As we all know by now, a blue tidal wave swept our nation this last week, as nearly every demographic and geographic category—urban, rural, Hispanic, White, Black, young, poor—shifted to some degree (some monumentally) towards Democrats.
The sheer overwhelm of large blue arrows across the map of the US below from Washington Post shows just how uniform and lopsided this victory for Democrats was.
So what I’d like to talk about now are some of my hopes for the right lessons to be taken from this outcome, vs. the wrong lessons I fear may be taken instead.
Lessons For Democrats
The messaging of victorious Democrats this election departed sharply from the “Woke 1” messaging of the late 2010s and early 2020s, and with good reason. (See AOC’s “Woke 1 was crazy” statement.)
Why Dems Lost in 2024
In 2024, it was apparent that out of touch activist elements had utterly seized the reins of the Democrat party. Messaging centered overwhelmingly on abortion, leftist gender and sexuality ideology, and identity politics.
Safe, legal, and rare was the mantra of the Democrats for most of my life. Many don’t know this, but Obama actually began proactive initiatives to reduce abortions through non-regulatory methods during his presidency. Abortion should always be viewed as an undesirable outcome, even if you disagree with me on the best path to minimizing rates.
In 2024, that was not the messaging, nor stance, of the Democrat party. “Shout your abortion,” became a popular mantra, and Kamala sent an immense share of her messaging stumping for abortion rights with rhetoric that bordered on celebratory.
Abortion is just one example of how the party became detached from the American center that makes up the vast majority of US citizens, and fell into an echo chamber of unhinged Leftist activists who knew nothing of what most Americans actually felt about the topic.
Even though I’m a Christian, I’m aware enough to acknowledge that most Americans support abortion access. But they do not share in the Far Left’s celebration of the matter.
Matters of gender ideology were similar. “Live and let live” is how the vast majority of Americans feel about adults making decisions about their gender identity. 71% of Americans agree that “transgender people deserve the same rights and protections as other Americans.”
But you try coming into my kid’s school and indoctrinating them with your innovative view of gender and overall worldview regarding sexuality? Nope, get out of here with that. Call me a bad person because I hold the same beliefs about genders that the vast majority of humans globally do today, and always have? Nope, not winning me with that, nor the vast majority of American citizens.
DEI itself is something that makes sense on the surface. I’ve worked in the nonprofit space advocating for the underresourced space of mental health and family support services for men in reentry, minority groups, and other underprivileged demographics.
But as Scott Galloway pointed out two years ago, a lot of young white men also felt like the Democrats had no room for them in their coalition. They felt unwanted, and so they voted for the people who they felt welcomed them.
And to top it all off, the Democrat party machine was anything but liberal (meaning free). There was no primary, an unpopular leader was installed by fiat as the party nominee, and Democrats and independents had no part whatsoever in deciding the points of messaging and policy that mattered to them going into the 2024 presidential elections.
What They Need to Get Right Post-2026
Now, in 2026, Democrats have won an overwhelming victory. And in this election, Republicans wanted to make the elections entirely about abortion and trans ideology.
They tried to so desperately that Republican groups appear to have sent trans advocacy mailers to households across Texas and Tennessee in an effort to whip up concerned parents into voting against the Democrats in protection of their children, with guidance in the mailers including how youths could attempt to emancipate themselves.
Democrats, though, had different ideas. They softened their advocacy, with Talarico and Annie Andrews, running in the historically red states of Texas and South Carolina, both expressing that they did not support the idea of biological males playing in girls sports, or gender reassignment surgery for minors.
Talarico suggested to a concerned voter that he didn’t like abortions, and wanted to treat them as a public health issue and reduce them.
“What I think we can do is actually come together on reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies and the number of abortions. Because if we treat this issue as a public health problem and not a culture war problem, then we can actually make progress together.”
Instead of the culture war topics they’d shifted to far to the Left on over the last decade, Democrats across the US in the leadup to the 2026 midterms expressed aims of moral accountability, ending corruption, fixing healthcare, resolving the affordability crisis, ending foreign wars, and many more things that, to be frank, were entirely reasonable.
The Hope for Dems
My hope for Democrats is that they understand this core behind why they won. No culture wars, build coalitions all can take part in, and speak to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Abandon (or at least relegate) the Leftist activist elements, as they’re not at all popular outside of the Northeast and West coast. Don’t come at families and attempt to force a worldview on them and their kids instead of simply governing. Continue to abandon AIPAC. And don’t you dare try to force select our options in 2028. Be actually “liberal.”
My Fear for Dems
There is a very real possibility that Democrats take all of the wrong lessons from this election, with activist elements receiving it as a mandate to indulge all of their worst impulses.
Outright pro-Communist messaging, celebration of abortion, imposition of Leftist ideology on gender and sexuality, and no room allowed for White voices to contribute (not dominate, just participate) are all swings of excess the party could very well engage in if they allow far-left activists to again seize the reins in a misread of their mandate after this election.
If the Democrat party takes such a direction, we will all be the worse off for it, they will again kill their chances at victory in 2028, and an opportunity would be unnecessarily and harmfully created for another victory of an unreformed GOP.
