By Ashton Kingdon
Democrats won both the House and the Senate on November 3, 2026. Donald Trump proclaimed that he “wasn’t on the ballot,” but said that he was willing to accept the result. Much of his far-right base was not. I spent the week of the election inside Gab, Telegram, and X. What I found was not one reaction but several, pulling in different directions. The movement is fracturing, and the way it splits over the next few weeks could shape how dangerous it becomes.
The Results in Numbers
Democrats gained ground at every level, while Republicans struggled to flip seats. In the House of Representatives, Republicans went into the election with 219 seats and the Democrats 215. With approximately 21 races still to be called, Democrats are projected to finish with about 259 seats, and Republicans 176. This will be a gain of approximately 44 seats, and the largest majority for either party since the early 1990s. Democrats flipped more than 40 seats, including several in districts Republicans had redrawn in their own favour. Republicans flipped just two.
In the Senate, Republicans held 53 seats to the Democrats’ 47. Democrats flipped seven Republican seats, in Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina and Maine, giving them 54 seats to the Republicans’ 44. Kansas elected its first Democratic senator since 1932. Democrats also held Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed will become the first Muslim US senator, and Georgia, where Jon Ossoff beat Mike Collins. Democrats also flipped five governorships in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Texas, and now hold 28 to the Republicans’ 20. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman elected governor in the US.
The Story Came Before the Evidence
The narrative that the election had been ‘stolen’ was already in place before any results came in. Months earlier, former White House strategist Steve Bannon told his War Room audience, “We’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November.” The Justice Department sent approximately 1,000 election monitors, a historic number for a Republican administration. Even Gab’s founder, Andrew Torba, saw a defeat coming. In a fundraising post, he warned of a “decade of Democrat hell”. On election day, every glitch became proof. False accusations and unverified claims about voting spread quickly online, from scam texts about polling places and a ballot scanner rescan in Fulton County, Georgia, to claims of fraud in other states. When ballot scanners failed in Westchester County, New York, one Gab user wrote: “This is their cheat plan this election.” Additionally, a claim that the FBI had found 20,000 fraudulent ballots in Houston spread widely, even after the FBI said no such operation had happened.
One Movement: Three Reactions
Once the scale of the defeat was clear, the far right appeared divided between three camps.
The Loyalists: Within hours of the results, prominent MAGA voices, including Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer, and Wayne Root, publicly said the election had been stolen and that weak Republicans had let it happen. On Gab, users echoed and amplified this message. Some blamed Senate Majority Leader John Thune directly: “We wouldn’t have a single Democrat victory tonight if John Thune would’ve… passed the SAVE America Act.” Others managed to hold both views at once: “Yes, the election was stolen… but we also deserved to lose. Both are true at once.” A few tried to turn defeat into a rallying cry, calling the night “a wake-up call” and insisting that “local action = national influence.” The fallout has been swift: Speaker Mike Johnson is stepping down, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has been replaced by Stephen Miller, and the Washington Post has described the infighting as a “MAGA media civil war.”
The Defectors: Blamed Trump himself, above all, for the war with Iran. Marjorie Taylor Greene called the result “a total referendum on Trump,” saying he had “started a foreign war no one wanted.” On Gab, users were blunter. One wrote that Trump had “squandered the entire thing for a war on behalf of a foreign country,” while another declared, “it was President Trump that caused this… his stupid Iran war.” The most striking defector was the vice-president. On the morning after the vote, JD Vance posted on X: “The reason we lost is the war.” He cited a pollster’s four ways to win voters back, and the fourth was “Change our relationship to Israel.” Trump called the post “largely true.”
The Accelerationists: Led by Nick Fuentes, who had urged followers not to vote at all; they wanted the Republicans to lose. Before the election, Fuentes told his audience: “Do not vote… The Republicans have to lose… A cleansing fire is the only thing that will save us.” On election night, he was jubilant: “Honestly, I could not be happier… Total Groyper Victory.” The clip passed 1.2 million views on X. Users on Gab and Telegram made it clear the defeat was the point: “Vance and Rubio should never get close to the nomination… That’s why we’re doing this.” In their place, we want “a slate of White, nationalist, Christian men instead of… female DEI candidates,” under a new “America Only” banner. “The true One will be so far right,” that “the communists will have to come up with a new term to replace fascist.”
The Threats
A prominent threat is the speed at which content is travelling. Claims that began on unmoderated Telegram channels are reaching a mass audience on X, becoming a community and a way to raise money on Gab, and are then presented as ‘proof’ on Rumble and Substack. For example, when Homeland Security said it would review voting records, users on Telegram referred to it as a “secret sting operation”, Gab users demanded a “redo of the election,” and Substack writers predicted “mass prosecutions”. Fundraising appeals, gold adverts and paid subscriptions all profited from the anger, and AI-generated answers with invented numbers are shared as “evidence.”
A further threat is a date. QAnon believers were promised a Trump victory, and when it didn’t come, they called the defeat “part of the plan” and “a trap set to expose the fraud.” On Gab and Telegram, followers of Q have now pinned their hopes on 18 December, 45 days after the vote, when Executive Order 13848 (signed by Trump in 2018 after Russian interference in the 2016 election) requires intelligence agencies to report on foreign election interference. The claim is that Trump will cancel the result, hold military tribunals, and stay in power until 2037. In reality, the order only allows sanctions on foreign actors. In reality, the order cannot ‘undo’ elections, the same theory spread after 2020, when believers also expected the 18 December report to overturn Biden’s win. When the intelligence assessment was finally published in March 2021, it found no sign that any foreign actor had changed votes, and Biden took office as planned.
The danger lies in what happens when/if nothing happens again. The majority of believers may quietly move on. A smaller, more extreme subset could pick a new date and retreat to Telegram, especially if Gab, which is hemorrhaging money, goes paid-only. Officials could revive the fraud story with claims about ‘illegal voters’. Perhaps the biggest risk is from lone-actor violence. Users of Gab are openly urging each other to “stay strapped… decide if you can be a martyr,” arguing that “maybe violence is the way to go” and that “your guns and ammo are absolutely worthless if you don’t use them.” Muslim, Somali-American, Jewish and Indian-American people, election officials and Democrats are being named as targets. The day before the vote, a January 6 rioter pardoned by Trump was arrested for threatening federal judges. On election day, a Michigan congresswoman, Haley Stevens, asked for US Marshals protection after receiving death threats. More than half of US secretaries of state have received threats of violence. The 60 days before the new Congress is sworn in on 3 January are a main danger window.
Conclusion
This is not only an American story. Patriotic Alternative’s Mark Collett called the result “a deserved humiliation” over a “Zionist war.” UK accounts shared the 18 December theory through the same Telegram channels that carry “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories to British audiences. Meanwhile, activists are quietly planning to take over the Republican Party by 2028 and to win local council and school board seats. The midterms did not defeat the far right. They split it. The next 60 days will show whether that split makes it weaker or more dangerous.
Ashton Kingdon is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for Criminology in the Digital Age at the University of Southampton. She is also an Advisory Board Member at the Accelerationism Research Consortium, a research fellow at VOX-Pol, a core member of the Extremism and Gaming Research Network (EGRN), a member of the steering committee for the British Society of Criminology’s Hate Crime Network and former head of Technology and Research Ethics at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.