Donald Trump insisted he was not on the ballot, yet he spent the closing days of the campaign urging Americans to vote as if he were. Voters took him at his word, and then they answered him anyway.
By Wednesday morning, Democrats had won control of the Senate and the House, leaving the president to explain that his party’s losses came because he was not on the ballot.
Americans did not vote for unity so much as for limits. By giving Democrats both chambers, voters decided that no president, however popular with his base, should govern without a check.
A result that was not supposed to happen
The scale of the shift deserves attention. Heading into Election Day, Republicans held the Senate 53 to 45, with two independents, and the House by a narrow 218 to 214 margin. The Senate map favored Republicans, as Democrats were defending far more seats.
Yet the Associated Press called the Senate for Democrats late Tuesday, after Josh Turek defeated Rep. Ashley Hinson in Iowa. Democrats also took control of the House.
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According to the Associated Press, Democrats had won 54 Senate seats, 228 House seats and 28 governorships by Wednesday. Those figures could still change as the remaining votes are counted.
The individual races told the same story. Jon Ossoff won re-election in Georgia. Roy Cooper flipped North Carolina. In Maine, Susan Collins, a five-term Republican, conceded to her Democratic challenger.
These are not the results of an electorate drifting at the margins. They are the results of an electorate sending a message.
A referendum, in the fullest sense
I believe this was, above all, a referendum on the man in the White House.
Republicans will argue otherwise. They will say candidates mattered, local issues mattered and Trump’s absence from the ballot depressed their turnout. Some of that is surely true; no national election has a single cause.
But the president’s own explanation concedes the central point: His party does better when his name is on the ballot and worse when voters can express their view of him through every other name.
The verdict also reached beyond a single candidate. Many Americans, I believe, were voting against the direction of the past two years: the threat of war with Iran, the strain of a global energy crisis and the harshness associated with immigration enforcement under ICE.
Exit polls and later surveys will show how much each issue weighed on voters. But a result this broad, across states that differ in geography, demography and history, suggests that discontent was not confined to one region or one group.
Michigan’s symbol
No race captured the moment better than Michigan.
Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and former state public health director, won the Senate seat in a race the Associated Press called for him. He is set to become the first Muslim senator in Michigan’s history.
His campaign was among the most bitter of the election cycle. President Trump called him a “Radical Left Socialist” and a “Communist Loser,” questioned his loyalty to the country and invoked the Sept. 11 attacks in describing the stakes.
Vice President JD Vance called him “evil” and, in the final week, a “psychopath.”
Republicans said they were objecting to his politics and associations, including his past remarks and his embrace of a controversial online streamer, some of which he later apologized for. Democrats and many observers called the attacks Islamophobic, aimed at his faith and Egyptian heritage.
Readers can weigh those competing characterizations. What is not in dispute is the outcome.
A Muslim candidate, attacked at the highest levels of the federal government, won a statewide race in one of the most closely watched contests in the country.
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I would not claim that Michigan voters chose him because of his faith or to send a message about it. Most voters weigh party, policy and economics. But a result can be symbolic without being intended as a symbol.
His victory shows what is possible in America, and that matters in Dearborn and Detroit, and to people watching to see whether this country still means what it says.
Is America less divided?
I would not say the country is no longer divided. Tens of millions of Americans voted for Republican candidates, and the intensity of the El-Sayed race is a reminder that the habits of division run deep. Elections do not heal a country on their own.
But it is fair to say that the country is not as divided as the loudest voices claimed.
For years, the prevailing story held that American politics had hardened into two camps that could never be moved. This election suggests otherwise.
Voters crossed lines, flipped seats and rejected a politics that rewards suspicion of neighbors. They did so peacefully, at the ballot box, and Trump has said he will accept the results. That, too, is part of the message.
What the world should hear
For allies and adversaries alike, the lesson is that American policy is not fixed by one man or one moment.
A president can set the tone for a time, but the electorate retains the power to correct course, and it just used it.
Governments that have adjusted their strategies around the assumption of unchecked executive power should now recalculate. Those that feared an America turned permanently inward or hostile should take note that the American people have just pushed back.
For South Asians and Muslims watching from abroad, and for the diaspora in the United States, there is a quieter message.
The rhetoric of suspicion and exclusion did not carry the day. It did not win the Senate, it did not win the House, and in Michigan, it did not stop El-Sayed.
The work ahead
Victory brings its own test.
Democrats now hold the power to investigate, legislate and set the national agenda, and voters will judge them as they judged their opponents.
If the new majority governs with the same contempt for opponents that it condemned, the check will prove hollow.
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If it addresses the cost of energy, the conduct of immigration enforcement and the risk of a wider war in the Middle East, it may begin to restore a measure of trust.
On Tuesday, Americans did not end their divisions, but they did insist on limits.
A country can disagree fiercely and still agree that no one should rule without a check. Whether that principle holds depends now on those voters elected, and on the rest of us who must hold them to it.