Early election night results for the 2026 midterms suggest a strong showing for the Democrats, and that’s putting it mildly. It’s only 9:30 PM ET as of this writing, and the path to victory in the House for Republicans looks impossible. In the Senate, their chances are disappearing. The idea that some of the states still currently on the board for the Democrats—like South Carolina and Texas—would be up for grabs tonight would have sounded like the deluded fantasy of your MS NOW-addled grandma on election night in 2024. But here we are.

While there’s still a conceivable universe where Paxton could win and become junior senator in Musk’s home state, Paxton’s opponent James Talarico’s lead was downright authoritative as of this writing. If Talarico wins, he will be the first Democratic senator from Texas in nearly four decades. (Updated: 12:37 AM ET:

New York Times screenshot from Gizmodo

To be absolutely clear It’s a good thing I spend so much, it’s really close! Maybe in the end, it’ll turn out my donations made the difference. And hey, maybe that will be true.

But for what it’s worth, that looks less likely at this point than Democrats taking both houses of Congress. In fact, a Paxton victory looks less likely at the moment than a Democrat win in Kansas, where the Democratic nominee for Senate just won a county by double digits that President Trump won by 40 points in 2024.

His current pointed tweet sets out to find out why. He claims to fear a scenario in which, over the next several years, the Democrats take over every branch of government and lock Republicans out of meaningful voting. “This would result in America becoming a permanent one-party state and the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word,” Musk writes.

There could be other reasons. Powerless Democrats have called for a criminal investigation into DOGE, and a probe into SpaceX’s activities with regard to the Ukraine war. It’s still early on election night, but it’s already very tough to imagine Congressional Democrats won’t have some actual firepower in the upcoming session.

It seems like he sometimes has flashes of self-awareness when it comes to his political activities. He spent an estimated $276 million on Trump in 2024, and may look at that as a success, but he also spent an estimated $20 million on an election last year for a Wisconsin supreme court justice who then lost, and then claimed he was—at least for a while—giving up political spending, saying “I think I’ve done enough.” Last month he said he was “evacuated” with his budget-slashing DOGE activities.

But he also invested an enormous amount of his dignity in his effort to please President Trump. Politics-wise, he’s paid the better part of $1 billion for a first-class, one-way ticket on the SS MAGA, and if I were him I’d be counting the lifeboats right about now.

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