The South Will Send Its First Openly LGBTQ Politician to Congress

Texas elected Julie Johnson to replace Representative Colin Allred on Tuesday, marking the first time that the Lone Star State has chosen an openly LGBTQ person to represent it in Congress.

The Democrat won Texas’s 32nd Congressional District by a landslide, pulling more than 60 percent of the vote against Republican Darrell Day, reported The Dallas Morning News. She will represent parts of Collin, Dallas, and Denton Counties.

But Johnson’s win isn’t just a local victory for LGBTQ Texans—it’s also a regional one. Johnson’s election makes her the first queer representative in Washington from the South, according to Austin-based KUT News.

“Tonight, Team Julie made history,” Johnson wrote in a post after the results were called. “I am incredibly honored and humbled that you have elected me to be your Representative for the 32nd district. Together, we have shattered barriers and proven that representation matters.”

“This is just the beginning of the work ahead, but tonight, let’s celebrate this historic moment and our progress together,” Johnson wrote, thanking the “countless individuals” who “fought for equality and inclusion.”

“Rest assured, I am committed to continuing this journey with the same passion and dedication, and I will not rest until we achieve our shared goals,” she added.

Kamala Harris has secured victory in the integral blue dot of Nebraska, bringing her one step closer to her 270 to win. 

Harris won the single electoral vote from Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, the Associated Press called Tuesday evening.

The blue dot was important to Harris’s campaign, and she now has 210 electoral college votes to Trump’s 230 votes, as both candidates race toward the 270 votes needed for victory. Trump has already pulled off a victory in the battleground states of North Carolina. Results in the other battleground states have yet to be announced. 

Omaha has been a pain in Republicans’ sides throughout the election cycle. Nebraska is one of only two states with a split electoral vote system, giving those living in the state’s largest city a special role in determining the presidential election. That’s why MAGA sought to change the state to a winner-take-all system earlier this year. 

While Harris and Tim Walz, who is from the state, won the district’s one electoral vote, Trump will take Nebraska’s remaining four.   

Democrats were perhaps buoyed to go to the polls thanks to Nebraska’s two abortion-related, and slightly confusingly worded, ballot questions. Also perhaps aiding in Harris’s victory, thousands of Nebraska’s former felons, many of whom live in or near Omaha, were enfranchised less than three weeks before the election. 

As results continue to trickle in, Walz should take a second to celebrate his home state win.

Republicans have taken control of the U.S. Senate, according to the Associated Press.

Republicans held 51 seats Tuesday night and Democrats held 42. There are still seven seats to be called.

The House majority has not yet been determined.

Ahead of the election, several GOP contenders found themselves struggling in states where the top of the ticket, Donald Trump, saw considerable enthusiasm.

Republican senators found themselves met by aggressive opponents. In Nebraska, Senator Deb Fischer found a tough contender in independent candidate Dan Osborn. Meanwhile, Texas Democratic candidate Colin Allred appeared to gain traction ahead of the election in his race against Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

Fischer and Cruz ultimately kept their seats.

And Republican challengers seemed to falter against Democratic incumbents. In Arizona, Kari Lake previously trailed Democratic Representative Rueben Gallego by multiple points, even as Kamala Harris and Trump found themselves tied. Ohio’s Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown held a lead against Bernie Moreno. And in Montana, Republican challenger Tim Sheehy held only a slim four-point lead over Senator John Tester, even though Trump led Harris by 17 points in the Treasure State.

Brown lost his seat. Gallego and Tester’s races have not yet been called.

Republican Senator Deb Fischer won her re-election Tuesday night, dashing Democratic votes that independent Dan Osborn would successfully oust her from office. 

Fischer won against the former leader 51.5-48.5 percent, with 72 percent reporting, according to the Associated Press.

Osborn, who led 500 workers at his Kellogg’s plant through a three-month strike to end a two-tiered benefits system and stop plant closings, led an impressive campaign against Fsicher, who has held the Senate seat since 2013. The Democratic Party did not field a candidate in the race, but given Osborn’s political views, his win was expected to be a serious setback for the GOP.

With Fischer’s victory, Republicans have secured control of the Senate. They currently have 51 seats to Democrats’ 42 seats, with seven seats still remaining to be called.

Osborn refused to seek an endorsement from any political party including the Democrats, citing his desire not to be beholden to the money or special interests behind them. “I want to be clear that I’m an independent,” Osborn told the Nebraska Examiner in May. “I want to stay true to who I am.”

Still, his pro-labor stances were expected to have him caucusing with the Democrats similar to Independent Senator Bernie Sanders.

“I hadn’t been a very political person until corporate greed came knocking on my door a few years ago, when I was president of my local union, and we went out on strike, at a time where the company was making record profits,” Osborn told Semafor in September.

With Fischer’s victory, Democrats’ hopes to retake the Senate comes to a sad end.

Missouri overturned a total abortion ban Tuesday, with the majority of the state voting to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution.

Roughly 53.2 percent of the state voted in favor of Amendment 3, achieving the simple majority necessary to protect reproductive freedom in Missouri, including an individual’s decision to have an abortion up to the point of viability.

Fetal viability typically occurs during the second trimester, between 23 and 24 weeks of pregnancy, but the ballot measure has a different definition for the developmental stage. Instead, it describes fetal viability as “the point in pregnancy when, in the good faith judgment of a treating health care professional” there is a “significant likelihood of the fetus’s sustained survival outside the uterus without the application of extraordinary medical measures.”

The measure, called the Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative, solidifies that the government has no role in a person’s “fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions. It undoes the Show-Me State’s total abortion ban, which took effect one hour after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

“The right to reproductive freedom shall not be denied, interfered with, delayed, or otherwise restricted unless the Government demonstrates that such action is justified by a compelling governmental interest achieved by the least restrictive means,” the ballot measure read in part. “Any denial, interference, delay, or restriction of the right to reproductive freedom shall be presumed invalid.”

