Two hundred fifty years in, Americans still know how to change the people in charge. The harder test belongs to the people they just handed it to.
Kansas last sent a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1932. On Tuesday it sent Adam Hamilton. Texas had gone since 1988 without electing a Democrat senator, and James Talarico ended that streak by beating Ken Paxton. South Carolina, which Donald Trump carried by nearly eighteen points two years ago, elected Annie Andrews, a pediatrician. Iowa put a Democrat in the Senate and another in the governor’s mansion on the same ballot. Greg Abbott, three terms in Austin, lost his job.
I write from Chicago, where a Democrat night surprises nobody. That is why the map from the rest of the country holds my attention. When Wichita moves, something real has happened.
Chicago keeps its own record of power changing hands, and some of it sits in plain sight. On the median at Wacker and Lake there is a cast stone marker with two brass plaques. One remembers the Sauganash Hotel, where the town held its board meetings when it was barely a town. The other remembers the Wigwam, the wooden hall thrown up on the same corner for the Republican convention of 1860, where Abraham Lincoln was nominated on May 18 of that year. The building is long gone. The traffic does not slow down for it. It is easy to sit at that light and never know that Lincoln’s road to Washington started a few steps away. A republic is mostly made of things like that: arrangements ordinary people stop noticing because they keep working.
The count is still running, and the results are not certified. But the major news organizations have called control of both chambers. Come January, Democrats will hold the House and the Senate, and the President will face a Congress run entirely by the other party for the first time in either of his terms.
So the question worth asking in the country’s 250th year is what the voters actually said, and what they are owed now.
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The cost of living and the war with Iran dominated the reckoning. Reuters and USA Today found Republicans losing ground in 99 percent of the roughly 2,200 counties with most of their votes counted by Wednesday morning, across rich and poor places, cities and suburbs. A party can explain away a bad race. It has a harder time explaining away a map. That is a whole country raising its hand at once.
The President’s first public appearance after the returns was a tour of the ballroom going up at the White House. His own Vice President was more direct. “The reason we lost is the war,” JD Vance wrote. Ron DeSantis called it “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans.” When the bench says it out loud, the verdict is in.
The winners will be tempted to misread the room, so look at the same ballots. According to Ballotpedia’s early returns, which are still preliminary, Kansas elected Hamilton and approved a citizenship requirement for voting in its state constitution. Ohio sent Sherrod Brown back to the Senate, made Amy Acton governor, and approved a photo ID amendment. North Carolina elected Roy Cooper to the Senate and extended its photo ID rule to mail ballots. Arkansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia added citizenship requirements too.
Those results do not tell us how each person voted. They do tell us that electing Democrats and approving stricter voting requirements were compatible choices for these states. Voters can reject a party’s conduct without adopting its opponent’s entire platform. A Democrat victory is not a blank endorsement of everything Democrats want, and the winners would be wise to notice before their consultants explain it away.
The voters changed tenants. They did not sign over the deed. The law has an old word for that arrangement, and Chicago knows better than most what happens when the terms are written badly.
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In December 2008 the city leased its 36,000 parking meters to a private company for 75 years in exchange for $1.157 billion. The details went public on a Tuesday. The City Council approved the deal two days later, 40 to 5. The next year the city’s own Inspector General concluded the meters were worth about $974 million more to the city than it got for them. The city and its advisers disputed that math, and they still can. What nobody disputes is the term. Seventy-five years. Every Chicagoan who feeds a meter on Clark Street is paying rent on a decision made in a matter of days, and the lease runs past the lifetimes of a good share of the people paying it.
That is a bad lease: too long, too fast, no exit. The people who signed it are gone, and the people who pay for it never got a vote and cannot simply vote the agreement away.
The framers feared exactly that, and they wrote the national lease short on purpose. The fifty-second paper of The Federalist, usually credited to Madison, walks through the history. The British Parliament had stretched its terms to seven years. Colonial Virginia elected its assembly about as rarely. The paper leans on an old maxim, that the greater the power, the shorter its duration ought to be, and it lands on two years for the House. Dependence on the people requires returning to them. Two years, and then you come back and ask again.
Lincoln, the man nominated on that corner at Wacker and Lake, put it plainly in his first inaugural. “This same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief, and have with equal wisdom provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals.” Little power, short intervals, their own hands. That sentence is a lease with the terms printed on it.
The old word is usufruct. Jefferson reached for it in a letter to Madison from Paris in September 1789, with the French Revolution about two months old around him. “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living,” he wrote. It is a lawyer’s word out of Roman property law. You may use the thing and eat its fruit. You may not wreck it, and someday it goes back. Jefferson was arguing about debt and whether one generation could bind the next, but the word fits Tuesday better than he could have known. A majority in Congress holds the country in usufruct, exercising power on behalf of a nation that will still belong to everyone else when its members are gone. It may plant and it may harvest. It may not salt the field on the way out.
