I could read the polls as well as anyone, but I wasn’t ready to buy them. Sure, the Democrats were poised to take the House. But by a double-digit national margin? Flipping Kansas—a state whose last Democratic senator was born in 1879? Oh, and a Texas Senate seat, the Luciest of the Footballs since Beto surged and sputtered against Ted Cruz eight years and four cycles ago? OK, señor.

Well, here we are, the Friday after election day, in a new political reality. Let’s set aside for a moment the post-Watergate-sized shift in Congress and what is shaping up to be a powerful Democratic majority in the Senate. Before Tuesday, Republicans had total control—governor and both legislative chambers—of 23 states against Democrats’ 16. Now it has flipped almost entirely: Democrats will, assuming results are certified, have 22 trifectas to Republicans’ 17. They have flipped at least eleven chambers. And these aren’t just any states either. They won governors’ races in Ohio and Georgia. They swept every statewide race in Texas. As of January, thirteen of the fifteen most populous states in the country will have Democratic governors. Twelve will also have at least one Democratic-controlled legislative house.

Not one of the seven major swing states in 2020 and 2024 will have a Republican governor. Just one, Pennsylvania, will have a Republican secretary of state, and he was appointed by the Democratic governor Josh Shapiro, largely on his reputation for standing up against Donald Trump’s fictitious fraud claims. If a Republican candidate decides in December 2028 to ask someone in one of those states to “find votes,” there will be effectively no one to call.²

And when you dig into the details, it gets wilder. Before Tuesday, three Black people had been elected governor in American history. Now five will be serving at the same time, including the first Black woman governor in U.S. history, Keisha Lance Bottoms. Voters also elected the first Latina governor of the US state also known as Tejas, and the first Latino governor of California since Romualdo Pacheco served for a few months in 1875. Democrats flipped the North Carolina House—a chamber that has had a Republican supermajority or close to it since the discount-store magnate Art Pope¹ basically purchased the statehouse in Raleigh in 2010—and broke the formerly veto-proof GOP Senate supermajority. Six transgender and nonbinary candidates became the first to win legislative seats in their states’ history, despite running against the most virulently anti-trans national campaign in memory.

Oh, and the US Senate. In 2015, I wrote an article about the roots of the modern conservative movement in the machinations of a textile magnate in upstate South Carolina, who, along with fellow South Carolina transplant William F. Buckley, Jr., joined forces with the segregationist Dixiecrat Senator Strom Thurmond to create what would become known as the Republican Southern Strategy. On Tuesday, Dr. Annie Andrews, a Democrat and pediatrician at Charleston’s MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children's Hospital, won Thurmond’s old seat. Abdul El-Sayed, another doctor, became the first Muslim senator, the first Egyptian-American, and one of the most adamantly antiwar senators in a generation. Coming into Tuesday, I thought Kansas and Iowa were reaches. As of this writing, it looks increasingly likely that Democrat Scott Colom will become the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction. The last one, Blanche K. Bruce, was born into slavery.

The reasons for this turnabout are both manifold and overdetermined, as election logic always is. They include incredible organizing and candidate selection on the Democratic side and the latest civil war within the Republican Party, this time between the trillionaire-backed MAGA die-hards and the Gen Z Nazis who want to do to them what Trump did to the Bush-era GOP. The headline gas prices and grumbling about the Iran War—and the quickly dissolving relationship between the U.S. and Israel—also played a role. What it all came down to, though, I think, was the failed promise of Trumpism. Donald Trump burst back onto the political scene in 2015 with a promise: Let me hurt some people who you don’t like anyway, and I will make life better for you.

Some of that was supposed to be material. Some of it was supposed to be emotional. But none of it happened. We got the hurting other people part, in droves, in ways that make even some of his faithful feel a bit queasy—especially when white people found themselves on the wrong end of the gun. But life didn’t get better. It got worse. Measurably and affectively worse. That energized the opposition and demoralized the base, and converted some critical mass in between, many of them Latino voters in key states, especially Texas. It was enough to overcome overt attempts to outright steal the election through mid-decade gerrymandering, lawfare, and intimidation, helped by the dissolution of media and the purchase of social media outlets and the unleashing of unlimited spending on elections by Trump cronies like Elon Musk thanks to the machinations of a corrupt and lawless Supreme Court. It is a testament to the deep power of democracy that none of it worked, and that we have the opportunity to resume building justice and establish the rule of law.

But that’s all it is—an opportunity, and one not to take for granted or waste. Once again, Democrats have an extremely limited amount of time, maybe a year, to move the ball: to end the filibuster; to investigate, refer for prosecution, and hold the corrupt malefactors of this regime to account; and, since they can’t override a presidential veto, at least to show what they want to do to actually improve the lives of all Americans and address the mounting crises facing the world. Looking at you, Chuck and Hakeem.