If watching the returns in the South on Tuesday night felt like watching Hungary eject Viktor Orbán, then congratulations, you’re putting this in the correct geopolitical context.
You see, as Americans, we have been far too used to thinking of authoritarian takeovers as something that happened in other countries (often with US State Department and CIA help cough cough), something that was visited upon our shores for the very first time when Donald Trump rode down that golden escalator in 2015.
Meanwhile, lots of Black people in the South would be happy to explain that actually, they’ve been living in authoritarian states their whole lives. States with names like Georgia and South Carolina and Mississippi and Tennessee. States that, if the United States were not allegedly united, would rank somewhere between Saudi Arabia and Belarus in The Economist’s Democracy Index.
That’s by design. Since the end of slavery, these states and their white supremacist leaders have been laboring to establish a system where the only voices that really count are those of their fellow white supremacist Christian men, and those men’s wives, as long as they agree to vote how Daddy says and not to shout too loud for any rights of their own. (Conservative white women love it, because they are also rank bigots.)
They gerrymander and slice and dice and criminalize and take away and intimidate and then when the Supreme Court gives them permission, they gerrymander and slice and dice and criminalize and take away and intimidate some more.
But sometimes they go way too far and something just snaps. Nobody knows the day or the hour, but when it happens, it blows your fuckin’ mind.
There had been talk before these midterms about how Black folks, especially in the South, understood the assignment, how they were especially furious after the Supreme Court gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act, how something historic and earthshaking and electoral map-changing was going to happen last night.
Well, it happened. Welcome to the New South.
Let’s see about some highlights:
Georgia and Texas remade themselves, not out of new parts, but with the people who have been the backbone of those states the whole time loudly shouting, “Never again, antebellum motherfuckers!”
James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas by 12 points. Gina Hinojosa, the state’s first Latina governor, beat Greg Abbott (considerably more popular than Paxton, who’s hated by errrrrebody) by a healthy seven. Creep Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was ousted by a woman named Vikki Goodwin, and by six points. Texas’s new attorney general will be Nathan Johnson, a Democrat. And just all the way down the ballot. The Republicans’ racist gerrymanders backfired, and it looks like Democrats are going to flip the state House.
And then there’s Georgia. Jon Ossoff was re-elected in an 18-point landslide against a pathetic, tiny man Ossoff never forgot to remind us was a sad, craven bigot. And that bigot must be feeling quite alone today, because have you heard about how the state is now just about entirely run by Black women?
North Carolina asserted itself. The Republicans’ racist gerrymanders there completely fucked them, and the states’ congressional delegation will now have a healthy blue majority. Senator-Elect Roy Cooper, the Democrat, won by almost 20 points.
South Carolina and Mississippi got in line right behind Georgia and North Carolina and said, “Oh hey y’all! We got next.” The new senator from South Carolina will be Annie Andrews, the Democrat, and it wasn’t even that close. As we speak, Mississippi’s Senate race remains too close to call, with Democrat Scott Colom in the lead by 65 votes over incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. (Or more: late-breaking, Decision Desk appears to have a new batch of votes showing his lead expanding to over 1,800. As always, double-check for up-to-the-minute numbers.)
Mississippi. The state with the most brutal voter suppression laws in the country, and also a Black population of approximately 38 percent. (These two things are related.)
As a lifelong southerner and fairly decent understander of the South, we have said many times, for at least a decade, that the next two dogs to bark in the South, so to speak, would be Mississippi and South Carolina. You can probably find us saying it in print somewhere. We have especially said it about Mississippi, and people have looked at us like we are crazy.
Now you know. (And if you want to know more, you need to learn about the “Black Belt” in the American South.)
And don’t be quick to say, “Well, but Darline Graham was a particularly useless hunk of cat mucus” and try to call it a fluke. That’s true, that’s what she is, and it’s sad how Lindsey Graham died and then his dumb sister fell on her face and we all had to laugh at it, but it has to start somewhere. People have to see that the confederate white supremacist slaveowner-descendant stranglehold on their states can be broken. They have to feel it. It has to be felt from within, and also understood from without, by the funders who decide where it’s worth investing.
The work is just beginning in South Carolina and Mississippi, but now y’all know, and you can’t fuckin’ pretend you don’t. One day, and it won’t be that long, they’ll be having their nights like Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas just did.
And since we were right about South Carolina and Mississippi, hear us now when we say that the next two are Alabama and Louisiana.
