The Republican Party got flayed Tuesday night. Losing control of the House seemed likely given the slim majority, but a landslide of this magnitude — no. Democrats have a House majority that’s so steep it’ll take years for the GOP to chip away. At the state level, this majority will get a backbone as gerrymandering tactics will likely be employed to protect it. It’s a climb, folks. And that’s not even the worst of it: Mississippi’s Senate race could go Democrat. 

Even if Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith survives, it’ll be by the slimmest of margins. This race boils down to provisional ballots, and it’ll take days to determine the winner. How is this race so close? How did the GOP get blown off the field? How did Texas fall to the Democrats? As RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende noted, it wasn’t so much a tsunami as it was witnessing the GOP coalition collapse. Also, the consensus that the political map was so ingrained in partisanship that neither side could net double-digit gains anymore died last night (via RCP):

What really explains what's happened this time around? Or is it, you know, this whole corruption thing, which we saw sort of emerging at the end there?

This is the complete collapse of the Republican coalition. This is like something we haven't seen in an election since 1974. I don't have to wait for California to close. The GOP is going to get wiped. Gavin Newsom's bet is going to pay off.

The Republicans are probably gonna lose eight, maybe nine Senate seats. Mississippi looks like it might flip. You know, this is a hole that is going to take the GOP years to dig out of, and it's not a hard story to explain.

You look at the groups that swung toward Donald Trump in 2024 and ask, what did they get?

Hispanics, right? Like, OK, close the border, you know, be a little more conservative. No, we're gonna march ICE through the streets of Minneapolis, and when they shoot people, we're not going to do investigations of them.

Black voters, OK, the Voting Rights Act gets curtailed, and we're going to oversee a redistricting that closes out a bunch of Black-majority districts.

Young voters, OK, gas is gonna cost you, like, twice as much by the midterm election because of a war that, by the way, I promised that I would not prosecute.

Again and again and again, it's just like everything. The Republicans took a two-point win in the popular vote and treated it like a New Deal. It wasn't even a New Deal mandate. They decided to govern through fan service, and this is the result of that.

Later, I'll tell you how I really think.

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I mean, the entire Texas statewide slate is gonna lose, like, all the way down the ticket. And they're going to lose a trifecta in North Carolina. Democrats are going to draw all those maps. They're going to pay back what the GOP just did in spades.

The chair of the NRCC, in a Trump-plus-18 district, Richard Hudson, is losing. And the Republican in North Carolina 14 is losing to someone who raised, like, $3,000.

I mean, this is a bloodbath. There's no way to sugarcoat it. The generic ballot looks like Democrats are going to win by 12 points. You know, that's worse than 2008. You have to go back to, I think, 1982 to get a generic-ballot win that big, and that was when the Democrats still had, you know, a bunch of unopposed seats in the South.

So I don't know. Look, I'm the last person who's gonna say the GOP is gonna go extinct, but they're taking a whooping tonight, for sure.

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This is, in a way, one of those things that, regardless of how you feel about it from a political standpoint, from just, like, standing back, we probably won't see anything like this again. It's that big.

It's something that forces us to rethink how we think about politics, because we had taken for granted that we were so polarized that the map couldn't move. And yet, boy howdy, it has swung.

Again, don’t surrender. Reform, regroup, and fight on. These things happen. This isn’t the first or last GOP election defeat. You want to regain ground—it starts now, as the 2028 cycle has begun. 

And the Democrats will have debates of their own: