How a Frenchman’s book on ‘Democracy in America’ nearly 200 years ago explains the midterms, from data centers to Texas

I turned to Alexis de Tocqueville, having read about him for years and never actually read him myself, after the Nov. 3 midterms handed Democrats a “blue tsunami” the likes of which I haven’t seen in my 43 years. Texas went blue down the line. And in 40 of 41 local votes across 10 states, Americans chose to limit data centers.

Within days, $3.2 trillion of AI-related stock market wealth was wiped out as investors bet the election winners would slow the AI buildout. Texas holds one-fifth of the planned data-center pipeline, and its governor-elect has promised to ban new approvals until the state legislature acts.

I had been privately skeptical, because data centers are the bedrock of the massive industrial boom powering most of America’s GDP growth. From an economic perspective, being anti-data center is like being pro-recession, I assumed, but Tocqueville’s Democracy in America explains a lot of what has really gone on in America for centuries.

Tocqueville was a young French aristocrat who toured the United States in 1831 and published Democracy in America in two volumes, dated 1835 and 1840. The Library of America calls it arguably “the most perceptive and influential book ever written about American politics and society.” One big idea he offered was what he called the “general equality of condition” among Americans, meaning how widely property and status were spread around. And this, he proposed, is the fact that the rest of American life comes out of. He argued that Americans hold tight to their property, care more about equality than liberty, and organize locally to get what they want. The data-center industry made its plans without accounting for any of that, and it’s an open question whether the Democrats who just won a landslide really understand it, themselves.

Most Gen Xers can barely remember a wave like this one. The closest historical comp is the 1974 blue wave that swept aside the corruption of the Nixon Watergate era. The 2026 midterms suggest a scrambling of the calculus of red states and blue states much like Donald Trump’s shocking election did a decade ago, when the “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan crumbled.

Nationally, Democrats have so far flipped seven Senate seats and are on track for at least 258 House seats. They took a majority of governors’ mansions for the first time since 2010, and Trump acknowledged that Democrats had secured both chambers. Down the ballot, voters in 10 states decided 41 local measures on data centers, and in 40 of the 41 they favored limits on development. In NBC’s exit poll, 76% said they would oppose a new data center in their community. There were many stunners, like Kansas electing its first Democratic senator since 1932, but Texas stands out as the signature shock.

The Lone Star state went blue across its statewide offices. Beyond the Senate and governor’s races, Democrats won agriculture commissioner, attorney general, land commissioner, comptroller, lieutenant governor and railroad commissioner. They have taken the state House for the first time since 2002. Gina Hinojosa unseated Gov. Greg Abbott and will be the first Democrat elected governor of Texas since Ann Richards in 1990, and the first ever Hispanic person to hold the office. The Texas House looks likely to have its first female and first Black speaker in the form of 87-year-old Senfronia Thompson, who took office in 1973.

Reading Tocqueville in this climate is downright spooky. He wrote in 1835 that American political bickering at first looks to a stranger “so incomprehensible and so puerile” that he can’t decide whether to pity the people or envy the happiness that lets them argue. I personally thought as much for months about the issue of data centers — a massively overstated environmental risk but a massively understated political and emotional issue — until voters proved they were not messing around.

Look closer, Tocqueville wrote, and nearly every faction of American political life comes down to one side trying “to limit,” and the other “to extend, the popular authority.” Five years later, in his second volume, he explained what made Americans different from the Europeans watching them. “The great advantage of the Americans is that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so.” Two centuries on, that birthright came out on Nov. 3 as a mass of voters told the Republican Party, and the data-center builders, something like “No, I don’t think so.”

Property, unlike aristocratic Europe where it is passed down from along family lines for centuries, is what keeps the whole thing from flying apart for most Americans, who are “possessed of sufficient property to desire the maintenance of order, yet not enough to excite envy.” Tocqueville observed that “the passions engendered by property are keenest and most tenacious amongst the middle classes.” And because equality leaves each person weak on his own, Americans band together to form what he called “associations,” without which they “become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another.”

Tocqueville also prophesied that Texas would hold the key to the American future. “The inhabitants of the United States are perpetually migrating to Texas, where they purchase land; and although they conform to the laws of the country, they are gradually founding the empire of their own language and their own manners,” he wrote, a decade before Texas joined the Union.

Texas has spent the 2020s proving him right. It added 391,243 residents in the year to July 2025, more than any other state for the third year in a row, reaching 31.7 million. It produced $2.9 trillion in GDP in 2025, and holds one-fifth of the planned 253-gigawatt data center pipeline nationwide. The five fastest-growing American cities, the Census Bureau revealed in May, were all in Texas, some for the second year running.