For nine months, Minneapolis’ Nicollet Avenue has stood as a makeshift memorial to Alex Pretti, a registered nurse who was shot and killed by federal agents while trying to protect a fellow protester during last winter’s eviction movement in the city. After Minnesotans cast their votes in the state’s Senate race on Tuesday, many placed “I Voted” stickers on lampposts at the memorial, like a finished painting. The gestures hinted at something about this year’s midterm elections, and as the night wore on, it turned out to be true: a mundane event with extraordinary moral stakes.
In the two years since Donald Trump won re-election, he has pushed the country to the brink of collapse. Trump only narrowly wins the presidential majority in 2024, and his party holds majorities in both houses of Congress by just a few seats. Even so, the president has encountered little institutional resistance in his push to encroach on the federal government. dog Plans, pointless and costly tariffs, authoritarian powers to suppress immigration, an incompetent Iran war. He was able to achieve these goals because he had convinced a majority of his party and much of the public that his victory over Kamala Harris meant that half the country would be irreversibly on his side.
The results of the midterm voting are still being announced. But the president’s veto was undeniable, uncomplicated, and it delved into territory long understood to be conservative. His party lost the Senate race in Ohio and looks likely to lose in Michigan, where the post-industrial economy has long been a symbolic core of Trumpism. It failed in both Texas and South Carolina, where Democrats have not won more than a hundred statewide races since 1994. It failed in both Iowa and Kansas, which has not gained a Democratic Senate seat since the Great Recession. Some counties in southwestern Kansas that Trump won by about thirty-five points two years ago — Finney, Seward, Ford — voted narrowly for Democrats as the tallies piled up in the state’s U.S. Senate race. For a decade, the country has become accustomed to a fixed map – blue for cities and dark red for outlying areas. There is some instability around the edges right now.
A specific issue, or a particularly weak Republican candidate, might make sense as a race-specific explanation. But the fact is that Trump has given voters a series of reasons to reject him over the past two years. In South Texas, that may be because of the brutal nature of immigration raids. In Kansas, the impact of the Iran war on diesel and fertilizer prices; in South Carolina, a particularly poorly chosen Republican candidate. During the long Trump decade, many liberals came to believe that conservatives were so engaged in the culture wars that they were politically immune to events. But this time, in a place like this, the news got out. All of this is important.
Suddenly, little is certain in American politics. The Democratic Party has lately been understood as an aging, defensive entity cloaked in nursing home guise. But this year’s campaign has promoted a group of young, new Democrats (Jon Ossoff in Georgia; James Talarico in Texas; Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan) who find it natural to denounce the oligarchic and authoritarian elements of the status quo and to distance themselves from certain elements of the party’s creed. The South, nearly the most historically conservative region of the country, suddenly took on a purple hue. Is J.D. Vance still the presumptive nominee to be the next President? Will the Republican Party still stand obediently on the side of the man who lost Texas?