agenda, somewhat restoring our faith in the American people. I almost didn’t watch, but could not help myself and began to take a peak at some broadcast news coverage while watching the live New York Times news feed online and posting early results on Facebook.

Some called it a Bluenami, while the Times called it a “big blue bludgeoning.”

Looking at the results first thing Wednesday morning to be sure nothing much changed overnight, it looks like Democrats flipped seven Senate seats in Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, Maine, South Carolina and even Texas, even by larger margins than pollsters were willing to predict.

It looks like the Democrats will control the Senate with 54 seats while the Republicans will only hold 44. The Democrats will take back control of the House, with a projected 228 seats to only 139 for Republicans, with some races still uncounted.

History in the Making

Democrat Xavier Becerra will become the first Hispanic governor of California, easily swatting away a challenge from Republican Steve Hilton. Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms of Georgia will be the first Black woman to serve as governor in that Southern state, a telling milestone. Democrat Deb Haaland of New Mexico will be the first Native American woman to serve as governor there. Democrat Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan will be the first Muslim senator, another milestone. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire will be the first openly gay man in the Senate, and Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota will be the first Native American woman elected to the Senate.

Democrats even upended Texas Governor Greg Abbott, won every statewide race in Georgia, and made Ohio look like a swing state.

In the House, as some races were still being counted, Democrats were on pace to pick up dozens of seats, dominating districts that Trump won handily in 2024. They won in suburbs across Michigan, in the mountains of North Carolina and in a rural West Texas District with a Republican tilt so strong that even Democrats once believed a candidate known as the “AK Guy” with a history of crude and sexist remarks was safe.

The results guarantee the Democrats will now set the agenda in Congress and hold a constitutional mandate to act as a check on this president’s power, with the power to investigate and impeach him and corrupt members of his cabinet. And with control of the Senate, they will also hold the power to convict him and force him from office. Will they do it? We will see.

The Bluenami stretched from coast to coast. Ballots were still being counted in Alaska’s contentious Senate race and in the unlikely battleground of Mississippi, but trends favored the Democrats.

Unfortunately for the poor people in my home state of Alabama, it appears Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville has indeed defeated challenger Doug Jones, the Democrat, again, who lost to Tuberville in the U.S. Senate race in 2020 after holding the seat for three years after an amazing upset in a special election in 2017. Early results show Tuberville with 52 percent of the vote to 48 percent for Jones.

As the scale of the Democratic victory came into focus, the party’s margin in the overall national vote for House seats was expected to be about 13 percentage points, the largest for either party in a congressional election in at least a half-century. Democrats made extraordinary gains with young voters and Hispanic voters, and even significant inroads with voters who didn’t attend college.

So now can we move on from this crazy Trump era and get on with governing again? It looks like the American people are finally ready for this change.

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Originally written as a syndicated column for The Progressive Populist newspaper out of Iowa and Austin, Texas.

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