The Victors

September 2, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
Sep 3


A number of pundits, especially Republican pundits, interpreted Trump’s win in 2024 as a permanent political realignment proving that post–World War II liberalism was dead. That conviction appeared to help feed Trump’s insistence that he had won a “landslide” and had a “mandate” to enact draconian policies.

Skeptics disagreed with this interpretation, noting that Trump’s victory in the popular vote was small— more people voted for someone else than for him— and that the 2024 election appeared to be determined by inflation and the pandemic, two things that had little to do with political positions. Rather than being an embrace of a political ideology, it appeared the swing toward Trump had more to do with anti-incumbent feeling, especially over inflation.

Still, after the 2024 election, hopeful Republicans set out to redistrict states like Texas to try to guarantee they would hold on to control of Congress after the 2026 election. They redrew districts based on the idea that what they thought was a new coalition would last, banking especially on Hispanic voters continuing to cast their ballots for Republicans. With that expectation, they created gerrymanders that shaved their margins thinner than they had been before the redistricting.

And then, in the elections of November 2025, dramatic gains by Democrats across Texas made some observers wonder if the gerrymandering of Texas hadn’t been a “dummymander,” teeing districts up for Democrats in a blue wave.

After the election, G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted that the anti-incumbent feeling had turned against the Republicans and that voters were even more strongly opposed to Republicans than they had been against Democrats in 2024. He explained that by then, Republicans had lost an average of 25 points of support from the very voters they were counting on to create their new coalition: young people, nonwhite voters, and working-class/lower-income voters.

And then, in a special election on January 31, 2026, voters flipped a seat in the Texas Senate from Republican to Democratic in a historically Republican-dominated district in Tarrant County. Democrat Taylor Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and machinist, defeated right-wing Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a seat that Republicans have held since the early 1990s.

Robert Downen of Texas Monthly noted that in the final days of the campaign, the Wambsganss campaign spent $310,000 while Rehmet spent nothing, and Daniel Nichanian of BoltsMag posted that overall, Wambsganss spent nearly $2.2 million more than Rehmet in the campaign. Both Texas governor Greg Abbott and Trump himself publicly supported Wambsganss.

Voters flipped a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024 to Rehmet, electing him by a 14.4-point margin. Without the minor-party candidates in the vote, the swing from the Republican in 2024 was 32 points toward the Democrats.

Liz Crampton of Politico noted that “Republicans are in full-out panic mode” after the election, especially over the swing of Hispanic voters toward Rehmet. Republican consultant Mike Madrid referred back to the newly gerrymandered maps and the voting patterns of young Hispanic men when he told Crampton: “They’ve banged three of these five new Republican seats on a demographic that Democrats were never able to turn out for 30–40 years.” Now, though, they had turned toward Democrats as Trump’s arrests, detentions, and deportation policies had “angered and upset them.”

In the wake of the election, Trump immediately began talking about nationalizing voting in the country, despite the provisions in the U.S. Constitution establishing that states, not the federal government, are in charge of elections. “If you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections,” Trump said during a press conference at the White House in early February. “I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway.”

Trump’s allies began talking about rigging the election by sending armed officers to the polls. Steve Bannon said on his podcast: “You’re damn right, we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

Since then, the administration has worked hard to take over the midterm elections, but so far everything it has tried has been blocked by the courts or failed in Congress. It is 0–23 in its effort to take over state voter data with the apparent plan of running it through a program designed to make sure noncitizens aren’t receiving welfare benefits for which they’re not eligible, a process that mistakenly flags citizens as noncitizens with a failure rate of at least 14%.

Courts also blocked Trump’s attempt to use the United States Postal Service (USPS) as a gatekeeper to stop ballots that the federal government decides shouldn’t be delivered even though state agencies determine they should be. We learned yesterday that, despite court orders, the administration’s plan to use the USPS to impose federal control on elections has continued. It has rushed into place a system a whistleblower warns would throw out entire batches of up to 10,000 ballots if a single one gets rejected.

This is a deliberate attempt to skew the midterm election. An analysis by Charles Stewart III of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Election Data and Science Lab shows that Democrats vote by mail more than Republicans. In 2024, 37% of Democrats voted by mail, while only 24% of Republicans did.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters yesterday that he is not ruling out sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to the polls. “The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” Mullin said. “ICE’s job is immigration, customs enforcement. That’s their job…if we’re serving a warrant we will be where we need to be.”

Maya Yang of the Guardian notes that Mullin’s threat flies in the face of federal law, which prohibits armed agents from “any place where a general or special election is held.”

Last night, in Tarrant County, Texas, county commissioners tried an even cruder way of rigging the election. As Cecelia Lenzen of the Texas Tribune reported, they voted 3–2 along party lines to get rid of 92 of the polling sites the county had in 2022 before the midterm election. In 2022 there were 316 election sites; the Republican commissioners cut that number to 224. They also cut three sites for early voting, from 50 to 47. Republicans voted for the cuts; Democrats voted against them.

“It’s not about cost. This is about power. This is very political. This is campaigning from the dais,” said Democrat Alisa Simmons. Throughout the eight-hour meeting about the cuts, speakers from the audience called on the commissioners to increase, rather than decrease, the number of voting sites for the more than 1.3 million people registered to vote in Tarrant County.

Those 1.3 million people are more than live in Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, or Montana, and about the same number of people who live in Maine or New Hampshire.

Voters in Tarrant County had plenty to say to the Republican commissioners about the cuts. One constituent warned: “You guys are out!” When County Judge Tim O’Hare refused to look at him, the man called out the disrespect. “What could possibly be so important, Mr. O’Hare? Can you listen to me, please? Hello? Hello? Can you look at my eyes, please?”

O’Hare answered: “I can hear every word you’re saying. You can use your minute however you choose.”

The man responded: “I want you to look me in the eyes.”

When O’Hare still wouldn’t, the man continued: “Yeah, look down because down is what you’re going in November. So keep looking where you’re going. Okay? ’Cause this is what we’re doing after this from now until November, whether you cut these places or not. We’re going and we’re knocking on doors and we’re bringing people out. And we’re telling them where the voter locations are, and we’re helping them get there, and nothing you can do can stop us from removing you in November.”