Texas

Actor Irma P. Hall, the former educator who pivoted to acting in her late 30s to star in films including “Soul Food,” “The Ladykillers” and “Meet the Browns,” has died. She was 91.

Hall died Tuesday in Dallas surrounded by her loved ones, her family announced Wednesday in a statement. Her family said the actor leaves behind a “remarkable legacy” that spans from her memorable characters on screen, her time as a teacher early in life and her role as a church leader in Dallas in her final years. A cause of death was not revealed.

“She started as a teacher in the classroom but ended up being a teacher to the world,” Hall’s daughter Irma Hall Crayton said in the statement. “My mom used to always say, ‘To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.’ And she was just that to many people.”

Hall, who was born in Texas and raised in Chicago, is best known to film fans for portraying scene-stealing, elderly types. She was Big Mama, the matriarch of the central Joseph family, in George Tillman Jr.’s 1997 “Soul Food,” starring Vanessa Williams, Vivica A. Fox and Nia Long as her three daughters. That same year she shared the screen with Kevin Spacey and John Cusack as witchy healer Minerva in Clint Eastwood’s Savannah-set “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” In the Coen brothers’ “The Ladykillers,” Hall was the religious and aging widow who rents a spare room to a deceiving “professor” (Tom Hanks) and his band of criminals posing as musicians (Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons, Tzi Ma and Ryan Hurst).

She earned numerous accolades for her work, including an NAACP Image Award for her work in “Soul Food” and a jury prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for “The Ladykillers.”

“I’ve always found older women extremely interesting. In fact, as a child I’d be playing outside and when they couldn’t find me, they’d just start knocking at all the old people’s doors,” Hall recalled to The Times in 1996. “My mother used to say I was probably the only child that was born wanting to be old.”

Hall’s acting career spanned from the mid 1970s to the 2010s and also included roles in the 1998 film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” starring Oprah Winfrey, 1996’s “A Family Thing” with James Earl Jones and Robert Duvall, the TV series “Hap and Leonard” alongside “The Wire” star Michael K. Williams and Tyler Perry’s “Meet the Browns.”

She sharpened her ability to play older in TV, film and theater by channeling the women in her life and studying elders’ behavior, she told The Times in 1996. She made it a habit to visit nursing homes, speak with their residents and study their physicality from their gestures to their gaits.

“I practice little things like that all the time because I love to play old people and I don’t ever want them to be embarrassed or ridiculed by my performance,” she recalled at the time.

Irma Dolores Player was born June 3, 1935, in Beaumont, Texas. Her father was a saxophonist during the big-band era and her mother was a housekeeper. She returned to Texas for college, graduating from Texas College in Tyler. She remained in her birth state to work as a teacher in poor, segregated schools before her unexpected pivot to acting in her late 30s. She taught foreign languages and ultimately taught theater.

Actor-director Raymond St. Jacques discovered Hall after hearing her read poetry and cast her in his 1973 film “Book of Numbers,” paving the way for a decades-long career that would endear her to generations of TV and film audiences.

“I want to tell their stories so profoundly that no one will ever forget these characters,” she told the Dallas Morning News of her characters in 2017. “I don’t care if they don’t know who Irma P. Hall is.”

Hall later lived in Chicago, where she cared for her parents and pursued an award-winning theater career. She also dedicated her efforts toward nurturing upcoming talent in her home state, co-founding the Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre, and served as a longtime member of and church mother at Inspiring Body of Christ Church in Dallas.

Hall’s survivors include her daughter. A celebration of life will be announced at a later date.

Did California help Texas turn blue?

One of the biggest stories of this month’s Democratic sweep in the midterms is that a very red Texas elected a Democratic U.S. Senator and governor.

Pundits cite many theories for the surprising results: Anger over the Iran war, high gas prices, Trump fatigue and data centers.

But did California’s high home prices and the state’s historic exodus play a role?

Experts doubt it. In fact, some Californians who moved to Texas are actually concerned about the blue wave.

Many presume that those arriving from California must be much more liberal than the average Texan, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

But “a significant share of the Californians transplanting to Texas tend to be moderate to conservative in their views,” he said.

For years, Californians fled to Texas in droves. About 100,000 people made the move in 2022 alone, and many were looking not just for a lower cost of living but also a state that reflected their conservative political outlook.

Nearly half of those Californians who moved to Arizona or Texas during the California exodus in recent years identified as conservative or very conservative, according to a Stanford University study.

The Public Policy Institute of California found that those who leave the state often go to states that share their political beliefs: “Californians leaving for Republican states are much more likely to be Republican than Democratic, compared to Californians as a whole, while those leaving for Democratic states are more likely to be Democratic than Republican,” the PPIC wrote.

In all, hundreds of thousands of conservative Californians have relocated to Texas since the 2020 pandemic emergency, studies suggest.

Marie Bailey, 44, moved from El Segundo to a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in 2017. She and her husband built a home for $750,000, while a “tiny fixer upper” in El Segundo would’ve cost upward of $1 million.

The couple quickly figured out that they could capitalize on the niche in the real estate market for California migrants to Texas.

For years, Bailey has administered the Facebook group where 45,000 users swap recommendations on how to make the move. She runs a real estate firm that places Californians all over the state.

“Ninety-nine percent of our clientele are people moving from California,” Bailey told The Times in 2023. As for why people make the move, “No. 1 is cost of living and No. 2 is politics.”

Banners for politicians are shown Oct. 27, 2026, in Edinberg, Texas.

(Gabriel V. Cardenas / For The Times)

Texas’ red politics were a big reason she made the move.

Bailey’s husband, who was previously employed by the UCLA medical system, “wouldn’t even talk about his politics because he was afraid of losing his job,” she said.

“Nowhere is perfect,” Bailey said in 2023, “but we fit in a lot better here.”

Now, just three years later, Bailey is confronting a seismic shift in her state.

“I’m actually thinking of moving to Oklahoma because of this,” she said in an interview Thursday. “Or Florida.”

In the Facebook group ‘Move to Texas from California,’ most posts since Tuesday concerned the new state of affairs in the Lone Star State.

“If I have to tolerate blue I might as well have good weather so maybe back to CA? Or give FL a try?” one commenter wrote.

“I am literally closing on a house in Texas next week! I am so pissed,” wrote another.

Blank sees some upsides to the Texas blue wave for those who moved from California.

“They get the benefit of having left what they see as a too-liberal state, and they get a place that is conservative but is unlikely to get much more conservative any time soon,” he said.

Blank thinks many California transplants were primarily motivated by housing costs, with politics being secondary.

“They don’t have to move back,” he said of Californians who moved to the Lone Star state. “And if they do, I’m gonna tell them they’re silly. It’s not a good way to make decisions.”

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Trump administration to build a border wall through the scenic and rugged Big Bend sector of west Texas.

The justices on Monday granted an emergency appeal from Trump’s lawyers and set aside a judge’s order that had paused further construction along a 517-mile section of the Rio Grande.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented alone and without an explanation.

In an unsigned opinion, the court said federal courts did not have the authority to stand in the way and block efforts along the border.

“The balance of the equities also favors the government,” the court said. “Construction in the Big Bend Sector will diminish the [plaintiffs’] ability to use and enjoy the area. But Congress’s enactment of [the special law] — which permits the Secretary to waive the requirements of environmental protection and other conservation laws — reflects a clear preference for expeditious border construction over the very harms” cited by the opponents.

A broad coalition of environmentalists, cattle ranchers, farmers, river boat guides, outdoor activists and church leaders had gone to court in El Paso seeking to stop the construction.

“The Trump administration and its contractors are hellbent on destroying one of America’s greatest national parks, and the Supreme Court just gave them the green light,” said Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This horrific decision clears the way for contractors to bulldoze pristine desert and dynamite canyon walls before the courts have even decided whether this destruction is legal.”

But Trump’s lawyers pointed to unusual measures adopted by Congress that gave the Department of Homeland Security broad authority to construct border barriers “to deter illegal crossings in areas of high illegal entry.” One provision authorized the department’s secretary to “waive all legal requirements” that stood in the way, including environmental protection measures.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it does not plan to build a border wall in the Big Bend National Park, with its steep canyons, but said new patrol roads and vehicle barriers would be added.

However, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone, an appointee of President George W. Bush, issued a preliminary injunction on Oct. 2 to halt further work on the border barriers. She said the government’s own evidence showed illegal entries and drug smuggling were much less common in the Big Bend sector.

“For ‘high illegal entry’ to impose any limit, it must at least mean, not ‘the lowest rate of illegal entry,’” she said. “The Bend Sector has the lowest rate of illegal entry along the entire U.S.-Mexico border.”

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer filed a fast-track appeal at the Supreme Court and urged the justices to set aside her order and to rule on the underlying legal question. He cited evidence that over four years, there were 89,000 apprehensions of illegal migrants in the Big Bend sector which covers nearly one-fourth of the U.S.-Mexico border.

“The Sinaloa and Juarez cartels operate south of this sector across the Mexico border and seek to exploit any vulnerabilities in United States border protection to traffic humans, drugs and weapons across the border and infiltrate the United States,” he told the court. “Leaving a 300-plus-mile gap in border defenses would act as a dangerous magnet for cartels and other bad actors to exploit as other routes close off.”

The “blue tsunami” in the 2026 midterm elections flipped control of both the House and the Senate last week, bringing a wave of Democrats, some with backgrounds in the arts.

The influx of newly elected officials — artists, musicians, dancers and even a former Prada model among them — comes just weeks before Congress will take another look at the Trump administration’s proposed 2027 budget, which requests $1.5 trillion in defense spending and, once again, seeks to nix funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Last year, Congress intervened against some of the arts cuts, but that didn’t stop the administration from terminating hundreds of NEA grants worth more than $27 million nationwide.

Next year’s massive reconfiguration of power, however, brings with it a number of elected officials with creative backgrounds, some of whom even incorporated music, dance and art into their campaigns and promises to constituents.

