The numbers are still coming in as I write this just after the witching hour of Election Night, but Democrats seem poised for one of the biggest midterm landslide victories in modern history. Democrats not only won the House handily, but are poised per current New York Times projections to win the national popular vote for the House by a whopping 7.2% percentage points. In the Senate, millions more Americans will once again cast votes for Democrats than for Republicans—in part because no Republican even made it to the general election in California, the country's most populous state. Democrats also won seven governorships and flipped seven legislative chambers. Liberal ballot measures passed all over the country, perhaps most importantly those expanding voting rights and creating non-partisan redistricting committees.
In a sane electoral system, such a resoundingly clear result would mean sweeping new powers for the winning party. And to a certain extent it does: the Democratic takeover of the House means the ability to block most Republican legislative priorities as well as to launch investigations into criminal wrongdoing by the President and his allies. And each governorship and state legislature retaken provides the opportunity to undo the gerrymandering and voter suppression rules conservatives euphemistically call their “structural advantages.”
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