Was Tuesday a Blue Tsunami, Blue Wave or Red Undertow?
Plus: A conversation with a Texas organizer, a look at Democratic trifecta states and our weekly column
NOV 6 |
1. LEADING OFF
Happy Friday, from our nation’s capital. The vote counts continue, and over the last 24 hours the Blue Wave has only grown. More races were called for Democrats yesterday, including flips in Arizona’s 6th, and Montana’s 1st.
To say this week has been historic would be an understatement. The first election I voted in was Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election, and yesterday Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a video to her Instagram describing why this election hit our generation a little differently and explained to Gen-Z one example of where what they call ‘millennial cringe’ comes from.
As I watched the results roll in on election night I remembered what it felt like 18 years ago. While that night was also amazing and historic for the country and Democrats, I was struck by the impression that this year’s election somehow felt bigger. The simple, if a bit cynical, explanation would be that it’s the arc of time dulling my memory, but when I look at the results map from Tuesday and see South Carolina, Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio all blue; and Democrats leading in Alaska and Mississippi, it makes sense why this year’s election is bigger.
This election night felt less like a long overdue victory as in ’08, but more like a swift vindication for the very mechanics of our democracy. That even when the structure of our government is pushed and shaken to its very foundation as this administration has done the last two years, the citizens are still the great equalizer.
Americans, for a multitude of reasons that are still being exhumed from the exit polling, voted to put a check on what they saw was an administration that was underperforming on the promises it made and unrelenting in its assault on the norms of our government and our common decency.
Every pundit prior to Election Day had fallen into one of three buckets: the blue tsunami, the blue wave or the red undertow. What no one, myself included, saw coming was a combination of all three. Some Republican voters stayed home, some split their tickets, some voted entirely Democratic, and Democrats showed up in spades.
There are still races to be called, and Alaska could very well take until Thanksgiving, but at this point, in the Senate and the House, any additional gains would only serve to fortify the incredible majorities Democrats picked up on Tuesday.
In the weeks to come, Democrats will have their fair share of work cut out for them, figuring out what the priorities are when they take control in January. But for now, if just for this weekend, let the celebrations continue. A nation of voters exercised their constitutional right to take back their country. It was a simple moment, but one with a normalcy that somehow felt revolutionary. So let the fireworks go off, let the revelry linger, and let freedom continue to ring.
— Jake Rakov
2. HOW TEXAS WAS WON
Texas’s Flip Was a Decade in the Making
By Russell Payne
Derrick Osobase is the organizing and political director of the Communication Workers of America and has been organizing workers in Texas for 20 years. Since 2014, Osobase has been focusing on work with independent expenditure organizations and helping build the political infrastructure that contributed to Tuesday’s Democratic wins in Texas.
Osobase also worked on the “Contract with Texas’s Working Class,” a set of policy commitments signed by both Senator-elect James Talarico and Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, as well as numerous down ballot candidates. The contract was part of an effort from organized labor in Texas that also included outreach to 2 million working-class Texans ahead of the midterms.
The document, Osobase explained, lays out a roadmap for what Democrats will need to do both in Texas and in Washington, D.C., in order to keep the Lone Star State competitive in future elections and to keep the backing of the movement that helped elect them in 2026
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I wanted to start by asking you about the role of union and labor organizing in the elections in Texas. A lot of political reporting on the races, some of my own included, has focused on the candidates, the stories they’re telling, and especially the spending in Texas. I’m hoping you could describe the landscape of labor organizing in 2026 there because my understanding is that this is something bubbling up there for a while.
This election didn't just start with these two very good personable candidates. We’ve been building, and the ‘we’ has been the CWA, the SEIU, AFT, United Here, and the Texas Organizing Project, which is a community organization. We’ve been doing independent expenditure work here in Texas since 2014.
The way that this all came about, for the names I just said in particular, is that we recognized that organizing the South was not easy and that we had to pair our organizing with also ensuring that we are building a better political environment in order for us to not only grow but to have policies that ensure we are able to fight our employers without being disadvantaged by our Republican rule of making it very easy for companies to come into Texas and screw over their workers.
