More than 124 million Americans made their voices resoundingly clear at the polls last week Tuesday.

By percentage, this was the second highest national midterm turnout since 1914.

Still, it is not the first time that bread-and-butter cost of living issues generated robust and even historic numbers. And it’s not the first time that voters reminded an arrogant president and a do-nothing Congress that there’s no such thing as a permanent majority.

However, it is the first time American voters have had to overcome government obstacles erected almost exclusively by Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers to keep them from the ballot box.

Voters instead headed to the polls and handed out historic wins. They flipped more than two dozen Republican-held seats in the House, giving Democrats in that chamber what could be their biggest majority in two decades. They flipped Senate seats that had been held by Republicans for decades — in the case of Kansas, since 1932. They handed Democrats a majority of governorships in the U.S. for the first time since 2006. It was “close to an extinction-level event” for Republicans, said Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Suppressing the vote

There is no way to know how many more would have voted if the U.S. Supreme Court had not shredded the Voting Rights Act, or if Gov. Ron DeSantis had not gifted Republicans new gerrymandered congressional seats, or if the Florida Legislature had not sharply restricted the use of drop boxes, all but criminalized voter registration drives and made voting by mail needlessly difficult.

The landslide was a clear rejection of those and other voter suppression schemes, culminating in Donald Trump’s desperate down-to-the-wire threats of imprisonment for voters and election workers alike.

That’s why the biggest winner in Tuesday’s midterm election isn’t a candidate or a party. It’s democracy.

Things easily could have gone the other way.

When the intimidation, and the cry to “cheat like hell,” comes straight from the Oval Office, voting can no longer be taken for granted.

Worried about fair elections

Voters should never have to wonder about whether Washington is going to disrupt our elections, Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott told Democracy Docket. But “nobody can say it’s uncalled for,” he said. “The statements have been made. The actions have been taken.”

In the weeks leading up to the election, Trump’s Department of Justice demanded that states set aside and not count thousands of votes from people who “might” not be citizens.

Local California election workers were subpoenaed. The DOJ did not even wait for Alaska’s election before suing to make sure votes for a Democrat Senate candidate be set aside. The agency deployed an unprecedented 1,000 government poll watchers, including in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

It threatened all 50 state election supervisors with possible criminal charges. Some so-called election “enforcement” efforts were so blatantly unconstitutional that, in an ideal world, the government attorneys’ license to practice law would be questioned.

But 34 courts paused or blocked Washington’s last-resort litigation.

People kept voting

All the while, Americans kept voting. More than 50 million had cast ballots by mail or early voting before Tuesday.

On Election Day, flooding closed three Palm Beach County precincts. In Broward, technical glitches temporarily halted voting minutes after polls opened.

Swastikas popped up near a polling place in Orlando’s Orange County.

But turnout in Orange turnout hit 57.8%, Broward’s was 60.4% and in Palm Beach County, turnout was 64.8%.

Biggest midterm turnout ever

The unexpectedly strong vote for Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. Senate, David Jolly and Angie Nixon, fell short and did not put them over the top.

Florida is still very much a red state. But Florida’s 8.3 million voters weren’t simply putting new faces in office.

They were sending messages. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ cynical gerrymandering failed when Democrats took every one of the new seats designed to protect Republicans.

The Florida House of Representatives lost its Republican supermajority, giving Democrats a much stronger voice and making balanced governing possible.

Every statewide Republican winner knows they squeaked into office by one or two percentage points. They know they have no mandate for extremism. They know that if they forget that, the same voters will remind them.

The president, of course, still has his job. But at least for now, the blue tsunami has forced the man who mercilessly bullied his way through the last two years to do what all bullies do when confronted with a united opposition.

Donald Trump caved.

I am “absolutely willing to accept those results,” Trump told the New York Times of the landslide.

Make no mistake. Trump didn’t change his mind. The people of America did it for him.

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