Voters angry about elite corruption, data centers, and unaffordability remade the electoral map—and the future’s possibilities. Also: reflections from blue Texas.
This newsletter was originally published on our Substack. Read and subscribe here.
Last night was unequivocal: voters are done with this era of corruption, incompetence, and cruelty.
The blue wave reached far across the country, flipping Senate seats in Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, and Texas, and giving Democrats control of both the House and Senate. Election night was full of remarkable victories: Gina Hinojosa defeating Texas’s longest-ever gubernatorial incumbent Greg Abbott, Keisha Lance Bottom defeating billionaire Rick Jackson to become Georgia’s governor, and Abdul el-Sayed winning Michigan’s Senate seat despite Haley Steven’s attempted sabotage are just a few.
We’re finally reaching the halfway point of Trump’s term, and voters have made it clear that the next two years cannot look anything like the last two. Democrats have a clear mandate to use the full extent of their powers to expose and combat the gross profiteering in the White House—and of the corporations and elites that have spent the last two years sucking up to the most corrupt president in history.
Corruption was on the ballot this year, and voters made their anger visible. As Benjamin Wallace-Wells observed in the New Yorker on Monday, Democrats have gained a political edge “by running against the war and against the President’s indifference to the affordability crisis, but also, in an unusually straightforward way, against corruption.” Many of the winning candidates connected the dots between Trump’s corruption and the billionaire class; perhaps nowhere was that more potent than in Texas, Elon Musk’s stomping ground and a major hub of the fossil fueled AI data center buildout, where Talarico proved that Texas is not for sale. (Keep reading down below for reflections on Blexas from RDP’s resident Texan!)
Our Corruption Calendar series has chronicled since January 2025 that corruption has been the overriding story of the Trump administration, a regime relentless in its consolidation of power and profit in the hands of the few. Every move that the Trump administration has made has been a gift to some rich and powerful entity, made possible by robbing the American public. Siphoning taxpayer dollars, shrinking public lands, gutting public services, damaging people’s health, and for what? Pointless, devastating wars, pumping up the cash flow for extractive and profiteering industries by draining the resources of hundreds of millions of people.
Trump has not betrayed the American people on his own. Predatory corporations have capitalized upon his administration’s refusal to protect the public. We don’t think they should be able to get away with controlling our future. That’s why we’ll be spending the next two years laying out an agenda focused on policing the elites.
The blue tsunami has shown that holding powerful people accountable for their crimes is resonant rhetoric, but it can’t just be rhetoric. Actual accountability for elite misconduct, aside from being both just and empowering, can provide material benefits for the ordinary Americans preyed upon by the oligarch class.
Now that Democrats will control both chambers of Congress, aggressive congressional oversight will be an essential tool for advancing an accountability agenda despite Trump’s legislative veto. And if the Roberts Court gets in the way of accountability? They need to understand that in an era of anger at cosseted and insular elites, Justices who regularly do the bidding of America’s worst rich people in return for wining, dining, and yachting will themselves be targets for overdue accountability.
A Bad Night To Be A Chatbot (Or A Cryptocurrency)
Tuesday night’s results decisively proved that backlash to the AI industry and its data centers was not just a fixation of the chattering classes, but a widely held belief among the American populace.
In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic nominee for governor whom the Establishment widely considered to be a weak candidate nevertheless became the first Black woman to be elected governor anywhere in the country. Among her campaign’s signature issues was a pledge to pause data center construction, a stark contrast to her Republican opponent, who has invested in the industry. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa was propelled to victory over Greg Abbott on a similar message.
Holding Big Tech accountable was a major campaign theme across the country: the Tech Oversight Project found that 100 House races, 17 Senate Races and 19 gubernatorial contests included paid messaging on tech accountability. In South Carolina, the AI industry spent millions of dollars to back Republican Senate nominee Darlene Graham, including running ads that were paid for by the data center-focused SuperPAC Building the Future, but the efforts flopped.
But that doesn’t mean the AI industry or its paid flunkies in Washington are accepting the overwhelming wave of anger as a fait accompli. The Chamber of Progress—which is in part funded by a 501(c)(4) dark money arm of the OpenAI/Marc Andreessen funded SuperPAC Leading The Future—has already been pushing polls paid for by OpenAI that show data centers were not among the most important issues to voters. But the same polls do show that issues like affordability and corruption are crucially important to voters, and it’s on these issues where the stances on AI regulation are felt.
