FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2026
Republican voters choose Donalds: "These are the days of miracle and wonder?"
Paul Simon said it long ago. It was a key take-away from his Graceland album, (in part) an album about the miracle of worldwide human connection.
Could that statement be true today? The New York Times has imagined just that, in a lengthy report by Jess Bidgood which starts exactly like this:
Blue Texas? Battleground Kansas? Both Parties Wonder if the Map Has Shifted.
Texas. Kansas. Mississippi.
Democrats’ surprising midterm victories in states that had long seemed out of reach for them have dangled a fundamental question in front of both parties, one with major implications for the 2028 presidential election and maybe for the country’s understanding of itself: Could America’s political map, long defined by tribalism and calcification, be changing?
Since the Obama era, just seven states have really been battlegrounds in presidential elections. In the Senate, red-state Democrats and blue-state Republicans became endangered species. State lawmakers narrowed the amount of competitive House seats through redistricting. The nation was dug in.
But this year, seven of Democrats’ eight Senate flips have come in states that their party has not won in a presidential election since 2012. In another historically red state, Alaska, the Democrat is narrowly ahead but the race is uncalled. Democrats flipped House seats in districts President Trump won by more than 15 percentage points two years ago. They won every statewide office in Texas, broke the Republican gerrymander of North Carolina and even won two statewide races in deep-red Indiana.
Has the (political) map of America shifted? In the text of her essay, Bidgood mentioned Mississippi only once, right there in the opening line shown above. Almost surely, Scott Colom's historic win in that state's Senate race hadn't been decided or declared when Bidgood created her text.
Has the map of America changed? Has Texas turned blue? Have we moved on to Battleground Kansas?
In the most astounding question of all, has Mississippi turned purple? We're going to guess that the answer is no, for a fairly obvious reason:
Senator-elect Colom dared to struggle and dared to win, but he narrowly beat a stunningly unskilled incumbent in a very unusual year. The political backdrop of this year involved the endless bizarre behavior of a sitting president who is mentally ill in an untreated way—bizarre behavior which was so relentless that it surely drove many voters away from the Red American team.
That bizarre behavior isn't likely to stop, nor is it likely that Blue America's upper end press corps will ever be willing to discuss the fairly obvious medical source of that endless, unhinged conduct.
No one knows where his (untreated) disorders will take us. We note this report, for example:
Trump Says He Wants to Get Cuba ‘Done’ Before Leaving Office
President Donald Trump told conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt that he’s not ruling out military intervention to accomplish regime change in Cuba.
“I want to get Cuba done before I leave,” Trump told Hewitt in a phone call on Thursday.
“And we have a very good, talented guy for Cuba named Marco, because Marco’s parents are from—Marco Rubio—his parents are from Cuba, as you probably know and he would love to do that,” Trump continued. “So we’re watching it very closely. It’s doing very poorly. It’s essentially a failed, you know place, nation, whatever you want to call it.”
“It’s failed and we’re watching it. I would like to be able to do it. I won the Cuban vote by 94% in Florida and I think I’m more popular now than I was then and, frankly, I’d love to be able to do it..."
And so on from there. o, we aren'''t making that up.
For the medical reason cited above, the person in question will almost surely never come to realize that his judgment and instincts are disastrously poor. He thought Iran would be a snap, and he'll likely feel the same way about Cuba.
Domestic turmoil would likely follow as we head toward November 2028. Back to the Magnolia State:
Senator Colom, who dared to struggle, won by only one point. If we ever escape the force field of a president who is mentally ill, that fact suggests that Mississippi will still be a Republican state, if we ever make it that far.
For right now, consider this. Once again, consider the passage which opened Jia Lynn Yang's news analysis in that same New York Times:
NEWS ANALYSIS
They Made History as ‘Firsts.’ That’s Not What They Ran On.
The first Muslim senator. The first Black woman to be elected governor of any state. The first openly gay male senator. The first Black governor of Florida. The first elected Hispanic governors in Texas and in California.
The number of “firsts” achieved on Tuesday’s elections was extraordinary. Barriers came crashing down across the country. And yet during the campaigns, the candidates themselves hardly uttered a word about being on the precipice of history. There were no exhortations to vote for a particular person because “representation matters.”
The first Black governor of Florida? That of course is Governor-elect Byron Donalds, the incoming Republican governor of the Sunshine State, the red state which hung on.
It was Republicans who voted Donalds in, making history as they did. Up in Michigan, that state's Republicans voted for another Black nominee, Candidate John James—but where Candidate Donalds won, Candidate James lost.
We wouldn't have voted for Donalds or James, but we note that Republicans in two major states did. Let's move to South Carolina, which elected a Democrat, Dr. Annie Andrews, in its Senate race:
This year, South Carolina's Republicans foolishly followed the sitting president's nutty advice in that Senate race. They nominated a poorly qualified candidate. Almost surely, that helped Andrews win.
Earlier, though, South Carolina's Republican voters sent Tim Scott to the Senate. They did so in a 2014 special election. They re-elected him in 2016 and 2022. In November 2028, they may even do it again.
(How was Scott first elected to the House? In the 2010 Republican primary, a run-off was held between Scott and Paul Thurmond, who was—yes!—Senator Strom Thurmond's son! Were those the days of miracle and wonder? South Carolina's Republican voters could have elected the son of Strom Thurmond. But they decided, way back then, that they'd go with the Black guy instead.)
We wouldn't have voted for Scott, but South Carolina's Republican voters did.
There's much, much more to be said about South Carolina's Republican voters, who sent Nikki Haley to the governor's mansion when she was just 39. There's mountains more to say about the larger topic of race in America.
We're omitting the mystery ride of Frederick Douglass—his history-altering, daring train ride out of the city in which we live. We're omitting the letter the Los Angeles pen pal sent to one of our own fifth grade students long ago, in the bicentennial year.
("You must be very proud to be growing up in the city where a great man like Frederick Douglass lived," that Los Angeles girl had written, after being told that the Baltimore girl was reading a book about Douglass. If memory serves, she and her family were living in Westwood. The letters of those antique pen pals were being written across the "racial" lines the pair had been forced to grow up with. The Baltimore girl to whom we refer, like her friends NAME WITHHELD and NAME WITHHELD, had an extremely kind heart. When we were shown the letter she'd written, the Los Angeles girl impressed us in a way we haven't forgotten.)
This year, Democrats ran candidates who grew from the cultural soil of their respective states. It turned out very well in this, a spectacular, sprawling continental nation with a wide array of varying culture zones.
Almost surely, the untreated disorders of the sitting president helped pull some of those candidates into the winner's circle. With respect to Governor-elect Donalds, we wouldn't have voted for him ourselves. On the other hand, we Blues haven't always been gracious enough to take yes for an answer when it comes to the way Red America's Republican voters have moved away from the past.
The state of Nebraska didn't come through in this year's Senate races. Tomorrow, without disrespecting the candidate in question, we'll consider one possible reason. We'll also recall what Paul Thurmond later said.
Democrats went with Colom. Republicans went with Donalds.
Tomorrow: What Paul Thurmond said
