Not sure what the dickens you’re trying to say here in response to my comment, but since you’re saying it bolded and in large type, it must be true.
I concede. 
I explained that Turn-out was important; i.e. that D’s turned out to vote and the R’s didn’t. You posted a confused non sequitur in response, so I repeated my point using littler words. Above I delete the font enlargements that seemed to confuse you, and restored the part of the sentence that you deleted. That was the “dickens.” Get it yet?
To each his own. I enlarged the words that you failed to comprehend. You use emoticons to ridicule. Whatevs.
Actually, what was posted was a request for a cite, which you still haven’t provided.
The NBC survey that Mr. Mapcase linked to showed the number of voters (in an exit poll?) who self-reported as D and the number who self-reported as R. These numbers can be compared with those of prior years. I did mention this and Mr. Mapcase’s specific link, albeit briefly.
Proof beyond reasonable doubt? No. Evidence pointing toward a conclusion? Yes.
My understanding is it mostly comes down to 3 things:
- Gen Z shifted to the democrats
- Latinos shifted to the democrats
- Republicans stayed home
Point 3 is why I don’t feel the intense jubilation others feel. The country didn’t become democratic, republicans just stayed home. This is a temporary victory IMO but hopefully it is the beginning of the end of MAGA and trumpism.
Republicans won about 50 million votes in the house in 2026 (vs 66 million for the democrats). But in 2024, republicans won 74 million house votes vs 70 million for the democrats. Dems lost 4 million votes and republicans lost 24 million votes.
Gen Z and latinos normally lean left, but in 2024 they supported Trump because of economic concerns. When Trump took office, he had about a 50% approval rating among Gen Z and latinos. Within a year of his policies (tariffs, wars, deporting immigrant laborers, etc) his approval among both Gen z and latinos was down to 25%.
Gen Z and latinos, when combined and excluding duplicates (Gen Z latinos) make up almost 20% of the electorate in the midterm. However they’ll make up 30% of the electorate in a presidential year.
There is also the fact that people naturally vote against the incumbent party in the white house. In the last 30 years or so, it is extremely common for the party in the white house to lose seats in a midterm (Clinton 1994, Bush 2006, Obama 2010/2014, Trump 2018, Biden 2022, Trump 2026).
But my impression is the main reasons are the ones I listed. Gen Z and latinos shifted back to democrats due to economic issues, and a lot of republicans stayed home. However those republicans will be back to vote in 2028.
https://www.npr.org/2026/11/08/nx-s1-6032829/gen-z-voters-midterm-elections
This was especially important in flipping states. Texas saw almost as many Democrats vote in 2026 as 2024, probably unprecedented, while the Republican vote dropped to normal midterm levels. I believe this was true for Mississippi as well, but the state has not officially posted the vote count. Democrats did increase their total by 85% over 2022 while the Republicans managed 2%, while the total vote went up 34%.
Callais backlash
Hispanic backlash to ICE/CBP
Trump picking absolute losers in important elections
Remember, The Dems and the GOP each have about 1/3 of the registered voters, with Independent voters also 1/3. All it takes is for those Indy votes to come over to the Dem side.
Not as strong IMHO, and this is based on past History:
As California goes, so does the nation.
- California’s legacy of diversity in elected leadership
“California’s history of electing women, immigrants and people of color set the trend for increases in diversity in elected officials we’ve seen across the country.
- Inspiring the nation’s shifting values
“Survey research tells us that Americans across the country are becoming more liberal on many social issues, including those at the intersection of the environment and people. This is a trend that has been emerging for decades with California at the vanguard,” said Joe Árvai, the Dana and David Dornsife Professor of Psychology and director of the Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability at USC Dornsife.
The idea is that the United States, in about a generation, mirrors where California is today, he said. When it comes to environmental issues, research suggests the timeline is even shorter — it’s more like just a few years.
The point here is that corruption (that impacted the 2026 election economic factor hard) and the asinine moves against immigrants and minorities; has made the change to the Democrats stronger than in past times. more than 30 years ago I expected that the ugly and scary turn in California applied now by the current admin and Republicans to the whole country was going to change the make up of states like Arizona and Texas in a generation.
It happened in California and the time was due nowadays for Arizona and Texas. (The change in Arizona and Texas was faster than I expected really, very likely due to how speedy communication is nowadays)
California's Prop 187 Vote Damaged GOP Relations With Immigrants : NPR.
DENKMANN: Wilson [Pete Wilson, the Republican Governor running for reelection] was embracing the issue of illegal immigration in his campaign and endorsed the controversial Proposition 187 that would deny public education, health care and other state services for people without legal status. Wendy Carrillo was then a 14-year-old high school freshman in Los Angeles. She and her family had fled civil war in El Salvador. Carrillo took Prop 187 personally.
WENDY CARRILLO: Wow. This law 100% targets me and my family.
DENKMANN: Carrillo and her classmates became part of the largest coordinated school walkout in LA since the city’s Chicano activism of the 1960s. She made the announcement on the school’s PA system.
CARRILLO: And one day, I was like, we’re going to have a rally at 11 a.m. for the sophomore class. And then I said, and we’re also going to walk out at this time (laughter).
