As I sit down to write this post the day after the election – five days before I’ve scheduled the post to appear – a massive Democratic tsunami is forming. We haven’t determined the extent of it, but it’s big. Democrats have won just about every competitive race. They’ll win in the ballpark of 250-260 House seats and 54-56 Senate seats.

My predictions called for 235 and 52, respectively, which is still a large Democratic wave. The real wave, however, came in even larger.

Let’s dive into the details.

National Election Results

The Democrats won basically everything worth noting. I haven’t seen this level of shellacking in my lifetime, even in 1994.

The explanation isn’t complicated, and unlike in 2024, few debate it. The voters delivered an epic repudiation of Trump. And they repudiated him due not only to his utter failure to address the underlying concerns that sent him to office – affordability, inflation, and excess U.S. involvement in war – but to his doubling and tripling down on the very things he campaigned against.

There’s not much else to say.

One interesting note is that Democrats tried running independent candidates out West – in Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Those candidates all failed, and they all underperformed along the way. What should we make of that? Party labels matter. Democrats in those western states desperately need to improve their party brand.

DSA’s Results

For DSA, specifically, the election went well. We elected about a half dozen new House members, and DSA candidates did well all down the ballot. Angie Nixon in Florida – DSA’s first U.S. Senate candidate – came up short, but she ran a spirited campaign and finished reasonably well.

The biggest questions concern where DSA goes next. Do we degenerate into infighting? Do we use election victories as a tool to recruit new soft members? Or do we actually start integrating new members into our org, while providing them with socialist political education (acknowledging that many of them aren’t actually socialists yet)?

We’ll find out.

Iowa Elections

Even in Iowa, where the state has marched to the right for more than a decade, Democrats won the gubernatorial race, split the statewide offices with the GOP, and made advances in the state legislature.

I’d call the statewide results a strong success for Democrats, but the state legislative races were much more of a mixed bag. Rob Sand will face a GOP supermajority in the state senate, and a solid GOP majority in the state house. Even a skilled politician – which Sand probably isn’t – would struggle.

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. I’d be impressed if Sand manages to make much of it.

Local Elections

Finally, I’ll say a word about the main topic on the ballot in our local elections in Johnson County, Iowa: the jail bond referendum. I wrote two weeks ago to say why I opposed it. But how did it do?

It lost. Badly. In fact, it lost by a much greater margin than the far worse bond referenda from 2012 and 2013.

This reflects political changes in Iowa City and surrounding areas that I’ve written about on many occasions. As the state of Iowa marches to the right, our center of gravity moves to the left. And the liberals and progressives we now find at the center of Iowa City politics have changed their attitudes toward the jail.

They supported the jail in 2012-2013 on liberal ‘humanitarian’ grounds, but they’re now jail opponents, finding opposition to the jail an attractive way to reconcile their support for capitalism with their desire to appear radical.

And so, the jail bond was probably doomed from the start, especially in an election cycle featuring a Democratic tsumani.

But the biggest loser in the jail referendum was Jon Green, one of our more skilled local politicians. He staked a lot on the outcome. And he lost big. While I still see him as the sort of person who could run for statewide office and build a different voter coalition, the failure of the jail bond referendum is a major challenge for him to overcome.