Van Jones Loses It Over Democrat Midterm Sweep, Claims “New Country” While Blaming ICE and Elon Musk
CNN’s Van Jones reacted with pure euphoria on election night as Democrats flipped Texas and secured major gains nationwide, including a Latina governor in Texas and a black female governor in Georgia. Asked about the Texas result, Jones immediately went into dream mode.
“Don’t wake me up. Don’t wake me up. I’m dreaming. Don’t wake me up. Listen, this is a new country. We’re in a new country. There is a Latina governor in Texas. There is a black female governor in Georgia,” he said.
He then tied the shift directly to Republican border enforcement, drawing a parallel to California’s Proposition 187 in the 1990s. Jones argued that Latino voters turned against the GOP once they concluded the party “did not care about their humanity, didn’t care about their children.” He described recent ICE actions as the breaking point: “These ICE attacks, people voted to close the border. They didn’t vote for nannies to be thrown on the ground. They didn’t vote for roofers to be thrown out of the country. They didn’t vote for babies to be ripped away, nursing babies from their mothers. And the Latino community said no.”
Jones credited heavy Democratic spending on Spanish-language media and groups like Texas for All, Texas Organizing Project, and LUPE. He also singled out Elon Musk for helping drive the outcome in the opposite direction: “Elon Musk put his little hand in the mix and thought he could buy the state, and he pissed everybody off.” The result, in his view, is “a new coalition of young voters, Latin voters, suburban voters.”
He closed with theatrical disbelief. “This is a new country. I can’t get my brain wrapped around what’s happening tonight, but this is not a tsunami. This is a volcanic eruption of blue Crayola all over. I can’t, there’s no way to describe what is happening.”
The segment frames the results almost entirely through identity milestones and alleged Republican cruelty rather than any policy record from the prior administration or the actual tradeoffs voters weighed on immigration, crime, and the economy. Jones celebrates firsts while skipping past the fact that black Republicans have already held governorships in red states without triggering the same “new country” declarations.
His California analogy also leaves out that the state continued to face high housing costs, homelessness, and out-migration long after the demographic shift he cites. The “volcanic eruption” language treats a midterm swing as permanent transformation, even as the same voters previously backed border security measures he now says they never actually wanted.