Gerrymandering doesn't directly impact Senate races because they are state-wide (everyone in the whole state votes for their senators, it isn't district by district), but the Republican gerrymandering in general either backfired or had no real impact more than it helped them this cycle.
A lot of the Republican gerrymandered House districts assumed Latinos who voted for Trump quite a bit in 2024 would continue to do so, but seemingly they did not.
It was worse than doing nothing, not that worse is bad in this case. Once the intended effect of gerrymandering was overwhelmed, it created more Democratic districts than it destroyed.
Democrats got their act together, rejected identity politics, talked about pocketbook issues, the nonsensical war, & the administration’s naked corruption. Democrats also benefited by the fact many of the GOP’s strong candidates were sidelined by Trump who favors toadies.
All in all, good news for the Democrats and for the US. My fear is that the Democrats will lose focus and become distracted and lose sight of what led to victory. The Economy and Trump’s naked corruption and degenerate abuse of government institutions for personal gain.
I went with the title NYTimes gave it on their home page rather than the wordy header on the page itself. That's "Midterm Elections Live Updates: Democrats Seize Control of Congress as Voters Rebuke Trump"
So screwed up that this was flagged. It seems all the election related posts were flagged. You have to wonder why the HN overlords aren't allowing such a major event to reach the front page.
Thou shall not speak ill of the techno fascists, accelerationists, EAs, spac scammers, etc. No matter how much they have curdled the image of the tech industry in the eyes of normies.
First, I don't know that it's the "HN overlords". It's likely to just be HN users.
Why would they flag such a thing? Election results aren't really very much of an HN-style topic. "Yay, our side won!" is not usually a very thoughtful conversation. Nor is there anything tech-related whatsoever in the topic (aside from some somewhat-off-topic conversations about data centers).
The site guidelines say that most stories about politics are off-topic. This one fits into the "most stories" category.
Maybe Trump, a long-term Democrat who turned quasi-Republican, and mutated the GOP from inside, wanted to further the might of the Democratic Party all along? Imagine this: a secret agent pretends to be all he despises, gets to the very top of the enemy ranks, rots them from the inside, and, hated both by his erstwhile party fellows and his disillusioned rabid supporters, thrusts victory after victory into the hands of its formal (and proclaimed) enemy. In a couple of years he steps down, ridiculed, but keeps his true allegiance secret, like a real hero.
Great outcome, though still a little disappointing that so many people had to feel the negative impact of Trump's incompetence on a personal level to get them to wake up, but better late than never.
Shame that the Democrats flubbed it in Florida (at the senate/governor level, they did get some nice House pickups due to the Republican dummymander).
Angie Nixon ran an incredible campaign and probably could have won if she got any significant support from the DNC.
It seems a little peevish to suggest that Democrats didn't have a daring enough approach to assigning campaign resources. It could've been the political equivalent of early optimization.
> It seems a little peevish to suggest that Democrats didn't have a daring enough approach to assigning campaign resources. It could've been the political equivalent of early optimization.
I'm still overall very happy with yesterday's results, but...
It isn't just the holding back of resources, they also played a lot of political distancing games because they didn't like the fact that Angie Nixon joined the DSA to help shore up her ability to mobilize.
There are absolutely Democrats who would rather lose ground to Republicans than give the left any breathing room. They can't even pretend that isn't true anymore after the Haley Stevens meltdown.
These games almost certainly cost the Democrats a Florida senate seat, and likely the Florida governorship too as collateral damage. Not the end of the world since so many other races turned out well and I expect to see Angie Nixon again in 2028 since the seat she was vying for wasn't a full 6 year term (it was for the 2 year remainder of Marco Rubio's vacated seat), but still disappointing that they dropped the ball there.
Big collective sigh of relief here in Europe too, I imagine. Our economies have been hurting in no small part because of the unchecked whims of the MAGA inner circle.
Damn straight. It's obvious as heck. At least America didn't keep slumbering on unaware, and my gosh, far far far less America voted for this unholy hellspawn tearing down of liberty and reason.
Free pet food, which isn't even a thing, vs shooting American citizens in the face, deploying troops as police, starting new wars, deploying your un-elected and un-appointed family members to act as representatives of the government. I could go on and on. In the US we have the extreme right and we have just left of center, there is no appreciable extreme left here. We don't even have universal health care, Israel has that for fucks sake.
Where in the world do you live with an overton window smaller than the USA's? I think the general stance would be to feel sorry for US citizens having to pick between hardline corrupt right or neo-liberal establishment right, hardly a large gap between them. Even by US standards the current democrats are more right than when someone like Sanders was still in the running.
