Normal Americans punished MAGA

The MAGA people appear to have been laboring under a number of delusions.

First, they seem to be genuinely surprised by the fact that they suffered a crushing defeat in the midterm elections. In fact, polls, forecasts, and prediction markets had all been calling a Democratic victory for months now. But a lot of MAGA types appear to have believed that America always has some big hidden reservoir of shy Trump supporters out there that everyone always misses, and that this silent majority would ride to the GOP’s rescue and prove all the pollsters and forecasters wrong, as they did in 2016.

To put it mildly, that did not happen. The election night surprise actually favored the Democrats, who won a far more extensive and decisive victory than almost any of the pollsters and forecasters had anticipated.

Even Trump’s traditional demographic support base — white voters without a college degree — abandoned the GOP in droves this time:

Trump could try to challenge this electoral verdict — to cry that the vote was rigged, to declare a state of emergency and suspend the Constitution, to abuse the powers of the presidency to nullify the popular will. But my gut says that he won’t, and here’s an important reason why:

As long as the MAGA people could tell themselves that Trump’s opponents were a bunch of old people and women, they could fantasize about prevailing in the street confrontation that would erupt in the wake of an autogolpe. But if young men — and especially young white men — aren’t on Trump’s side, then starting some sort of civil war would likely not go well for MAGA.

Anyway, as of this writing, here’s what the Senate election map looks like:

Kansas is colored blue. So is South Carolina. So is Iowa. Mississippi will probably end up blue as well.

And most of all, Texas is blue. Not just the Senate race, either — the GOP governor, Greg Abbott, has been unseated by Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa. Bo French, who tweeted alarm at seeing Indian American football fans at a University of Texas game two months ago, lost his bid for Texas Railroad Commissioner to Democrat Jon Rosenthal.

The fall of Red Texas is an epochal, era-defining event. Growing up in Texas, I saw Dems win statewide office occasionally, but these were always old-school conservative Southern Democrat types. Yesterday’s election saw Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico, both staunch progressives, win the governorship and one of the Senate seats. In fact, the only Republican now holding a statewide office is…Ted Cruz.

How did that happen? Part of it was bad candidate selection — MAGA primary voters tossed out the popular mainstream Republican Senator John Cornyn for not being slavishly loyal enough to Trump, and replaced him with Ken Paxton, a man who has been repeatedly indicted and investigated for financial crimes and corruption. But Abbott was a popular, mainstream Republican incumbent governor with a strong economic track record, and he still lost to a progressive upstart challenger.

Rightists were simply unprepared for a world in which this was possible. Here was Jonathan Keeperman, whom I recently debated about Indian immigration, just yesterday:

The only possible interpretation of this huge wave election is that it was a referendum on Donald Trump. Trump is now among the least popular presidents in living memory, rivaled only by George W. Bush at the end of his presidency. I wrote about why most Americans despise Trump, and my analysis hasn’t really changed:

Trump was elected to tame inflation, but he raised taxes on almost everything Americans buy from overseas, and raised gas prices by attacking Iran. When people complained about the cost of living, he told them to buy their daughters fewer dolls. Trump was elected to stay out of Middle Eastern wars, but he plunged us into an expensive quagmire. He has relentlessly promoted the interests of Vladimir Putin, whom normal Americans hate with a passion. His antics — threatening to invade Greenland, trying to bully people into renaming the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario, and artificial intelligence, and so on — seem dangerously unhinged.

Then there’s the corruption. Trump has relentlessly looted the country to fatten the pockets of himself, his family, and his close political allies:

The American people noticed. This is from last week:

Voters are now more concerned about government corruption than any other issue, including high grocery and gas prices, according to the final CNBC All-America Economic Survey before the Nov. 3 midterm election…[T]he results nevertheless align with other recent polls showing corruption has shot to the top of voters’ list of pressing worries…A Fox News poll published last week found 60% of registered voters are extremely concerned about government corruption, surpassing concerns about inflation and high prices. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday found some two-thirds of respondents think Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, up 10 percentage points since September 2025. Gallup recently found perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. have hit multi-decade highs. And an August poll from Reuters/Ipsos found nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe Trump’s businesses influence his presidential decisions.

