Democrats Rout GOP | Hacker News Reader

Democrats Rout GOP

nytimes.com

91 pointsgcanyon60 comments

The Mississippi senate race is essentially tied, which is kind of an insane result. As well as the Democrats winning practically everything in Texas.

did all that last minute gerrymandering do nothing or did even make this possible?

Gerrymandering doesn't directly impact Senate races because they are state-wide (everyone in the whole state votes for their senators, it isn't district by district), but the Republican gerrymandering in general either backfired or had no real impact more than it helped them this cycle.

A lot of the Republican gerrymandered House districts assumed Latinos who voted for Trump quite a bit in 2024 would continue to do so, but seemingly they did not.

Gerrymandering does not affect whole-state races like the Senate. Nobody is re-drawing state borders for every election.

And in some areas gerrymandering did backfire as far as I read, though I didn't look at the specifics.

it did lead to I think two GOP pickups in Texas, near Dallas iirc

It was worse than doing nothing, not that worse is bad in this case. Once the intended effect of gerrymandering was overwhelmed, it created more Democratic districts than it destroyed.

Gerrymandering in the south made blacks and other minorities angry and motivated them to show up. There is even a term for it in this that was recently coined by some pundits, "blacklash".

So gerrymandering very much contributed to this GOP wipeout.

Dems are currently up 0.2% there, and markets put it at 84% likely a Dem win now. 6 hours ago it was 94% against.

In the senate race there 2 years ago, GOP won by a 26% margin. Different candidates now obviously, but that’s a huge swing. https://votes.decisiondeskhq.com/races/2026-11-03/mississipp...

Democracy still has a fighting chance in USA, and that’s good news.

Best wishes from Europe!

You say after yet another free and fair election where opposition leaders were neither jailed nor assassinated Democracy in the US might limp along?

Don't buy the Kool-Aid.

I understand you disagree in some way. But not exactly how. Can you explain with less insinuations between the lines?

I infer your phrasing in "Democracy still has a fighting chance in USA..." that you are insinuating a State's requirement to choose Federal representatives by democratic vote was anything other than completely assured.

(It occurred to me that if English is not your first language, then maybe you don't know what the phrase "fighting chance" means.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fight... )

(Or it could be sarcasm, with a problem being that some people actually believe it)

-- Out to the wings where your insinuation lives:

In the US, not only were there gatherings called "No Kings" (and apparently without any sense of irony, one outside a US embassy in Great Britain, which was currently ruled by King Charles III), there were people who were absolutely certain that Trump would not allow elections in November or if he did that the elections would be rigged and if the Republicans still somehow lost they somehow would not seat the incoming Representatives. You'll have to look in the wingnut areas to find it, but if we're were talking about "fighting chances" for US democracy, that's where you live so it shouldn't be hard.

Btw, the two most recent times I' m aware of where a political party in the US has chosen its candidate for the general election by ignoring the popular vote in the party's election process were by the Democratic Party. Maybe that's what you're referring to in the "fighting chance"?

It is still not apposite because the general election is still "by the people" and just because, for example, the people of Maine did not select the Democratic Party's candidate on the general election ballot for Senator does not mean the people could not have voted for the same person they did in the Party's primary by write-in vote.

Back out of the wings, The US Constitution explicitly requires that both US Representatives and Senators must be chosen "by the people" and that the the people doing the choosing must be the same set that are allowed to choose Representatives in the State legislature and further requires that those people be broadly selected.

In no State of the Union was attempt made that I'm aware of to modify the qualifications of the people allowed to vote to restrict them further than they were in 2022 or even 2002.

Choosing the members of the House and Senate in the United States by popular vote in each State is not a feature of the United States political system that has ever had a serious threat (and the people allowed to do the voting has generally only expanded, with the exception of the 1996 law that excluded "aliens" [whether of terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin] from voting in federal elections)

Perhaps you can see why I left my first comment shorter

It’s a bloodbath for Republicans. Even the guy in charge of leading GOP efforts to win the House lost.

It is hard to be 'anti-establishment' when you are the establishment. That's one of the reasons why Trump won, lost, won the election.

All I can say is: GOOD.

Democrats got their act together, rejected identity politics, talked about pocketbook issues, the nonsensical war, & the administration’s naked corruption. Democrats also benefited by the fact many of the GOP’s strong candidates were sidelined by Trump who favors toadies.

All in all, good news for the Democrats and for the US. My fear is that the Democrats will lose focus and become distracted and lose sight of what led to victory. The Economy and Trump’s naked corruption and degenerate abuse of government institutions for personal gain.

