Call it whatever you want—a drubbing, thumping, or thrashing—but Tuesday was a powerful night for Democrats. The party stormed back from a rout of its own in 2024, receiving a massive mandate from the American people to claw back the president’s reckless agenda.

The performance of the Democratic Party Tuesday night is exactly what left-leaning operatives have been dreaming about for years: a massive, up-and-down ballot rebuke of Donald Trump, something that until last week has never truly happened.

So here we have it: the great realignment of 2026. First-time voters, long-time voters, older voters, younger voters, conservative voters, Latino voters, and many more shifted leftward in support of Democrats. As a result, the party now sits with historic federal, state, and local power at the fingertips. And with this new influx of power also comes a new playbook for the party to use to win tough races across the country.

Across the country, Democrats in historically conservative states like Iowa, Kansas, and Texas wrested control from entrenched conservative establishments that in the Sunflower State, for example, have not elected a Democratic U.S. senator since the Dust Bowl.

Whether or not you think a tide of dust—this new one probably metaphorical—is rolling across the country again, national Democrats should take note of the strategy behind these impressive victories, especially with what might be a free-for-all presidential primary at our doorstep.

For, say, James Talarico’s triumphant win in Texas or Adam Hamilton’s crusade against Sen. Roger Marshall’s aggressive medical billing practices, it is easy to thank the president’s cratering approval rating. After all, the president plunged the nation into a costly, directionless war in Iran, failed to ‘liberate’ the American consumer through tariffs, rose a record number of eyebrows due to shady ethics, and pursued an excessively nasty and gory deportation agenda. There are countless families (and industries) in Texas affected by Trump’s immigration enforcement, just as there are Kansas farmers who cannot stomach six-dollar diesel.

But to win by such commanding numbers in states once written off by Democrats as ruby-red required more than capitalizing on the widespread revulsion of the incumbent president during a midterm cycle. It required two things from candidates: fine-tuning their platform to match the innate political quirks of their state and embracing loose economic populism in a time when few feel like they can get ahead.

In Texas, Democratic state representative Gina Hinojosa embraced the Lone Star State’s libertarian spirit in a 15-second spot that tied her opponent, longtime Gov. Greg Abbott, to the rollout of 10,000 Flock cameras that are “reading your plate, logging where you sleep and pray.” The same ad, whose voiceover speaks in a rhythmic Texan drawl, highlighted the state for “celebrating freedom from big government,” words that few Democratic candidates would have muttered this cycle. But, after all, this is Texas, and for Democrats to expand the map and compete in non-traditional places, candidates need to tap into local political quirks.

In Texas’ marquee Senate race, James Talarico embraced the state’s oil and gas industry, a must-do in a state where adopting the Democrats’ standard position on energy is the equivalent of committing political suicide. But Talarico too embraced that loose form of economic populism, telling rallygoers from the bed of a rusted 1980s Ford pickup truck that the biggest divide in the nation is “not left versus right” but instead “top versus bottom.” In his year spent on the campaign trail, Talarico engaged in a passionate, populist struggle against the billionaire class, an epithet oft-heard in Trump 2.0.

In Ohio, candidates like former Sen. Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton tied their Republican opponents to data centers, the ever-thirsty servers that present real concerns within Midwestern communities. In Mississippi, prosecutor Scott Colom honed in on the state’s shuttering network of rural hospitals. And in Iowa, Josh Turek stuck to a platform that promised fair markets for small farmers. In addition, all of these candidates dabbled with that loose strain of economic populism, vowing to ban congressional stock-trading and promising accountability for members of the ‘Epstein class.’

In none of these races did candidates run as an avatar of the party’s national brand. Instead, these candidates ran hyper-local races. They ran as candidates who intimately understood the American public is fond of the softer brand of economic populism, the one that leans into the top-versus-bottom, underdog-style narrative. And these candidates all won in tremendous fashion.

This, here, is the new playbook for the Democrats. It’s scrappy, stubbornly local, and it remains to be seen if others will actually lean into it. But it has carved out the winning formula that delivered seismic wins up-and-down the ballot in states Democrats have long written off the map.