U.S. Representative-elect Claire Valdez, says art is the first language she knew. “It is a language that crosses all kinds of divides and gives voice to something that is otherwise inexpressible and has tremendous power to change,” she said. “I think that transformation is needed now more than ever.”

Here’s a look at some of the elected officials who have a little razzle-dazzle on their resumes.

Iowa Governor-elect Rob Sand

Then-model Rob Sand walks the runway in the Prada menswear spring 2003 ready to wear runway show in Milan, Italy.

(Davide Maestri / Penske Media via Getty Images)

It’s been 20 years since Iowa chose a Democrat to govern the state, but Iowans just elected a former Prada model to strut into office next year. The New York Times profiled Sand in 2019, noting that the Brown University and University of Iowa College of Law graduate doesn’t like to talk about his days modeling in Paris and Milan. Back then, he worked his way through college and ultimately earned a J.D. degree.

The cat’s out of the bag, though, and Sand seems to have surrendered to the social media attention and even leaned in. “I’m disappointed to learn images of me modeling for Prada are circulating,” he wrote alongside a grayscale fashion editorial. “Because this shot from Italian Vogue is much better.” He also launched a “My Model Governor” tee, featuring a chic twenty-something Sand showing off his sought-after bone structure.

It’s been about two decades since Sand, repped by IMG Models at the time, graced the catwalk for Giuliano Fujiwara and other high fashion designers. After college, he traded the runway for a courtroom, and in 2018, was elected state auditor as a Democrat, serving two terms. The now 44-year-old governor-elect appealed to Iowan voters using a campaign centered on public education, affordable living, anti-corruption and bipartisanship. His campaign slogan is: “Not redder or bluer, but better and truer.” He’s a Jesus-loving hunting enthusiast whose first job was catching chickens, and he insists that he’s more interested in public service than two-party politics.

Texas’ new Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson

Texas state Sen. Nathan Johnson speaks against a bill that would add new abortion restrictions in Austin, Texas.

(Eric Gay / Associated Press)

From the top of the ballot to the bottom, Republicans lost their long-held grip on Texas last week. Democrat Nathan Johnson was elected Texas attorney general, an office held by Republicans for 28 years. This isn’t the first time Johnson flipped Texas either. Back in 2018, he was elected to the Texas state Senate, and while he’s impressed Texans with promises to root out corruption, restore traditional consumer protection and shift away from the high-profile culture wars of prior officeholders, he claims glory for something else:

“In the 2000s, I wrote the musical scores wall-to-wall of 67 episodes of ‘Dragon Ball Z’ and five of the movies,” he told Texas Sen. Taylor Rehmet in a video posted to Facebook. “It was a lot of fun … And even then, it got me street cred with my kids’ friends, and it gave me a creative outlet and a cultural connection that very few people had the opportunity to have.”

The Texas Attorney General-elect worked on “Dragon Ball Z: The World’s Strongest,” “Dragon Ball Z: The Tree of Might,” “Dragon Ball Z: Broly — Second Coming,” “Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn” and “Dragon Ball Z: Wrath of the Dragon.” He also ran a music production company and composed classical stage music.

Speaking to Texas Standard after the midterm results were in, Johnson chalked up the blue wave to a “national revolt against meanness, against hateful speech and divisiveness.”

“People indulge in those sorts of things when everything else is feeling great,” he said. “But at a time when corruption is confronting us in the face and people are super anxious about their economic future, there was a whole-scale rejection of Republican leadership.”

U.S. Representative-elect Bobby Pulido

Bobby Pulido, a Latin Grammy winner, sings during his last concert, La Última Desvelada, at the Bert Ogden Arena.

(Gabriel V. Cardenas/For The Times)

Another Democrat elected in the Lone Star state is the Latin Grammy-winning Tejano music star Bobby Pulido, who will represent Texas’ 15th Congressional District. Pulido said he’s willing to trade his three-decade stage career and take a hefty pay cut to step into public service. He won 62% of the total vote of Texans across the Rio Grande Valley and central Texas on a platform of affordability, healthcare access, immigration reform and reconnecting with working-class Latino voters.

“I give you my word tonight that I will never forget where I came from,” Pulido recently said during an Oct. concert, “La Última Desvelada” (The Last Restless Night), in his hometown of Edinburg, Texas, per TejanoNation. “I did music for me, but I’m running for Congress for you … Because I’m not going to Washington to serve a political party, I’m going to serve you.”

Pulido defeated Republican incumbent Monica De La Cruz, who took jabs at his showbiz background during her campaign. “This election isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera,” she said earlier this year, according to the Texas Tribune.

The Tejano star responded by performing at quinceañeras across the congressional district, which only boosted his popularity in the region. “In south Texas, a quinceañera isn’t just a pachanga. It’s a rite of passage that brings family and neighbors together,” said Pulido in a TikTok clip in March. “And honestly, that’s exactly what this campaign is about. We want to bring people together, not tear them apart.”

U.S. Representative-elect Claire Valdez

Congressional candidate Claire Valdez won her race against Brooklyn borough President Antonio Reynoso in the New York 7th District to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.).

(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

Valdez, a visual artist and union organizer, was elected to represent New York’s 7th Congressional District with a campaign message that espoused the need for artists to “change our political, our economic, and our social order.” Valdez’s political aspirations are personal: She moved to New York to pursue a career as an artist and quickly realized the financial realities of making art under capitalism. Art should never be a luxury for the rich, she argues, but a necessity for all.

“This district represents more artists than almost any other district in the country, and yet we live in a city where it’s almost impossible to have the studio space, the time off, the money, the resources, the healthcare to make the art that we need in our society to shine,” Valdez said in a campaign speech earlier this year.

“I did not come to politics through electoral ambitions … I came to this place via my union. My union taught me that when people come together, we can organize for incredible things. We can move literal mountains, and we can beat back all the other people who make our lives a living hell, who have made this city unaffordable and impossible to thrive in, impossible to be an artist in. We deserve and demand a life of dignity, beauty for every single person, no matter where you are from. That’s what’s on the table, my friends.”

Valdez worked as a program assistant in the visual arts department at Columbia University, where she became a union leader. In 2024, she was elected to the New York State Assembly to represent the 37th District in Queens. Last week, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani backed the candidate, who won 83% of the vote.

Los Angeles Mayor-elect Nithya Raman

Los Angeles Mayor-elect Nithya Raman arrives with supporters standing nearby to claim victory in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

(Mario Tama / Getty Images)

Los Angeles Mayor-elect Nithya Raman was first elected to the L.A. City Council in 2020, and last week, she became the first challenger to defeat an incumbent Los Angeles mayor in more than two decades. While Raman didn’t turn L.A. blue, the democratic socialist did beat Mayor Karen Bass, a more moderate Democrat, turning the city a deeper, more progressive shade of blue.

Raman campaigned on a platform centered on housing affordability, public transit expansion, street safety, and a major overhaul of how the city approaches homelessness, but she also has a unique inside perspective on issues that plague Angelenos who work in entertainment. Her husband, Vali Chandrasekaran, is a television writer and producer, with a resume stacked with popular shows including “Modern Family” and “30 Rock.” The two met as undergrads at Harvard, where Raman was active in the university’s arts scene, and contributed to student productions as a designer and choreographer. The two broke up but reconnected on the picket line during the 2007-08 Writers Guild Strike.

According to a profile in the Harvard Crimson, Raman studied classical dance with renowned Bharatanatyam dancer Leela Samson in Chennai, India, and toured with her dance company after she graduated in the early aughts. The mayor-elect told the outlet that she still follows dance when her schedule allows.

“I don’t just watch Indian classical dance, I watch all kinds of dance,” Raman said. “I’m a dance aficionado, and when I’m not busy on the campaign trail, I try and attend dance programs and performances.”

Raman took the stage late on election night during her party on the plaza outside the Greek Theatre, and asked the crowd: “Will you all get on the dance floor with me?” In response to the applause, she said, “Yes, we will dance. We will dance!”

After this week’s major wins by the Democratic Party in the midterm elections, it’s no surprise that the cold open on “Saturday Night Live” was political in nature.

But there was one surprise guest: The new senator-elect of Texas, James Talarico.

The cold open began with a conversation between Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (Kenan Thompson) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (Sarah Sherman), the minority leaders of the House and Senate (and possible future majority leaders), respectively, as they celebrated their party’s victory, including flipping Texas blue — for which they took credit. (Schumer: “That was all me. I found the candidates, I recruited them. And as a show of respect, they begged me not to appear at their campaign events.”)

Jeffries pledged that their first order of business would be to march up to President Trump and tell him, “Hey, knock it off, Buster.”

But Trump (James Austin Johnson), not one to be left out, interrupted to take the credit for the Democratic victories instead — thanks to the “horrible economy and terrible war.” “So in the words of Moana’s big fat friend, ‘You’re Welcome,’” he said.

After an appearance from J.D. Vance (Jeremy Culhane) and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost), plus Trump’s complaints about having to work with millennials and the return of their optimism, he began listing some of the newly elected senators who would be arriving in Washington: “Jon Ossoff, or as I call him Thinky Herman. Abdul El-Sayed, or as I call him, Mamdani for men. And of course, down in Texas, Talafreako.” Talarico then stepped into frame to a roar of applause and cheers from the audience, leading to this exchange:

Talarico: “Hi America, I am James Talarico, the guy who has been texting you everyday asking for $5.”

Trump: “In this economy, who can blame you.”

Talarico: “But I think Mr. President, if we can work together, we can make life better for everyday Americans. It’s clear people want something new. They want something different. I’m talking of course about ‘SNL’s’ cold opens. How many of these Trump freezes are they going to do?”

Trump: “Infinity.”

Talarico: “Well in that case, there is only one thing to say: Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night Live.”

Devon Dampier accounted for four touchdowns, Utah intercepted four Bear Bachmeier passes and the third-ranked Utes remained undefeated with a 28-20 victory over No. 7 Brigham Young on Saturday in Salt Lake City.

