I did not see this coming. I went to sleep expecting one set of results and woke to another. Texas has a Democratic governor and a Democratic U.S. senator. The state House and the broader national picture moved with them. Turnout in Bexar County reached roughly 50 percent, high for a midterm and well above 2022, though still short of the 2024 presidential total. The early-vote numbers were the largest the county has recorded in an off-year. Those facts are not in dispute this morning.¹
What follows from them is not abstract. A change in the governor’s office and the Senate seat changes the practical path on abortion statutes in Texas. It changes the state’s posture on border enforcement and the rules that govern election administration. Nationally, the same night alters the trajectory of the tariff and border measures that had been advancing, the work on fentanyl and the cartels, and the foreign-policy relationships that had been rebuilt with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Xi in China, Putin, and others. Those are concrete shifts in authority. The money, the candidates, and the organizational effort on the other side did not prevent them.
Two years ago the same electorate produced a clear result in the opposite direction. Elections remain volatile; a single midterm does not lock in a permanent new baseline. That observation does not cancel the policy consequences that arrived with the returns. It simply means the next cycle will test which pieces of the 2026 environment prove durable and which do not.
The integrity of the process is not a side issue that can be set aside while the numbers are examined. Ballots are scanned at the precincts and voting centers. Tabulation occurs with the thumb drives. Those drives take a circuitous route under the published chain-of-custody rules. The machines run on proprietary programming, so poll watchers cannot see what happens to the drives once they leave the polling place.² Bexar County’s published central-count plan and the Texas Secretary of State handbook describe sealed transport bags, numbered seals, camera coverage, and two-person transfers. Whether those procedures were followed in every instance on November 3 remains a question that requires examination of the records. High turnout does not resolve it. The canvass and any subsequent public inspection of the paper are the proper next step.
I am still processing the scale of the change. People have asked for a reaction. This is the honest one: the direction of policy in the areas named above has changed, the size of the Texas result is larger than ordinary midterm patterns, and the process questions around central count remain open. Those three things sit together. The work now is to look at the paper, the precinct data, and the actual statutes that will be proposed, not to pretend the night was ordinary.
One reader put the larger frame this way: the Lord did not see things as desired, and the country may be receiving what it deserves. The difficulty is that everyone suffers the consequences. Communism is a real problem, and it is on the move. Its roots are the old ones Fulton Sheen named: covetousness and envy, the collective form of selfishness that appears once God is set aside.³ Open borders have supplied one practical means. Muslims who organize and vote as blocs have been brought in. Whether that organizing produced a measurable effect on the statewide margins, and whether open-border policy is the direct cause of its growth, remains a question that requires examination.⁴ The statutes, the administrative rules, and the foreign-policy shifts that follow from last night’s numbers are the practical means by which that movement continues.
The response cannot be despair. Serious, sustained prayer of the redemptive-suffering kind is required. That is the work that remains open to each of us while the canvass proceeds and the statutes are written. Deo gratias for the clarity of the numbers we do have. The rest will be examined in due course.
Notes
- Bexar County Elections Office, Election Day turnout report, November 3, 2026 (approximately 50 percent overall participation, including early voting; Election Day total 136,124 as of poll close). Comparison years drawn from county historical data.
- Texas Secretary of State, Central Counting Station Handbook (rev. July 20, 2026); Bexar County Elections Administrator Michelle Carew, public statements on chain-of-custody improvements (matching outer clothing for transfer staff, additional cameras on the route, numbered seals tracked by technicians rather than broken by judges, retained copies of forms). Published procedures require sealed transport, two witnesses, and the right of poll watchers to follow materials from the polling place to central count. Proprietary USB media is standard for the ES&S systems in use. No public record located as of November 4, 2026, documents specific unsecured transfers or departures from those procedures on November 3. The question is therefore one of compliance and public inspection of the actual records.
- Fulton J. Sheen, Communism and the Conscience of the West (1948) and related radio addresses. The identification of covetousness and envy as the moral roots of communism is consistent with Sheen’s published teaching. Exact wording should be verified against the primary source if a direct quotation is intended for final publication.
- Organized Muslim political activity in Texas is documented. CAIR Action issued a voter guide that designated Talarico, Hinojosa, and other Democratic candidates as preferred or endorsed. Mosque-based registration drives (Islamic Society of Greater Houston, North Texas Votes, Emgage Action, local PACs) operated throughout the cycle. Talarico held a community meet-and-greet in Irving. Muslim population estimates in Texas run in the 400,000–500,000 range. An underground reporter who entered a mosque and voted with the congregation reported bloc voting; multiple accounts described the same pattern. The large building proposed outside Camp Bullis, and the national-security investigation that Attorney General Paxton and Governor Abbott pursued in response to it, are treated in the earlier article on that proposal. These efforts existed. What is not yet established is the size of their effect on the statewide margins or a direct causal line from open-border policy to the growth and effectiveness of these particular organizations. The claim that they organized and voted as blocs is an argument that requires examination; it is not yet a settled fact. Sources: CAIR Action voter guide (October 2026); Islamic Society of Greater Houston registration claims; North Texas Votes mosque registrations; Emgage Action endorsements; Irving Muslims PAC; Talarico Irving meet-and-greet (October 19, 2026); Texas State Historical Association population estimate (2010) and subsequent public estimates; CAIR midterm survey; prior article on the Camp Bullis proposal and the Paxton-Abbott investigation.