Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and let’s be honest — today I was tempted to go for the champagne.
To our paid subscribers: thank you. You let us do what we love: covering politics and chasing down politicians to get the truth. We’ve enjoyed every minute of it. On this Sunday after a whirlwind election, we’re eternally grateful.
If you’re reading this and you haven’t joined yet, it’s time. You see what we’re doing here. You see how much it matters. It’s time to dig in and get started. Upgrade your subscription and become part of the most important community in America.
The Three Hardest Wins in America
First, I want to celebrate our core victory: America’s democracy survived, and is growing back.
Trump’s election in 2024 was the product of COVID-era inflation. It was not a validation of his corrupt, despicable politics.
Tuesday’s vote also showed that billionaires can be beaten at the ballot box. Elon Musk spent $212 million in Texas, and James Talarico won by 12 points.
I know it might sound premature, but after Tuesday, I have faith in America again.
Let’s start in Mississippi.
Scott Colom was born on Christmas Eve 1982 into a family that already knew what it meant to be first. His mother, Dorothy, was the first Black person ever elected to the chancery court in her district. His father was a lawyer who worked for Ronald Reagan and ran for state treasurer as a Republican.
In his twenties, Colom went to law school in Wisconsin. At 32, he became the first Black district attorney ever elected in a majority-white district in Mississippi. He’s still a member of the same Baptist church he grew up in. When a sheriff in his own district — a fellow Democrat — abused his office, Colom was the one who brought in the feds.
In 2023, President Biden nominated him to the federal bench. Mississippi’s other Republican senator, Roger Wicker, said yes. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith said no.
So he ran against her, and won. Scott is a seventh-generation Mississippian.
Mississippi hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1982. When it’s called, Colom will be the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.
Then there’s South Carolina.
Annie Andrews moved to South Carolina in 2009 to work at Charleston’s children’s hospital. She spent nearly twenty years there, often as the doctor on the floor when a kid was hospitalized.
There she sometimes found kids who’d shot themselves with a gun they’d found at home. After the Parkland school shooting, she stopped being able to leave that at work. So she joined Moms Demand Action and started researching how doctors can talk to parents about locking up guns.
In 2025, RFK Jr. took over the nation’s health agencies. South Carolina, a state that never expanded Medicaid, became the epicenter of a measles outbreak, with nearly a thousand cases.
That was it for her. “No one recruited me to run,” Andrews said. She quit her job in June to campaign full-time, a mom of three public-school kids living on protein bars and gas-station snacks.
Andrews will be South Carolina’s first female senator, and the first pediatrician in the chamber’s history. In her victory speech, she said the win belonged to the teachers and the veterans she’d met in every corner of the state.
And then Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.
Adam Hamilton grew up in the Kansas City suburbs in a family that rarely went to church. He found religion as a teenager, and married his high-school sweetheart, LaVon, a week after graduation. In 1990, when they were 25, the two of them started a church with four people — themselves and their two little girls — meeting in the chapel of a funeral home.
Thirty-six years later, Church of the Resurrection is the largest United Methodist congregation in America. With 24,000 congregants Hamilton says are equal parts Republicans, Democrats and independents. He’s written thirty books, and prior to this race, he’d never run for anything.
Republican senator Roger Marshall’s answer was to let his allies brand him a heretic for suggesting non-Christians might get into heaven, and run an ad accusing him of protecting a pedophile.
Hamilton’s reply was that if Jesus were standing in front of them, Roger Marshall would call him woke too.
Kansas voters agreed. “This election is a rebuke of unkindness and cruelty in Washington,” Hamilton said Tuesday night.
Marshall conceded, saying, “I don’t have any answers.” For once, a Republican senator told the truth.
Excited about the election results? Become a part of the community that made it happen. Raw America needs you; we run on subscribers. Thanks for becoming a part of this important fight.
The Gerrymander That Ate Itself
Last summer, “very stable genius” Donald Trump ordered Texas Republicans to redraw their congressional map to try and squeeze out five more Republican seats. Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Missouri followed.
Texas’ Republican gerrymander rested on a single bet: that Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 would do it again.
Texas Republicans redrew the map to gain five seats. They ended up losing one.
Nationwide, Republicans targeted fifteen Democratic districts. They won two.
In North Carolina, the former House Speaker who led the state’s redistricting, Tim Moore, lost to a Democrat in the very district he drew for himself. And Richard Hudson, the chairman of the Republican House campaign committee — the man whose job was to hold GOP seats — lost his, in a district his party had drawn to be safe by eighteen points, to retired Army major Richard Ojeda.
In Missouri, voters threw out Republicans’ new map by 24 points.
Republicans tried to pick their voters. Voters picked back.
The Wins Nobody’s Covering
Missouri didn’t just reject the map.
For years, Missouri’s Republican legislature gutted whatever voters passed: Medicaid expansion, minimum wage laws and abortion rights. On Tuesday, voters passed Amendment 6, which makes the state’s citizen initiative a fundamental right.
Lawmakers can now only overturn a voter-approved law with 80 percent of both chambers and a public vote. It’s the strongest protection for direct democracy in the country, and it’s barely been mentioned.
In Virginia, voters restored voting rights for felons when they walk out of prison. Virginia had lifetime disenfranchisement for any felony, among the harshest in the nation. It’s over.
Virginia wrote the right to abortion into its constitution. Nevada did it too. Missouri Republicans tried to repeal the abortion amendment voters passed in 2024 and bundled it with a ban on care for trans kids; voters rejected both.
What Comes Next
The gavels change hands in January. This means subpoenas, and dramatic hearings on the Iran war they hid from you. More investigations into the Epstein files. Paramount’s disgusting media deal.
We’ll be there for every one of them.
If you haven’t yet joined as a paying subscriber, now’s the moment. I want you to be part of our vibrant community, making history happen. Today’s the day — I’m hoping you’ll join me right now.
What I’ll remember from this week isn’t Washington. It’s a pastor in a funeral-home chapel, a pediatrician who couldn’t look away, and a prosecutor whose own senator tried to end his career.
The billionaires bought the networks because they thought you’d stopped paying attention.
But you were. I was counting on it.
I’m John Byrne. I hope you enjoyed this election. I’m looking forward to following these green shoots with you.
— John Byrne, Founder, Raw America & Raw Story
P.S. If this election matters to you, share this newsletter today with someone who’d love to read it.
The diagnosis is premature. Trump holds the executive branch, which holds law enforcement and the military. The judicial branch is still very much Trump-leaning, most notably "absolute presidential immunity" fabricating John Roberts and the rest of the MAGA activists on the bench. SCOTUS is effectively the MAGA Revolutionary High Council and a court of ideology, not a court of law.
Holding the legislative is a start, but it's not the end of the struggle.
Great article. Hope we see changes in the next couple of years.