Dampier hurt the Cougars with with his arm and legs, finishing with 264 yards of offense to help the Utes (9-0, 6-0 Big 12) snap a three-game losing streak in the Holy War rivalry series. He threw two touchdown passes to Braden Pegan and ran for two scores.

Trailing by six at halftime, Utah forced three turnovers and shut out the Cougars (7-2, 4-2) in the second half to keep alive its College Football Playoff hopes. BYU has lost two of three to dampen its CFP chances.

Bachmeier threw for 272 yards and a touchdown and ran for 59 yards, but he had two of his four passes intercepted during the fourth quarter — both in the end zone. He had four interceptions in BYU’s first eight games.

No. 7 Texas 34, at No. 18 Missouri 20: Arch Manning threw for 297 yards and three touchdowns, including the go-ahead touchdown pass to Raleek Brown with about five minutes to go, and No. 10 the Longhorns rallied to keep alive its College Football Playoff hopes.

Brown added 85 yards and a clinching touchdown on the ground, while the Longhorns (7-2, 4-2 SEC) made a series of big defensive plays in the fourth quarter to help preserve their fourth win over a top-20 opponent this season.

The biggest defensive play came as the Tigers (6-3, 3-3) were trying to match Brown’s go-ahead score. They had taken over near midfield with about two minutes to go, and on third down, Austin Simmons tried to find favorite target Cayden Lee, but a defender knocked the ball into the air just as it arrived and Texas cornerback Graceson Littleton hauled it down for an interception to set up Brown’s clinching score.

at No. 24 Arizon 29, Texas Christian 28: Michael Salgado-Medina kicked a 37-yard field goal with 39 seconds left after the Wildcats recovered an onside pooch kick and Arizona pulled out an improbable victory Friday night.

The Wildcats (7-2, -23 Big 12) pulled to within 28-26 on Noah Fifita’s 15-yard touchdown pass to Quincy Craig with 1:45 left, but their two-point conversion attempt failed. TCU’s Ed Small couldn’t come up with an over-the-shoulder catch on the pooch kick and Arizona’s Zuri Watson recovered at the Horned Frogs’ 26 to set up the game-winning field goal.

Fifta threw for 313 yards and two touchdowns with an interception that Hudson Hooper returned 93 yards for a touchdown.

Etc.

Five days after he called Dana Holgorsen “one of the best offensive minds of our generation,” Nebraska coach Matt Rhule fired his offensive coordinator Saturday in the wake of the Cornhuskers’ loss at Illinois a day earlier. Co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Glenn Thomas will take over play-calling duties for the Huskers (5-4, 2-4 Big Ten), who have scored just 54 points combined in four straight losses.

WASHINGTON — Democratic upsets in this year’s midterms, which stretched from the suburbs of Atlanta to rural Kansas, could reshape the electoral map that governs presidential politics — and, with it, the calculus for each party in the fight for the nation’s top office in 2028.

Democrats were already cautioning against overconfidence, discussing how to translate their midterm success into more lasting power and to draw back Tuesday’s voters in 2028.

For Republicans, the defeat set off something close to an existential crisis, with would-be contenders for the party’s presidential nomination openly debating what had gone wrong and how the party should regroup after voters rebuked President Trump’s agenda.

And members of both parties were taking stock of the deep reach Democrats demonstrated Tuesday, with Senate, House and state legislative seats flipped in red strongholds that have not been up for grabs in a presidential race in years.

The midterm results have “enlarged the competitive map” for 2028, said Alex Keyssar, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, who has written books about voting rights and the electoral college. States such as Texas and Georgia may no longer be considered long-safe GOP territory, he said, leaving Republicans with fewer states they can count on and more ground they will have to spend money to defend.

“The number of states that the Republicans can feel secure that they have has diminished,” he said. “And the flip side of that is that there are more states that the Democrats can compete in. And that’s a shift.”

Presidential hopefuls typically begin putting together exploratory committees soon after the midterms, announce their candidacies after the new year and begin fundraising by midyear. Potential candidates began putting down markers swiftly this week.

On Thursday, allies of Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) launched a fundraising committee for his potential candidacy. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is considering a run, commuted the death sentences of all California’s death row prisoners. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker this week released a road map with recommendations for the new Congress.

And party leaders in Washington were nodding to 2028 as they outlined broad plans for their House and Senate majorities.

“As we look to 2028 and beyond, we need to start identifying now, in 2027, to solidify our position in the states we won and build our party infrastructure in those areas,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told an audience Wednesday at the think tank Center for American Progress, “and continue to expand the map into new states.”

Meanwhile, Republican leaders moved swiftly to assert authority within their party with analyses and prescriptions after Tuesday’s battering. Vice President JD Vance, long seen as a potential Trump heir, on Wednesday rushed to blame the sweeping losses on the president’s war in Iran.

Sen. Ted Cruz, whose state of Texas saw a historic blue wave, faulted his party for ignoring the economic pain many voters face. And Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, one of the few states where Republicans held the line, called the midterms an “extinction level event for Republicans” that will last beyond 2028.

“Once you have the [midterm] election results, that’s when like the real literal politicking begins, and you have to move quick,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist who worked for the National Republican Congressional Committee and the presidential campaigns of Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney.

For the GOP, Tuesday’s results will mean spending more money in places such as Texas that the party has traditionally counted on to get their candidates to 270 electoral votes, Keyssar said.

“When the map shifts, the strategies have to shift, and that includes the allocation of money,” he said.

For Democrats, the midterms demonstrated that the party should be “investing heavily in the coastal South,” said Keneshia Grant, a Howard University political scientist. The party needs to “recognize the moment and meet it,” she said, pointing to the unexpectedly close Senate races in Florida and Mississippi.

“If you’re the Democratic Party at the national level, you now have to ask yourself different questions about the calculus,” Grant said.

It is generally difficult to predict the next presidential election outcome based on the results of the preceding midterms, said Justin Grimmer, a political scientist at Stanford University.

“Right now there’s this incentive or dream of Democrats to think, like, ‘Well, what if this were 2028? Then it’s a landslide.’ And then Republicans are fearful that if this map were to carry forward, that they would get ransacked in ‘28,” Grimmer said.

But “it’s hard to know what the major issues are gonna be in 2028, who the candidates are, and what sort of world we’ll be in.”

‘No silver lining’

President Trump has so far declined to endorse a successor, saying it is “too early” to make the call, though he has praised both Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“We’ll see what happens,” Trump said Wednesday. “You can have maybe a lot of people running, maybe nobody is going to run. … I don’t know who is going to run.”

Trump cast doubt on whether Vance would eventually run. But Vance appeared to be signaling 2028 aspiration with a post that pinned the GOP defeats on the Iran conflict launched by Trump this year.

The scale of the midterm losses may be the most useful thing for Republicans moving toward 2028, Gorman argued.

“The silver lining is that there’s no silver lining,” Gorman said.

That’s because there is nothing to cling to. “It’s a bottoming-out,” he said, which frees the party to begin “rebuilding conversations.”

The larger danger for whoever leads the party next is assuming that Trump’s voters come with the nomination, he argued, saying the 2028 nominee will have to create their own voter coalition. The same applies to Democrats, Gorman said, pointing to Latino voters who swung toward Trump in 2024 and back toward Democrats this year.

Such groups of swing voters, said California Republican consultant Mike Madrid, care about economic and quality-of-life-issues, not culture-war and partisan issues.

Madrid said that if he were advising a 2028 presidential contender, he would tell them, “Quit talking about these differences, or at least set these differences in the construct of a class-based, top down model — not a right left model.”

Time to ‘deliver’

With Democrats set for a wide-open presidential primary with a large array of candidates, the sweeping success on Tuesday of the party’s populist platform could influence how 2028 contenders run their campaigns.

Democratic leaders in Congress have said they intend to make affordability a centerpiece of their legislative agenda as soon as they take control of both chambers next year. But any measure will still need Trump’s signature, setting up an early test of whether Democrats can hand voters tangible results before 2028 — or end up with a stack of vetoes to campaign on instead.

“We have won immense amounts of political power, and now it’s the most important time in which to deliver,” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) told reporters Wednesday, “so we can keep that political power.”

Now that voters expect Democrats to clean up the nation’s problems in the next session, the party has to ensure that is “backed up by real results” — something anyone who is preparing a 2028 run will need to have in mind, strategist Rob Flaherty said at the Center for American Progress event Thursday.

“That is a huge thing that whoever we nominate has to be thinking about: quick delivery, quick change that people can substantively feel in their lives,” Flaherty said.

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who has not ruled out a presidential run, told reporters Thursday that some states may now be more “swing-ish” and that the Democrats will need to “take in” and analyze Tuesday’s data.

But, he said, voters’ top issues will remain the same.

“The candidates … that can answer those things authentically and well for the voter,” he said, are “going to be the more successful” ones.

Dallas, Texas – Tuesday’s midterms were bruising for Republicans in Texas, a longtime right-wing stronghold.

The state elected its first Democrats to statewide office in 32 years, and the left-wing party held onto four congressional districts that were recently redesigned to favour Republicans.

But Republicans had one redistricting bright spot in a sea of unexpected defeats in Texas this midterm election cycle.

Amid the so-called blue wave, Republican Jace Yarbrough defeated Dan Barrios in Texas’s 32nd congressional district near Dallas, taking control of a heavily redrawn seat previously held by a Democrat.

Yarbrough became the only Republican this year to flip a Texas congressional seat, despite a push under United States President Donald Trump to shake up the state’s map for the right-wing party’s benefit.

So how did Yarbrough buck the trend? He was successful for two reasons, according to Matthew Wilson, a professor at Southern Methodist University who lives in the 32nd district.

“I think he did effectively pivot from a primary strategy to a general election strategy,” Wilson told Al Jazeera.

