America Has Plenty of Firsts to Celebrate After Election Night

Americans made history Tuesday night. Amidst the seasonal pandemonium of ballot counting and number crunching, the country elected several political firsts.

Michigan elected its first Muslim senator, choosing Dr. Abdul El-Sayed over Republican candidate Mike Rogers. El-Sayed ran a shrewd campaign, canvassing across the state and overcoming a nasty strain of Islamophobia while holding earnest, intelligent conversations with conservatives and liberals alike.

Halfway across the country, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won her bid for Georgia’s gubernatorial office, making her the first Black woman to hold a governorship in U.S. history. Her winning campaign platform promised to push back on the White House, to find relief for inflated gas and grocery prices, to eliminate state income tax for public school teachers, and to impose a moratorium on data center development.

In Illinois, voters chose to send Juliana Stratton to the Senate. Stratton’s admittance to the upper chamber in January will mark the first time in U.S. history that three Black women have served in the Senate simultaneously. She joins Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland. The previous record was set in 2025, when Blunt Rochester and Alsobrooks joined the 119th Congress.

Nearby, Ohioans elected Dr. Amy Acton as their first woman governor, besting billionaire tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy’s final campaign push centered around a disturbing ad that featured Acton’s estranged mother declaring that something was wrong with the 60-year-old Democrat.

She wasn’t the only gubernatorial first. Deb Haaland, who served as secretary of the interior under former President Joe Biden, became the first Native woman to be elected governor when New Mexicans cast their ballots Tuesday.

The diversity achievements also extended to Texas, where civil rights attorney Gina Hinojosa became the first Latina governor in the nation.

Other candidates that broke the mold include former Minnesota state Representative Peggy Flanagan, who became the first Native woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. The Native community’s groundbreaking moment could be made that much sweeter by a win for former Representative Mary Peltola, who is currently fractions of a percentage point behind Republican Dan Sullivan for Alaska’s Senate seat as the Last Frontier continues to tabulate its ballots.

Delivering a speech from St. Paul, Minnesota, Flanagan noted that her victory signaled a breakthrough in the nationwide fight against Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

“You said no more war. No more health care cuts. No more taking away food from children and seniors. No more selling this country off to the highest bidder. And no more masked goons shooting our neighbors,” Flanagan said, according to the Minnesota Reformer.

And nearly 50 years after Harvey Milk was elected as the country’s first openly gay lawmaker, New Hampshire elected former Representative Chris Pappas as the first openly gay man to become a U.S. senator.

Maryland voters approved a ballot measure Tuesday amending the state’s Constitution to allow Democratic-led congressional redistricting.

The measure, known as Question 3, passed 60 percent to 40 percent, with 77 percent of votes counted.

The measure does not enact a new map, but gives Maryland state legislators greater powers in drawing congressional district boundaries. Maryland has eight congressional districts, and all but one, the 1st district, are represented by a Democrat. The state Constitution currently requires compact districts that respect “natural boundaries,” and the 1st district, represented by Republican Andy Harris, is mostly confined to Maryland’s eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay.

Republicans fought the ballot question in court, but in September, the state Supreme Court allowed the amendment to be put to a vote in November’s elections. In the weeks leading up to the election, Maryland’s Democratic Governor Wes Moore campaigned for the measure, and former President Barack Obama lent his endorsement, filming a video ad urging voters to approve it.

Missouri also voted on redistricting Tuesday night, and the Show Me State’s residents blocked a Republican-led effort to gerrymander the state in favor of conservatives.

Last year, Donald Trump began pushing Republican-led states to gerrymander their districts in order to prevent a Democratic majority in Congress from investigating him. This set off a gerrymandering war, and Republicans successfully put new maps in place in seven states: Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Ohio. That was helped by the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act in April, allowing Southern states to eliminate majority-Black districts.

Until now, Democrats only had one successful redistricting effort in California and a favorable ruling from a federal judge in Utah, who rejected a Republican-drawn map in favor of independent redistricting reform approved by voters in 2018, creating another Democratic district. For 2028, it appears that Democrats are on their way to picking up another congressional seat in Maryland.

Missourians blocked a new congressional map pushed by the state’s Republicans and President Donald Trump Tuesday by nearly 62 percent of the vote.

Proposition A would have redrawn the state’s map to favor Republicans and push Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver, whose district currently comprises most of Kansas City along with nearby suburbs, out of office. The vote follows months of television ads mostly opposing the new map drawn by Republicans last year, according to St. Louis Public Radio.

