It Only Took the Worst President in US History to Turn Texas Blue

Political scientists have known for 20 years that voting is a habit. Alan Gerber, Donald Green and Ron Shachar of Yale ran a field experiment in 1998, got a random set of people to the polls with door knocks and phone calls, and then watched them the next year. The people who had been nudged once kept showing up without the nudge, and the paper they published in 2003 carried the title Voting May Be Habit-Forming. Alexander Coppock and Green went back over the question in 2016 with a larger set of experiments and found the same thing: casting one ballot raises the odds of casting the next one.

That research is the lens for the Nov. 3, 2026 midterm. The thing that lasts past January 2027 is the voter who had never voted in a midterm, did it in 2026, and now has the habit. The party that becomes the reliable midterm and off-year party wins most of the governorships, attorneys general and secretaries of state, because 36 of the 50 governors and most statewide executive offices are elected in the midterm year, and it wins the state legislatures by holding them through both halves of the cycle instead of one.

The Associated Press and the networks called every race below by the morning of Nov. 4, 2026.

• Texas. Democrats took every statewide office on the ballot. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton for the Senate, the first Democrat elected statewide since 1994, in the most expensive Senate race of the cycle, with Elon Musk’s money on the losing side. Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott, the first Democratic governor since Ann Richards and the first Latina governor in the state’s history. Vikki Goodwin beat Dan Patrick for lieutenant governor, Nathan Johnson took the attorney general’s office Paxton vacated, and the comptroller, land commissioner, agriculture commissioner and railroad commissioner went with them. Trump got regime change in Texas before Iran.

• Kansas. The Rev. Adam Hamilton, founder of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, beat Sen. Roger Marshall. The last Democrat to win a Kansas Senate seat was George McGill in 1932, which Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball calls the longest losing streak for either party in any state. Trump and Vance made three trips to Kansas for Marshall.

• Georgia. Keisha Lance Bottoms beat Rick Jackson, Trump’s endorsed candidate, to become the first Black woman elected governor in the history of the United States and the first Democrat to hold the office since 1998. Jon Ossoff was reelected with 64 percent of the vote.

• South Carolina. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, beat Darline Graham, Lindsey Graham’s sister, to become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from South Carolina since 1998 and the first woman ever. By 4:30 in the afternoon on Nov. 3 the state had counted 1,797,335 ballots, more than any governor’s election in its history.

• North Carolina. Roy Cooper beat Michael Whatley, Trump’s handpicked former Republican National Committee chair, for the first Democratic Senate win since 2008. Thom Tillis, whose seat it was, congratulated him.

• Ohio. Sherrod Brown beat Sen. Jon Husted and is back in the Senate. Amy Acton beat Vivek Ramaswamy for governor, the first Democrat since 2006 and the first woman elected to the office.

• Iowa. Rob Sand beat Zach Lahn for the open governor’s seat, the first Democrat in 20 years. With Georgia, Texas and Ohio, that is four governorships flipped from red to blue, and Democrats clinched a majority of the nation’s governorships for the first time in 16 years.

• New Hampshire. Chris Pappas beat John Sununu and becomes the first openly gay man elected to the Senate.

• Florida. Two Democrats won House seats in districts the legislature redrew in 2026 to beat them.

• The House. Democrats took it back, and Hakeem Jeffries is positioned to be the first Black speaker of the House.

• The Senate. Democrats flipped seven Republican seats, in North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina, Ohio, Kansas, Iowa and Maine, where Troy Jackson beat Susan Collins, and the Associated Press called the chamber for Democrats after Josh Turek beat Ashley Hinson in Iowa.

Northeastern University’s political scientists put the cause in one sentence on election night: voters rejected the war with Iran, gas prices and the affordability crisis. Trump started the war, Trump’s tariffs set the prices, and Trump endorsed Paxton, Whatley, Jackson, Marshall and Lahn. It only took the worst president in US history to turn Texas blue. Trump should win an award for this.

More than 57 million Americans voted early by the morning of Nov. 3, past the 45.9 million who voted early in all of 2022. In the states that register by party, Democrats cast 43.9 percent of early ballots to Republicans’ 31.3. South Carolina’s early vote ran 83 percent above 2022, Maine’s 44 percent, and Michigan, North Carolina and Kansas each more than 30 percent.

More than 7.7 million Texans voted before Election Day, over 40 percent of the state’s 19 million registered voters, and ABC News modeled that early electorate at 51 percent Democratic to 45 Republican. At the same point in 2022, Republicans led that model by 8 points. That is a 14-point swing in four years in the state Republicans had carried in every statewide election since 1994.

Among Texans who voted early in 2026 and had sat out every federal election from 2018 through 2024, the ABC model put 64 percent as Democrats and 21 percent as Republicans. In 2022 that group split 50 to 39. In Georgia the same never-voters came in at 52 percent Democratic to 12 percent Republican, where in 2022 it was 51 to 27. In North Carolina, Democrats and unaffiliated voters cast about 73 percent of a record early vote.

The people in Texas and Georgia who cast a midterm ballot for the first time in their adult lives in 2026 are the people in the Yale experiments, and a large share of them will do it again in 2027, in 2028 and in 2030 without anyone knocking on their door. A generation of voters is finally seeing results. They are finally witnessing what happens when you stand up for your ideas against the prevailing “wisdom” of your parents and grandparents, and a voter who has seen it work once comes back.

Republicans spent 30 years as the party whose voters show up when the presidency is off the ballot, and that is the whole reason they held the Texas Legislature, the Kansas Legislature, the Georgia secretary of state’s office and the state supreme courts that drew the maps. The party that owns the off-year electorate owns the machinery, and the machinery decides who gets to vote in the presidential years.

A Kansas win also changes who runs. Adam Hamilton considered an independent bid, prayed on it through Lent and skipped a meal a day deciding whether a Democrat could win his state at all. Annie Andrews left a pediatric practice to run against a Graham in South Carolina. Every state legislator, county commissioner and school board candidate in a red state who watched the Nov. 3 returns now knows the race can be won, and the volunteers who knocked doors in Johnson County, Kansas, know their Saturdays were worth something.

Trump watched the same returns and posted on Truth Social at 10:48 Eastern that night: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

He was on the ballot in every race on the list above, as the war, the price of gas and the endorsement, and 57 million people gave the matter their attention early. Kansas waited 94 years for a Democrat, Texas waited 32, and it took one man two years to deliver both. The Republican Party built a generation of power on being the party that votes in the off years, and the figures from Texas and Georgia say that party is now us. If the people who voted for the first time in 2026 vote again in 2027, that is the generational change, and no one has to wait for a presidential year to see it.

CALL TO ACTION

Who you’re contacting and how: Reach out to one of your state legislators. You can do that by email, phone, FaxZero or even a printed letter. You could even go to their office during business hours, bring donuts, and tell the staff you’re going to talk to them about an issue you care about if the representative isn’t there.

Find your legislators by clicking on this sentence.

What you’re asking for: Ask them to publicly endorse automatic voter registration in your state, so every person who voted for the first time in 2026 stays registered when they move, change jobs or miss a cycle. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia already have it, and you can read how each one does it by clicking on this sentence.

Let them know who you are, what you want, and why you care. Offices count identical messages once, so write it in your own words.

- Chris