If current projections don’t change dramatically, Democrats will roll into the next Congress with an astonishing six-seat Senate majority and 40-plus-seat majority in the House. But it’s not just the sheer numbers that remain so shocking in the aftermath of Tuesday’s epochal election. It’s where Democrats went about winning those majorities, from a Senate seat in Mississippi to a series of victories in the heart of postindustrial Trump country to a raft of previously unreachable statehouses. Do these results mark a turning point in the polarized politics that have defined America for so long? To make sense of that big question and others, I spoke with Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

You’ve been doing this a long time. Does Tuesday’s election feel different from any other you’ve covered?The closest thing I could say is 2010. But when we get the final numbers, it’s more likely to look like 1974 in terms of the popular-vote margin for Democrats. So we really haven’t seen anything like this in 50 years. But it’s also such a shake-up from the politics we’ve witnessed for the past decade, which felt like they were stuck in this perpetual calcified place where red states would vote red and blue states would vote blue.

Or even longer than that. Even before Trump. You’re right. In 2008, you saw Democrats expanding the Electoral College into places they hadn’t been before, like Virginia and Colorado. After that, we saw states going from a lighter shade of blue or red to purple. But we didn’t see a real incursion by one side into the other side’s territory until Tuesday. That’s what makes it feel so different. Because it had felt like we were going to be just stuck there forevermore. And it’s not just that Democrats won those Senate races in places like South Carolina and Texas but that there’s a cushion for Democrats in the Senate that nobody had thought was possible.

The consequences of which — well, nobody wants to talk about future elections yet …Let’s not.

Just to say one thing, which is that Democratic margins in the House and Senate are so large that it will take a lot to dislodge them. Which obviously has huge significance, if Democrats win the presidency in 2028, for the filibuster and all kinds of stuff down the road. It’s not the usual 51-49........

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