Seems bad for data centers and AI, though the benefit of keeping the deranged president in check likely outweighs lost progress following from anti-tech populism.
That's a bit like saying it's regrettable that not enough people were able to take out subprime mortgages. Neo clouds and crypto pivots are the difference between a correction and a crash.
> Seems bad for data centers and AI, though the benefit of keeping the deranged president in check
The data centers got rejected on their own basis [0]. While the Texas senator race was more about corruption and a picking a candidate that embodies Texas far more than his Trump hand picked opponent -- the Texas governor race is a clear message vote for data center restriction.
The Mississippi senate race is essentially tied, which is kind of an insane result. As well as the Democrats winning practically everything in Texas.
Dems are currently up 0.2% there, and markets put it at 84% likely a Dem win now. 6 hours ago it was 94% against.
In the senate race there 2 years ago, GOP won by a 26% margin. Different candidates now obviously, but that’s a huge swing. https://votes.decisiondeskhq.com/races/2026-11-03/mississipp...
did all that last minute gerrymandering do nothing or did even make this possible?
Gerrymandering does not affect whole-state races like the Senate. Nobody is re-drawing state borders for every election.
And in some areas gerrymandering did backfire as far as I read, though I didn't look at the specifics.
Gerrymandering doesn't directly impact Senate races because they are state-wide (everyone in the whole state votes for their senators, it isn't district by district), but the Republican gerrymandering in general either backfired or had no real impact more than it helped them this cycle.
A lot of the Republican gerrymandered House districts assumed Latinos who voted for Trump quite a bit in 2024 would continue to do so, but seemingly they did not.
It was worse than doing nothing, not that worse is bad in this case. Once the intended effect of gerrymandering was overwhelmed, it created more Democratic districts than it destroyed.
Democracy still has a fighting chance in USA, and that’s good news.
Best wishes from Europe!
You say after yet another free and fair election where opposition leaders were neither jailed nor assassinated Democracy in the US might limp along?
Don't buy the Kool-Aid.
I understand you disagree in some way. But not exactly how. Can you explain with less insinuations between the lines?
Democrats got their act together, rejected identity politics, talked about pocketbook issues, the nonsensical war, & the administration’s naked corruption. Democrats also benefited by the fact many of the GOP’s strong candidates were sidelined by Trump who favors toadies.
All in all, good news for the Democrats and for the US. My fear is that the Democrats will lose focus and become distracted and lose sight of what led to victory. The Economy and Trump’s naked corruption and degenerate abuse of government institutions for personal gain.
It’s a bloodbath for Republicans. Even the guy in charge of leading GOP efforts to win the House lost.
It is hard to be 'anti-establishment' when you are the establishment. That's one of the reasons why Trump won, lost, won the election.
All I can say is: GOOD.
I went with the title NYTimes gave it on their home page rather than the wordy header on the page itself. That's "Midterm Elections Live Updates: Democrats Seize Control of Congress as Voters Rebuke Trump"
Non-paywall: https://archive.is/laAzx
[flagged]
The NYT has dynamic headlines and that was the actual headline at one point.
So screwed up that this was flagged. It seems all the election related posts were flagged. You have to wonder why the HN overlords aren't allowing such a major event to reach the front page.
Thou shall not speak ill of the techno fascists, accelerationists, EAs, spac scammers, etc. No matter how much they have curdled the image of the tech industry in the eyes of normies.
First, I don't know that it's the "HN overlords". It's likely to just be HN users.
Why would they flag such a thing? Election results aren't really very much of an HN-style topic. "Yay, our side won!" is not usually a very thoughtful conversation. Nor is there anything tech-related whatsoever in the topic (aside from some somewhat-off-topic conversations about data centers).
The site guidelines say that most stories about politics are off-topic. This one fits into the "most stories" category.
Counter example to your argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12909752
There are plenty more.
I don't think we're gonna get our $5000 checks. LOL
Still holding out hope for the tariff dividend though!
Heard these will be sent during infrastructure week.
Two more weeks!
Maybe Trump, a long-term Democrat who turned quasi-Republican, and mutated the GOP from inside, wanted to further the might of the Democratic Party all along? Imagine this: a secret agent pretends to be all he despises, gets to the very top of the enemy ranks, rots them from the inside, and, hated both by his erstwhile party fellows and his disillusioned rabid supporters, thrusts victory after victory into the hands of its formal (and proclaimed) enemy. In a couple of years he steps down, ridiculed, but keeps his true allegiance secret, like a real hero.
What a movie that could be.
[dead]
Great outcome, though still a little disappointing that so many people had to feel the negative impact of Trump's incompetence on a personal level to get them to wake up, but better late than never.
