On the one hand the margins look generational, a repudiation and a broad shift in the electoral map. Zoom out far enough and the take can get more cynical: the pendulum ticks back, as it always does in a midterm, the question merely one of degree. The winners will proclaim a changed country and the losers will panic about disaster, but in a few years gravity will swing things the other way and we will hear the exact opposite arguments, the commentariat stuck in these circles. It might all feel mundane, but instead it just gets cruder and more apocalyptic in its rhetoric, a theater of national decline that has become a sort of mass sporting event for some (complete with the gambl—err, sorry, prediction market opportunities) and a life-orienting religion where loyalties supplant even those of, well, religions.

So, having tossed in that wet blanket to start, I will say this election was momentous for what it put on the table. Democrats can win in Texas and Kansas, take serious runs in South Carolina and Mississippi. This is a high-water mark they may not get a chance to repeat again in the near future, but certain doors creep open, party brands shift and new possibilities emerge. Suddenly, Democrats are winning by less in places like Michigan and Minnesota, which raises some interesting questions about where they’ll stand in a closer national environment. The old national map, which has been so predictable outside of a handful of swing states, no longer applies.

We may be at a crack-up that shifts our party system: while we are likely stuck with two closely warring tribes, the battle lines are just different now. Some wondered if the Age of Trump was the start of a new era, but I think it will now look more like the end of an old one. So much feels contested: who is now the pro-development party? Who stands for fiscal restraint, and making sure social security is funded long-term? Are old categories of hawk and dove abroad still accurate? Who has a plan to fix health care that understands today’s reality? How do we handle the advance of AI? Is an affordability agenda actually possible, and what does it entail? We are embarking on a new era, one where new ideas and new figures make things possible, and on most of these questions neither party can default easily to one answer. I am curious (in a good way!) to see them try.

Suddenly the Democratic Party, after being ruled by a gerontocracy and its hand-picked successors since the end of the Obama presidency, feels young and very deep. There are Obama-style Rust Belt liberals like Josh Shapiro and Pete Buttigieg. There are charismatic young leftists like AOC and Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed. There are people of deep faith, like James Talarico and Raphael Warnock and Adam Marshall. There are the red state or district moderates, like Andy Beshear and Rob Sand and Marie Glusenkamp Perez. There are southern women, like Keisha Lance Bottoms and Annie Andrews. And my old classmate, Jon Ossoff, just might be the chosen one. A generational shift has, finally, happened, and the party is brimming with ideas and energy. How they harness it is now the million-dollar question.

The Republican identity is likewise up for grabs. For ten years now it has been all tied up in one man, and that one man is now a lame duck who has suffered one of the largest electoral repudiations in modern history. Right now he appears most interested in tending to DC area monuments, which does in fact feel like one of the better uses of his time he could find over the next two years. All presidents face midterm losses, but the degree to which these ones came from unforced errors, from a dumb war to brain-dead tariffs to needless friendship-ruining to brazen grift, are epic in scale. Trump’s lizard brain for what would resonate with the electorate worked well when he had adult minders to keep him loosely on task, but with all of them abandoned for the second term, we are left with a bunch of toadies and opportunists who bring out the worst in him. It will be fascinating to see if he tries for one last great revival or instead fades into the Truth Social night.

Meanwhile, a bunch of ambitious Republicans who have spent the past two to ten years cozying up to Trump have a dilemma on their hands. Do they double down yet further, cling to the loud base as their ticket through a primary? Do they run as far away as they can, risking a wounded leader’s wrath? Is there some way to split the difference, find that elusive dream of Trumpism without Trump? Or do they just practice amnesia, ignoring President’s output and recycling Reaganism’s greatest hits?

No doubt Marco Rubio will try to follow one of these latter two paths. Some old-school conservatives will try their comebacks, and who knows what might crawl up out of the sludge of the toxic Very Online right in the next couple years. The JD Vances and Vivek Ramaswamys of the world look particularly awful at the moment: they are smart men who should know better but have instead come to embody all of the cruelty of the Trump Era with none of the carnival fun. I try to channel my inner Talarico and forgive them for their sins, but it ain’t easy.

I am shelving the paragraphs I’d pre-written on Minnesota’s trajectory through the Trump era, because I don’t think they are the story right now. I will say only that, love or hate her, I find Amy Klobuchar a formidable force. Her ability (or lack thereof) to whip the legislature and her state agencies (something Tim Walz never really tried to do) will be very telling for the direction of Democratic governance. Yes, Klobuchar is in some ways a product of deep Minnesota DFL culture, the same world that propped up Walz. But she’s managed float above it all because she is a politician raised outside the niceties of the Twin Cities WASP-Scandinavian brahmin class: she is the daughter of an Iron Ranger. She is a political fighter, and her moderation is not poll-tested caution but something engrained through years of going to every corner of the state to practice relational politics. Just as Minneapolis fought off ICE because it resorted to a very old-school localist instinct at odds with an age of anomie, Klobuchar has the tools to be a restorative DFL governor, but only if she avoids the go-along-with-the-coalition trap Walz fell into and stays true to those deeper instincts and roots.

Closer to home, I am happy for two friends, one re-elected to the Minnesota Senate and one launched into statewide office; I am sad for another, defeated for a county board seat in which she put in so much invisible work that will, I think, be deeply missed in what can be a fractious county. Play this game enough and there will always be some dissonance. But the thing that warmed my heart the most on election night was probably seeing two landslide levies pass for the Duluth school district, a testament to a campaign to pass them that went above and beyond past ones, and a general referendum on how a district has moved beyond past naysaying or rubber-stamping to lead in a way that actually inspires some confidence. Our methods for funding schools are not great and growing more broken with time, and there are still plenty of things that need fixing. But I am proud to live in a community that is willing to invest in its future, and pleased to have many fellow travelers who, through it all, remain so committed to making it work.