CRACKS IN THE EDIFICE: The night the Maga fever broke and the moral arc bent back towards justice

Some are calling Tuesday’s thrashing of Donald Trump’s Republicans a Blue Tsunami, but I prefer to think of it as the night of the long arc – as in Martin Luther King’s famous line, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”.

One of the last two Senate races still undecided, and probably the most surprising, is Mississippi. As of Wednesday morning, Scott Colom, the Democratic candidate, was just 43 votes ahead of his Republican opponent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, with a few thousand provisional ballots still to count.

Colom, a Black district attorney, blindsided the pundits with an extraordinary showing in a Deep South state Donald Trump won by 23 points in 2024. His feat also carried a historical resonance that, more than anything else, captured what Tuesday night really meant.

Colom filmed his final campaign ad inside the home of Medgar Evers, the World War 2 veteran and civil rights activist who was murdered by a white supremacist in the driveway of that house in Jackson, Mississippi, in June 1963.

The ad was a statement not only about the long arc of Mississippi’s ugly racial past, but about the Maga movement’s resurrection of the ghosts of the Jim Crow South, and their absorption into the governing ideology of Donald Trump’s Washington.

Anyone keeping score would know that the Trump administration deleted the name of Medgar Evers, who served in the Normandy campaign, from an Arlington National Cemetery web page honouring Black veterans. That was just one of a slew of slights, petty but instructive, that spoke volumes – among them restoring the names to military bases of Confederate generals who fought for slavery.

A blow to the haters

If Tuesday night’s thrashing was a repudiation of Donald Trump, the sycophants of the Republican Party and the billionaire class, it was also a historic blow against bigotry, hatred and cruelty – one I doubt either Trump or Maga will recover from.

The race getting the most attention is Abdul El-Sayed’s victory over Islamophobia and Aipac money, perhaps the best sign that a new America is rising. Representative Ilhan Omar won her district despite the racist attacks on her and Minnesota’s Somali community by Trump and his Maga followers.

But the name of the game on the Democratic side was diversity. In New Mexico, Deb Haaland became the second Native American woman elected governor of any state. A record number of women will now serve in Congress and in statewide executive offices.

And interestingly, for a party increasingly critical of the Israeli government, one of the most impressive candidates to leapfrog to the front of the 2028 presidential field is Jon Ossoff, a Jewish senator re-elected in Georgia.

Patrick Gaspard, the former US ambassador to South Africa, commented that the election was about more than the price of gas, irrational tariffs or the cost of living: “This was a rights-based surge. A democracy surge … we cannot ignore what animated the souls of our surge voters. And we absolutely cannot continue to ignore corruption as an issue even within our own party ‘until the polls catch up.’ ”

Democrats saw a massive swing across the Maga South. They won South Carolina and blew the lights out in North Carolina and Georgia, where Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman elected governor in US history.

She will govern from Atlanta, home of Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, whose pastor, Raphael Warnock, already sits in the Senate.

A reminder of how long the arc of history is came in April, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Louisiana v Callais. For decades, Section 2 of the Act had protected the majority-Black districts that gave Black voters in the South representation in Congress. That protection had helped bring Black representation in the House close to the Black share of the population for the first time in the nation’s 250-year history.

The ruling gave states licence to gerrymander those districts out of existence. Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama moved quickly to do just that.

Voting rights were at the heart of the civil rights movement. That same determination to overcome disenfranchisement brought Black voters to the polls and, joined by Latino and sympathetic white voters, helped drive the massive swings in the South that so many pundits failed to see coming.

Fighting to recover their voice

For the past two years, Black Americans have watched themselves being quietly erased from public life, turned once again into effectively second-class citizens.

One of Trump’s first actions upon returning to power was to fire General CQ Brown as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, only the second Black general to hold that post. Since then, other Black officials have been removed from office, and the campaign against “wokeism” and DEI has frozen the government careers of many more.

Much of this is symbolic and petty, like shelving the plan to put Harriet Tubman – the formerly enslaved abolitionist and Civil War hero – on the $20 bill, while Trump tries to get his own face on a new $250 bill. But all of it was on the ballot for Black voters on Tuesday.

And the policies have real-world consequences. The refugee programme has been suspended for every other country, while a special pathway has been created for white Afrikaner “refugees”. In fiscal 2026, more than 16,000 of them were admitted, alongside just five refugees from anywhere else.

