With the Democratic Party’s landslide victory, a day of reckoning appears to have arrived for Trump and the far-right, white nationalist forces that have turned cruelty into a governing principle and hatred into a political language. Something has broken in the machinery of fear. The old fascist ideas, the politics of racial hatred, and the relentless assault on human dignity have encountered a…
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Earlier this year, longtime Republican Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada unexpectedly announced his retirement, though his party wasn’t too concerned about holding on to the seat. Not only is this a congressional district that Donald Trump carried two years ago by 14 points, but voters in Nevada’s 2nd District have also quite literally never elected a Democrat.
That is, until now. The Nevada Independent reported:
Teresa Benitez-Thompson became the first Democrat ever to win Northern Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District as a nationwide blue wave slammed into Nevada.
The social worker, former pageant queen and former Assembly majority leader defeated small-business owner David Flippo (R) in a district President Donald Trump won by double digits.
With roughly 93% of the ballots tallied, Benitez-Thompson appears to have prevailed by a roughly 6-point margin, and MS NOW has called the race.
The results come a few weeks after Amodei, the outgoing congressman, reiterated that he would “absolutely not” vote for Flippo, his own party’s nominee.
Why not? As it turns out, Flippo has been accused of repeatedly exaggerating his military record — he’s said he received a Bronze Star for valor, for example, which did not happen — and falsely having claimed to have served during Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s. (Flippo denied any wrongdoing and blamed his claims about his military record on clerical errors.)
Mother Jones also reported last month on Flippo having been fired as a financial adviser two years ago, after his employer accused him of “willful misrepresentations and/or omissions of material fact” (Flippo’s campaign did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment about his firing).
Amodei nevertheless called his own party’s nominee to
Michigan voters were clear in 2022 when they voted by a 13-point margin to codify the right to abortion care in the state constitution, and the state’s Republican US Senate candidate, former Rep. Mike Rogers, claimed two years ago that he had no interest in “going back to Washington, DC to undo what the people of Michigan decided to do.” But a recent campaign contribution from the National…
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This article was originally published by Truthout on Nov. 04, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
Several statewide and state legislative contests in this week’s midterm elections have resulted in new Democratic Party “trifecta” governments — places where the party is now in control of both houses of the state legislature as well as the governor’s office.
With these new wins, Democrats have the opportunity to do something once considered nearly impossible: implement a popular vote model for electing future presidents of the United States, to replace the archaic and unpopular Electoral College.
Due to the mechanics of the Electoral College, five presidential “winners” in U.S. history have taken office who did not win the approval of most voters, including twice over the past three decades. While a constitutional amendment would be needed to formally abolish the Electoral College — which is unlikely to happen anytime soon, even after this week’s “blue wave” — there is a workaround called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which doesn’t require such an amendment.
Per Article II of the U.S. Constitution, each state is mandated to appoint, “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” These electors end up voting for president and vice president.
All states today direct their electors to vote based on their own results in presidential races. If a Democratic candidate wins in California, for example, all 54 of its electors are people chosen to support that candidate in the Electoral College.
But under
Angela Gonzales-Torres, a Democratic candidate for Congress in California who is endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has defeated establishment Democrat Rep. Jimmy Gomez, who has been in office since 2017. As of Thursday morning, Gonzales-Torres led Gomez by 18.4 points, with 74 percent of the vote in so far. The race has been called by all major news networks.
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