Bluesky is a niche Twitter-clone frequently accused of being an echo chamber for progressives. After the blue tsunami of this week’s midterms, however, its inhabitants don’t seem to be echoing themselves so much as the vast majority of American voters.
The sheer scale of Democrats’ victory is staggering. They won control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress, flipping Senate seats in seven states Trump carried in 2024—including Republican stronghold Texas, which now also has a Democratic governor and attorney general. All in all, this year’s midterms represent the biggest electoral shift in state-level politics to hit the U.S. in generations. They also represent a Texas-sized validation of the worldview Bluesky has become notorious for over the past two years.
Amusing how if you read X, Facebook, most of NYTimes and The Atlantic, all of The Argument, and so forth, yesterday was a huge surprise and you have to reset everything from the past two years.But if you joined BlueSky in November 2024 and clicked on any politics-related starter pack, you’re good.
— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) 2026-11-04T11:27:40.179Z
BLUESKY WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG
— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2026-11-04T04:19:19.671Z
Although it officially launched in the spring of 2023 , Bluesky might as well have been born on election eve in 2024. That was the moment millions of disillusioned Twitter users decamped from a website owned by the largest single contributor to Trump’s reelection. Bluesky quickly became a haven for Twitter expats and grew at a frenetic pace . It went from 9 million users in September 2024 to 15 million by mid-November , eventually reaching its current 47 million.
Because many of Bluesky’s users arrived out of principled opposition to X, formerly Twitter, the two sites have arguably existed in opposition to each other. Both portray their counterpart as out of touch, with Bluesky alleging Elon Musk’s algorithm tweaks have skewed X’s political vortex too far to the right, and X suggesting Bluesky is a bubble of liberals who can tolerate anything except a difference in opinion.
The latter idea seemed to largely prevail.
In 2025, Washington Post columnists , tech world figures like Mark Cuban , and myriad other pundits dismissed Bluesky as smug, self-righteous, and irrelevant. It was the fantasy sandbox where progressives went to play among themselves, protecting reality dwellers from having to hear their drivel. ( “Like a containment dome over a nuclear reactor,” as the writer Josh Barro put it.)
So, how well did Bluesky’s users stay in touch with reality between elections, compared with X’s exponentially larger population? Consider the post-midterms perspective.
Rather than accept the narrative that 2024 represented a rejection of “wokeness” and a political realignment toward Trump, the manifestly trans-friendly Bluesky suggested the election was more a referendum on postpandemic inflation and global anti-incumbent bias . As an emboldened Trump then proceeded to antagonize U.S. citizens and the rest of the world , while making billions for himself in crypto , Bluesky meticulously chronicled the state of play. It became the premier destination for seeing radicalized older white ladies , abysmally attended pro-ICE rallies , and complaints about the lack of mainstream news coverage around massive No Kings protests. Any random day would find endless posts with evidence that, per the motto of the political philosopher and Bluesky power user Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “We are going to win.”
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew.bsky.social) 2026-09-08T01:17:36.844Z
Above all, Bluesky proved to be less a bubble than an expression of the multitude of ideological factions that had united under the umbrella of non-MAGAness . . . to argue with one another.
Meanwhile, X’s millions of liberal and progressive folks were often drowned out by an algorithm that seemed to favor right-wing voices and their preferred narratives. A bubble chart from Nate Silver, the political analyst, visually depicted the accounts with highest engagement rates back in April. Its many MAGA-red circles made it look like the blood-filled elevator from The Shining . As a May 2026 study from Northwestern University suggests, X’s algorithm rewards posts that provoke strong reactions, so the loudest and most emotionally satisfying political claims become disproportionately visible. That’s how we got viral fever dreams about James Talarico, the then-senatorial candidate, checking into a mental hospital , something that never in fact happened.
It should come as little surprise that many high-profile MAGA voices on X spent the days leading up to the election incorrectly predicting how it would turn out.
I nailed all my election predictions in 2024, not so much in 2022. Here are my 2026 calls with a reminder that all of you should get out and vote. Byron Donalds wins Florida Gov comfortably. Senate: Ken Paxton wins Texas, Mike Rogers wins Michigan, Jon Husted wins Ohio, Ashley…
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) November 1, 2026
Don’t believe the polls. There will be no blue wave. Once again, fake polling, designed, not to inform but to persuade & suppress turnout, are misleading voters. I know what I’m talking about. As a twice elected Dem governor and 3 time elected Dem Congressman, I never lost an…
— Rod Blagojevich (@realBlagojevich) October 6, 2026
Who looks out of touch and stuck in an echo chamber now?
While X may have been more plugged into the political discourse online for the past two years, Bluesky now appears better attuned to what’s been happening on the ground. Its users were right about pretty much everything.
They were right that anti-trans ads would have little or no impact on the 2026 election , and that their impact on the previous election had been vastly overstated .
They were right that Graham Platner wasn’t the only Democrat who could beat Susan Collins in Maine, and that Abdul El-Sayed’s association with a controversial Twitch streamer relatively few voters had even heard of was not as big a deal as X users seemed to think .
And they were right that fleeing X’s algorithm helped them view the world with clear eyes.
If Bluesky is a bubble, then it is currently a champagne bubble awash in celebration.
The festivities will likely last only a matter of hours, though, until infighting explodes around just how the Democrats should spend their newfound political capital .
