Democracy’s biggest win in a night of big wins

On March 23, 2026, the Conservative Political Action Conference — which is to the global right what the Comintern once was to international communism — held its fifth annual meeting in Budapest. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, was both the host and the keynote speaker.

And why not? Orbán had long been a role model for hard-right parties like the GOP or Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD. Under his rule Hungary, while still notionally a democracy, had become a de facto one-party state in which elections were effectively rigged to give the ruling party a permanent lock on power. This freed it both to pursue harsh ethnonationalist policies and to engage in massive corruption, with no need to fear a voter backlash.

Except, it turned out, if the voter backlash was a political tsunami so large that it swamped the seawalls the regime had erected. And that’s what happened in Hungary just three weeks after that CPAC event. Orbán and his party were swept from power. The new Prime Minister, Peter Magyar, has promised to “liquidate Orban’s mafia state,” and his government — as part of a program named Project Purgatory — has launched extensive investigations into Orbán-era corruption. Some prominent figures from the former regime — including the former governor of the central bank — have already been arrested.

There are obvious parallels between what happened in Hungary last spring and what happened here last week. At the time I wrote, “Hungary has shown the way. Will America follow?” We did.

There are, however, also some obvious differences. Although the U.S. right has long wanted to Orbanize America, on the eve of the midterms the U.S. wasn’t Hungary — that is, it wasn’t a state that had lived for years under one-party rule, rule that party had used to rig the political system to make that rule permanent.

But while America as a whole wasn’t like Hungary, Texas was. Republicans have dominated the state’s politics since the 1990s, and have been ruthless about using gerrymandering, crony capitalism that rewards their allies, and other tactics to preserve that dominance. The effects of gerrymandering are still highly visible if we look at the state’s Congressional representation: Democrats swept every statewide office, yet only 14 of the 38 representatives Texas will be sending to the next House of Representatives will be Democrats. And while Republicans lost the state’s own House, they retain control of its heavily gerrymandered Senate.

Yet Democrats did sweep every statewide office. This was a truly shocking development. See the chart of Polymarket odds at the top of this post. Prediction markets are largely useless at their supposed job of, well, predicting, but they do sometimes offer a useful snapshot of conventional wisdom at any given point in time. And what we see is that until very late in the game hardly anyone gave Gina Hinojosa a significant chance of winning the governor’s race. She ended up winning by 7 percentage points.

How durable will Texas’s stunning blue shift be? It’s always dangerous to read too much into a single election. A huge number of pundits declared that Donald Trump’s 2024 victory — by 1.5 percentage points — represented a fundamental rightward realignment of U.S. politics. Such proclamations look silly now that Democrats appear to have won the popular vote in the midterms by about 13 points.

Yet there are some reasons to believe that Texas will be a blue, or at least bluer, state for a long time.

A key point is that the state’s flip was powered in part by a huge leftward shift among Latino voters. This shift was much larger than the shift among Texas voters in general, which suggests that it wasn’t simply a reaction to Trump’s total failure to deliver on his economic promises. Latinos were, almost surely, also reacting to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant extremism and ICE’s brutal tactics. Not to put too fine a point on it, many Latinos voted Republican two years ago in the belief that Trump would lower prices, and instead found masked men arresting their friends and relatives on the street.

Could this change in political orientation be permanent? Consider the case of California, which wasn’t always a liberal bastion — remember, it elected Ronald Reagan as governor. But it became consistently Democratic after the 1994 passage of Proposition 187, a harsh anti-immigrant measure which was soon ruled unconstitutional, but nonetheless appears to have turned a large part of the state’s electorate permanently against the GOP.

It seems plausible that the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies will have a similar long-term effect. That effect might have faded if Trump had moderated those policies, but instead he has made Stephen Miller his new chief of staff.

And the effect will be especially large in Texas, with its large Latino population.

If Texas really has flipped persistently blue, the national impact will be immense, and not just for electoral politics. Because of its sheer size, Texas has a huge effect on many aspects of national life. For example, the Texas Board of Education is often able to determine what can and can’t be covered in high school history textbooks across the nation.

There were many startling results in the midterms, some even more amazing than what happened in Texas. Thus Mississippi appears on track to have only the second Black senator in its history; his predecessor was born a slave.

But for those of us who have been worried about the fate of U.S. democracy — which means everyone who has been paying attention — the Texas miracle is especially meaningful. Continued one-party rule in Texas was an essential assumption behind the authoritarian project. And we can all breathe easier now that the people of Texas stood up to say no.