Showing the industry’s desperation to shift the goalposts on what a true reproach by voters might be, Chamber of Progress’ CEO even touted a poll showing that 40 percent of Ohio voters said their decision was influenced by a candidate’s stance on data centers. A truly astounding amount, yet somehow still an undercount when compared to other exit polling.
NBC’s exit polls showed that 56 percent of voters felt that stances on AI data centers were either a crucial or major factor in deciding to vote for a Congressional candidate, and 57 percent of voters said they felt AI would do more to hurt society than help it. At a local level too, voters put these stances into action overwhelmingly voting to block the construction of data centers in their communities in 43 out of 44 local propositions tracked.
Democrats would be smart to take this mandate and run with it. The American people hate AI and data centers, and they expect this newly elected Congress to as well. Incidentally–to toot our own horn for a moment–we published an article Labor Day of 2025 saying that “Democrats Must Oppose the AI Industry.” Despite the recalcitrance of some key figures, ultimately a wide range of Democratic candidates adopted this strategy and are reaping the benefits. More like this please!
That said, the AI industry was not the only loser on Tuesday. The cryptocurrency industry was pretty roundly beaten in crucial contests across the country, including ones where their candidate was the overwhelming favorite. Sherrod Brown’s victory in Ohio would have been glorious in and of itself, but coming after tens of millions of real money was spent by the purveyors of fake money makes it even sweeter.
Similarly humiliated were the people who’ve spent the past few years urging Democrats to abandon organized labor, often using Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s support for Donald Trump as the reason to do so. Despite O’Brien’s misplaced priorities, union workers overwhelmingly voted with Democrats. NBC’s exit polling found that union members or people with a union member in their household voted with Democrats by a 20 point margin, suggesting that backing organized labor is not only correct on a moral level, but it’s also the pragmatic choice for Democrats looking to win elections.
Reflections on Blexas
During an election defined in part by dramatically gerrymandered maps seeking specifically to deprive Black and Latino voters in the South of their right to representation, Black voters, Latinos, women, and young people still delivered to Democrats an electoral map many of us did not think possible.
Right at the heart of that map, Democrat’s longtime white whale: a blue Texas.
In a stunning reversal of a generational, suffocating status quo, as of last night, Texas’ next Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Senator, and Railroad Commissioner (an oil and gas regulatory position) will all be Democrats.
While many of us here in my adoptive home state were reticent about hoping for the possibility of Blexas after Beto O’Rourke’s bruising defeats in 2018 and 2022, last night some combination of a sickeningly bad slate of Republican candidates, rage at the overt corruption, fraud, and abuse that defines the Trump regime, and the dogged dedication of Texas Democrats to an unfaltering platform of economic populism, were enough to do the impossible.
Texas has long been the testing ground on which the Republican party, and its billionaire puppeteers, have pioneered some of the worst of their cruelties. Year in and year out, vulnerable communities across the state have paid a heavy price for the abject disdain with which our ruling class views us here.
Pregnant people have been subjected to deadly and dangerous criminalizations of basic healthcare. Immigrant populations have lived in fear as ICE and their accomplices in police departments across the state have run amok, aided and abetted by the racist extremists now on their way out from the Governor’s mansion and Attorney General’s office. Massive data center campuses across the state, themselves fueled by billions of dollars in ousted Governor Greg Abbott’s tax breaks, have threatened Texans’ already extremely limited water, polluted Texans’ air, and driven up electricity prices.
Last night, Democrats won Texas on the promise that the Lone Star State will no longer be led by bootlickers. Now, they must deliver.
In the months to come, there will be many billionaire-backed pundits, cynical commentators, and self-interested strategists who crawl out of the woodwork to try to convince Democrats that their newfound power in Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, (potentially) Mississippi, and more is best used capitulating to Republicans, broligarchs, and the corporate elite.
When the backlash to this blue tsunami comes, we encourage Democrats across the country to remember the working people who delivered to them 2026’s historic electoral map and to actually deliver on the populist platform that finally turned even Texas blue.