DENKMANN: It was the start of a political career. Today, Carrillo represents her old neighborhood as a member of the California State Assembly.
CARRILLO: I think that was an awakening for a lot of people to say we can and we should do more.
KEVIN DE LEON: For some folks, the Vietnam War, Watergate, Nixon was their political awakening. For me, this was it - was Proposition 187.
So yeah, the Republicans still won big in California with that approach in 1994, they then lost California thanks to that inhumane and corrupting temporary victory.
G. Elliott Morris is a former employee of Nate Silver who IMO has exceeded his former boss in number crunching, analyzing, and explaining election results. From his (unfortunately paywalled) blog:
Why did the party score such a radical victory? In this series of analytical articles diving into the party’s success (and the media’s failure to see it coming), I take the view that a multiplicity of factors combined to produce the Democratic tsunami we saw last week. While some analysts point to single “mono-causes” of the electoral blowout, a more holistic view emerges from a broader accounting of all the data.
That being said, I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t start with the most obvious factor in the GOP’s demise: Donald Trump. While the president claimed his party only did poorly because he wasn’t on the ballot, the evidence suggests that his unpopularity and policy decisions created significantly more defections than the president’s party faces in a normal midterm.
Trump’s youngest voters were his least loyal. Voters under 30 backed House Democrats by somewhere between 35 and 48 points, depending on the source, among the highest on record. This after some analysts claimed young men were looking like the “most conservative in a generation.”
According to this, only about 6% of democratic voters in 2026 were Trump voters in 2024.
More than one-in-10 (11%) were new Democratic voters. About half of this group (6% of all total voters) voted for Trump in 2024 and voted for a Democrat in 2026. The others (5% of all total voters) were those who either didn’t vote in 2024 or voted for a third-party candidate before voting Democrat in 2026.
So if democrats got 66 million votes, that’s about 4 million people who voted trump in 2024 and switched to democrats in 2026. If you ass-u-me that those people would’ve shown up and voted GOP in the midterm under other circumstances, then the gap between the democrats and republicans in 2026 drops from about 16 million down to 8 million.
So I guess that means that of the 16 million vote gap between the GOP and democrats in 2026, about half of it was the 4 million trump voters who switched parties, 3 million was people who didn’t vote in 2024 or voted third party, and the other 5 million was higher dem turnout and lower GOP turnout.
However I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the 3 million who sat out 2024 or voted third party were democrats who were upset about Gaza. Democrats lost 2 million votes in CA alone in 2024 mostly due to the war in gaza.
Generally true, and it reminded of an odd fun fact I picked along the way. The number of voters registered Independent in Mississippi is approximately equal to the total number of Republicans and Democrats combined. I never would have guessed that. Statistically, therefore, indie voters must have stepped up.
(Johnny Carson voice) “I did not know that.” Interesting, thanks!
People have a bad habit of conflating voters’ party registration with their party preference.
In states where primaries are open or are jungle style, there is no advantage whatsoever to registering to vote with a party designation. All it does is paint a target on you for either fundraising or intimidation.
I lived most of my life in states like that and always appeared on the state’s voter rolls as “independent”. Which is an inherent misnomer.
The best word I know for my actual attitude was “undisclosed affiliation”. IOW, I had an affiliation, but it was unnecessary for me to disclose it to the world, so I didn’t. Secret ballot and all that stuff. But the word the state used was “independent”. Inapt, but there we are.
Which utterly misstates my political views which were always hardline D voter.
IMO there is no way in hell that in Mississippi people who actually regularly switch between voting R or D are actually a majority larger than the Rs and Ds combined.
Don’t let the labels fool you.
In my state there is no such as registering for a party at all. You just register to vote, period. It isn’t even an option to register as a party.
“Indie voters really stepped up” doesn’t necessarily mean “indie voters went to the polls and switched their allegiance to Democrat.” It could also mean “indie voters who usually vote for the Democrats when they bother actually bothered this time.” Since people who are willing to declare themselves Democrats probably already vote, whereas independents are filled with the cautious, people who try to claim independence despite being reliably for one party, and everyone else who didn’t care enough to declare for a party. That last group of people might be the ones who noticed the gas prices.
I don’t know who you were arguing with, but it wasn’t me. Please figure this out and address your comments to the appropriate person. Goodbye.
The statistic came from the Independent Voter Project. Mississippi is an open primary: you just show up and ask for a ballot of the party you want to vote for. And of course in the actual election, party registration is irrelevant.
I merely offered a fun fact that had to be statistically true, no deeper meaning than that. But in fact it was true. Independents do switch their votes over time.
According to the exit polls, which are not final yet, Democrats won independents by an astonishing 20 points. If this holds, it will be the largest margin in the history of exit polling, beating the Republican margin in 2010 of 19 points. For Republicans, this is the fifth consecutive election losing independents.
I don’t know enough, or for that matter anything, about the background for the way Mississippi voters vote. But I’m pretty sure that saying they stepped up in 2026 more than before was accurate, in hell or out of it. Not that Mississippi’s climate is that far out of hell.