A constitutional lawyer, Yarbrough had defined his career by litigating progressive policies. But Wilson explained that the cost of living and other economic concerns took an increasingly prominent role in the final months of Yarbrough’s bid.

“In the primaries, the social issues, cultural issues were really important,” Wilson said.

“But then he pivoted very quickly and realised that those were probably not going to have the same resonance in the fall campaign. And so he did talk a lot about lowering prices. He did talk a lot about things that were of concern more to voters in the centre of the electorate.”

Wilson added there was another important factor in Yarbrough’s victory. “It was just the fact that his district was drawn to be so heavily Republican.”

The 32nd district had previously been composed of left-leaning Dallas and its immediate suburbs, but in August 2025, the Texas state legislature voted to reconfigure the congressional boundaries, with the aim of helping Republicans win five extra seats in this year’s midterms.

That push came at the behest of Trump, who called on Republican-led states across the country to follow suit.

Yarbrough’s district was redrawn to include only a portion of Dallas. It now stretches east instead, to encompass several Republican-dominated counties.

The demographics of the district also shifted dramatically.

In 2024, the district encompassed sizeable Latino, Black and Asian communities, accounting for about 60 percent of the population. The new map lowered the share of those demographics, while including several predominantly white areas.

Still, Wilson pointed out that Yarbrough’s victory was far more muted than initially expected. He won 51.5 percent of the vote to Barrios’s 48.5 percent.

“Even in his case, the race was a lot closer than he would have expected,” Wilson said. “So there was a pretty uniform Democratic swing across congressional districts.”

Latino backlash

With the dust settling on the election, Republicans will start the next congressional term in January with 24 representatives from Texas, losing one seat to Democrats this midterm cycle.

Democrats, who will have commanding control of both chambers of Congress, will have 14 House seats filled by Texans.

The four other Democrat-held districts Texas Republicans hoped to gain via redistricting were swept up in the groundswell of opposition to Trump.

In those districts, the party’s redrawn maps largely miscalculated Latino voters, a demographic that makes up 40 percent of the state’s population and swung towards Trump in 2024, according to political experts.

This year, the demographic tilted back towards Democrats with force, fuelled both by affordability concerns and dismay over Trump’s hardline immigration policies, which disproportionately affect Latino communities.

“In political science, there’s a body of literature we call ‘group threat theory’,” Michael Adams, a professor at Texas Southern University, told Al Jazeera. “When a particular group feels that they are threatened, that mobilises them, and we normally see a higher increase in terms of voter turnout.”

One of the most resounding defeats came in the ninth congressional district in Houston, which for years encompassed an area with large Black and Latino populations. Texas’s newly redrawn map cut out some Black communities but left a large population of low-propensity Latino voters.

Democratic candidate Leticia Gutierrez ended up taking nearly 58 percent of the vote against Republican Alex Mealer.

Speaking to Al Jazeera before the election, Gutierrez said her strategy focused on reaching Latino voters through aggressive Spanish-language outreach focused on pocketbook issues.

“I always say that I have a big chunk of family that are citizens registered to vote, but if they don’t hear it in Spanish, they’re probably not going to show up,” said Gutierrez.

“I’m fortunate enough to be able to speak both languages fairly well, and so just again, doing a lot of that targeted getting out the vote, getting in front of voters, door-knocking.”

Latinos make up about 60 percent of the ninth congressional district. The demographic is even more pronounced in South Texas, where Republicans hoped to pick up the 28th, 34th and 35th districts in their redistricting push.

But in a district representing the suburbs of San Antonio, Democrat Johnny Garcia handily defeated Republican Carlos De La Cruz by more than 10 percentage points.

Along the US-Mexico border, incumbent Democrat Henry Cuellar carried his district with nearly 66 percent of the vote over Republican challenger Tano Tijerina, while in the 34th district, Representative Vicente Gonzalez skated to victory by more than 15 percentage points over Republican challenger Eric Flores.

In another border district, Tejano musician Bobby Pulido, a Democrat, unseated Republican incumbent Monica De La Cruz, whose 2022 victory presaged a wider conservative shift among Latinos in the state.

Two years later, Trump carried nearly every Latino-dominated border district in Texas, seizing on unrest over immigration policies under former President Joe Biden. He also leveraged the prevalence of conservative social views among the largely Catholic population.

The area had long been considered a Democratic stronghold.

“Democrats are very conservative here. So I’m not surprised that it went for Trump in 2024,” 37-year-old voter Donato Medina told Al Jazeera from the border city of McAllen before the vote.

“But now it’s like people are kind of waking up, because his policies are affecting them directly.”

Just after 11 on election night, Nithya Raman took the stage in a plum-colored dress outshined only by her smile.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass had a narrow lead in early returns. But to Raman and her supporters who packed the plaza in front of the Greek Theatre, they had already won.

A blue deluge had swept across the U.S. to clear out the MAGA status quo that has gaslit Americans for too long. The clueless Republican ruling class’ only defense was that the liberal alternative was worse than the crap President Trump fed Americans while calling it apple pie.

Los Angeles is as blue as the Pacific, yet the same anti-establishment wave, fueled by voters frustrated with the high cost of living and a mayor who face-planted during crisis after crisis, had crashed hard here. Raman, a City Council member, was standing on its crest.

A campaign that started on the last possible day, dismissed by rivals as amateurish and given little chance to succeed against an incumbent with decades of experience and the support of nearly the entire L.A. Democratic establishment, was poised to win. Raman, 45, was expected to pull ahead as more ballots from younger, left-leaning Angelenos were counted.

Standing before Raman was the coalition that made her unlikely rise happen — one that, despite the obvious differences between L.A. and heartland politics, paralleled the one that made the Democratic Party’s takeover of the House and Senate possible.

There were the democratic socialists, who embarrassed mainline Democrats in L.A. once again with a blockbuster night for candidates endorsed by the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter. In addition to Raman’s strong initial showing, Marissa Roy was ahead in the city attorney’s race, and Angela Gonzales-Torres had a substantial lead in her Eastside congressional matchup against incumbent Jimmy Gomez, a scion of the fabled Eastside Latino machine.

There were young people like Arthur Johnson, a 23-year-old Cal State Northridge student who waited in a long line on campus earlier that day to vote in person, “because I wanted that old-school feeling.” Johnson told me that many of his friends were voting for the first time “because they hate Trump, they hate Karen, and they wanted change, however it came.”

There were Latinos like Eloisa Galindo, 45, of East Los Angeles, who showed me a cellphone video of her hanging a handmade pro-Raman manta — a bedsheet sign — on a freeway bridge over the weekend. In Texas and California, Latino voters turned out in huge numbers, helping to make history in each state by electing one of their own as governor for the first time. Galindo and her fellow members of Eastside Padres Contra la Privatización, a group created to help residents affected by the Lineage warehouse fire, felt that Raman represented a new, better way.

“She paid attention to us, and the mayor didn’t,” Galindo said in Spanish. “We felt discriminated against, we felt forgotten — but Nithya did none of that.”

Galindo and her crew were far in the back but cheered so loud that it practically echoed across Griffith Park. The Four Tops’ ”Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” faded out, and Raman beamed.

L.A. mayoral candidate Nithya Raman dances with her campaign chair, Kathleen Murray, at her election night party on the patio in front of the Greek Theater.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

“Do you love Los Angeles?” she exclaimed. “Are you ready for an L.A. that loves you back? Look at the space around you. Look at what we built together.”

Her rousing speech surveyed the course of L.A. history, from its striving immigrants to Cecil B. DeMille to LGBTQ+ history to the creation of San Pedro’s harbor. She tied her campaign to an election year in which voters across America “demanded change” because they were “angry about a broken status quo, and the politicians who failed them over and over again.”

Angelenos, she said, have become convinced “that this is the best that we can do. Our City Hall became a place where we became so used to saying, ‘No,’ we forgot how to say ‘Yes.’”

She decried the “cynicism that started to take over this city, that started to make us believe that L.A.’s problems weren’t just bad, but they were permanent. That L.A.’s best days were behind us.”

Raman praised her supporters for believing in “hope” — for a better city, a better future, but also hope that even the most entrenched longtimer could be brought down by people who were just tired of being told their concerns didn’t matter.

She spoke for about half an hour and apologized for going on so long in the chilly weather — but no forgiveness was needed on a night like this. Supporters cried tears of joy and hugged one another, sharing political news of the city and also the country, as the energy in the crowd further amped up seemingly every half-hour. James Talarico won in Texas! Dr. Abdul El-Sayed took it in Michigan? Mississippi was in play?!

Was the blue wave real? Could it hold against an angry, vengeful Trump? On this night, at least, it would.

“We have shown Los Angeles” that it’s “a city that is worth fighting for every single day of our lives,” Raman said.

She ended her speech by inviting her Indian American family to the stage — parents, brother, husband and twin 10-year-old children. Faces of a new, more progressive America, now likely the First Family of L.A. They descended the stairs together, and then a crush of Raman supporters stopped her for photos and congratulations.

Another Motown classic — “Dancing in the Streets” — blared, a song of freedom and boogie and promise from a previous generation.

Early in Raman’s speech, she asked the crowd for a favor: “Will you all get on the dance floor with me?” Many obliged, joining their leader to shimmy to Selena and other SoCal favorites.

Tomorrow would come the hard part: What to do next. But on this night, Raman and blue America would dance.

A few hours later, with more votes counted, she was ahead of Bass.

Bobby Pulido is graduating from quinceañera gigs to the Capitol. The Tejano singer pulled off a historic victory when he flipped a Texas congressional seat back to blue during the U.S. midterm elections.

On Tuesday, the Latin Grammy-winning artist defeated Republican incumbent Monica De La Cruz in Congressional District 15, a narrow geographical area that extends east of San Antonio down to Rio Grande Valley.

The singer’s win comes after President Trump pushed Texas Republicans to redraw congressional districts last year, with the intent to weaken the state’s Democratic strongholds by diluting the Latino vote in the region.

