Friday Talking Points — The Tectonic Shift Of 2026

We should begin by saying that, not being a friggatriskaidekaphobe, today is just another Friday to us. Our sympathies go out to those who are, though.

Etymological fun aside, though, let’s get back to our post-election glee, shall we?

As we were preparing to write this, the news came in that Democrats had won their 256th seat in the incoming House of Representatives, and this was a particularly satisfying one because it means Lauren Boebert has officially been defeated. So we won’t have to put up with her loud mouth in the House again (at least for the foreseeable future). She joins the growing list of seriously obnoxious Republicans who got unceremoniously booted out of office this year by the voters.

The full count could go higher, as Democratic candidates are leading in four of the ten uncalled House races, but by razor-thin margins (none of them leads by as much as 350 votes, meaning recounts are likely). Over in the Senate, Democrats now stand at 55 incoming members, with one race left to be decided. In the uncalled Alaska Senate race, Mary Peltola currently leads her race by 5,800 votes, but she has not managed to break the crucial 50 percent barrier (she is currently at 49.1 percent), which means we’re all going to have to wait a while longer to find out the eventual winner. This will happen when the system of ranked-choice voting kicks in, reapportioning votes from voters who chose the third- and fourth-place finishers. When this process begins, the mainstream media will belatedly (one assumes) begin to educate everyone what ranked-choice voting actually means (which they really should have done weeks and weeks ago).

The biggest and most stunning race to be called in the past week was, of course, the Senate race in Mississippi, where Scott Colom — who is Black — beat a sitting Republican senator. Let us say that once again, for emphasis: Democrats won a Senate seat in Mississippi.

This is historic, for many reasons. Mississippi hasn’t had a Black senator since Reconstruction, and Colom will be the first such senator ever elected statewide (Reconstruction was roughly 150 years ago, so it predated the direct election of senators) — even though Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black voters of any state in the nation. The New York Times reported dancing in the streets after Colom’s victory was announced by the Associated Press.

The win was chock full of irony (or perhaps “poetic justice” is a better way to put it). A few years back, Colom was nominated to a lifetime seat as a federal judge by President Joe Biden. However, there is a rule in the Senate that home-state senators of any judicial nominee can singlehandedly block such nominations (the “blue slip” rule). Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith did so, and blocked Colom’s nomination. She was so proud of this that she actually bragged about it at her Election Day rally (before the vote count turned against her). If she had allowed Colom’s nomination to move forward and he had been confirmed, it is almost certain that he wouldn’t have run for her seat. So she dug her own grave, metaphorically, which makes the victory so much sweeter (in a schadenfreude-y sort of way).

Democrats will now have one senator representing North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas, in addition to having both senators from Virginia and Georgia. These are six of the eleven states that formed the Confederacy during the Civil War. In addition, Democrats in both Louisiana and Florida got very close to flipping two more Senate seats from the Deep South.

What this all means in the grand scheme of things is anyone’s guess, but it’s pretty easy to see that both political parties are going to be spending a lot more money in Southern states for the next few election cycles, at the very least. When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he was reported to have said: “I have lost the South for a generation.” Even he didn’t realize it would be more like two or three generations, as all the formerly staunch (“Yellow Dog”) Democrats in the South changed their party registration to Republican in protest. Ever since, the South has been a bulwark that the GOP could not only count on, but pretty much take for granted on Election Day.

That is no longer true. First Virginia flipped, then North Carolina and Georgia turned purple. Both Virginia and Georgia are turning into solidly-blue states at this point, and North Carolina just saw as stunning a blowout by the Democrats as the one that happened in Texas — not only at the national level but also at the state level. Democrats will control the state house in North Carolina (although probably not the state senate, which they missed taking control of by one seat), and flipped state legislative chambers in Georgia and Texas as well.

This happened in large part due to Black voters all across the South being enraged by the Supreme Court dismantling the last shreds of the Voting Rights Act earlier this year. Southern states responded by gleefully redrawing their district lines to eliminate (so they thought) as many of the districts drawn to give Black voters representation in Congress as they could. Republicans thought this would disenfranchise the Black vote all across the South, but the determination of Black voters to make their voices heard overwhelmed such efforts. The question is whether this newfound electoral power will fade over time, or be just as strong in the next few elections. If it remains strong, then the South may have lost its status as a Republican bulwark for (possibly) the next generation. The pendulum of politics swings — sometimes slowly, but it does eventually swing.

