I woke up Wednesday morning thinking about my children.
Among the final edits I made to the manuscript for my book Backslide was to the dedication page, which reads: “For my children, and to those born later.” I wrote those words with hope, but I also with sadness — and no small amount of fear — because of the diminished state of American democracy we were handing to their generation.
My daughter had at least been politically aware during Barack Obama’s second term, but she also had seen those years of hope and solidarity plowed under by the ugly bigotry of Donald Trump’s MAGA machine. My son, 9 years younger, has only known the Christian nationalism and authoritarianism of the Trump era.
Wednesday morning, my first thoughts were not of the details of the horse races but of what these results could mean, if we leverage them, for their future.
Finding an off ramp
I’m cautious by nature. But I believe Tuesday night’s historic blue wave midterm elections mark what could be — if we harness this power over the next two years — the beginning of the end of the MAGA-induced democratic backsliding.
As I argued in Backslide, the 2026 midterm elections were one of the last available off ramps to avoid a more complete slide into authoritarianism in the U.S. Prior to Tuesday night, this is where our democracy was heading.
The most recent Varieties of Democracy Report found the U.S. had plummeted 20 points on their Liberal Democracy Index in the first year of Trump’s second term. They concluded: “With such a sharp drop on the LDI, the level of democracy at the end of 2025 is back to the 1965 level. Symbolically, that is the year that most analysts consider the USA began its transition to a real democracy. Democracy in the USA is now at its worst in 60 years.”
But Tuesday night, we the people applied the brakes, giving us an opportunity to change course. This chart in Wednesday’s New York Times of the Senate vote by county compared to the 2024 presidential vote shows just how widespread the repudiation of Trump’s MAGA agenda was.
Three insights from the early results
We all should be cautious about results from the early exit polls. Votes are still being counted in a number of races. But here are some preliminary insights that stood out to me.
Trump and democracy were on the ballot. Trump repeatedly implored voters to “close your eyes and pretend that I’m on the ballot.” Turns out, voters did just that — but not the way Trump intended.
Early exit polls show 43% of the electorate reported their primary reason for voting was to oppose Trump’s agenda, compared to just 16% who said they were voting to support Trump. At least six in 10 voters said Trump prioritizes his own interests over the country’s, do not believe he fights for people like them, blame him for the country’s economic woes and disapprove of the way ICE is conducting itself.
When asked about what issues were the most important to them, voters ranked “the state of democracy” (32%) as the second most important issue after “the economy” (39%), and 78% of those democracy voters supported democratic candidates.
Progressive religious Democratic candidates such as James Talarico and Adam Hamilton won across the country, many in red-leaning states or districts. Jack Jenkins at RNS has been following these trends throughout the election cycle and has a must-read piece, “On Election Night, the Religious Left is Back.” He writes, “The victories marked a striking moment for the religious left, which has long struggled to match the influence and visibility of conservative Christians. Across the country, candidates and faith leaders embraced a message that put values like compassion and inclusion at the center of their campaigns.”
Mississippi turning? The Senate race in my home state of Mississippi was not supposed to be on the “races to watch” list. But with votes still being counted in a close race, Democratic candidate Scott Colom, who is African American, leads against incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith, a white candidate who has in the recent past posted pictures of herself on social media in a Confederate hat holding a Civil War era rifle.
To put this in perspective, Hyde-Smith won by 10 points in 2020 and Trump won Mississippi by a whopping 24 points in 2024. If Colom wins, that would put the Democratic majority in the senate at 55. But we should buckle up for a long wait on a decision — there almost certainly will be a recount and legal challenges with this razor-thin margin.
A personal aside about what I always find heartbreaking about these results in Mississippi: They put in stark relief the chasm between Black Protestants, who vote more than nine in 10 for Democratic candidates, and white evangelical Protestants, who vote more than eight in 10 for Republican candidates.
The realignment of the Latino vote. To modify a quip that has been used to describe Catholic political behavior: “There is no Latino vote — and it’s important.”
The Latino community is complex, with a number of politically relevant fault lines. But this election — particularly with the backdrop of violent mass deportations and economic stresses — seems to have narrowed those internal fissures considerably.
According to The New York Times “Voter Trends,” Latino voters favored Democratic House candidates by 38 percentage points, an increase of 28 points compared to their presidential vote in 2024. In Texas, they comprise a quarter of the electorate and supported Democratic candidates by a margin of two to one (65% vs. 33%). Strong majorities of every demographic subgroup among Latino voters supported Democratic candidates.
One key factor here is the movement of Latino Protestants (most of whom identify as evangelical) away from the Republican Party. In PRRI’s pre-election American Values Survey, we found Trump’s favorability among Latino Protestants had fallen 20 percentage points since 2024, from 51% in 2024 to 31% — bringing them much more aligned with Latino Catholic views (16% favorable).
What comes next
I’ll conclude with the following excerpt from Backslide, which points to some good news, reflected in these electoral outcomes, about our divided land:
Amid all the violence and chaos, there is some good news about the nature of our divisions. While Trump and the MAGA movement have indeed fractured the nation, we are not evenly divided between the poles. Despite the most recent presidential election results, and the assaults on our rights and freedoms from the current Trump regime, the data confirm that most Americans do not in fact embrace an antidemocratic vision for America’s future.
This is our hopeful but challenging reality: Two-thirds of Americans embrace an expansive vision of America, even while one-third of the nation is working to reserve the rights of life, liberty and happiness for themselves. ….
We are experiencing a great asymmetrical stretching of the moral and political bounds of American society. Increasingly, self-identified Republicans (who represent approximately 30% of the public) and white evangelicals (who represent 13% of the public) are spiraling together while drifting further from the American mainstream, drawn away by MAGA’s extreme gravitational pull.
While Republicans and white evangelicals may be “determined to have a king over us,” far more of us are united in seeing Trump as a fundamental threat to the future of American democracy. It is indeed comforting to remember that, at least for now, there are significantly more Americans who support than oppose the principles of a pluralistic democracy. But it is also sobering that a sizable portion of that number may be willing to quietly and continually submit to the injustices and assaults on democracy being meted out by a tyrant like Trump, so long as it has not directly impacted them. The question is whether we can galvanize this diverse majority into a political force while there is still time.
These midterm elections results indicate that this democracy-supporting majority is finding its feet and its voice.
As I think about my children and their children’s future, I hope we will look back at this moment as the decisive repudiation of our authoritarian drift: The time we collectively decided to put the brakes on the backsliding. May it also mark the beginning of the hard work of accountability and rehabilitation that will allow us to hand them a brighter democratic future.
Robert P. Jones
Robert P. Jones serves as president and founder of PRRI and is the author of Backslide Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future and White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.
This column originally appeared on Robert P. Jones’ Substack Redeeming Democracy. Subscribe there to follow the latest from Robert P. Jones.