Postgame
Plus: What happened in Texas, what happened in North Carolina, what happened with tech, and more...
No more election results yet: Democratic candidate Mary Peltola leads in Alaska, though the Senate race has not yet been called. There's still no final result in Mississippi's super-tight Senate race, and it might take until November 10, when all provisional ballots will be done being counted, to have a firm result.
But plenty of analysis: The era of the Latino Trump voter might be over. "As voters across Texas rejected Republicans to elect their first Democratic senator and governor in decades, nowhere was the shift more pronounced than in heavily Latino South Texas," reports Bloomberg. "From Brownsville through Laredo and up to Eagle Pass, heavily Hispanic counties in the region favored Democrats by margins that averaged over 40 points. That made for a stark contrast with President Donald Trump's gains two years ago, when he swept the area's traditional Democratic strongholds." It will be interesting to see whether this holds true in the next presidential election cycle, or whether Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott were just notoriously unpopular candidates matched with relatively charismatic newcomers, amid a backdrop of increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity that Latino voters rejected.
The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day's news every morning.
Candidate/ballot initiative mismatch: "There is a very interesting mismatch between the elections for *candidates*," writes Charles C.W. Cooke on X, "which effectively yielded a massive and historic sweep for the Democrats, and the *ballot initiatives*, almost all all [sic] of which yielded conservative outcomes, even in the deep blue states (but not VA)."
This is good news: People in many parts of the country seem to like conservative policy positions—ballot initiatives that cap certain taxes, for example—but dislike or distrust Republican politicians right now. Count me among them.
Some initiatives, like ones that allow the building or expansion of data centers, are just terribly unpopular across the board: "There were 41 data center-related initiatives on local ballots," writes Reason's Christian Britschgi. "Most of these were proposing bans, moratoriums, or additional zoning restrictions on data centers. In all but two of those races, the anti-data center position won." The tech overlords will have to contend with this massive political backlash, and do a much better job with their AI sales pitch than just "it will replace your jobs en masse and you must supply the land on which we build the infrastructure to power it," which is understandably not super attractive to the median rural voter.
Party durability is no more: Do not look at the results from Tuesday as a glowing endorsement of Democrats so much as a repudiation of those in power. (A welcome and familiar sentiment for libertarians.) "Young voters and nonwhite voters (who are, themselves, disproportionately younger than whites) are not so much punching tickets to join a party as they are leasing one-year terms to vote for one group, only to punish them in the next election if things don't improve," writes Derek Thompson.
He also argues that Trump has terrible taste in candidates, and the Republican Party must not pay for this: "Trump pushed out popular conservative senators in Texas and North Carolina for insufficient loyalty and backed horrendous wannabes that gave Democrats a chance to win in parts of the country where not even the most hopium-addled lib would have dreamed of winning in January 2025," notes Thompson. As Trump's influence over the party presumably wanes, it will be interesting to see what the course-correction looks like, and whether it will be too little too late.
Scenes from Texas: Lord forgive me, I'm fighting about Senator-elect James Talarico on the internet again.
I would argue Talarico's theology is not recognizable to the majority of Christians, and is instead mostly palatable to the non-religious and very lightly religious https://t.co/9p2lJvaOce
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) November 4, 2026
QUICK HITS
- A note from your host: I unfortunately have to go to another funeral tomorrow, and Reason Roundup will have a guest writer. It's been a bad week, y'all. Sorry for all the disruptions, especially during this important time. We'll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week.
- "As bad as things were for Republicans nationally on election night, they were arguably worse in North Carolina—ground zero for a repudiation of President Donald Trump's attempts to strong-arm GOP control of government that left this formerly red Southern state bluer than ever," argues The Washington Post.
- Open to this being a positive change:
Mamdani's ballot props have mercifully euthanized the worst "public input" for routine infrastructure: 1970s Public Citizen-style workday hearings that no normal people can *ever* attend
These inherently undemocratic vetocracy procedures were ended by real democracy: Elections https://t.co/LEwD988O5f
— Alex Armlovich (@aarmlovi) November 5, 2026
- I think it's not just this—the poorly-refined pitch from AI makers as to how it will transform the future of work—but also the failures of the Department of Government Efficiency, and the real inability of tech overlords to sell the idea that their products result in meaningful efficiency or quality-of-life gains. Instead, we got, like, Flock cameras.
Not the determining issue, but one sub-theme of the election is that the idea of an accelerationist "tech right" in 2022-2024 was associated with cool rocketry and new military hardware, but once in power it ended up associated with the terrible vibes of the AI industry instead.
— Ross Douthat (@Douthat60) November 4, 2026
- New developments in Congress:
🚨🚨BREAKING NEWS -- REP. JIM JORDAN will announce this morning that he's running for House minority leader.
The Ohio Republican is the first person in the minority leader race.
JORDAN will make the case that the leadership needs new blood, investigations are his specialty.…
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) November 4, 2026
🚨🚨BREAKING NEWS -- MIKE JOHNSON will not run for House minority leader.
He just said it on the staff call.
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) November 4, 2026