The scope of how much the pendulum swung in 2026 is absolutely breathtaking, at every level. Nate Smith found that the popular vote for House seats swung a jaw-dropping 15 points towards the Democrats in 2026. Virtually all the polling underestimated Democratic turnout just about everywhere. The number of Democratic incumbents in the House who lost to a Republican was zero. Democrats have picked up five governor’s seats (and counting… Alaska has still not been called), giving them a total of 29 — the first time in years that Democrats will be in charge of more states than Republicans. They flipped governors’ races in Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas, and held onto the governor’s office in Kansas as well. This will mean that nine of the ten most-populous states will be led by a Democrat.

In Texas, Ted Cruz is the only remaining Republican who has been elected statewide — all the other offices (most of them at the state level) will now be held by Democrats, as will four seats on the state’s supreme court (including the chief justice).

Democrats flipped over 500 state legislative seats, finally taking back many of the seats flipped by Republicans in the 2010 Tea Party election (when the GOP picked up over 700 seats). They will hold “trifectas” (holding both state legislative chambers and the governor’s office) in six new states, giving them total control in more states than Republicans for the first time since 2009. In addition, they broke GOP trifectas in five other states as well. Democrats flipped a total of 12 state legislative chambers and broke a veto-proof GOP supermajority in 13 others.

This means that some of the fastest and most-impactful changes are likely to occur at the state level, before all the new Democrats in Congress can start passing bills. Many newly-blue (or bluer) states are considering redistricting, as well as handing control of drawing legislative district boundaries over to a nonpartisan commission (to end the back-and-forth gerrymandering battles once and for all). Restrictive laws on abortions and permissive laws on gun ownership will start to be rolled back. Recreational marijuana may be legalized in more states. Health care funding and affordability will also be big targets for newly-empowered Democrats. The high cost of energy and housing will be tackled. Expect to see a flurry of legislative activity starting in multiple states immediately after their new governors and legislatures are sworn in.

At the national level, even longshot Democratic candidates were chalking up wins. The New York Times ran an amusing article about some of them, which started off with:

Zack Mullock had no victory speech ready on election night.

It was about 10 p.m. when Representative Jeff Van Drew, Republican of New Jersey, called him to concede. Mr. Mullock, the 41-year-old Democratic mayor of Cape May, N.J., could hardly believe it.

Frustrated by President Trump, Mr. Mullock had started campaigning for Congress in February to put up a fight, never imagining that he could win.

The funniest story from the article, though, was about how everyday candidates had to react to the news the next day:

The morning after the election, Victoria Broderick, a tech support worker in Fayetteville, Tenn., told her boss she needed the day off because she might just have been elected to Congress.

Her race has yet to be called, but she currently leads the Republican incumbent by just under 300 votes.

The big blue wave swept Democrats into office all across the country. Moderates won their races, progressives won their races, Democratic Socialists won their races. The media has been playing up the infighting between progressives and moderates, but the reality is that they’re actually both on the same page about the core things that Democrats need to do with their newfound power. It can be summed up in one succinct phrase: economic populism.

It didn’t matter what label they had, Democratic candidates everywhere ran on affordability. This was the triumphant crescendo of Bernie Sanders almost singlehandedly remaking the Democratic Party in his own image, to give credit where it is due. The laser-like focus Sanders has always had on how Americans are being ripped off by the millionaires and billionaires was something of a joke, when he first began to be noticed in the 2016 presidential race. Nobody’s laughing much any more, though. Even so-called centrist Democrats are now singing from Bernie’s songbook. He has successfully shifted the Overton window in the Democratic Party to such an extent that Democrats across the spectrum now agree with much of what he’s been saying all along. It remains to be seen whether Democrats will be able to successfully turn this into a legislative agenda, but at least they’re all in almost universal agreement about the problems that need to be tackled first. In our humble opinion, a minimum wage hike bill would be a dandy place for Democrats to start their legislative efforts next January.

