TPM’s Untitled Live Show (Name TBD) returns today at 2 p.m. Eastern. If you think everything to be said about the midterms has already been said, you might be right, but we’ve got thoughts and analysis nevertheless. We’re going to pay special attention to the non-politician winners and losers from Tuesday night. I hope you’ll join Nicole, Hunter, Derick, and myself this afternoon on YouTube.

I wanted to flag this critical data point: across the Deep South (AL, MS, SC, LA, GA) the percentage of the electorate made up by Black voters rose dramatically — by 3 percentage points in all those states except for, Alabama where it rose by 4 percentage points. For instance, in Mississippi, it rose from 30% in 2024 to 33% in 2026. Put differently, Black voters turned at out at 96% of their 2024 turnout whereas white voters managed only 71%. The impact of this gap showed up especially in Senate races in South Carolina and Mississippi. This was, needless to say, critical to Democratic victories throughout the region. Paradoxically the increase was greatest in Alabama which didn’t have a Senate race and lacked a high profile governor’s race, judged by national attention, though Democrat Doug Jones made it a much closer race against Tommy Tuberville than most anticipated. There was a closely watched House race where Rep. Shomari Figures (AL-2) retained his seat despite an attempt to gerrymander him out of it. These numbers can be compared to a stable share of the electorate in the Northeast and Industrial Midwest. So much of 2026 was a rebellion against Donald Trump and MAGA. Here it’s at least slightly different: all the evidence we have tells us this as a reply to the Callais decision in which the corrupt Court majority essentially struck down what remained of the Voting Rights Act and unleashed a string of rushed gerrymanders to eliminate Black majority districts across the region. How different this is is hard to say: SCOTUS is pretty much MAGA at this point. But it’s a distinct wave or tsunami within the larger one.

I’ve seen a few comments over the last couple days to the effect that our system turned out to be more robust, stronger than some of us feared. Trump tried to tamper with and rig the 2026 election. But he mostly failed. I would put it a little differently. We turned out to be — the American people — stronger, more robust than many of us feared. This may seem mawkish or merely semantic. But it’s more than that and the difference speaks directly to the current debates about accountability and how it should shape the next Congress and the next two years.

The singular lesson of the Trump Era has been that no system can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow and enforce the rules that govern it. It’s worth sitting with that for a moment. No constitution or system of laws and protections can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow the rules that govern it. Trump was faced with the big challenge that states control the administration of elections. But the White House came up with numerous quite ingenious angles to overcome those obstacles. It took an immense amount of work by voters, elected officials, judges, lawyers, countless Americans in myriad positions and professions to stop it. A governmental system provides a framework, a playing field. But as the authors of the federal Constitution debated and largely decided: there is no machine that runs of itself. It lives or dies, degenerates or perseveres, based on the people, the citizens who make it up.