November 7-8, 2026: The 2026 Election

[Following up my weeklong series inspired by the 1976 election, a few takeaways on this year’s particularly significant midterms.]

Blue-nami, baby! That’s the main thing I want to say, but I do have a few specific AmericanStudies thoughts on a historic election (for many reasons beyond the ass-whooping):

1. Embodying Article VI: I’ve written many times about the Constitution’s Article VI, which guarantees that there can be “no religious test” for office-holding; and more exactly about the fact that it was directly connected to existing Muslim American communities in Revolutionary-era America. (I also talked about it in my invited keynote lecture at last week’s awesome Contexts conference at William Paterson University.) To my mind there is thus literally nothing more anti-American than arguments that Muslim Americans shouldn’t run for or hold political office, arguments we saw directed at Abdul El-Sayed throughout this campaign. Well, Islamophobes & white supremacist traitors, meet the first Muslim American Senator!
2. Tejano Triumph: In a chapter from my book We the People, and in this blog post inspired by that chapter, I wrote about the foundationally American identity, heritage, culture, and community known as Tejano. While there’s nothing more Texas (nor more American), it’s fair to say that that community has been deeply under-represented in that state’s politics, and thus in our national political landscape as well. So while every part of the thoroughgoing political wipeout that has given us a 100% Blue Texas is deeply satisfying, to this AmericanStudier nothing—not in that epic win, nor in the 2026 election overall—is more profoundly inspiring nor more powerfully American than Gina Hinojosa’s victory in the Texas gubernatorial race, becoming the first Latina American Governor.
3. More historic firsts: There are a number of other historic firsts from the 2026 elections worth celebrating: the first Black woman governor; the first openly gay man to be elected Senator; and the first Native American woman to be elected Senator, among others. But I want to end by highlighting an amazing woman about whom I wrote in this 2018 post: Deb Haaland, who that year was elected to the House, went on to serve as Biden’s Secretary of the Interior, and this year was elected the first Native American woman governor. As I wrote in that post, Haaland is Laguna Pueblo, the same indigenous nation as the amazing Leslie Marmon Silko. I don’t know a better model of hard-won hope than the conclusion of Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977)—and I don’t know a more potent moment of hard-won hope in my lifetime than the 2026 elections.

Blog anniversary series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on this election?