The biggest blue wave in 50 years, explained in 7 charts
· Vox
It’s going to take some time to fully comprehend what just happened in the midterm elections.
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Last Tuesday brought a blue wave of historic proportions, with Democrats winning large majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as winning several new governorships.
But now that the dust is settling from the results, it’s worth drilling down into just how historically unusual this win was — and untangling what, exactly, was the coalition that brought Democrats back to power.
Overall, this was a once-in-a-half-century election; most of the population has never seen a blowout of this size in their lifetimes. Outcomes the political world believed to be downright impossible in our polarized era — such as Democrats flipping Senate seats in deep red states — actually happened. House candidates won elections in races they never expected to have a chance of winning themselves. And Democrats will have far more power over state government than at any point in decades.
How did the blue wave become a blue tsunami? Which voters swung the hardest? And what does the landscape look like moving forward? Let’s dig into the data.
1. This wave was the biggest in a half-century
We’ve lived through wave elections before, but the size of this one is historic. One way to assess that is by examining the national House popular vote — that is, totaling how many votes for candidates of each party were cast in the 435 House of Representatives elections around the country. We don’t have a final tally of that for this cycle yet, due to slow counting of mail ballots in states like California. But estimates currently suggest Democrats are headed for over a 13-percentage-point popular vote victory — the largest in 50 years.
Indeed, even the much heralded Republican midterm waves of 1994, 2010, and 2014 didn’t get anywhere near that total; they topped out at 6 or 7 points. The only comparison in recent decades has been the 2008 wave amidst the financial crisis that swept Barack Obama into the presidency with huge majorities. But Democrats’ House majority next year will, it appears likely, end up a bit larger than the 257 seats Obama’s Democrats wound up with in 2009.
2. Massive swings in red state strongholds delivered Democrats a large Senate majority
When it came to the Senate, not all states swung equally. It was striking how some of Democrats’ largest gains came in states President Donald Trump had won overwhelmingly just two years ago, many of which were in the South.
The biggest swing in the country came in Texas, which Trump had won by 13 points, and Sen.-elect James Talarico (D) won by 12. But some states were even redder two years ago — Trump won Kansas by 16, South Carolina by 18, and Mississippi by 23 — and Democrats, incredibly, pulled off victories in some of those too. (The Mississippi race hasn’t been called, but Democrat Scott Colom very narrowly leads). Indeed, Democrats even came surprisingly close to flipping Louisiana, a Trump+22 state; their candidate lost there by just 2 points.
By contrast, other states like Michigan and Minnesota saw more modest shifts. And while moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) finally lost her seat after decades of bucking partisan trends, she put up a uniquely strong fight: Maine was the only Senate battleground to vote to the right of its 2024 presidential vote, though in the end Collins still lost by about 6 points.
3. Republicans’ attempts to gerrymander themselves a House majority fell flat
Trump and the GOP knew all along that holding their narrow House majority would be a tall order. So they hatched a plan — they’d get Republican-controlled states to launch a highly unusual mid-decade redistricting push, to slant House maps in those states further in their favor. Indeed, they hoped to net more than a dozen new seats from newly favorable maps alone.
Outraged Democrats responded with a redistricting push of their own in California, to try and dilute some of these gains. (A similar Democratic measure in Virginia was struck down by state judges.)
In the end, the GOP actually lost seats in some states it gerrymandered, like North Carolina. Still, that doesn’t mean their push was a total failure — in such a strong Democratic year, the new maps may have still helped the party avoid even greater losses, or laid the groundwork to win them back more easily later on.
4. Turnout among Black voters was quite strong
In April, the Supreme Court’s Callais decision dramatically weakened the Voting Rights Act protections that could require states to draw majority-minority districts — clearing the way for some of that aforementioned aggressive Republican gerrymandering, which often involved eliminating majority-Black districts in the South.
But when the results came in on Tuesday, there was a striking pattern — Black turnout was incredibly strong. Some reports attributed this to anger over the Supreme Court decision, suggesting it spurred outrage and increased mobilization. Whatever the cause, heavy Black turnout helped Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia become the first Black woman ever elected governor in US history, contributed to a blowout victory by Roy Cooper in North Carolina’s Senate race, and put the Senate seat in Mississippi — a state with the largest proportional Black population in the country, but with a white majority that’s long been heavily Republican — into contention.
5. Trump’s 2024 surge among Hispanic and Latino voters vanished
Trump’s strong performance among Hispanic and Latino voters in the 2024 elections shocked Democrats, and raised fears the party had culturally lost touch with communities that had been a key part of their base. But in retrospect, that outcome looks more like a blip — Latino voters swung heavily back to Democrats, helping power their big wins in Texas in particular.
Polling showed a backlash to Trump’s harsh immigration crackdown among Latinos, but that perhaps even more important was the issue of affordability. “Latinos aren’t a monolith. But we are monolithically irate about how hard it is getting to stretch a paycheck,” Democratic consultant Chuck Rocha wrote in the New York Times, summarizing his research.
6. Some Democrats defeated Republicans even though they’d raised very little money
A wave as enormous as this one will wash some surprising winners to shore. And there were several House races where Democrats who had raised quite little money shockingly managed to win GOP-held seats — or appear favored to do so.
The above numbers don’t include outside spending, which was a major force in the midterms. But campaign fundraising is a good proxy for identifying some of the least-known candidates who made it across the finish line.
In some of these races — Teresa Benitez-Thompson’s win in Nevada’s Second District — the Democrat overcame enormous GOP spending advantages to win an upset. In others — like Tennessee’s Fourth District, where Republican Rep. Scott DesJarlais narrowly trails Democrat Victoria Broderick in a race that hasn’t been called — the incumbent appears to have been caught sleeping.
And in some, no one was more surprised by the outcome than the Democratic candidates themselves. Zack Mullock, who won New Jersey’s Second District, said he had to Google what his salary would be as a member of Congress after he won.
One of the most striking results was that LaKesha Womack, a community organizer who spent just about $56,000 in her race for North Carolina’s 14th District, ended up defeating a prominent state Republican —despite being served with a felony warrant in October for having allegedly failed to return a rental car in 2019.
7. Democrats won several new state government trifectas — and broke several GOP trifectas
Beyond Congress, the Democratic wave will have massive implications for governance of the states. The party won new trifectas — that is, control of the governorship and both houses of the state legislatures — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Minnesota. That’s several new states where Democrats will be newly empowered to try and govern as they see fit — presenting major opportunities for progressive policymaking.
Just as seismically, Democrats broke up GOP trifectas in several states the party had long controlled. In addition to Bottoms’s win in Georgia, Gina Hinojosa will become the first Democratic governor of Texas in 32 years, Rob Sand won the governorship of Iowa, and Amy Acton won in Ohio — though in all four of those states, Republicans will continue to hold at least one house of the state legislature.
The impact of these wins could be very real. Democrats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin plan to try to raise their state minimum wages to $15 or $20 an hour. Democrats in Arizona and Texas plan to take aim at school voucher programs enacted by state Republicans. Medicaid expansion could be a priority in Texas and Georgia — though in each state, some GOP state senators would have to sign on.