Texas

Everything is bigger in Texas. And that now includes the epic repudiation of Donald Trump by the American voters in the midterm elections. Yes, Republicans got pummeled in several conservative redoubts, including the loss of Senate seats in Kansas and South Carolina. But the biggest, most expensive and most stunning losses happened in the Lone Star State. After 32 years in the wilderness, Texas Democrats won eight statewide races in a single day, including the thumping of incumbent governor and Trump ally, Greg Abbott, by Gina Hinojosa. They also won the lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller and three other offices, and flipped control of the Texas House of Representatives.

Latino voters played a decisive role in the 2026 midterm elections, sending an unequivocal message to leadership in both parties: their support is earned, not guaranteed. “We may not always march, but we are the silent majority – and that is exactly what we demonstrated on Tuesday night,” said Maria Teresa Kumar, President and CEO of Voto Latino. An analysis of voter trends by the New York Times found that Latino voters shifted 29 points toward Democrats between 2024 and 2026 – the largest movement of any major demographic group. The shift was even more pronounced among younger Latinos, who moved 43 points toward Democrats, and Latino men, who shifted 31 points. In Texas, the change was especially visible along the southern border.

We keep being told that Michigan is the key battleground in the midterms, so where better to begin a rip through the swing states? Americans love to paint Britain as a sectarian hellhole, but if you want to see what Balkanization really looks like, head to Detroit. Black and white workers live separate lives on separate streets, while the nearby city of Dearborn is fiercely proud to be a Muslim enclave. Nearly a third of its population is foreign-born, and community leaders revel in their bloc vote power. And they are really put out about Iran... but, then again, so is everyone else, as a president who promised to get prices down kicks voters squarely in the pump.

In the midst of the most contentious Texas US Senate race in a generation, Democratic nominee James Talarico suddenly and mysteriously dropped off the campaign trail on September 29, and has yet to return, though his campaign claims a resurrection is coming tomorrow.  ​Talarico last appeared in public at a fundraiser alongside Robert DeNiro in New York City, which isn’t in Texas. On September 30, he showed his face on Zoom at a forum for the Hispanic Business Council, and said he had the flu. “I was ready to eat my favorite quesadilla tacos, but I was starting to feel kind of under the weather a few days ago, and last night it got so bad that I went to the urgent care here in Dallas,” he said.

At the opening night of the first ever “midterm” Republican convention in Dallas, Donald Trump roasted the local Democratic candidate for US Senate, whom he calls James “Talafreako.” “He was also somebody that hated eating meat, but he ran a campaign to beat meat. He called it ‘beat meat,’” said Trump, to cackles of laughter from the MAGA faithful. “I don’t know what the hell he meant by that. These people are going to tell me ‘what the hell… he wants to beat meat?’ But it was bad for his image, so he started eating meat, and he recently – it’s getting worse. I’m getting myself in trouble.” That was the highlight of the President’s almost two-hour-long remarks.

We’ve heard a lot about a “God gap” between Republican and Democratic voters in the United States – and for good reason. The gap between churchgoing conservatives and secular progressives, when measured by voting habits, has become conspicuously wide. In 1980, 40 percent of Democrats attended church regularly, with GOP voters a couple of points higher. Today, Republican church attendance is still in the low to mid-40s, while less than a quarter of Democrat voters are regular worshippers; only 17 percent of Harris voters in 2024 reported weekly attendance. Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, roughly 40 percent of Democrat or Democrat-leaning voters are religiously unaffiliated (atheists, agnostics or “nones”) compared to only 21 percent of Republican voters.

We know the terrible details of how congressional staffer Regina Santos-Aviles, 35, died. She poured gasoline on herself and then flicked the flame on a lighter – a mad decision she instantly regretted. "Please send help. It hurts so bad," she screamed at the 911 dispatcher. "Oh my God, I don't want to die.” She tried to smother the flames by rolling on the ground of her backyard in Texas and crawling to a faucet to extinguish them with water. But it was too late. A medical examiner found that the only part of her body not scorched by flames were the soles of her feet.  Thanks to a police report we know these terrible details of her death last year.

There used to be a political designation in the South of “Yellow Dog Democrats,” meaning voters who’d vote for a yellow dog if the Democrats put them up for election. But in Texas, the yellow dogs have been Republican for a generation. Texas last had a Democratic senator in 1993, and last occupied the Governor’s Mansion in 1995, when Ann Richards gave way to George W. Bush.   Nevertheless, the dogs are barking this year. Senator John Cornyn is up for re-election, and the primary contest has been chippier than usual. On the Democratic side, former football player Colin Allred dropped out of the race in December, hoping for a return to Congress, leaving the nomination wide open for James Talarico, a state representative and Presbyterian minister.

The contrast could hardly have been starker. As Donald Trump palled around with Mohammed bin Salman in the newly gilded Oval Office, Congress was voting on a transparency act that would further expose Jeffrey Epstein’s grave misdeeds. Trump, who had worked overtime to try and quash the vote, was in his element with the Saudi crown prince. Transparency? Not a bit of it. Trump proclaimed that the crown prince “knew nothing” about the death of Jamal Khashoggi who was, after all, “extremely controversial,” the term that he often deploys to describe anyone he dislikes or finds nettlesome.  The hero, or, to put it more precisely, heroine, of the day was Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene is a profile in courage.