In 2014 there was a group who really sat down and said that we needed to build an independent structure that is able to communicate not just with our members but with the general public and that is something that labor hasn’t quite focused on in the past. We talked to our members but we started to realize that that wasn’t enough to win wide and deep and that this project of organizing working class folks who aren’t aligned with or in a union was critically important.
We put our first independent expenditure together in the Houston mayoral race in Harris County, and we won. And what we saw out of that was that to build a deeper connection and engagement with one Latinos in the state and African Americans in the state of Texas and workers just in general. So we started building these infrastructures and we called it the ‘Cities Out’ strategy in 2015, where we understood that in order to win statewide, we were going to need to build in the cities where we had a Democratic infrastructure. We spent the years from 2014 to about 2017, 2018 building programs and organizing working class people, and predominantly those folks were Latinos and African Americans.
We knew we were on the right track when Beto O’Rourke got about 200,000 votes away from Ted Cruz, and the makeup of that electorate were the very people who we had been engaging for the last 4 years.
In 2026, this was the biggest program we ever ran. We engaged over a million people, knocking on doors, canvassing on phones. We had over a million calls. We had a digital program that reached almost 600,000 people talking about the Contract with The Texas Working Class.
Leading up to this election we sat down and found our targets around who we wanted to talk to and we said we needed to talk to working class Latinos and African Americans in the state. We went not only wide but deep with targeting over 2 million people with organizations like Texas for All.
What we found in those conversations is that people were very clear that their economic conditions have increasingly gotten worse, not just during this administration but over the 30 years of Republican rule in the state of Texas. We had a governor and a legislature who were hell bent on giving more tax breaks to rich corporations and tax breaks to folks like Elon Musk, saying that it would make our economy do better.
We hadn’t seen that and that’s what we were getting at the doors and what people were specifically saying was that healthcare and housing have gotten completely out of control and that they don’t make enough to support their family. The last thing is that there was a clear chorus around corruption within the Texas Republican Party and their rule.
I wanted to ask you about what's being done to keep the organizing infrastructure that helps fuel winning campaigns in the state, but it sounds like you guys already have kept that in mind along the way from the beginning.
Yes, we knew that we couldn’t just build a voter engagement program around voting for just Democrats. That actually is part of the reason that most working class people have drifted away from Democrats because, we can't just say we want to elect the party just just because of their party identity. This program kind of went beyond party politics and actually spoke about what are the things that individual Texans needed to ensure that they could have an economic future for them and their family that isn't just you know getting by.
So the contract with the Texas Working Class was just really clear on the set of things that we needed these folks to to actually fight for and deliver. Both Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico signed it, along with all the other statewides who won.
We were super clear with them: this isn't just a laundry list that you can just sign and just go on to the next thing. Like this is the agenda of working class people in Texas. This is the thing that they identified when we had these conversations that they want you to not only just try to pass. We want you to actually deliver on these economic items, and we didn't want them to sign it if they weren't going to take it seriously.
Read the rest of Russell's conversation at The Caucus.
3. COMMENTARY
How Will You Pay For It?
By Samarth Gupta
Many of you may feel exhausted – but buoyed! – after sprinting through the finish line of Tuesday’s election. But I hope you caught your breath; the next race is beginning very soon. In the days, weeks, and months to come, dozens of Democrats are expected to launch their campaigns for President.
If you are willing and able to cast your mind back to the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary, you’ll remember incessant policy fights between the 29 candidates. Medicare for All. The Green New Deal. Free college and student debt cancellation. There was a reoccurring question that hounded candidates: How will you pay for it?
This time around will be no different. Democrats can’t spend two years hiding from the question. As they propose expansions of healthcare and childcare programs, new investments in housing, or expanding the social safety net, they will need an answer for how they will turn those proposals into reality. At a time when the federal deficit has crossed $2 trillion and the debt has surpassed $40 trillion, it will be impossible and irresponsible to wave the question away.
Read the rest of Samarth's column at The Caucus.