Shame that the Democrats flubbed it in Florida (at the senate/governor level, they did get some nice House pickups due to the Republican dummymander).
Angie Nixon ran an incredible campaign and probably could have won if she got any significant support from the DNC.
It seems a little peevish to suggest that Democrats didn't have a daring enough approach to assigning campaign resources. It could've been the political equivalent of early optimization.
> It seems a little peevish to suggest that Democrats didn't have a daring enough approach to assigning campaign resources. It could've been the political equivalent of early optimization.
I'm still overall very happy with yesterday's results, but...
It isn't just the holding back of resources, they also played a lot of political distancing games because they didn't like the fact that Angie Nixon joined the DSA to help shore up her ability to mobilize.
There are absolutely Democrats who would rather lose ground to Republicans than give the left any breathing room. They can't even pretend that isn't true anymore after the Haley Stevens meltdown.
These games almost certainly cost the Democrats a Florida senate seat, and likely the Florida governorship too as collateral damage. Not the end of the world since so many other races turned out well and I expect to see Angie Nixon again in 2028 since the seat she was vying for wasn't a full 6 year term (it was for the 2 year remainder of Marco Rubio's vacated seat), but still disappointing that they dropped the ball there.
As an Australian, I can say we are all very relieved.
Big collective sigh of relief here in Europe too, I imagine. Our economies have been hurting in no small part because of the unchecked whims of the MAGA inner circle.
Yeah me too as a Brit. The whole Trump buddying up with Putin to try to save his invasion was a bit of a worry.
I'm afraid the US Constitution, as interpreted by the sitting Supreme Court, gives the executive a lot of power.
But at least 25% of people changed their mind, realized: these people are demons. Pure and total monsters.
We saw the state of democracy and we were angry. We saw the corruption and we were angry. https://bsky.app/profile/olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social/post/3mzh... https://bsky.app/profile/froomkin.bsky.social/post/3mzh46dug...
Damn straight. It's obvious as heck. At least America didn't keep slumbering on unaware, and my gosh, far far far less America voted for this unholy hellspawn tearing down of liberty and reason.
That's the key part for me. I was honestly beginning to despair that the people in the US were just going to let him trample over everything.
[flagged]
Free pet food, which isn't even a thing, vs shooting American citizens in the face, deploying troops as police, starting new wars, deploying your un-elected and un-appointed family members to act as representatives of the government. I could go on and on. In the US we have the extreme right and we have just left of center, there is no appreciable extreme left here. We don't even have universal health care, Israel has that for fucks sake.
I don't know who's proposing tax paid pet food but is it that surprising more people would rather spend money on that than on wars in the middle east?
I can afford pet food; it is the taxpayer-funded {pet|human} healthcare that I want.
One party is pushing for ranked-choice voting, whereas the other party is against it and even banning it by law everywhere they can.
Did… did you just say that “ICE murdering civilians” and “free pet food” are… equally extreme?
What if those pets are lions and their preferred food is people? Ever think of that???
And NOBODY is talking about dogs with bees in their mouth that when they bark, they shoot bees at you. Nobody.
Well, I for one will absolutely start talking about it now that you have opened my eyes to the situation.
Where do you live that a center-right party winning over a highly corrupt Putin aligned extreme right wing party is choosing between two extremes?
Extremes? Are you joking? The US "Left wing" is most other countries right-wing.
I think the point is more that there's no middle ground to distribute opinions more evenly.
Primary voters seem to disagree.
That's not really the same tho. In primaries, everything is still under one party. It's hard for outsiders to enter and spread their message.
One party is pushing for ranked-choice voting, whereas the other party is against it and even banning it by law everywhere they can.
If you want more choice, vote Democratic.
I don't disagree.
Where in the world do you live with an overton window smaller than the USA's? I think the general stance would be to feel sorry for US citizens having to pick between hardline corrupt right or neo-liberal establishment right, hardly a large gap between them. Even by US standards the current democrats are more right than when someone like Sanders was still in the running.
At least in Texas there was a huge Corruption Gap for the Senate.
Seems bad for data centers and AI, though the benefit of keeping the deranged president in check likely outweighs lost progress following from anti-tech populism.
That's a bit like saying it's regrettable that not enough people were able to take out subprime mortgages. Neo clouds and crypto pivots are the difference between a correction and a crash.
Know what's good for AI? everybody (people) having access to RAM and GPUs
> Seems bad for data centers and AI, though the benefit of keeping the deranged president in check
The data centers got rejected on their own basis [0]. While the Texas senator race was more about corruption and a picking a candidate that embodies Texas far more than his Trump hand picked opponent -- the Texas governor race is a clear message vote for data center restriction.
[0] https://datacentersontheballot.com