In “Shorter America”, Dr Emma Shortis keeps you up-to-date on the United States with news and analysis that you can trust.
By Emma Shortis
Fri 6 Nov 2026 14.11 AEDT
Photo: The White House/Flickr
Well. Yikes. Texas, Kansas, the Carolinas, Mississippi? This is a generational, seismic, historic shift in American politics (help me, I’m running out of adjectives). It’s a repudiation of Trumpism, absolutely – but it’s also much more than that. Texas, for crying out loud.
This week:
I think Michigan’s new Senator Abdul El-Sayed calling Vice President JD Vance “habibi” might be the best thing that’s ever happened. The undisguised contempt El-Sayed has for Vance is nothing short of delightful (in the dying days of the campaign, El-Sayed observed that Vance “has no actual soul”). El-Sayed’s joy in his own unapologetic, values-driven politics is emblematic of the bigger shift underway in the Democratic Party.
That Party is in the process of a remarkable (though still not inevitable) transformation. A young, vibrant new group of elected representatives is sweeping to power, and they’re committed to really getting stuff done. They might also be about to yeet the Party’s leadership in the Senate and the House in favour of leaders more attuned to this new kind of politics. What a thing to have happened. Mississippi. Wild.
Of course, predictably, there’s already a fight over narrative – basically, whether this is just “the economy, stupid” or a bigger realignment and rejection of Trump’s version of America (see, for example, this dumb piece in the NYT). On that, this interview with Jake Grumbach in the Boston Review is both interesting and thoughtful.
Quality research, analysis, explainers and factchecks from experts you can trust.
My take on it is basically: ¿Por qué no los dos?
I don’t think there’s any other way to read the fact that Georgia just elected the first Black woman governor ever in American history, Michigan just elected the first ever Muslim Senator in American history and Texas just elected a Latina Governor as anything other than a clear choice for a very different America. It is a rejection of right-wing identity politics. As El-Sayed put it on Hasan Minaj’s podcast: “I want to live in a world where we treat everybody well”.
As I said, I’ve run out of adjectives. Texas. It’s not just that James Talarico smoked Republican Ken Paxton; it’s that pretty much the whole state flipped – the governorship and the state house, too. As this piece in Time outlines, that is both symbolically and materially catastrophic for Republicans.
On that, I absolutely loved this Tim Murphy piece in Mother Jones on “The Texas Miracle”. And this one by Garrett Graff on what he (and I think I) sees as “the most poignant picture” of election night: James Talarico with Luci Baines Johnson after he won back her daddy’s Senate seat. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson saw the loss of the American south as the price for civil rights reform – a price that was worth paying. The significance of its return should not be lost on us.
I wrote a lot (possibly too much, sorry) about what this result means for Australia in The Point yesterday. The tl;dr is that this is an enormous strategic opportunity for us, but this government probably won’t seize the moment.
The implications for the rest of the world are also pretty significant. In Foreign Affairs, Elizabeth Saunders and Daniel Drezner have an important piece about the dangers of a lame duck Trump. And in the NYT, our longtime favourite Jamelle Bouie on how Trump remains extremely dangerous.
But for now, habibis, let’s hold on to hope x