What will be interesting to see is whether this means a big shift in the Democratic Party’s leadership in Congress. At the start of this week, we wrote an article about how Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer were probably going to hold onto their leadership roles in the House and Senate in the next Congress, but now Schumer has a challenger for Senate majority leader: Senator Chris Van Hollen. In December, Democrats will meet to hold elections for their leadership posts, but Van Hollen’s challenge to Schumer is still something of a longshot (at least, so far).

The shift in the party’s vibe is not so much ideological as personality-driven. It really isn’t about stances on corporate donations or Israel or Medicare-for-all, instead it is a question of “fight versus flight.” Democratic voters want to see their elected officials fight hard for big change, instead of timidly propose tinkering around the edges. Both Jeffries and Schumer have always firmly been in the incrementalist camp, so they can either decide to change their basic attitude about what politics can achieve (or what should be attempted), or they are going to wind up massively disappointing millions of Democratic voters. The choice is theirs.

Republicans, from Donald Trump on down, seem hellbent on doubling down on their extremism. Trump elevated Stephen Miller to be his White House chief of staff, while the Republicans in the House chose firebrand Jim Jordan to be their new minority leader. This does not signal that the GOP is interested in compromise or changing their ways at all. Which could wind up being a very good thing for Democrats, since the more hardline the Republicans get, the easier they will be to beat again in 2028.

Other things were happening in the political world this week, but we’re not even going to attempt any sort of rundown of them all, because we’re still trying to take in the enormity of the 2026 midterm election results. Maybe it’ll all turn out to be a fluke, and things will go back to being more normal in future elections, but maybe (just maybe) the tectonic realignment of the American political landscape which just happened will result in a generational shift in the political landscape. That possibility now exists, where it just didn’t before last Tuesday.

 

This one’s pretty easy this week. Senator-Elect Scott Colom of Mississippi is easily our Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week, for obvious reasons.

Colom ran an excellent campaign that, for the most part, flew under the radar of the national political media. It’s easy to understand why — who among us would have thought, even a couple of months ago, that Mississippi would be in contention? The very idea would have been considered bonkers, to put it mildly. With so many other possible pickups for Democrats, reporters on the ground were spread thin, and Mississippi just got overlooked. So it came as a surprise to everyone, really — except the people in Mississippi.

The revenge factor was amusing in this race (as we’ve already mentioned), but the best thing about Colom’s winning effort was one very effective ad. It was so good it might take the prize for “best campaign ad of 2026” in fact. It is a textbook example of how to take a gaffe your opponent makes on the campaign trail and jam it down their throats on the airwaves.

Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, when asked what she was going to do about the soaring price of beef, responded in a very cavalier way. She responded: “You know, you have so many proteins to choose from.” She was later asked by the same journalist if she wanted to update her answer, and instead she doubled down: “[T]hank goodness, when mothers want to feed their families, you go out shopping, there are proteins — you wanna feed meat — there are some cheaper prices, and, uh, that’s what that statement was about.” She was trying to contrast high beef prices with the high price of gasoline, where she said: “You can’t get the water hose and fill up that tank; you can’t get peanut oil and fill up that tank. Gasoline, unless you want to ride the bicycle, that’s your only option.”

Colom took this and ran with it. He released an ad that was absolutely scathing in response. The ad opens with the clip of Hyde-Smith’s gaffe, followed by some reactions from Mississippi voters:

“Pick another protein? Shiiit, I’d rather pick another senator instead,” one voter said in the clip, while flipping a burger.

“Pick another protein? She gone lost her damn mind, I’d rather pick another senator,” said another.

“Pick another protein? What the f..,” said a third, before Colom cut in to say, “Pick another senator instead.”

In the background, a bass line plays that is somewhat reminiscent of Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust.”

It truly is a brilliant ad. When Colom appeared at a victory rally the day the Associated Press announced he had won, he spoke at a lectern with a sign on the front which proudly stated: “Picked Another Senator.”

So while his win was beyond impressive — a Black man will be Mississippi’s new senator — we’re giving him the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week award for the ad that probably did more to elect him than anything else. We must admit, we don’t think we’ve ever seen an opponent’s gaffe used so effectively against them in a political ad before. And we have to say (using a rather beefy metaphor): Well done!

[We don’t, as a rule, link to campaign websites, and Senator-Elect Scott Colom has yet to be sworn in, so he does not yet have an official Senate webpage. You’ll have to look up his contact info yourself if you’d like to congratulate him and let him you know you appreciate his efforts.]