Republicans tried to force their new map through before the midterms, but the Supreme Court halted their efforts in an unsigned order in September. In the months since then, Democrats successfully canvassed across Missouri in an effort to defeat the measure, while Republicans, who were hoping to have the map in place already, had less enthusiasm.

Trump began pushing for rapid redistricting last year in an effort to keep a Republican majority in Congress and prevent Democratic investigations of himself and his administration. That set off a gerrymandering war, with Republicans successfully getting new maps in place in seven states: Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Ohio. The effort was helped by the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act in April, allowing Southern states to eliminate majority-Black districts.

Democrats were only able to respond with one successful redistricting effort in California, and picked up a seat in Utah thanks to a federal judge rejecting a Republican-drawn map in favor of independent redistricting reform approved by voters in 2018. In Missouri Tuesday, voters sided with Democrats, but the redistricting fight will continue there and across the country for 2028’s presidential election.

Donald Trump demanded that the midterm elections be another referendum on his popularity, but now he can’t seem to accept the results.

The president called in to Fox News around midnight to complain about the conservative media behemoth’s polls, which reflected Trump’s tanking approval ratings.

“And then I read at Fox that I’m not popular. The Fox polls are terrible. You ought to get yourself a good pollster ‘cause your polls are the worst,” Trump said live on air.

Host Brett Baier pushed back: “But tonight, actually, the results are pretty close to what the Fox polls showed.”

But Trump wasn’t willing to confront reality. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he snipped.

Democrats won big all over the country—even in historically deep red districts—taking control of both chambers of Congress in the process. Despite the obvious blow, Trump told Fox News that he had the “greatest two years in the history of the presidency.”

An NBC News exit poll found that more than half of voters saw the election as an opportunity to rebuke Trump and his MAGA agenda, which has thus far included an aggressive foreign policy that tied Americans to a wildly unpopular war with Iran, economic tariffs that vastly inflated the cost of living, and a militaristic deportation scheme that has pitted federal agents against the general population.

Republican candidates saw the writing on the wall months ago, but were unable to successfully peel their campaigns away from the president’s influence. Instead, the president urged voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” By late Tuesday, Trump was already trying to rewrite history.

In a separate interview Tuesday night, Trump told Politico’s Dasha Burns that his party would have won big if he was on the ballot.

“I wasn’t on the ballot, and we didn’t get the people out, but I wasn’t on the ballot,” Trump said. “If I was on the ballot, we would have won. We would have won it all very easily.”

“But Mr. President, you told voters that you were on the ballot, to vote as though you were on the ballot,” Burns reminded him.

“I said, ‘Think about me being on the ballot,’ but they didn’t agree and they didn’t like the candidates in most cases. Just one of those things,” Trump said.

He then offered that he didn’t want to blame any one individual, but that he watched the results roll in with “great interest” and that he “learned from it.”

“What did you learn, sir?” Burns pressed.

“Well, we’re going to work with the Democrats, to make sure things go well for our country. They’ve already called and—I have the right to veto everything, but I don’t want be just sitting there vetoing everything,” Trump said. “We have a lot of friends in the Democratic Party.”

After wasting almost half a billion dollars supporting Republicans in the midterm elections, tech oligarch Elon Musk is having trouble digesting the Democratic landslide.

Musk took to his X platform in the early hours Wednesday morning, offering some lame observations as his preferred candidates were trounced. At about 1:12 am, Musk posted, “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” before following that up with, “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time 🤷‍♂️” a minute later.

A couple of hours later, he commented, “Interesting” on a repost of exit polling purporting to show that voters supported the Trump administration’s immigration policies, but massively opposed the Iran war.

It’s not clear where that polling is from or whether it is credible, but in any case, Musk appears to be trying to cope with the negative results as best as he can. Stocks in his Tesla and SpaceX companies are plummeting Wednesday despite other tech companies doing well in early trading. His plan to merge SpaceX and Tesla might now hit some obstacles in a Democratic-controlled Congress, which has already signaled that investigations of the tech oligarch are on the way.

Plus, Musk moved his companies from California to Texas to escape Democratic oversight, only to now have a Democratic governor in the Lone Star State, Gina Hinojosa, who campaigned against Musk. She also called for a moratorium on new data centers and an end to tax breaks for the industry. Now Democrats in Texas, as well as across the country, have him and other tech barons in their crosshairs.

“They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing,” posted Democratic Senator Ed Markey Tuesday night.