Two years ago voters granted that use to one party. On Tuesday they took it back and granted it to the other. The machinery worked. Tens of millions of ballots were cast and counted. The loser conceded in Texas. A sitting President said he would get along with the Democrats unless they turned destructive.
It is worth pausing on how strange this is. For most of human history, power changed hands by funeral or by force. Here the landlord has no army, the tenant holds the keys to the building, the budget, and the military, and the tenant still packs up when the lease runs out. Human nature gives us very little reason to expect that. It is a habit, kept up by millions of people who rarely think about it, and it should never stop surprising us.
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Now the new holders have to earn the renewal. Chuck Schumer promised “legislative razor wire.” Fine, but razor wire is a fence. It does not make a week at the grocery store cheaper or end a war. Hakeem Jeffries says his majority will focus on affordability and accountability. Good. Hold him to the first word as hard as the second.
Democrats will not control the presidency, and they cannot honestly promise to govern as though they do. They can put forward specific legislation to reduce health-care and household costs, seek changes to tariffs that raise prices, and use hearings and spending negotiations to demand an account of the war’s aims, costs, and conditions for ending it. Here is a test Democrats can apply to every bill and every bargain between now and 2028: will anyone notice at the register? Pick the two or three prices a family sees every week, name them out loud now, and agree to be judged on them. None of that guarantees a presidential signature, but it gives the country something concrete to judge. An opposition Congress has limited power to deliver. It has considerable power to reveal whether anyone is trying. If they spend two years confusing being obstructed with having nothing useful to propose, they will hand this lease right back in 2028, and they will deserve to.
The same standard applies to accountability. Investigating corruption, exposing unlawful conduct, and defending the rights of people mistreated by their government are substantial public duties. Congress does not have to apologize for doing its job because the evidence is uncomfortable or a hearing might bore somebody. But an investigation is not an economic program, and a subpoena is not a household budget. The work has to establish facts, protect rights, recover money, correct abuses, or make the next abuse harder. A witness’s humiliation is not much of a result by itself. Neither is a clip that survives until the next morning’s cable show. A party that spends 2027 congratulating itself on its subpoenas while families keep paying more for less will have learned nothing from the people it just defeated.
Lincoln had advice for winners too. Two days after he won a second term, in the middle of a war, he stood at a White House window and told a crowd of serenaders to study the election’s incidents “as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.” He had more reason for revenge than anyone in Washington this week, and he chose the other thing. Accountability should leave the country better able to govern itself. The oversight that matters is the oversight that changes something for somebody. The rest is a grudge with a gavel.
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Every Kansan who voted for Roger Marshall woke up Wednesday a full citizen. So did every South Carolinian who stuck with Darline Graham, and every Texan who voted for Greg Abbott. Their taxes are due on the same day. Their sons and daughters serve in the same war. Their claim on their government did not shrink when their candidate lost.
The first time the presidency passed from one party to the other, in 1801, Jefferson used his inaugural to say out loud what the winners owed. He called it a sacred principle: “that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” Rightful must be reasonable. Two hundred twenty-five years later, nobody has written the clause any tighter.
A majority can carry out policies its opponents dislike; elections must have consequences. But it cannot treat disagreement as grounds for lesser citizenship, or public office as permission to reward its own people and punish everyone else. The new majority’s economic and health-care proposals have to make sense for Republican households too. Its defense of due process must extend to people it would never invite to a fundraiser. Its concern about an overreaching executive must survive the next election of a Democrat president. Otherwise, its principles are merely preferences about who should be in charge. A majority that governs only for the people who voted for it invites the same correction that put it in office. The new one has two years to prove it learned something from watching.
The obligation runs the other way too, and it is just as hard. The people who lost on Tuesday owe the country what Paxton gave it: a concession, and a return to the slow work of persuading neighbors who just voted the other way. Contest a result through the courts and the canvass when there is evidence to contest it. When there is not, accept that other citizens can win an election without having stolen anything.
The republic depends on that habit. Losing must leave you with rights, a voice, and another chance. Winning must leave you with limits. Neither is an inconvenience to be overcome. They are the arrangement.
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Lincoln said one more thing at that window in 1864. The election, he told the crowd, “has demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war.” He said that until then it had not been known to the world that this was possible. He was a little proud of it, and he had a right to be.
Two hundred fifty years is a long time to keep that arrangement going. We have done it through worse than this. The voters did their part on Tuesday, in places that should humble anyone who claims to know this country from a single city, and that includes mine.
On a median at Wacker and Lake, a brass plaque marks where the man who kept the arrangement alive through a civil war won his first nomination. The cars go by. The light changes. The arrangement holds because enough people keep choosing it.
The meters on Clark Street will keep collecting until 2083, whoever wins anything. I believe most of what democracy’s critics say about it, and I keep watching it work anyway. We have once again changed the people in charge. I am still waiting for it to lower the price of anything.
Come back and ask me again in two years.