Governmental interest was specified as compelling only if it had the limited effect of “improving or maintaining the health of a person seeking care” and was consistent with “widely accepted” evidence-based medicine and does not “infringe on that person’s autonomous decision-making.”

Missouri is one of 10 states that have placed abortion on the ballot this year—the most to appear in a single year in U.S. history.

Democratic state Senator John Mannion has defeated Republican Representative Brandon Williams, marking an important victory for New York Democrats in the states 22nd congressional district.

Mannion earned 53.9 percent of the vote with 84 percent reporting.

For months ahead of the election, Williams was the only House Republican whose seat “leaned Democrat,” according to Cook Political Report, making it an essential marker for Democrats as they attempted to retake the House. Williams narrowly won the seat by fewer than 3,000 votes during the 2022 midterm elections, when Republicans flipped four seats across the state.

Like many pro-Trump Republicans, Williams has attempted to paint his opponent as weak on crime, spending nearly $3 million on attack ads with help from the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund, according to The New York Times.

Despite Republican spending, Mannion appeared to have a sizable lead ahead of Election Day. One Democratic PAC called the 314 Action Fund canceled a $600,000 ad and mailer blitz effort for Mannion because he didn’t appear to need the extra boost, according to Syracuse.com.

An anti-abortion, Trump-endorsed Republican propelled by Mitch McConnell and cryptocurrency PAC dollars has won the Ohio Senate election—flipping a key seat for Republicans.

Republican Bernie Moreno beat incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown 50.5 percent to 46.1 percent according to the Associated Press, which called the race on Tuesday evening, with 91 percent of votes counted.

This is a much-needed win for Republicans,  who now hold a nine-seat majority in the Senate, with 11 votes still remaining to be called.

Thanks to dark money, the only Democratic senator in the state was finally unseated after first being elected in 2007. The race had garnered more ad spending than any other Senate race in history with nearly $500 million spent between the two candidates.

On the Republican side, Defend American Jobs, a super PAC tied to the cryptocurrency industry spent over $40 million to support Bernie Moreno. While the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spent over $160 million for Moreno, more than any other Republican Senate candidate this year.

Their investment made up for the fact that Moreno continued to flaunt his extremist MAGA views on the campaign trail, rallying against “wokeness” and bashing reproductive rights.

“You know the left has a lot of single-issue voters,” Moreno said back in September. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion’s it! If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else!’

“It’s a little crazy, by the way, but, especially for women that are past 50. I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you,’” Moreno continued.

Moreno also made headlines for allegedly lying about his business dealings and for appearing on a gay hookup app, despite his anti-LGBTQ+ record.

The Colombian immigrant Moreno later went on to copy Trump’s playbook and spread racist rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.. In September, Moreno wrote that thousands of “illegal Haitians” were “sucking up social services and even reportedly killing and eating pets.”

“We need to deport illegals, not invite them to wreak havoc on our communities,” he added.

The MAGA Republican won out as Trump won the state, as he did in 2016 and 2020.

Donald Trump has won North Carolina, securing 50.8 percent of the vote over Vice President Kamala Harris.

It’s the third time in a row that the Tar Heel State has sided with the MAGA leader since he entered national politics in 2016. That year, Trump convinced North Carolinians to turn out en masse for him, winning by a margin of nearly four percent, with more than 177,000 votes over Hillary Clinton. But that level of support crumbled after Trump spent four years in office, after which he won the swing state by just 1.3 percent over President Joe Biden.

The outcome in North Carolina brings Trump to 230 electoral votes. He needs just 40 votes more to return to the White House.

Elon Musk says his America PAC isn’t going anywhere after Election Day.

At the end of an X Space event Tuesday evening, Musk told his fans that his political action committee will “keep going after this election.”

Musk added that he is already “preparing for the midterms and any intermediate elections, as well as looking at elections at the district attorney level.”

The billionaire has already donated nearly $119 million of his own money to the PAC.

America PAC spent more than $19 million this election boosting Republicans in over a dozen House races around the country. Some of the races where Musk spent big, such as New York’s 17th district and New Jersey’s 7th district, could go his way—but for the most part Musk’s investments so far are a mixed bag. What he did succeed in, however, is dominating the airwaves and majorly sucking up to Donald Trump throughout the past several months. The PAC has spent a whopping $152 million to attempt to elect Trump as president.

While leading the America PAC, which essentially ran Trump’s ground game, Musk faced many struggles and legal challenges, mostly propelled by his sketchy actions. These included a data-scraping operation, a glitchy app, poor treatment of door knockers, and of course, his $1 million bribes to swing state voters.

Musk’s frightening QAnon turn, coupled with his willingness to spend, unfortunately means his PAC will be something to watch going forward.

Donald Trump’s campaign took a shot Tuesday at Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, after the former president declared victory in that state.

Selzer’s Iowa Poll in the Des Moines Register found last week that Kamala Harris had “leapfrogged” Trump in Iowa and was leading him 47 to 44 percent—a shocking result in a state that had previously gone for Trump twice. The Iowa Poll had correctly predicted Trump’s victory in the state in 2020 and 2016.

After Iowa was called for Trump Tuesday night, his campaign released a statement gloating about the win—and calling out the gold-standard pollster by name.

“Starting on Day 1 President Trump and Vice President JD Vance will help to ease costs, secure the border, and protect Social Security for retirees like Ann Selzer,” the statement said.

Trump won Iowa with 56.5 percent to Harris’s 41.9 percent, with 65 percent of votes reported.