Last year, Donald Trump rolled out what he thought was a surefire strategy to staying in power: Just order big red states to redistrict in the middle of the decade instead of as usual after the Census, so they could send more Republicans to the House and he’d be spared the embarrassment of big Republican losses in the midterms. 

No, of course it wasn’t Trump’s own idea; it originated with Trump’s then-Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair, who later stepped aside from his White House job to run Trump’s midterm strategy. Trump thought highly of Blair, giving him the nickname “Brilliant James,” although as the Washington Post noted days before the election (gift link) sometimes Trump said “brilliant” with a sarcastic tone. 

If Trump hasn’t already shitcanned Brilliant James following Tuesday’s elections, we can probably expect a social media post soon, explaining that Trump barely knew the guy, maybe he brought coffee to Cabinet meetings, Trump couldn’t say. 

Anyhoo, that scheme really didn’t pay off for Trump, what with Democrats winning back control of the House with Crom knows how many total seats (somewhere around 260, plus or minus, once all the California votes are counted). More to the point, Republicans took a solid thumping in most of the gerrymandered congressional districts that were supposed to protect Trump from impeachment. 

And while everyone is going nuts over the national outcomes, let’s also spare some cheers for big changes in state governments, since states control what the electoral maps look like in future elections. Tuesday’s voting resulted in five new Democratic trifectas, in Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 

Yes, in freaking Wisconsin, which since 2012 has been saddled with one of the most extreme GOP gerrymanders in the nation despite long having a roughly even split in voter registration. Then in 2022, the already skewed Republican majority engineered an even more extreme partisan advantage, making elections almost an afterthought. The resulting artificial GOP skew in the 2023 Wisconsin Lege gave House Republicans a 64-35 majority, just one seat shy of two-thirds, and a veto-proof 22-11 supermajority in the state Senate. 

In 2023, the state Supreme Court, finally freed by voters of a Republican stranglehold, threw out the gerrymandered voting maps. Wouldn’t you know it, once the maps were unfucked, people elected Democrats: in 2024, voters whittled down the Republican legislative majority, and this year, with fair maps, Wisconsin voters threw the Republicans out of power completely for the first time in 16 years. 

Lest anyone whine that the new maps just swapped in a Democratic advantage, we’ll note that both houses now look a lot like Wisconsin’s closely divided electorate: The 99-seat House will now have 53 Democrats and 46 Republicans, while the split in the 33-seat state Senate is a tidy 18 Dems and 15 Rs. That’s a hell of an improvement over 2023!

This is what restoring democracy looks like, and it’s beautiful.

Incredibly, though, Wisconsin Public Radio reported the return of fair representation as if it were a friggin’ authoritarian takeover, with the headline “Democrats flip Wisconsin Legislature, setting up single-party control.” Jesus.