I went with the title NYTimes gave it on their home page rather than the wordy header on the page itself. That's "Midterm Elections Live Updates: Democrats Seize Control of Congress as Voters Rebuke Trump"

I don't think we're gonna get our $5000 checks. LOL

Still holding out hope for the tariff dividend though!

Heard these will be sent during infrastructure week.

Two more weeks!

Non-paywall: https://archive.is/laAzx

[flagged]

The NYT has dynamic headlines and that was the actual headline at one point.

Great outcome, though still a little disappointing that so many people had to feel the negative impact of Trump's incompetence on a personal level to get them to wake up, but better late than never.

Shame that the Democrats flubbed it in Florida (at the senate/governor level, they did get some nice House pickups due to the Republican dummymander).

Angie Nixon ran an incredible campaign and probably could have won if she got any significant support from the DNC.

It seems a little peevish to suggest that Democrats didn't have a daring enough approach to assigning campaign resources. It could've been the political equivalent of early optimization.

> It seems a little peevish to suggest that Democrats didn't have a daring enough approach to assigning campaign resources. It could've been the political equivalent of early optimization.

I'm still overall very happy with yesterday's results, but...

It isn't just the holding back of resources, they also played a lot of political distancing games because they didn't like the fact that Angie Nixon joined the DSA to help shore up her ability to mobilize.

There are absolutely Democrats who would rather lose ground to Republicans than give the left any breathing room. They can't even pretend that isn't true anymore after the Haley Stevens meltdown.

These games almost certainly cost the Democrats a Florida senate seat, and likely the Florida governorship too as collateral damage. Not the end of the world since so many other races turned out well and I expect to see Angie Nixon again in 2028 since the seat she was vying for wasn't a full 6 year term (it was for the 2 year remainder of Marco Rubio's vacated seat), but still disappointing that they dropped the ball there.

So screwed up that this was flagged. It seems all the election related posts were flagged. You have to wonder why the HN overlords aren't allowing such a major event to reach the front page.

Thou shall not speak ill of the techno fascists, accelerationists, EAs, spac scammers, etc. No matter how much they have curdled the image of the tech industry in the eyes of normies.

First, I don't know that it's the "HN overlords". It's likely to just be HN users.

Why would they flag such a thing? Election results aren't really very much of an HN-style topic. "Yay, our side won!" is not usually a very thoughtful conversation. Nor is there anything tech-related whatsoever in the topic (aside from some somewhat-off-topic conversations about data centers).

The site guidelines say that most stories about politics are off-topic. This one fits into the "most stories" category.

Counter example to your argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12909752

There are plenty more.

Maybe Trump, a long-term Democrat who turned quasi-Republican, and mutated the GOP from inside, wanted to further the might of the Democratic Party all along? Imagine this: a secret agent pretends to be all he despises, gets to the very top of the enemy ranks, rots them from the inside, and, hated both by his erstwhile party fellows and his disillusioned rabid supporters, thrusts victory after victory into the hands of its formal (and proclaimed) enemy. In a couple of years he steps down, ridiculed, but keeps his true allegiance secret, like a real hero.

What a movie that could be.

As an Australian, I can say we are all very relieved.

Big collective sigh of relief here in Europe too, I imagine. Our economies have been hurting in no small part because of the unchecked whims of the MAGA inner circle.

Yeah me too as a Brit. The whole Trump buddying up with Putin to try to save his invasion was a bit of a worry.

I'm afraid the US Constitution, as interpreted by the sitting Supreme Court, gives the executive a lot of power.

But at least 25% of people changed their mind, realized: these people are demons. Pure and total monsters.

We saw the state of democracy and we were angry. We saw the corruption and we were angry. https://bsky.app/profile/olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social/post/3mzh... https://bsky.app/profile/froomkin.bsky.social/post/3mzh46dug...

Damn straight. It's obvious as heck. At least America didn't keep slumbering on unaware, and my gosh, far far far less America voted for this unholy hellspawn tearing down of liberty and reason.

That's the key part for me. I was honestly beginning to despair that the people in the US were just going to let him trample over everything.

Seems bad for data centers and AI, though the benefit of keeping the deranged president in check likely outweighs lost progress following from anti-tech populism.

> Seems bad for data centers and AI, though the benefit of keeping the deranged president in check

The data centers got rejected on their own basis [0]. While the Texas senator race was more about corruption and a picking a candidate that embodies Texas far more than his Trump hand picked opponent -- the Texas governor race is a clear message vote for data center restriction.

[0] https://datacentersontheballot.com

That's a bit like saying it's regrettable that not enough people were able to take out subprime mortgages. Neo clouds and crypto pivots are the difference between a correction and a crash.

Know what's good for AI? everybody (people) having access to RAM and GPUs

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