Alabama had one of those “flukes” almost 10 years ago now, when they decided to send Doug Jones to the Senate, instead of Roy Moore the multiply-accused kid-toucher. And too many people saw it as just that, a fluke, instead of taking the opportunity to say “Oh wow, look what is possible in Alabama. Is there something we don’t understand about Alabama?”
Well, the statewide races didn’t go so great in Alabama last night. Tommy Tuberville will be the governor, but he only beat Doug Jones by four points. Some Republican hick named Barry Moore is taking Tuberville’s seat in the Senate, having beaten a Democrat named Everett Wess by nine, in a race that got absolutely zero national attention.
But in the House races, in Alabama’s Second District, which white supremacist Republicans redrew specifically to confiscate Black voting power after the illegitimate partisan hack Supreme Court gutted the remainder of the Voting Rights Act, incumbent Democrat Shomari Figures won anyway, by eight points. Literally the seat that was designed to be taken from him and given to a plantation owner. Voters said fuck off.
And that was not a fluke.
In Louisiana, one of the closest Senate races in the country — Louisiana! Closest! — was won by Republican Julia Letlow, who barely managed 50.9 percent of the vote over Democrat Jamie Davis, a Black farmer, who received 49.1 percent. That’s a race that wasn’t on anybody’s radar among the mainstream punditry. We only really started hearing about it ourselves last week.
Also not a fluke.
And we don’t want to leave out states like Tennessee. As a Tennessean, we will have more to specifically say about what happened in Tennessee on Tuesday, because from the outside it might not look like Tennessee participated in the assignment. But it did. Ohhhhhh, it did.
Democrats flipped six state House seats. The incoming governor Marsha — gag — Blackburn did not win a majority, and indeed only beat her challenger Jerri Green by 2.5 points. In 2022, Republican Governor Bill Lee won by 32.
The white supremacist Tennessee legislature redrew the maps this year to rig them against Black Memphians, to take away the one majority Black district Tennessee had remaining, before Donald Trump’s illegitimate partisan hack Supreme Court said that wasn’t necessary anymore. And congrats, all three of the new districts that carved up Memphis went to Republicans, by margins of five, six and, as of this writing, 1.1 in the new, absurdly gerrymandered Memphis Ninth.
But yet, in Tennessee’s Fourth District, which is one of the remnants of the last time white supremacist Republicans carved up one of their blue cities to steal representation — that’d be Nashville, three years ago, and we say “remnant” because they had to draw them even weirder to skullfuck Memphis this year, so the new Fourth stretches from some Nashville suburbs to the Chattanooga suburbs — a Democrat named Victoria Broderick is being widely reported as the victor over incumbent fucking creep Scott DesJarlais, who is “pro-life” except when it’s his mistress he’s pressuring to get an abortion.
This means that the current 8-1 Republican majority in the Tennessee delegation will be, in the new Congress, after they carved up Memphis … 8-1. Thanks to a district nobody saw coming returning to bite them in the asses. (Indeed, by our count, based on last night’s results, Tennessee now has six extremely competitive congressional districts. Out of nine.)
Point is, Tennessee did something last night too. The swings we saw were in the neighborhood of 20 points, 24 points, 26 points, 30 points. Huge.
It’s just that Tennessee has much further to go, possibly the furthest of all the southern states. But it did a fuckload of the work last night.
So that’s a snapshot of some stuff that happened in the South in the 2026 midterms.
You also may be noticing that we’re not hearing much in the way of “rigged!” and “stolen!” screaming from MAGA authoritarian losers and their loser Dear Leader Donald Trump. That’s because we didn’t just win, we punched them in in the fucking dicks, and then we ran over them with our fucking cars, and then we let our dogs use them as toilets. Their heads are spinning.
That’s what happened in Hungary too. And in Serbia. Flávio Bolsonaro might be screaming “rigged!” about the recent election in Brazil, but he’s doing it from the safety of Donald Trump’s grundle.
That’s the new South. As we said, there’s a hell of a lot of work remaining to do, but American politics changed forever last night.
Come to Jesus, white southern Republicans. The South just fuckin’ rose again.
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How satisfying is Ramaswamy's loss?
All his money and all Elon's money didn't help a bit. The voters of Ohio slapped the smug off that douchebro's face.
I am praying for Colom to win Mississippi but no matter what happens there it shows that Every. Fucking. Vote. Counts. Don't let anybody tell you it doesn't.