And here’s their chart:

Republicans seemed to somehow labor under the delusion that regular Americans were going to just ignore all this. Perhaps they thought that Trump’s charisma, which allowed him to bounce back from the January 6th coup attempt, made him invincible. It’s possible they reasoned that Americans had simply become so jaded about corruption that they would ignore dozens of scandals that each would have ended any other presidency. Perhaps they believed that no matter how bad Trump got, Americans’ dislike of woke culture and progressive governance would always make the Republicans the lesser of two evils.

Maybe they believed that Americans never really cared about inflation in 2024, and that worries about the cost of living were just people’s way of expressing their worries about immigration and wokeness. Or maybe they believed America would blame Dems for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and reject them at the ballot box accordingly. Perhaps they thought they could scare Americans away from the Democrats by calling them “communists” and screaming about “Western civilization”:

This was MAGA’s greatest delusion — the idea that the average American sees things similarly to the rightists on X. The truth is that the average American does not see “Western civilization” as a fortress under siege. The average American does not spend all day in a state of panic that brown immigrants and their children are invaders bent on subjugating the white race.

One gets the sense that the MAGA people believed that the average American doesn’t even exist. For decades, ideologues and extremists in both parties have shouted — often in direct contradiction of the evidence — that swing voters don’t exist, that polarization rules everything, that moderation and appealing to the center are useless, and that electoral victory goes to whichever party mobilizes their base to come out and vote.

That was always probably wrong, but MAGA seems to have taken this flawed logic one step further, convincing themselves that the country consists only of “the left” and “the right” — that every voter is either a blue-haired trans communist or a chisel-jawed defender of Western Civilization who spends all day posting memes on X about gender-swapped Draco Malfoy. If you have no idea what the heck gender-swapped Draco Malfoy is, or why on Earth anyone would think it’s politically important, rest assured that you’re not alone.

Texas and Kansas and South Carolina have been turned blue by a coalition of voters who aggressively, emphatically neither know nor care about gender-swapped Draco Malfoy, or Anakin Skywalker memes, or any of the other nonsense that bounces around the rightist echo chambers on X and 4chan. It was a coalition that never read Elon’s never-ending stream of tweets about James Talarico wanting to “trans your kids and destroy the border”. It was a coalition that does not know or care whether it’s white French people or brown French people burning down Paris this week.

It turns out that normal Americans do exist — in great numbers, in fact. It’s possible to keep them divided with relentless partisanship. It’s possible to drive them to jaded apathy with relentless he-said-she-said accusations and manufactured scandals. It’s possible to get many of them to stay home on election nights, simply by ignoring their wishes for long enough. But if you push them hard enough — if you step on their face again and again, with corruption and mismanagement and disdain for their daily struggles — they will eventually bestir themselves and rise up and smack you down. They will remind you of who won the Second World War, and why.

So the Democrats, ideologically divided as they are, took a well-deserved victory. The risk now is that they don’t learn their lesson from watching Trump’s implosion. Just as MAGA convinced themselves that the average American was a meme-spouting rightist, Democrats might marinate in their own echo chambers, egged on by leftist activists and progressive pressure groups and Bluesky cancel-culture warriors.

Democrats might convince themselves that what Americans really care about is Palestine rather than the cost of living. They might embark on a borrowing binge in order to throw more money at health care, resulting in rising interest rates and rising prices. They might try to halt inflation with price controls, with predictably terrible results. They might spend their political capital on billionaire taxes of the type that California’s electorate just rejected. They might forget the lessons of 2024 and try to admit as many illegal asylum-seekers as possible.

And if so, I’ll be writing another version of this post in 2030 or 2034, explaining why a Democratic president got hit with a red wave in the midterms.

In fact, Talarico said that God is “nonbinary”.