In a result that would have seemed fanciful even a few months ago, Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated three-term Republican governor Greg Abbott, becoming the first Latina governor of a state that was successively a province of Spanish America, a Mexican territory, and an independent sovereign republic before being annexed into the United States.
Texas also elected Democrat James Talarico to the Senate, the first Democratic senator from the state since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. Similar political convulsions in Maine saw Democrat Troy Jackson defeat Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine, ending her nearly 30-year Senate career that was considered impregnable. Kansas, which has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932, delivered another stunning upset, sending Adam Hamilton to Washington.
South Carolina, a Republican bastion, elected Democrat Annie Andrews to the Senate, defeating Darlene Graham, sister of four-term senator Lindsay Graham. Democrats also captured Senate seats in Michigan (Abdul El-Sayed, the first Muslim senator in US history), Ohio (Sherrod Brown), Iowa (Josh Turek) and New Hampshire, where Chris Pappas became the first openly gay man to be elected to the Senate.
Convulsions were afoot even within the Democratic Party, with radicals and progressives making a mark, most notably in Los Angeles where Democrat Socialist Nithya Raman was leading establishment Democrat Karen Bass by a narrow 16,000 votes in the mayoral election as the time of writing. Because the shock extended well beyond the Senate, the results were less a blue wave than a political tsunami, sweeping away some of the GOP’s most deeply entrenched assumptions that pre-date Trump, who effectively took the party down with him.
It’s a total, complete rejection of President Trump,” Bill Miller, a top Republican lobbyist in Texas, told BBC, calling it “a disaster of the first magnitude” that nobody saw coming. Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms as the first Black woman governor in American history, while Ohio went to Democrat Amy Acton who defeated Indian-American Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy. Candidates behind whom Trump put his heart, soul, and body, often telling voters to assume he was on the ballot, were sent packing. The rout shocked and angered even conservatives, many of whom began to turn on Trump. “It’s on him. It’s not on anybody else. Washington DC itself elected council member Janeese Lewis George, a Democratic socialist, as mayor, an in-your-face repudiation of Trump in the nation’s capital.