The Trump administration has placed demands on South Africa that it has applied to no other country, and has chosen to communicate with the South African government through the Freedom Front Plus, a party that won 1.4% in the last national election. It is led by Corné Mulder, whose father, Connie Mulder, was minister of information in the apartheid government and fell in the “Information Scandal” of the late 1970s.

One of the men behind Trump’s actions and misstatements about South Africa is Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the same man behind the mass deportations by ICE that New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has described as ethnic cleansing. If anyone other than Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth is to blame for Tuesday’s Republican rout, it is Miller.

The Latino vote

Hispanic voters in places like the Rio Grande Valley swung heavily to Trump in 2024, one of the reasons for Kamala Harris’s defeat. Many are conservative Catholics, small-business owners, tradesmen and contractors who supported Trump’s promise of tighter control of the border and the jailing and deportation of violent criminals.

What they did not expect were sweeping raids targeting people, including their own family members, who had been living and working peacefully in the United States for years.

Since 20 January, 2025, ICE and Border Patrol agents have killed at least 11 people in shootings, including US citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and Keith Porter Jr in Los Angeles. Others have died while fleeing. And about 60 people have died in ICE detention over the same period.

In September 2025, the Supreme Court lifted a lower-court order that had barred immigration officers in Los Angeles from stopping people based solely on race or ethnicity, language or type of work. As a result, many Latinos live in fear of being picked up – and some of those picked up are not undocumented at all, but US citizens and legal residents.

Though much of the real pain has unfolded out of sight of middle-class America, few Americans have not been touched by it, either personally or through someone they know.

My friend Marilyn fled El Salvador’s civil war and its death squads in 1979 and reached the United States by way of Costa Rica. She married an American and became a US citizen. Her sister, who came later, never naturalised. For 20 years, she worked as a cleaner in apartment buildings in the Washington suburbs while raising a son, who is now 12.

One day last November, she was driving a truck to the dump when ICE agents pulled her over, dragged her from the cab and took her to a detention centre in Baltimore, where they confiscated her phone and purse.

From there, she was bused to Louisiana and put in an overcrowded cell with many other women, among them a 75-year-old Chinese woman with dementia and a Peruvian woman seven months pregnant. Marilyn’s sister managed to reach lawyers, who got her released on bail. Many of the women she was held with have since been deported or are still there.

Stories like hers are now commonplace across the United States. As the journalist Adam Serwer put it, the cruelty is the point. The aim, it seems, was to make life so unliveable that people would simply leave of their own accord.

The result has been a labour crisis in construction and on farms. Even stores and restaurants in Latino neighbourhoods are struggling to survive, because their customers have either left or are too frightened to go out.

“A lot of people thought they were going to go after the criminals and the bad guys,” Marilyn said. “But they came, and they took people from our family. They even take American people, you know?”

How the Republicans lost Texas

Plenty of groups were angry with Trump: farmers in Kansas, just about anyone under 30, even working-class white men struggling paycheck to paycheck while Trump hobnobs with billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Across the board, one of the most potent issues was opposition to the data centres springing up across the American landscape, symbols of AI and the tech billionaires behind it.

But the biggest contributor to the Republicans’ terrible night was the Latino backlash. Nowhere did it hit harder than in Texas, where James Talarico won by a huge margin, Gina Hinojosa brought down one of the party’s biggest figures, Governor Greg Abbott, and Democrats captured almost every statewide office.

Texas is a particular headache for Republicans, because without it they have little chance of winning the Electoral College in 2028. And it is now clear that, just as in California three decades ago, no one will win the state without Latino voters.

Vice President JD Vance blamed Tuesday’s losses on the Iran war, which was a big factor. But the poisoned chalice Trump will hand him will outlast the war. The message Vance has been peddling – that certain people “belong” and others don’t, and that certain civilisations are superior – will not go down well with the very voters he hopes to win.

Trump still has enormous power over the military and foreign policy, though the new Congress will challenge him all the way. But on Tuesday night, from Medgar Evers’ Mississippi to Martin Luther King’s Atlanta, the long arc bent a little further toward justice. DM

Phillip van Niekerk is managing partner of Calabar Consulting, a political risk consulting firm.