Trump crashed on his own shores of discontent, but the blue wave doesn’t deliver certainty

November 6, 2026 — 2:00am

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Wave. Deluge. Tsunami. At some point, we might have to abandon the nautical metaphors because they can’t quite capture the scale of what’s happening. It’s true the Trump administration got swamped this week, Donald Trump himself just about drowning in the Democratic swell.

There are, frankly, too many examples from which to choose. James Talarico’s outrageous senate win in Texas, snapping a 32-year losing streak by around 12 points. Gina Hinojosa’s even more seismic victory in the same state to become its first Hispanic governor. Swings just either side of 20 per cent in multiple House races in Kentucky. Georgia electing its first black female governor. Democrats winning a Senate seat in Kansas for the first time in 94 years. Droughts extinguished by the flood.

But the trouble with the metaphors is they assume something steady lies beneath. They are measured against some idea of normality. A wave, for example, is measured in relation to an otherwise consistent water level. But there is nothing stable underneath all this. There hasn’t been for at least a decade since Trump upended American politics. Biden’s 2020 win was more convincing than Trump’s. Then in 2024, Trump’s was more convincing again, delivering a greater share of the electoral college and both chambers of Congress. His position mirrored Barack Obama’s dominance in 2008. And it has unravelled in two years.

I think there are two implications here. One is that Trump’s victories, while sensational, have always been........

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