The Biggest Victory of the Night

In many ways, yesterday’s election was extraordinary. Democrats took control of both houses of Congress in an overwhelming rebuke to the Trump administration, winning Senate seats in states long held by Republicans: Kansas, Texas, and even, stunningly, South Carolina. The Democratic margin of victory in the House of Representatives is the largest for any party since Richard Nixon’s post-Watergate midterm wipeout. If Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 marked a “vibe shift” toward a more conservative America, as many pundits argued at the time, the vibe has shifted once again, and far more definitively.

But in the way that counted most, Election Day was astoundingly normal. People across America peacefully cast their ballot without interference from partisan actors or the federal government. Election officials counted their votes. Winners were declared, and losers conceded. “Sure, I’ll accept” the results of the election, Trump said in a late-night phone call to Fox News yesterday. “Why wouldn’t I?”

For all Trump’s nonchalance, his acquiescence—and the calm proceedings of Election Day and the hours after—was not a given. The president, who famously insisted in the hours after Election Day 2020 that, “frankly, we did win this election,” has spent the past several months pushing to engineer a GOP midterm victory and stir up doubt among his supporters over the integrity of any result that did not favor him. Administration officials refused to rule out the idea of sending troops or federal agents to the polls, and announced plans to deploy an unprecedented number of Department of Justice election monitors across the country, largely to blue areas with significant nonwhite populations. The Postal Service attempted to make mail-in voting essentially impossible for election officials to administer, before the Supreme Court stepped in and rejected the scheme. The Department of Homeland Security combed through public data to identify supposed noncitizens on the voter rolls, and threatened states into removing these voters. The Justice Department sought to force states to hand over sensitive voter information, warned election officials that they might face prosecution, and sued Alaska to preemptively block certification of the state’s Senate race. DOJ and DHS also trumpeted criminal cases against more than 100 people for allegedly voting or registering to vote illegally, feeding a right-wing narrative of widespread voter fraud.

[Read: How the Democrats beat Trump]

Understandably, then, the midterms took place in an environment of anxiety. Minor glitches popped up across the country: In Westchester County, New York, for example, voting machines struggled to scan ballots apparently printed on too-thick paper. But no major surprises shaped the election process. Only in a few minor instances did DOJ’s poll monitors tangle with election workers. The Department of Homeland Security posted ominous warnings online that “if you vote illegally, we will find you,” but immigration officers were not sent to the polls. “Last night was very quiet,” Tammy Patrick, the chief programs officer for the National Association of Election Officials, told me this morning. She pointed to the sweeping vote tallies as one reason for the smooth election process: A wave election is simply harder to contest. “The election administrator’s prayer is ‘High turnout, wide margins,’” Patrick said.

Patrick credited preparation by both voters and election officials. More voters chose to cast their ballots early and in person, likely in response to worries around the Trump administration’s changes to USPS’s handling of mail-in ballots. Election workers, meanwhile, held up under threats of criminal charges from the federal government and were able to navigate the challenges that did occur—such as bomb hoaxes and fire alarms—thanks to relentless planning. “Election professionals were tested and they came out on the other side,” Patrick said.

This morning, most election deniers have been quiet. Many losing Republican candidates in high-profile races—though not all—have conceded. Trump, for his part, has seemed uninterested in raising claims about supposed election fraud, telling The New York Times that he will “look forward to working” with a Democratic Congress and insisting on Truth Social that had he been on the ballot, “we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson acknowledged late yesterday that he was “disappointed” to have lost his majority.

[Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump is bad at politics]

The election is not entirely over. Ballot-counting continues across the country, and tight Senate races will be closely scrutinized in Alaska and—surprisingly—Mississippi. “The period after Election Day is especially high-risk for false and misleading claims about election fraud, particularly in close races that take longer to call,” cautioned Tim Harper, who leads the Elections and Democracy project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. The months between now and January 3, when the new Congress is seated, may yet feature bad-faith efforts to undermine the Democratic victory. And there remain serious problems with how America administers its elections, including the systematic underfunding of election infrastructure.

But the sheer normalcy of Election Day is nevertheless a victory for democracy in America—a hard-fought one, made possible by the remarkable efforts of election officials, civil-society organizations, and voters who rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to swing the vote for Republicans. The repudiation of Trump’s authoritarianism at the ballot box represents a long-overdue opportunity for democratic renewal. The fact that the American electoral system held up under extraordinary pressure is itself a major reason to be hopeful.