However, attempts to overhaul district seats in favor of a GOP candidate backfired; in fact, Texas Republicans now will have one less seat in the House come January.

Tuesday night, as poll results began trickling in in favor of Pulido — and other Democratic victors in the state including U.S. Senator-elect James Talarico and Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa — he took to X to share his disbelief in a Spanish expletive similar to “Holy s— !”

On Wednesday morning, after major polls confirmed that Pulido won 62% of the total vote, he shared a video message to all his supporters on Instagram: “I give you my word tonight that I will never forget where I came from.”

The clip was from a speech he made during his final concert on Oct. 17, titled “La Última Desvelada” (The Last Restless Night), in his hometown of Edinburg, Texas, per TejanoNation.

“I did music for me, but I’m running for Congress for you,” Pulido stated in the Instagram video. “Because I’m not going to Washington to serve a political party, I’m going to serve you.”

In July 2025, Pulido announced his political interests in Congress via Instagram, which came after he got a nudge from Lorena Saenz Gonzalez, the wife of Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas).

In an interview with The Times in July 2025, he explained that he wanted to run an “issues-based campaign” focused on immigration, the economy and healthcare. He stressed that he would not run on a platform of “vote for me because I’m famous.”

Still, it didn’t stop De La Cruz from targeting his musical background. In March, she referred to Pulido as a “scandal-plagued celebrity,” adding that “this election isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera,” according to the Texas Tribune.

The commentary on the traditional cultural celebration prompted Pulido to put out an open call for invitations to perform at quinceañeras across the Congressional District, aiding his popularity in the region.

“In South Texas, a quinceañera isn’t just a pachanga. It’s a rite of passage that brings family and neighbors together,” said Pulido in a TikTok clip uploaded on March 10. “And honestly, that’s exactly what this campaign is about. We want to bring people together, not tear them apart.”

Born in Edinburg, Texas, Pulido comes from a famous musical family. His dad, Roberto Pulido, is credited with the modernization of Tejano music through added brass instrumentation that helped bridge the separate camps of Tejano and Conjunto music.

In 1995, Pulido launched his own independent singing career during the golden age of Tejano music, defined by acts such as Patsy Torres, Little Joe y La Familia and Selena Quintanilla.

The singer is best known for his smash hit “Desvelado,” a 1995 cumbia-tinged track off his debut album by the same name. While many fans have speculated that the song was about Selena, who was killed in March 1995, Pulido has said it is not. Although he did admit to having a crush on the “Como La Flor” singer when they were young, “but to be fair, who didn’t,” he shared with Mitú earlier this year.

Early hits like “Se Murió de Amor,” “Le Pediré” and “Enséñame” also helped cement the crooner’s legacy as a Tejano legend with a cumbia edge, not only making his lyrics relatable for the yearning community, but also danceable.

In January, when U.S. Representative-elect Pulido takes office, he will be the first congressman to have two Latin Grammy Awards, which he won in 2022 and 2025 in the Tejano album category for “Para Que Baile Mi Pueblo” and “Bobby Pulido & Friends Una Tuya y Una Mía (Vol.1/En Vivo),” respectively.

Although, he could have a total of three gramophone trophies by the time January rolls around. His latest album, “Bobby Pulido & Friends Una Tuya y Una Mía (Vol.2/En Vivo),” is nominated in the Tejano album category at the Latin Grammy Awards, which will take place Nov. 12 in Las Vegas.

Staff writer Carlos De Loera contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Latino voters, whose swing to the right aided President Trump’s election in 2024, helped Democrats reclaim both chambers of Congress on Tuesday in a stunning reversal of support for Republicans.

The shift, which transpired nationwide but was especially pronounced in Texas, is seen as a rebuke of the president and his party by a group of Americans who have watched as their families and neighbors were detained by immigration agents while their cost of living shot up.

“President Trump asked voters to pretend like he was on the ballot, and our observation is that Latino voters did just by that, resoundingly rejecting his extreme policies and actions and anyone who rubber-stamped them,” said Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS, a Washington-based Latino civil rights and advocacy group.

“While the numbers are still coming in, what we know so far indicates that this will undoubtedly be the largest turnout of Latino voters ever in a midterm election,” she added.

UnidosUS on Wednesday released findings from a poll, conducted by the Los Angeles-based analytics firm BSP Research, of more than 3,000 Latinos who voted in the midterm elections. The findings showed many Latinos are independent, swing voters — 17% of 2024 Trump voters supported Democratic House candidates in this election.

Gary Segura, president of BSP Research, said on a call Wednesday with Murguía and reporters that Latino voters returned this election to historic patterns, with about two-thirds voting for Democrats and one-third voting Republican.

In 2024, Trump won more than 40% of Latino votes, many motivated by his promises to reduce prices.

This year, cost of living and inflation are by far Latino voters’ top concerns, the poll found, with more than half citing food and grocery costs as particular burdens and saying they have no money left over each month or struggle to pay bills.

Immigration was also a factor, with 90% of Latino voters supporting a balanced immigration system and a quarter of them naming ICE and immigration reform as among their top three issues, following cost of living.

“The Republican candidates on the ballot yesterday were really struggling to swim upstream against an administration with this kind of disapproval across issues,” Segura said.

GOP strategist Giancarlo Sopo said right-wing echo chambers didn’t understand that when Latinos hear “criminal illegals” they picture gang members or people who evaded Border Patrol.

“But the vast majority of immigrants without legal status did not swim the Rio Grande,” he wrote in a post on social media. “Conflating people who sneak in with asylum applicants and visa overstayers working through a labyrinthine system is turning off Hispanics.”

In Texas, voters in majority-Latino districts near San Antonio and along the border helped Democrats break Republicans’ longstanding grip on the state to win the races for governor, lieutenant governor and senator. James Talarico’s victory against Republican Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton marks the first time a Democrat has won a Senate seat in Texas since 1988.

NBC exit polling shows that 61% of Latino men, with whom Trump had made particular inroads, voted for Talarico.

Among those casting his ballot was Ronaldo Salgado, the son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Houston. He told MSNOW on Monday that he had placed his “I Voted” sticker on a memorial dedicated to his father.

“I always vote with my parents in mind, with my family in mind, but this year’s vote is definitely with much heavier weight on it,” he said. “I cried as I was casting my vote because I was doing it in honor of my dad.”

Bobby Pulido, a South Texas Tejano singer whose campaign strategy included performing at quinceañeras, beat Republican incumbent Rep. Monica De La Cruz by more than 20 percentage points. De La Cruz was among the battleground Republicans to warn the White House that ICE should focus on criminals and not law-abiding people.

Latino voters told the BSP Research pollsters that both parties, but especially Democrats, reached out to them more in this election cycle than in the past.

Even in districts where Democrats did not prevail, Latino votes made some races tight. In Florida, where Republican Sen. Ashley Moody narrowly won reelection and Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar holds a slim lead, Latinos also shifted left.

Doral, a municipality near Miami with the highest concentration of Venezuelans in the country, favored Trump in 2024 by 23 percentage points over Vice President Kamala Harris. On Tuesday, Doral voters chose Moody’s competitor, Angie Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, by 3 percentage points.

Nationally, about 6 in 10 Latino voters opted for the Democratic candidate in their local House race, according to an Associated Press exit poll.

The midterm was also pivotal for Latino representation among elected officials.

In the two states with the most Latino residents, Gina Hinojosa became the first Latina elected governor in Texas, and Xavier Becerra is California’s first Latino governor in more than 150 years.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus announced that it will have at least 55 members in the new Congress, making it the largest membership in the caucus’s 50-year history.

“Our representation is growing, our voices are stronger, and no one can afford to take Latino voters for granted,” caucus leaders wrote in a statement.

But representation alone won’t cut it, said Julián Castro, chief executive of the Latino Community Foundation. Latinos will look to how their votes translate into policy changes that benefit those who trusted the leaders they helped elect.

“What are they going to do about affordability?” he said on the call with UnidosUS. “What are they going to do about corruption and rooting that out? What are they going to do about ending ICE abuse and cruelty and pursuing a more balanced approach on immigration?”

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), who is likely to become the next chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, acknowledged the responsibility that Democrats have.

“One of the big stories coming out of tonight is the enormous swing that Latino voters are now re-entrusting Democrats on,” he told MeidasTouch News. “…We have to deliver on taking on ICE. We have to deliver on passing real immigration solutions and reform.”

WASHINGTON — Democrats heralded a new era in American politics Wednesday after voters broke Republicans’ control of government and delivered a pivotal rebuke of President Trump.

Victories that handed Democrats control of the House and Senate on Tuesday night came in historic form, with margins outstripping expectations, posting double-digit shifts to the left by nearly every voting bloc. In some of the reddest states in the union, even Republican redistricting efforts designed to shield districts from competition were not enough to prevent Democratic inroads.

The sweeping wins were driven by a rare coalition of voters across nearly all walks of American life, in cities and countryside, from the rural Midwest and Deep South to a traditionally conservative mid-Atlantic. Not since voters were repulsed by President Nixon after the Watergate scandal half a century ago has the popular vote swung so decisively in a single election cycle.

The wave was so comprehensive that it handed Democrats wins that for decades have been unthinkable — flipping Senate seats in Kansas, South Carolina and Texas — and gained a majority of governor’s seats for the first time in a generation. How large their House majority would be remained to be seen as states continued counting votes.

Statehouses in Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania flipped for Democrats — and, as ballots were counted, Texas hung in the balance — while the party wrested at least five gubernatorial seats from Republican control.

“The only thing unusual here is scale,” said Andrew Sinclair, an assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. “It is not at all unusual in American political history to see a poorly led party lose badly in the next election.”

“To build anything enduring out of this election,” he added, “Democrats are going to have to do the hard work of having honest conversations with each other about how such a diverse group of people can cooperate and deliver results.”

The seismic routing appeared to validate the populist messages Democrats — in many cases, both progressives and moderates — ran on, from lowering costs to addressing healthcare and housing issues to confronting the power of corporations in American society.

Party leaders vowed the morning after to respond to voters’ mandate on affordability and to check executive power, as members of both parties predicted the results would reshape politics for years into the future.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called it “a generational remake of the Senate map that is going to change America not only now but on into the future.”

He pledged Democratic senators would be intent on working for their constituents and delivering on promises to relieve Americans’ economic “anguish” and clean up government corruption. He also nodded to the responsibility the party now shoulders.

“With this majority, Americans have given we Democrats the opportunity to prove ourselves worthy of their trust, and that’s our most important job,” Schumer said.

In every demographic, whether cut by gender, race, age, education or region, voters shifted to the left compared to 2024, in most cases by double digits, according to New York Times data. Men 18 to 44 moved to the left by 31 points, Latinos by 28 points, voters under 30 by 32 points.

The nation also elected several historic “firsts,” including the first Muslim senator, the first openly gay male senator and the first Black female governor, in spite of Republican campaign attacks around identity. And Democrats defied Republican redistricting efforts in at least 11 districts, including four in Florida,four in Texas,one each in Ohio, Alabama and North Carolina.

The results showed the success of economic populist messages, said Alex Jacquez, a Democratic consultant and former policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

“The throughline for all the Democrats [who won] is the corporate-friendliness era of moderation is over and we are much more squarely in the prairie populism of the 80s and 90s,” Jacquez said. “You saw a real resurgence of that.”

The unambiguous nature of the victory helped repel the notion that Republicans might attempt to challenge election results, as Trump had telegraphed as a possibility before the election.

Republicans swiftly began trading blame as they parsed the results.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely 2028 presidential contender, predicted the results could “reverberate for the next decade or most,” saying the routing was worse than anticipated.

It was “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans across the country,” DeSantis told reporters Wednesday.

Republicans will now face questions about the party’s future direction, and how they prevent a repeat of Tuesday’s wave in 2028. President Trump signaled his willingness to accept the election results and work with Democrats, while evading blame for himself.

“For Republicans, it is clear that President Trump has led the party to disaster — again,” Sinclair said. “Looking to the future, Republicans should reconsider following his style of governance and his policy agenda.”

Democrats will now have to deliver on the affordability and accountability agenda. With full control of Congress, they will be able to send legislation to Trump’s desk, and could force him to sign bills or make unpopular vetoes. Schumer told reporters Wednesday that the party would work to lower costs “with the president or without him, period.”

“It is critically important now that Democrats, now that we’ve been given the keys to the car here, we’re able to drive it,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who won reelection Tuesday, said on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.”

Shapiro, a likely presidential contender, projected confidence in the new majorities and said Democrats would need to show that they “can legislate, bring down costs, end these wars.”

The mood among Democrats was quickly turning to “resolute” amid the jubilation, said consultant Andrew DeStefano. Party operatives want to build lasting power, he said, not become just another swing in the electoral pendulum.

“Folks don’t want this to be the latest ping-pong volley,” DeStefano said. “Laser focused on how we can deliver on some achievable concrete policy.”

Colin Allred is all blue. The Democratic politician from Texas played linebacker for the powder blue-clad Tennessee Titans for four years and he rode the historic blue wave Tuesday to return to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Allred, who served three consecutive terms in Congress before making an unsuccessful bid for the Senate in 2024, is one of several prominent former athletes who ran for office in the midterm elections. He won this time in a landslide over Republican Patrick Gillespie, collecting nearly 80% of the votes in the 33rd Congressional District located in Dallas County.

In an Substack essay in August, Allred enumerated lessons learned playing in the NFL, calling them “the core values I’m bringing with me in my fight for Congress”: Staying humble, recognizing that leadership comes from bringing people together despite their differences and building strong relationships, trust and teamwork.

Joining Allred in Congress — albeit from the other side of the aisle — will be another former professional athlete who ran a successful campaign in Texas: Former Angels slugger Mark Teixeira, a Republican who will succeed Chip Roy.

Teixeira was the fifth overall pick in the 2001 MLB draft by the Texas Rangers, for whom he played until 2007. After brief stints with the Atlanta Braves and Angels, he spent nine seasons with the New York Yankees, helping them to a World Series title in 2009 and finishing second in MVP voting.

After retiring in 2016 with 409 career home runs, Teixeira returned to Texas and announced his candidacy for the 21st Congressional District a year ago. An avowed conservative, he said he was “ready to help defend President Trump’s America First agenda, Texas families, and individual liberty.” Trump endorsed Teixeira and he defeated 11 candidates in the Republican primary.

Historically, former athletes running for office lean Republican. Decades after helping Michigan to national championships in 1932 and 1933, the outstanding center and linebacker Gerald Ford became the 38th president of the United States on the Republican ticket.

Ford never played professionally, but several men who did have served in Congress: Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY), Rep. Steve Largent (R-OK) and Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) played in the NFL; Sen. and Rep. Jim Bunning (R-KY) was a Hall of Fame MLB pitcher; and Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ) was a Hall of Fame NBA forward.

Dave Bing and Kevin Johnson became the Democratic mayors of Detroit and Sacramento, respectively. And if the net is widened to include powerlifting and pro wrestling, Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Jesse Ventura of Minnesota get a nod.

Tommy Tuberville, a former longtime college football coach and Republican senator since 2021, won the governor’s race in Alabama on Tuesday, defeating Democrat former Sen. Doug Jones. Tuberville posted a record of 159-99 over 21 seasons at Auburn, Cincinnati, Texas Tech and Mississippi.

Two former NFL players and a veteran NFL broadcaster appear to have fallen short in their attempts to win political office.

Republican Jay Feely, an NFL kicker for six teams over 14 seasons, trails Democrat Amish Shah, a former team physician for the New York Jets, 52.6% to 45.4% with 85% of the vote tallied in a race for the U.S. Congress in Arizona. Democrat Chris Kluwe, a Minnesota Vikings punter from 2005-2012, lost a close race to Republican Gracey Van Der Mark to represent California Assembly District 72, which mainly consists of Orange County beach communities.

And Republican Michele Tafoya lost the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota to Democrat Peggy Flanagan, the state’s lieutenant governor. Tafoya was a sideline reporter for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” and also worked as a broadcaster for CBS and ABC.

Perhaps the most impressive showing by a former athlete was that of Iowa Democrat Josh Turek, who flipped a seat for the U.S. Senate by defeating Republican Congresswoman and former TV anchor Ashley Hinson. Born with spina bifida and confined to a wheelchair after his father was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, Turek is a four-time Paralympian and two-time gold medalist in wheelchair basketball.

For more than a decade, Donald Trump seemed to defy all the known laws of political physics.

He was impeached, repeatedly indicted and convicted of multiple felony counts. He ranted and raged and acted more like a colicky infant than any president that anyone living today has ever seen.

He enriched himself lavishly, pursued his self-interests relentlessly and indulged his whimsies — from war, to tariffs to tacky decor — without regard to cost, crudeness or any flicker of conscience.

And yet Trump bestrode the country like no figure since Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was not just a political titan, but an irresistible social and cultural force.

On Tuesday, however, time, impatience and gravity finally caught up with Trump.

He took an electoral thrashing that will stand alongside the worst political beat-downs of modern times. His party not only lost control of the House and Senate, but drowned in a blue wave that swept away Republicans in election contests big and small, from sea to shining sea.

No lies, no bluster, no flimsily drafted lawsuits challenging the result can change or overturn that fact.

Presidents almost invariably lose congressional seats at the midpoint of their term, especially during their second stretch in office. But Tuesday’s results weren’t predestiny. They were a Republican disaster wholly of Trump’s making.

Keeping control of the House, which the GOP held by a historically small margin, was always going to be exceedingly difficult, even after Trump and his allies ruthlessly gerrymandered congressional lines to improve their chances. Democrats needed a gain of merely three seats. They scooped those up before the polls even closed in California, Nevada and other Western states.

The only question, with many races still to be decided, is how big a majority Democrats will enjoy when the next Congress convenes in January.

The Senate, where Republicans enjoyed a 53-47 advantage, should have been the GOP’s bulwark.

The political map could scarcely have been more favorable. Roughly two-thirds of the contested Senate seats were in states that Trump carried in 2024. Five of the seven toss-up races were in states Trump won, several by double digits.

Democrats were happily biding their time Tuesday night, awaiting results from Michigan and Alaska to see how many seats they would ultimately gain.

At the start of this election cycle, the notion that Democrats would seriously compete in such deep-red bastions as Kansas, South Carolina and Texas would have seemed absurd. On Tuesday, voters elected Democrats James Talarico in Texas and Annie Andrews in South Carolina, the first time the party has won a statewide office in either state in decades.

In Kansas, Adam Hamilton beat Roger Marshall to become Kansas’ first Democratic U.S. senator since before “The Wizard of Oz” was released in movie theaters in 1939.

Trump could not have done more in the last two years to undermine his party and its political standing if he’d purposely set out on a mission of self-sabotage.

His meddling in primaries left Republicans with several flawed candidates, including in Texas and South Carolina. His cruel and roughshod anti-immigrant policies alienated Latinos, who just two years ago voted for Trump in record numbers.

His tariffs and, in particular, go-it-alone war with Iran stoked inflation and sent the cost of gas, diesel, groceries and fertilizer soaring. Those elevated prices taxed consumers everywhere but hit particularly hard in rural, small town and exurban America, which is home to much of the Republican base.

Trump’s focus on building a White House ballroom, raising a triumphal arch and resurfacing Washington’s Reflecting Pool — which he visited on election eve for a closing message, that, inexplicably, drew attention to its botched renovation — showed exactly where his skewed priorities lie during these economically anxious times.

Empathetic it was not.

