Well, holy shit. My eyeballs are red and raw from staring at my phone screen deep into the night to catch every single election result coming out of the United States, and the news kept getting better as the hours rolled on.

The blue wave we were expecting turned into a blue tsunami—and the biggest shellacking a party has seen since Watergate. Elon Musk set half a billion of his own dollars on fire. MAGA is dead. Democrats won full control of enough states to kill the electoral college by 2028, potentially moving the presidential election to a popular vote. And a group of men at Ken Paxton’s watch party in Texas fully cried together in a circle after James Talarico—whose name means “wife-stealer” in Brazilian slang, incidentally—clobbered him by 11 POINTS. What a beautiful fever dream.

Democrats flipped Senate seats in Texas, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maine (Bye Susan, you were the worst!), Kansas, and Iowa and are projected to have won 55-56 Senate seats by the end of the day. Alaska is still being counted but looking good for Native American candidate Mary Peltola. And as I write this, the Democratic Senate candidate in Mississippi is winning by a hundredth of a percentage point.

The Mississippi race has my heart: Black attorney Scott Colom beating white incumbent Cindy Hyde Smith in a state that hasn’t elected a Black senator since Reconstruction—and has seen a terrifying rise in apparent lynchings this year—would send a resounding message to the state’s crusty old racist leadership. Just last month, Mississippi’s attorney general ruled that the police shooting of a 1-year-old Black baby through a car window was justified after his mom had been accused of stealing diapers from a Walmart. (She didn’t.) Protesters stood at that AG’s office just yesterday and chanted “our baby’s life mattered” as Black voter turnout surged across the state. If Colom wins, that mean that even the worst Jim Crow maps couldn’t squeeze out Black representation across the deep South. And this bit of karmic justice for Smith would send a shiver up my spine:

There are so many other great victories and moments to mention here that I’m just going to bullet point my favorites:

Democrats won young white men by 17 points, per CNN exit polls, after Trump won them by 28 points in 2024
Republicans lost most of the House seats that they had gerrymandered for themselves after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act (and lost the whole House by a landslide)
Hispanic voters swung like crazy to the left, shifting one Texas district a full 74 points toward Talarico in early + mail voting, after ICE’s campaign of terror
Abdul El-Sayed became the first Muslim senator in U.S. history, despite a near-constant barrage of Islamophobic hate, beating Republican Mike Rogers by 7 points in Michigan after predicting back in May that he would win by exactly that much:
Susan Collins’ infurating Reign of Concern is finally over, and we are free of her bullshit forever
Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), the smug asshole who said he couldn’t have abused his ex-wife because she made him dinner later six days later, lost his seat in Congress to Democrat Brian Poindexter
Deb Haaland won the governorship in New Mexico, becoming the first Native American woman governor in U.S. history
Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) became the first Black governor of Georgia and the first Black woman governor in U.S. history
Gina Hinojosa became Texas’s first Latina governor and the first Democrat to win that office in more than 30 years
Chris Pappas (D-New Hampshire) became the nation’s first out gay senator
Adam Hamawy, a Muslim surgeon who treated patients in Gaza, won a Congressional seat in New Jersey
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, set to become chair of the Senate Finance Committee, tweeted after Dems officially took control of the Senate: “Subpoenas.”
Ukrainian-born MAGA Congresswoman and traitor Victoria Spartz, who voted against Ukraine aid while Russia literally bombed her hometown, lost reelection in a Trump +17 Indiana district
Virginia repealed its ban on same-sex marriage and abolished a Jim Crow-era lifetime ban on voting for felons
Missouri voters rejected an abortion ban
The worst Republican men had to reckon with their shitty party
And Twitter libbed out at levels I haven’t seen since 2012:

The time is nearing for Democrats to put on their big boy pants and govern like their lives depend on it. But for now, we can all just take a beat to celebrate the fact that American democracy is still standing.

STRAIGHT INTO MY VEINS