 

There were some strong feelings among Democratic House members this week, because when Republican Thomas Massie’s articles of impeachment for Pete Hegseth received a floor vote (a procedural vote), it failed. The disappointment (which boiled over in some rather snarky comments) was because 11 sitting Democratic House members did not make it to the floor to vote. This included former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, among others.

Some Democrats did the math and concluded that if all of those 11 had shown up to vote, the impeachment would have succeeded. But we can’t really agree, for a few reasons. The first is that this was only a procedural vote to advance the measure — it wasn’t actually a final vote for impeachment. The second is that even if all the Democrats had shown up, the Republicans would have just held the vote open until they rounded up enough of their members to defeat it. Only one Republican — Massie himself — voted for his measure. Democrats would have needed three or more to prevail. So just adding 11 votes to the total doesn’t really tell the whole story — the measure would have failed anyway, and even if it had passed, the final vote for impeachment itself would have certainly failed.

Sure, it is disappointing to see elected officials not doing their jobs, but we’re just going to give the 11 who played hooky a (Dis-)Honorable Mention and move on.

As previously mentioned, there were many surprise longshot Democratic candidates who actually won their races in the 2026 midterms. One of them was even more astonishing, when you consider the circumstances (which her opponent made use of during the campaign, to no avail):

Rep.-elect LaKesha Womack (D-North Carolina) faces a felony charge of failing to return a rental car in 2019, a case that casts a pall on the new lawmaker, who defied expectations by unseating a well-funded Republican incumbent last week.

Womack was served a criminal summons for the alleged crime last month while she was campaigning, according to court records. The state valued the rental car at roughly $20,000. Womack was initially scheduled to appear in court Tuesday, but is now slated to have her first appearance Dec. 1, when she will have her probable cause hearing, her attorney Harold Cogdell said. Cogdell declined to comment on the criminal charge itself.

. . .

Womack won her seat in a surprise victory against Rep. Tim Moore in North Carolina’s 14th Congressional District. The race was considered relatively safe for Moore, and the district was not included on House Democrats’ list of targets this year. Moore won his seat by more than 16 points in 2024.

Moore, who spent 10 years as speaker of the state House before joining Congress, was also far better equipped financially, with over $2 million raised this election cycle. Womack raised only $59,000 and had no experience in elected office. Moore prominently featured Womack’s felony charge in attack ads, noting her silence about her case throughout her campaign. No Democrats, including Womack, spent a cent in ads on the race. She still ended up winning by just under 3 percentage points.

We have to say, this one leaves us rather ambivalent. Sure, it is disappointing to have felony charges of such a nature lodged against a newly-elected Democrat, but at the same time the voters knew all about it and elected her anyway. Without the felony charge, her victory would have been downright stunning — for beating a well-financed incumbent with a shoestring budget, who had won his previous race by 16 points.

But the rightwing news media has latched onto the story and is using it to try to paint all incoming Democrats as criminals, so we have to say that the story is indeed disappointing enough to rate this week’s Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award.

[Again, as a rule we don’t link to campaign websites, and Representative-Elect LaKesha Womack has yet to be sworn in so does not yet have an official House webpage. So you’ll have to look up her info too, sorry.]

 

Volume 863 (11/13/26)

What the heck… rather than doing talking points this week, instead we decided to just spike the football in the endzone some more. Here are some of the more gleeful and amusing things that have been happening since the big blowout 2026 midterms, for your amusement. The last one, in particular, is just to give everyone a good laugh….

 

   The Secret Handshake strikes again!

They’re ba-aa-aa-ck! The art collective known only (and mysteriously) as “The Secret Handshake” has erected a new satirical statue on the National Mall. These are the same guys that have been spoofing Trump for the past two years with golden statues that scathingly poke fun at Trump’s various shortcomings and embarrassments. This one appeared two days before Veterans Day, and shows a golden Trump with an ugly wincing expression on his face, sitting down with one shoe off and massaging one of his feet. The installation is titled: “The Foot Soldier” and the plaque on the front of it reads:

We honor the service and sacrifice of our Commander in Chief, Donald J. Trump. He’s a soldier in spirit, who marched to the front lines of dodging the draft, armed with a perfect diagnosis of bone spurs. We salute a leader who knows you can’t spell sacrifice without “I,” and a warrior who reminds us that sometimes when you’re called to stand up, it’s best to just sit down and rest your feet.

 

   I hardly knew her!

The Foot Soldier statue was accompanied on the first day by a person in a costume named “TOEY” which (of course) was nothing more than a giant big toe, with a reddish lump on one side and nine hairs sticking out of it. Here is just some of what TOEY had to say:

I’m the biggest toe. The hugest toe. Huge. Hugest toe. Largest toe that anyone’s ever seen…. Draft dodger? I hardly know her!

 

   Thank you for your attention….

Hillary Clinton got in a good burn on Trump this week too. This was the latest in a back-and-forth between the two, actually. Hillary, earlier, had denigrated Trump for what he had done to the Oval Office and White House, saying it was “so tackeyed up,” and adding it was because of Trump’s “narcissistic personality and his need to feel important, including sticking gold embellishments all over the walls of the Oval Office.” When Trump was told about Hillary’s comments on the Oval Office in an interview this week, Trump responded: “She did? I don’t like her house either. I know her house very well.” Clinton couldn’t resist and shot back on social media:

He’s never been in my house.

He’ll never be in my house.

Thank you for your attention to the matter of my house.

 

   AT ALL TIMES!

Pete Hegseth proved once again this week that he is patently unqualified for the job he still (somehow) holds. He took his wife and a group of buddies to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery this week, which is possibly the most somber and dignified military monument in the entire nation. Hegseth’s group was laughing it up, taking photos and generally being disrespectful (without even bothering to really acknowledge the marble memorial behind them), treating the whole thing as nothing more than a photo opportunity (again: with laughter). The sentinel guarding the tomb (it is guarded 24 hours a day by a soldier in full-dress uniform with a rifle, who marches slowly back and forth in front of it) then did his sworn duty. He stepped forward and in a drill-sergeant’s bellow, reprimanded the man in charge of the Pentagon with a severe:

ALL VISITORS WILL MAINTAIN AN ATMOSPHERE OF SILENCE AND RESPECT AT ALL TIMES!

 

   Hello, next caller?

Hopefully, this will become an ongoing thing. Since the midterm election, fewer and fewer people (and fewer and fewer media outlets) are paying attention to pretty much anything Donald Trump has to say. He halfheartedly tried to claim the election results were rigged, and nobody even batted an eye. He’s tried several outrageous ploys to own the news cycle again, and everyone just yawns. In fact, it’s getting pretty pathetic.

“Donald Trump is now reduced to calling in to a C-SPAN show in a desperate bid for attention. Nobody cares what he thinks anymore, everyone is tired of all his nonsense, and more and more the media is choosing to just ignore his little daily temper tantrums. Let’s hope this continues, because it is precisely what he deserves — being completely and utterly ignored. Maybe it’ll be a regular thing, him calling in to what has to be one of the lowest-rated shows anywhere… the late-night comics are already having a field day with ‘Hello, Donny in Washington D.C., you’re on the air…’ and that’s about all he deserves, at this point.”

 

   Trumpcare? Sure, why not?

If the first post-election week was any indication, Senator-Elect Abdul El-Sayed is going to be a lot of fun to listen to in the future. While being interviewed this week, he had a stunningly brilliant idea, because it just might work — it certainly punches exactly the right buttons, that’s for sure. Here’s what El-Sayed had to say to Donald Trump, while pushing the “Medicare for all” idea:

Donald, if you’re watching, we can put your name on it. I know you like to put your name on stuff. You can finally meet the unmet promise in America to guarantee everybody healthcare. So, it’s on the table if you want to do it…. I’m absolutely serious. I don’t care what it’s called. I want people to have healthcare in this country…. I think that would be a win. So if he wants to call it Trumpcare, I’m game.

 

   Funniest quote of the week

This one was just priceless. Maybe we just have a juvenile sense of humor (we certainly admit the possibility) and remember playing backyard scratch football with other neighborhood kids. When someone on social media asked why the vote-counting in Mississippi was taking so damn long, there was one witty response that just made us crack up:

We have to say “Mississippi” after each number.

— Chris Weigant

 

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Cross-posted at: Democratic Underground