As inflation worsened and his seeming obtuseness grew — “I don’t give a damn,” Trump said of higher gas prices, “we’re making a freaking fortune” — the president’s approval ratings sank to levels not seen since a Trump-inspired mob laid siege to the Capitol in a failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Even that defeat wasn’t as bad as Tuesday’s political massacre.

Voters were not happy.

Roughly three-quarters of those sampled by the Associated Press said they were angry or dissatisfied with the overall direction of the country as well as the state of the economy. Nearly 7 in 10 said they wanted Congress, supine under Republican control, to provide more checks and balances on the capricious president.

We live in an age of remarkable political volatility.

From 1960 to 1978, there were three elections in which control of the White House, Senate or House switched parties. From 1980 to 1998, there were four. Since 2000, there have been 12 elections in which power shifted, with Tuesday’s midterm referendum being the latest.

Voters have punished presidents for an unpopular war (in Iraq), for policies they didn’t like (Obamacare, threatened cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) and for that particular scourge of presidents and their parties, inflation.

But no other midterm election this century delivered the kind of personal repudiation that Trump faced, because no other president placed himself so very front and center in the campaign.

Riding the thermals of his over-inflated ego, marching stridently beneath his banner of self-regard, Trump incessantly urged voters “to pretend I’m on the ballot.” They did and their verdict was thunderous and clear.

Trump lost. Epically.

Let the healing — and the reckoning — begin.

James Talarico has won the United States Senate race in Texas, the first time a Democrat has won state office since 1994.

Tuesday’s victory marks a seismic shift in Texas, which has become a standard-bearer for staunch conservative policies for the Republican Party.

The win comes after a primary intervention by US President Donald Trump, which saw him endorse scandal-ridden Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over Republican Senate candidate John Cornyn.

But Paxton failed to generate enthusiasm, even among his own party. That came despite record-breaking spending, topping over half a billion dollars.

The largest share came from billionaire donor Elon Musk, who spent at least $212 million supporting Paxton.

Musk’s SpaceX company is based in Texas. He has spent heavily across the country, with Democrats expected to investigate his role as head of the federal cost-cutting panel, DOGE, after taking control of Congress.

“It’s historic,” said Taylor Bell, a 27-year-old law student, who attended an election watch party in Houston.

“Hopefully we see money coming back to the people of Texas, and not more of the same we’ve seen — well, my whole life at this point.”

Congressman Christian Menefee, who represents Houston, told those gathered that “tonight Texas has restored the hope of a nation”.

“Tonight, I believe firmly that we can accomplish anything in this country if we just stand together and we fight back against hate and bigotry,” he said.

“The younger generation and all the people who want a better future came out and made their voices heard,” said 29-year-old Yvonne Nunga, who works in IT. “This party, this fight right now, is not about left or right. It’s about top versus bottom, and I’m so glad that we have candidates that are making this a pivotal point in their messaging.”

“The current politics of the current administration is not working for the people. It’s not for the people, by the people, it’s for the billionaires bought by the billionaires,” she said.

No ‘puppet governor’ for Trump

Tuesday also saw the surprise victory of Gubernatorial Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa, whose challenge had been considered a long shot even into the final days of the race.

Hinojosa has become the first Latino governor in the history of Texas, despite Latinos making up 40 percent of the state’s population.

Alejandra Peimbert, a regional communications director for Hinojosa’s campaign, said the victory should be seen as a rebuke to the hardline immigration policies enacted under 10 years of outgoing governor Greg Abbott.

Abbott has cooperated closely with the Trump campaign in its mass deportation campaign, spearheading policies that saw local law enforcement officials conduct immigration enforcement.

“I think the Latino community and our vote has been underestimated by politicians constantly,” Peimbart told Al Jazeera, adding that the economy is so bad, and the horrendous things that ICE has done to our community, tearing apart families…I think my community finally had enough.”

“President Trump will no longer have a puppet in a governor,” she said.

Abbott’s tenure has been defined by a conservative lurch in the state, with hardline approaches not only to immigration, but to social welfare programmes, abortion rights, education and religious freedom.

Abbott’s supporters have touted rapid economic growth in recent years, spurred by tax cuts and rollbacks on regulation.

The state has long been a Republican standard bearer in the US

Critics have said the metrics of economic success have the most positive impact on corporations and the wealthy, while middle and lower class Texans see little benefit.

Texas’s poverty rate sits above the national average, with little in the way of social safety nets.

“It’s one of the biggest things Texas can ever experience because these are two strong candidates that took their time, they took their dedication, and focused with every community in Texas, and so they deserve this position,” said 21-year-old Dylan Sutter.

“Everything is blue. It’s like the ballot itself was painted blue by the time we were done with it.”

WASHINGTON — Control of Congress hangs in the balance as Americans head to the polls Tuesday to vote in a historic set of midterm elections that will determine how power is divided for the rest of President Trump’s time in office.

A robust turnout appeared possible, after months of polls suggesting voters’ frustration with cost-of-living issues may drive them to the polls. More than 59 million Americans had already cast ballots in early voting, according to the University of Florida Election Lab.

The campaign has largely been marked by Democrats’ unexpected traction in red states, resulting in Senate races that have been far more competitive than anticipated. Whether that translates into losses for Republicans could become a nail-biter Tuesday night.

Polling shows Democrats poised to make significant gains in the U.S. House and well-positioned for swing Senate races, but analysts say the Senate majority could go either way. Several gubernatorial seats are also open, and some contests have become unexpectedly close, including in Georgia, Kansas, Texas and Florida.

Eyes will be on a handful of bellwether House races as the polls begin closing, with a Kentucky district expected to be the first to offer clues as to how good a night it may be for Democrats.

For weeks, the midterms have appeared poised to deliver a referendum on Trump’s second term and the state of the economy. Americans’ approval of the president has sunk to historic lows as they have cited concerns about affordability, corruption and immigration as driving factors for their votes.

On Monday and over the weekend, candidates made their final pushes to persuade voters.

Democrats, hoping to clench voter support for a “blue wave,” hammered home their arguments about affordability, corruption and the perceived toll of Trump’s governance, aiming to sway non-Democratic voters.

“This election is a battle between the powers that be and the powers that ought to be,” Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico of Texas said at a Sunday night rally. “We are standing with the powers that ought to be — the teachers and the nurses, the farmers and the ranchers, the grandmother who is facing eviction.”

Republicans, anticipating losses in the House, focused on delivering dire warnings to voters about Democratic candidates, whom they have portrayed throughout the campaign as extreme, dangerous and in some cases a threat to the American way of life.

“This race is about defending our state and our country, but it’s also about safeguarding our way of life,” Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican nominee for Senate, said Sunday. “Texas has never been this close to slipping away. We’ve never been this close to losing everything that we hold dear — our jobs, our livelihoods, our way of life.”

As voters cast ballots Tuesday, the Justice Department’s election monitors fanned out at polling sites across the country. Thousands of volunteers nationwide were also mobilized to be poll monitors, a backlash to the idea of potential federal election interference.

Trump sent out a flurry of last-minute social media endorsements for Republican congressional candidates and called in to the “Fox and Friends” show to make a final case. Democratic candidates dropped last-minute ads urging voters to head to the polls.

This article will be updated.

WASHINGTON — Americans are heading to the polls Tuesday in a historic set of midterm elections that will determine which party controls the chambers of Congress for the remainder of President Trump’s time in office.

Democrats appear poised to make significant gains, with polling showing the party up between 7 and 11 points on the generic ballot. Republicans are braced for losses but hoping to hang on to Senate control.

The night’s big question is whether a true wave will materialize for Democrats and how sizable it might be — how many U.S. House seats the party can flip, whether it can secure a Senate majority and whether Democrats take control of a majority of governorships.

The first polls close at 3 p.m. PST in parts of Kentucky and Indiana, and more Eastern states follow at 4 p.m. Here’s a rundown of the possible outcomes and what to watch as Tuesday unfolds.

Who could control Congress?

• Blue House, red Senate: Democrats could win a House majority — either substantial or modest — while Republicans retain the Senate.

  Split control of Congress would give House Democrats the ability to launch investigations into the Trump administration and block Republican legislative priorities. Senate Republicans would be able to scuttle legislation coming out of the House and continue approving Cabinet and judicial appointments, including to any openings on the Supreme Court. Legislative gridlock — and possible government shutdowns — would be likely.

• Total Democratic control: A larger “blue wave” could occur, sweeping up House seats for Democrats and tipping key Senate races in their favor to hand Democrats a majority in both chambers. The Senate majority would likely be very narrow and could come down to a single race.

  Democrats would be able to block Senate confirmation of Cabinet and judicial appointments. They would be able to pass legislation, but Trump would hold veto power and the Democrats would be unlikely to secure veto-proof majorities on partisan priorities.

• Wild cards: Most analysts agree there is very little chance that Republicans will keep House control.

  The potential for civic unrest looms over the election. If results in one or more races are contested by a losing party — as Trump and his allies have suggested is possible — the potential exists for prolonged uncertainty or a constitutional crisis.

When will we know the outcome?

The House majority could become clear before the night is over. The Senate majority could require a longer wait, particularly if it comes down to Alaska, which along with Hawaii is the last state to close polls, at 9 p.m. PST.

If the Democrats take the House, their full margin of victory likely won’t be clear Tuesday night. Some key swing races are in states that have slower ballot counts, including California and Pennsylvania.

If a blue wave does not materialize and the race for the House majority narrows, how each party makes out could take longer to ascertain.

Which races will provide early clues?

More than four dozen House races are competitive, including 18 that are considered tossups by election forecaster Cook Political Report. The additional 35 races are considered competitive but leaning towards one party. Whether additional, less competitive seats flip unexpectedly will be one indication of how much of a “wave” election this is.

Seven Senate seats are tossups: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas. Three more are potentially competitive: South Carolina, which leans Republican, and Minnesota and New Hampshire, which lean Democratic under Cook’s ratings.

