What happened last night was no ordinary election. It was a mass affirmation that most Americans still believe in our nation’s basic values, and a mass rejection of a movement that wants to destroy everything our nation stands for. And no, it wasn’t just economic dissatisfaction.

Yes, Trumpflation created by tariffs and the Iran debacle helped. But an election swung by public anger over high prices looks like 2024, when Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. Last night Democrats appear to have won the popular vote by 13 -14 percentage points.

What drove this amazing victory? Hispanic voters, who swung to Trump in 2024 in the naïve belief that he would bring prices down, turned massively against a regime that is arresting, imprisoning and deporting their friends and families. Blacks turned out in droves against a transparently racist party that is trying to take away their voting rights. Americans of every kind were repelled by the administration’s cruelty and its rampant, brazen corruption.

After 2024, large swathes of the elite rushed to prostrate themselves before Trump, somehow convincing themselves that the narrow defeat of Democrats in a year when incumbent parties were defeated almost everywhere heralded a permanent transformation of U.S. politics, that corrupt authoritarians peddling hate would rule forever. There’s a lot to be written about why oligarchs in particular were so willing to believe that small-d democratic values were a thing of the past — and one of the main things big-D Democrats need to do now is hold not just Trump’s officials, but also his enablers, accountable. But that’s a topic for another day.

The main point for now is that MAGA took 2024 as proof that Americans want fascism, and acted on that premise. But tens of millions of Americans in effect said, no, that is not what we want. That is not who we are.

The damage done over the last two years is incredible, and I don’t know how much of it can ever be repaired. But there is, at last, hope. For last night America showed that it is still America.