Holy Shit, Texas Democrats Are Gonna Govern
You're not hallucinating. Or, even if you are, either way it really happened.
To paraphrase a fake quote from Vladimir Lenin—who, had he been a statewide Democratic candidate here last night, would have won by at least five points—there are decades when nothing happens, and there are nights when the Republican men who’ve held this state in their collective deathgrip for the past 12 years are thrown like Whataburger wrappers onto the electoral ash heap of Texas history.
There are a few ways to summarize Tuesday’s results. For example, as in the headline above: “Holy shit.” Or: “This is impossible.” Or: “I think I’m accidentally on some kind of drug you typically have to forage deep into a remote jungle to find.”
Or, somewhat more precisely, Texas Democrats last night did the following: Flipped every statewide race from U.S. senator down to railroad commissioner and even including the four state Supreme Court seats that were up (of nine total). Facing a Trump-ordered 2025 U.S. House gerrymander meant to flip 5 seats to the Republicans, Democrats instead flipped one net seat for themselves, driven by an overwhelmingly strong performance in South Texas, where the GOP had overindexed on Trump’s fleeting 2024 strength. Dems needed 14 seats to flip the state House, a generally unfathomable number as of 6:59 p.m yesterday; as of Wednesday morning, they’d clearly flipped the chamber, with the only question being the size of their incoming majority. With Texas’ help, Dems nationwide flipped the U.S. House and Senate by wide margins too.
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At the very top of the ballot, Austin state Representative James Talarico defeated Attorney General Ken Paxton by something like 12 points, while the statewide Dems below—most notably state Representative Gina Hinojosa squaring off with Governor Greg Abbott—prevailed in the range of 5 to 7 points.
That, to be clear, is not what the polling showed—with Talarico and Hinojosa overperforming their poll averages by roughly 10. And that’s not what any pundits, save perhaps one I can think of, predicted. That is a fever dream made flesh.
We are, after all, only two years removed from a historically dispiriting election for Texas Democrats. In 2024, Dems here lost ground everywhere—from the biggest cities to the swingiest suburbs to, most acutely, heavily Hispanic South Texas—as voters including the youngest cohort spurned Kamala Harris and, to a slightly lesser extent, Senate hopeful Colin Allred.
This year, to give a sense, the most populous county in the Rio Grande Valley in deep South Texas—Hidalgo County—swung toward the Dems by about 49 points, comparing Trump’s ’24 margin to Talarico now. Talarico performed some 30 points better there than the top-ballot Dem in 2022 as well.
Turnout numbers aren’t final, but we’re headed for a number around 10 million—a certain record-breaker for a midterm, though not too different from 2018 as a percent of voters registered. New York Times estimates suggest Hispanic Texans shifting 40-plus points toward Dems compared to 2024 and voters ages 18-29, in the realm of 50 points.
The hardest thing, then, is not understanding whether Republicans took a shellacking this year for the ages; it’s understanding what this all means come January.
Will Texas Education Agency head Mike Morath be fired? Yes, that’s safe to say. Will that stop the school district takeovers that have roiled the state? One can hope. Will the Lege actually turn around the ship of privatization and equitably fund our public schools? Harder to say.
Will any pushes to further entrench police cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement or punish abortion-seekers be dead on arrival? Seem like safe bets. Will Texas stop putting band-aids on a broken government revenue system and just pass a damn progressive income tax? Well, no, but maybe one day! Anyone who tells you they know what’s possible now is lying.
Today is Wednesday, November 4, 2026, and our state officially faces the unthinkable: Democrats who govern.
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