Speaking of the GOP.
Lessons For Republicans
Like Democrats before them, Republican leaders seem to have massively misread their mandate after the elections of 2024.
Why Republicans Lost in 2026
Folks wanted reform on immigration. They did not want men being shot in the back of the head in the street by government agents, our Hispanic neighbors (including US citizens) getting grabbed by masked men, pregnant women suffering miscarriages in horrific conditions in detention centers to such an extent that ICE stopped counting…I could go on.
Folks wanted no new wars—which I always found as ironic, because Biden didn’t start any wars…Alas, that was still the line of messaging. And then Trump apointed a bloodthirsty Hegseth—a man who seemingly had something to prove to a childhood bully who always told him he wasn’t man enough…or something like that, I don’t know. One quick war in Venezuela and a not-so-short one in Iran later, it has been shown that the mantra of “no new wars” was no match for men with egos stoked by the expression of military might over others.
Folks wanted to see corruption cleaned up in Washington. Instead, we got perhaps the single most corrupt presidency of all time, with repeated refusal of court orders, Constitutional violations galore, a whole pay-for-pardons operation that raked in millions while wiping sentences (including billions in restituion owed), hundreds of millions in above-market-rate contracts funneled to administration friends and donors (exhibit A: Minnesota Declined to Buy a Prison for $75 Million. D.H.S. Paid $495 Million.)…again, I could go on.
And we don’t even need to get into the constant and depraved cruelty this administration has been marked by. You know of it, and you probably know that many of us were tired of it.
What They Need to Get Right Post-2026
Even with all of that behind them, I don’t think things are necessarily over for the Republican party. However, I do think things are, or at least should be, over for MAGA.
Conservatism is all-but dead in the US, and MAGA killed it.
Conservatism says state ownership of enterprise is a path to corruption and imperfect markets. MAGA said, “Let’s take ownership stakes in 41 corporations.”
Conservatism says government overreach cannot be allowed. MAGA said, “ICE can invade your home, trash it, kidnap you, realize they have the wrong guy and apologize, but then slanderously call you a pedophile protector from the national stage to justify their actions and protect their image.
Conservatism says fiscal responsibility is paramount and will decide the future of our nation. MAGA said, “Let’s rack up record expenses AND cut taxes needed to pay for them!”
Conservatism says moral character is paramount. MAGA said, “Integrity doesn’t matter, it’s just too amusing to be an utter jerk, and what’s really wrong with making some money from this whole political office thing?”
If Republicans ever want to win again in the US, I personally think they have to toss the principles of MAGA into the fire and revive Conservatism as a phoenix from the ashes.
My Hope for Republicans
I proudly voted for Romney in 2012. I felt he was a man of character and, as a foreign policy nerd, I felt he had an overwhelmingly wiser view of the world than what I perceived as naivety from Obama.
In one debate, Obama brought up that Romney, when he was asked who America’s greatest foreign threat was, had answered that it was Russia. In a manner that would not age well at all, Obama responded with, “…the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.“
Oof.
I think Conservatism, truly observed, brings an important element of realism and calculation to foreign policy, economics, and matters of individual self-interest that, particularly when paired with the challenges of an idealistic Progressivism (in the style of Teddy Roosevelt) leaves us all better off.
My hope for Republicans is that this election serves as a dramatic repudiation of the MAGA movement, that this is received and understood by Republicans, and that the path to power through continuation down the MAGA path comes to be seen as utterly inferior to the embrace of a true Conservatism. I also hope those who were complicit in Trumps’ crimes are utterly cast aside from the party, and that a new generation of actually Conservative leadership can seize the reins.
My Fear for Republicans
My fear is two part. First, my fear is that I’m wrong about America. My fear is that America would have been perfectly fine with the abuses of our neighbors, with the corruption at the top, with the crimes and violations of our Constitution, if it simply hadn’t been for that pesky Iran War and the economic impacts it brought to our pockets when paired with the negative effects of tariffs.
If we had been comfortable, would we have repudiated MAGA in the same way? I don’t think so. But the question that remains is: “But to what degree would we reject MAGA toxicity absent economic factors of comfort or distress?”
And my second fear is downstream of that: I worry that some will say, “It was just the Iran War and the tariffs people were rejecting, and we can still build momentum with all of the most toxic elements of this movement. We just need to make it pay better,” and that, rather than a death of the MAGA movement, we just see a refinement of it to a more competent version.
In that world, Conservatism remains dead, MAGA continues to hold the reins, and we get to go into 2028 seeing if Democrats will bring a competent enough challenge or if we’ll be tossed right back into a world of cruelty and corrupt character all over again.
Lessons For Christians
What Happened to Our Christian Witness Since 2016
In 2016, the world watched as Christians overwhelming excused a clearly morally compromised man—one who bragged about grabbing women by the p*ssy and opened his presidential campaign with the accusation that Mexican immigrants were generally rapist, murderers, and criminals (only some were, he assumed, “good people”)—and we supposedly virtue-focused Christians happily took this man to the office of President of the United States.
