I guess we aren't gonna get those $5000 checks.
The question going into Tuesday night was continually, how much can we trust the polls? The polling showed that the Democrats were almost certainly going to win the House of Representatives, and there was a slightly better than positive chance they could win the Senate. To do so they needed to win some races that six months ago seemed impossible, including one here in Kansas, where a megachurch pastor was running as a Democrat (!) and going up against an incumbent Republican. While Kansas is actually more moderate than most people believe, and we have had Democrats or moderate Republicans as governor most of the time I've lived here as an indication that we aren't as deeply red as, say, Alabama, it had been since 1932 since we last had a Democrat elected from Kansas in the Senate. My long-deceased grandparents were teenagers in 1932.
The Democrat won in the Senate by five points, over 55,000 votes. And to my surprise, it seems that Cindy Holscher, the Democrat, is going to beat a not-that-offensive Republican candidate for governor, though the race hasn't yet been called even as she is up by about 7000 votes. And to my delighted shock, it seems that Kris Kobach, our hardline Trump-worshipping attorney general, is going to lose by about 13,000 votes. Even the state house of representatives, which has had a GOP supermajority for quite some time, is now swinging back to be balanced, as somewhere around 15 state Republican representatives have been defeated, not to mention many others who chose not to run again.
(Someday I will look back on this post and wonder why I chose to write this. I'm not really trying to make some clever point. It's just that two days later, I'm still in shock. My home state of Kansas, finally starting to act like the sensible people I know we are. At least most of us. I just wanted to get this down for the historical record, in case the AI monster eats us alive in the next five years. Perhaps some space people will come along in a billion years and this blog will remain the only output of humanity that they can find. If so, hi there...sorry I didn't get to meet you. But dang, the GOP got their asses handed to them in 2026, didn't they? Just wanted this to be on the record.)
There's been a lot of glee from the late night comedians and news guardians over the past few days. It's been almost unseemly, but I get it. We've been wallowing in despair ever since around 2017 when we realized that yeah, Trump is going to be as bad as we thought he would be, not to mention the abject terror in 2025 when he returned and many of have genuinely thought that this is the end of our country.
But I'm not quite so giddy. In the days running up to the election, there's a part of me that almost was hoping that the Senate might end up being split 50/50. Let the House put the brakes on Trump, but when the economy inevitably collapses sometime in the next two years (e.g. $40 trillion in federal debt, household debt through the roof, AI bubble popping, gas prices and cost of living not coming down), the Senate still being Trump's wouldn't give the next wave of the GOP ammunition to say, as they inevitably would, that the economy's problem is all the Democrats' fault. Now, however, with the Democrats probably moving into 260 House seats territory (over 40 seats gained!) and ending up with 54-56 Senate seats (a 7-9 seat gain!), the Democrats have a stake in what happens the next two years...and having a stake means that they will absorb some of the inevitable blame.
So how are they going to handle success? The Democratic party I have known for most of my life has been a party of incompetence and naive dreams. I fully understand why there is a large segment of the population who says, yeah I know the Republicans are bad, but the Dumbocrats are worse. But this newfound confidence of the Democrats? Maybe it's a sign that they too will be changing. This might be the peak of Adam Hamilton, pastor/senator. But Jon Ossoff? James Talarico? Rob Sand? Keisha Bottoms? A bunch of names that maybe we'll never heard about again but are enjoying their 15 minutes of fame? Maybe some of these new Democrats will turn out to be the new wave of post-Obama paragons of hope. I hope so.
And maybe, just maybe, some of the Republicans will finally wake up and repent of the shitshow they have been raining down on this country. Maybe we'll finally see the last days of Trump as well as the people who wanna be Trump: Ken Paxton, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and a cast of hundreds. A good portion of people are finally seeing what they are, and maybe the Adam Kinzingers of the world will be able to bring back a moderately conservative sense of sanity and make it a Grand New party. We can only hope.
But today, I'm still shocked, and will be for sometime.