North Carolina and Georgia, originally viewed as competitive seats, are now both seen by forecasters as fairly safe bets for Democrats.

The swing states could largely tip for Republicans or for Democrats, or the majority could come down to just a single race.

Experts say they’re watching a handful of races that could provide early indicators for how the night may go, though predictions are always dicey and outliers are possible. Among the races to keep an eye on:

• Kentucky’s 6th: This Lexington-area U.S. House district has become an unexpected tossup, and with the nation’s earliest poll-closing time, it could be a bellwether. “If Democrats win that district, then it’s a Democratic tsunami,” said Christopher Warshaw, a Georgetown University public policy professor. “Even if it’s close, that would be pretty telling.”
• Iowa’s 2nd: Forecasters have shifted this race to a tossup amid a difficult environment for state Republicans. If Republicans lose this seat — which belonged to Rep. Ashley Hinson, the party’s Senate nominee — it could signal a blue wave on the bigger side.
• New York’s 17th: One of just three districts with a Republican incumbent that went blue in the 2024 presidential election, the outcome of this close race could “tell us a lot,” said Todd Belt, a George Washington University political science professor.
• Texas’ 15th: This district offers a bellwether for Latino voters who moved right in 2024 but, signs indicate, may be shifting back to the left. The 34th and 35th districts in Texas could also be indicative.
• Michigan Senate: If the Democrats lose Michigan, their path to Senate control becomes difficult. A win in Michigan is a best-case scenario for Republicans seeking to retain Senate control. Without Michigan, Democrats would have to flip five out of six swing seats in Alaska, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina.
• Maine Senate: If Democrat Troy Jackson wins in Maine, that will likely be a good sign for his party’s chances at the Senate majority and their races in Michigan, Ohio and Iowa. Without it, Democrats could still take the majority, but Republicans’ path will become easier.
• Other states: If Democrats pull off wins in purple or red districts in Florida, Virginia and Pennsylvania, those could also signal a blue-leaning night.

Houston, Texas – The gospel music from Mount Hebron Missionary Baptist Church spills into the streets of Sunnyside, a predominantly Black neighbourhood in southern Houston.

It is a familiar scene on any given Sunday: hands in the air, immaculate bow ties on starched shirts, fabric flowers adorning perfectly pastel hats. But with the US midterm elections just two days away, the service held a special significance on the front line of a US redistricting battle.

Mt Hebron had long been located in the ninth congressional district, its politically engaged Black voters for two decades helping to elect Democrat Al Green, a flamboyant presence in Congress known for his cane-waving opposition to US President Donald Trump.

But following an appeal from Trump, the Republican state legislature last year conducted rare mid-decade redistricting, redrawing the church and its Black community into the Black-majority 18th district.

Critics call the process “cracking and packing”, diminishing the representation in Congress of minority groups, particularly heavily Democratic Black communities, by consolidating their voting power into fewer districts.

“It’s kind of one and the same when we talk about the voting and the civil rights,” said Pastor Max Miller, who has served at the church for 18 years.

“They are trying to manipulate and monopolise the vote and minimise the people who are in those districts,” said Miller. “We see so much rolling backwards that it looks like they’re trying to take a script from an old song and turn back the hands of time.”

As a result of the redistricting, Green was forced to run in a primary against 18th district incumbent Christian Menefee, another Black Democrat. He lost, and Houston lost one of its Black representatives in Congress.

The ninth district, meanwhile, was redrawn to favour Republicans, one of at least five US congressional seats the party hopes to pick up in the midterm vote.

The machinations have resonated with worshippers at Mt Hebron.

“I don’t like the redistricting at all because Al Green was moved out,” said 97-year-old Alice Jefferson, who had followed the congressman throughout his political career. “He always had good advice for the people.”

Janice Ray, a 61-year-old home health aide and entrepreneur, said state lawmakers were “trying to move people out of the district that they’re familiar with”.

“To me, it was all a bunch of BS,” she said. “There was no reason for it.”

“But we’ll stand firm, regardless of what they try to do,” Ray added. “Because just like it was changed, it can always be changed back.”

‘Voices have been weakened’

The redistricting process has undergone a generational transformation this election season, one that, experts say, has degraded longstanding guardrails protecting minority voting power.

“In political science, we have what we call descriptive representation,” Michael Adams, a professor at Texas Southern University in Houston, told Al Jazeera. “In terms of descriptive representation, minorities and others feel that if they can elect someone who reflects their values, for example, and who may look like them, their voting can be defined as one voice.”

“And certainly with not having an additional Black member of Congress representing Houston, a significant segment of Black voters may feel that their voices have been weakened,” he said.

Texas was only the beginning.

This year Republican and Democratic state legislatures across the country joined the spree: Republicans successfully redistricted in Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Ohio; Democrats did so in California, while a court-ordered map in Utah handed Democrats a favourable seat. A Democratic push in Virginia was subsequently invalidated.

Redrawing maps mid-decade, and not waiting for the latest demographic numbers from the US census, was already atypical. But many of the maps drawn this year would have been deemed illegal in previous cycles.

Section 2 of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, initially passed to counter blatantly racist voting practices in the US, had long prohibited redrawing congressional maps to dilute the electoral power of minority voters.

In April, the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court ruled that anyone challenging such a map must prove “racist intent”. Critics have said the ruling effectively allows for racial gerrymandering, with proving such an intent an unreasonably high bar.

But critics of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act have said drawing maps to protect minority voting power is in itself discriminatory.

Defenders in Texas, meanwhile, have said the redistricting was based on the shifting political makeup of the state, and not racial gerrymandering.

“This plan includes political considerations, public testimony, recognition of population growth and recent changes in voter trends,” State Representative Todd Hunter, a Republican, said shortly after the new map’s passage last year.

“Each of these newly drawn districts now trend Republican in political performance. While there’s no guarantee of electoral success, Republicans will now have an opportunity to potentially win these districts,” he said.

A political test

There are no guarantees that a party’s redistricting plans will actually work.

Following the tit-for-tat map redrawings, Republicans hoped to net at least 13 seats nationally. Polling has suggested their gains may be much more muted.

All told, about 35 million US voters will be casting ballots in newly redistricted seats this election.

“Redistricting can change the political boundaries, but it can’t guarantee how voters will behave,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor at the University of Houston, told Al Jazeera.

In Texas, the Republican map was drawn largely based on recent Latino voting trends. The demographic swung heavily for Trump in the state in 2024, despite once being considered a reliable Democratic voting bloc.

Beyond the ninth congressional district in Houston, Republicans hoped to pick up four other districts, most based in South Texas, with an eye on shifting Latino sentiment.

But the political tides have again turned. Trump’s popularity has tanked among Latino voters, fuelled in part by unrest over the economy and the administration’s aggressive deportation campaign.

It remains to be seen how that will reflect at the ballot box when Texas voters pick a senator, governor, members of Congress and a slate of state and local officials.

“These districts are a test of whether political dissatisfaction can overcome an aggressively partisan map,” Rottinghaus said.

‘Trying to mobilise’

With new boundaries come new opportunities.

The ninth district is now considered Republican-favoured, but its large population of low-propensity Latino voters creates a pathway for a Democratic victory, according to Dayana Iza, Texas state director of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voting organisation that has focused resources on the congressional race.

The state legislature “kept a big portion of Latino voters there, but the reality is that the Latino percentage in that district that votes is very, very low,” Iza told Al Jazeera. “So that then became a district that we are trying to mobilise in terms of turnout.”

On the Saturday ahead of the November 3 vote, Democratic candidate Leticia Gutierrez and State Senator Molly Cook zigzagged through a neighbourhood of single-family homes in eastern Houston.

Any path to victory, Gutierrez assessed, would be based on face time and a chance to connect with disillusioned voters.

“This community here has an average annual income of $63,000 a year. I make a little over that, and it’s difficult,” Gutierrez told Al Jazeera. “At this point, it’s not a left or a right thing anymore. This is an affordability crisis.”

“You’ve heard some of the voters out here say this is the first time someone actually came to my door,” she added. “That means a lot, and so we want to continue to do that.”

Among the residents was Christian Garcia, a 53-year-old who works at a local chemical plant and has not voted since moving to Texas from Puerto Rico in 2014. He said he is focused on his family, saving enough for retirement and eventually leaving some money behind for his adult children.

In the past, Garcia said, he felt voting was “wasting my time”.

“You know, it’s a lot of corruption and things,” said Garcia. “I just don’t believe in anybody anymore.”

Down the block, Esmeralda Gil, a 39-year-old teacher, said she hoped for a Democratic surge.

Gil questioned why taxes, particularly on housing, seemed so high, while so many struggled to access healthcare.

“We need affordable healthcare and affordable housing,” she said.

Melissa Rycroft has been arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated, again.

The “Bachelor” and “Dancing With the Stars” reality television star was arrested after Southlake, Texas, police say that she crashed into an ambulance and fled the scene on Halloween.

According to a press release published on the Southlake Police Department’s Facebook page, the former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader allegedly collided with a Southlake Fire Department ambulance that was sitting at a stop sign just before 6 p.m. A short time later, officers tracked down the “hit-and-run vehicle” and identified the driver as Rycroft.

No injuries were reported, but the mom of three was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated, second offense; accident involving damage more than $200; and driving with an invalid license. The TV personality was transported to the Keller Regional Detention Facility for processing, and bond for the combined offenses was set at $9,000.

Rycroft, who appeared on the 13th season of “The Bachelor” and went on to host “Bachelor Pad,” pleaded guilty to a separate DWI charge in August, stemming from a September 2025 incident, and agreed to serve 20 months of probation. Days before her Halloween arrest, she posted photos from a Studio 54‐themed party, where she donned a costume complete with a gold sequined dress and showed off the “Dancing With the Stars” mirror ball trophy she scored when she won Season 15 in 2012 alongside her pro partner Tony Dovolani.

Rycroft’s attorney did not immediately respond on Monday to The Times’ request for comment.