What was mystifying for many wasn’t that Christians begrudgingly voted for Trump as a “lesser than two evils candidate,” but that the celebrated him with overwhelming enthusiasm and made up one of his core voting blocks.
Over the course of the years following 2016, many people would come to be utterly alienated from the Evangelical Christianity they’d grown up with, one which they no longer recognized as it traded the principles of the Cross for the principles of a con man.
Slowly and steadily, some of us have been making an effort to build Christian institutions, voices, and culture that is not compromised by MAGA Evangelicalism, a body often more political than religious.
Publications such as Holy Post Media or Good Faith have begun to emerge as sojourners still in love with Jesus, but skeptical of institutions which simultaneously claim him while opposing him under the banner of their politicians of choice, seek voices they can trust.
But up until the elections this week, the vast majority of platformed voices in American Christianity were still telling their congregations, audiences, and “digital disciples” things like “You can’t vote Democrat as a Christian,” or “XYZ MAGA candidate is the ‘clear Christian option.’”
The Risk (and Opportunity) for Our Witness Now
On Tuesday, America overwhelmingly rejected that version of Christianity. The thing is, Christians largely did not. Overwhelmingly, White Evangelical Christians served as MAGA’s most reliable voting block. From this Newsweek piece:
"They have not, as some have argued, held their nose and voted for Trump; they have been enthusiastic supporters of Trump for the last decade," Robert P. Jones, president and founder of PRRI and author of Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against Democracy, told Newsweek.
I’m not even here to tell you the inverse of what the MAGA preachers say: “You can’t be Christian and vote red.” I just think the gap itself is telling.
I think there’s something important to be considered when America at a national level votes against MAGA overwhelmingly for moral reasons (e.g. corruption) and the Church, a Body supposed to serve as a reliable moral core for any nation which she inhabits, is voting overwhelmingly differently.
What does it say about our ability to reach a lost world when we tell adherents to our faith that they have to vote one way, and then millions of people outside of our faith vote differently, but are giving historically Christian reasons for their vote, such as integrity (opposition to corruption), nonviolence (opposition to Iran War and ICE excesses), and opposition to greed?
My Hope for Christians
My hope is that Christians can look at the election results of the last week and take a moment of self-reflection to consider:
“Wait, have we become unequally yoked?”
“Have we hitched our wagon to a sinking ship of moral depravity?”
“Will we lose our ability to be a voice of moral conviction altogether if we keep our voice tethered to an immoral administration being rapidly rejected for moral reasons by the majority of Americans?”
If we can ask those questions of ourselves and begin to realize that this compromised version of Christianity has no future, I am hopeful that we can reform and free our faith from the political shackles it has largely come under in the US.
My Fear for Christians
The MAGA Christian political pundits have wasted no time throwing blame for the reasons for the defeat of the candidates they’ve thrown their lot in, even going so far as virtue signaling to their Christian base and attacking them as morally compromised for voting differently than they told them to.
I’m not joking. You literally have pastors going off on Christians for voting blue. “Blood is on your hands,” says Pastor Keenan Clarke to Christians who voted blue.
“Jesus is King, Jesus is God, Jesus is savior. James Talarico doesn’t believe that,” goes off Allie B. Stuckey, while entirely ignoring that Ken Paxton, likewise, is 100% not at all submitted to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
To me, that’s insanity, and the entirely wrong direction to go in the aftermath of this result.
If you can’t even take a moment for self-reflection to consider, “Hmm, the number one reasons folks gave for voting against the candidates I endorsed was the matter of corruption, something Jesus was famously. vocal. about,” then I don’t know what might cause you pause.
Maybe, just maybe, your hypocrisy is showing, and Americans have overwhelmingly rejected it.
And, as a fellow Christian, my concern is that your tethering of my Christ and His Gospel to your dying political ideology will further alienate souls that myself and others are interested in actually reaching.
Don’t do that. The writing is on the wall. The politics you sacrificed all of your impartial application of Scripture to, the politics that caused you to only emphasize the value of life in the womb while neglecting to advocate for the lives of the hundreds of thousands of children killed due to haphazard USAID cuts (or 10,000s killed in Gaza), the politics that caused you to turn a blind eye to rampant corruption the likes of which this nation has never seen…those politics may very well be dead.
Don’t drag the Church down with you as that ship sinks.
How We Move Forward, Christians
Abandon that ship, embrace Christ and Christian accountability applied equally to Democrats and Republicans alike (plenty to critique among each), and choose to restore the integrity of the faith which you claim.
Moving forward, us Christians can choose to double down on the culture war, or to embrace a bigger, uncompromised Gospel.
We must seize the moment to lead those seeking truth, rootedness, and Christ as they wander out of this strange decade of politically-motivated blindness that struck so many Americans across both the Left and the Right.
And we must use our societal influence to do what we can to ensure both Democrats and Republicans choose the proper path forward today.
Excellent analysis. I also share your fear that it was largely economic reasons and not the rampant abuses by ICE, DOGE, increased maternal mortality rates, etc., that led to this blue wave. We cannot afford to wait until policies affect us personally, we have to look critically at how policies are affecting the most vulnerable. Thanks for this post!
very well done. thank you!