The midterm results have been many things: a referendum on Donald Trump, a gut reaction to the betrayal of the Iran war, an angry verdict on gas prices, a backlash against Artificial Intelligence, a youth revolt, a rueful return to an order based on morals and not on violence, and a repudiation of the culture wars. After the decade-long political detour of woke and anti-woke politics, of identity-based liberalism and tribal conservatism, we are back to the underlying problems of the country which have to do with money in politics, changes in technology and growing inequality. “The main binary in American politics”, writes the Portuguese author Bruno Maćaes on X, “is not between left and right, but between fiction and reality”. So, the fantasies of the MAGA world have imploded over the shambles of Donald Trump’s reign - for the ever reality-prone Democrats to clear up the debris, fix the economy and rebuilt the damaged democratic institutions.
The blue wave is more than the beginning of the end of Donald Trump. The midterm results mark a steep descent into a volatile interregnum where the president-as-king has turned into an abject and despicable figure who might still threaten the world but can no longer destroy the domestic body politic. Republicans will start their flight from responsibility or reposition for the presidential election in 2028. Democrats should hold the president and his administration to account for the damage done without going for full revenge. Because at the same time, they must start laying out a roadmap for the future of a country, still angry, injured and confused. It’s going to be two unpredictable and fascinating years, yet not without hope for a better America. One week after the “blue wave” swept over the United States, here are my takeaways from the midterm elections of November 2026.
First, it was a referendum on a president who no longer cared about his citizens, not even his voters. A leader who supported Republican candidates from a rack of cronies whilst Democrats had painfully learned how to select the fitting choice for each constituency. Thus, Democrats could win in the former electoral no-go areas of Kansas, South Carolina and Texas, may be even in Mississippi. If these victories at all political levels amount to a historic realignment in the states of the South remains to be seen. More likely the changing geographic vote patterns might just signify a new volatility of angry citizens in a world driven by the instant gratification mode of social media. Still, one would not have suspected a year ago that up to 10% of disenchanted Republican voters would switch to the Democrats instead of just staying at home. Although there were those, too. Preelection and exit polls suggest the turnout vote of registered Democrats to have been almost 10% higher than that of Republicans.
Second, there was the Iran War, selected as the main culprit for the Republican defeat by no other than Vice-President Vance in his self-serving post-election statement. The military conflict with Iran has been both, a betrayal of the no-more-wars promise to the MAGA crowd and the main driver of inflation at the gas pump. The fact that the second highest official of the Trump administration felt compelled to distance himself from his president and that its foreign minister has been tight-lipped since the defeat does not augur well for their chances to become the Republican candidate at the presidential election in 2028. Both are tainted by association; or as a commentator put it in the New York Times: “JD Vance is probably toast”.
The Democratic victory has also disproven the adage that foreign affairs have little influence on electoral decisions. This time foreign policy mattered because democratic candidates could link the closure of the Strait of Hormuz directly to the cost of living. How ever Trump will deal with the vexed issue of Iran’s resilience - with renewed bombing attacks, a virtual capitulation through a badly brokered deal, by still supporting or distancing himself from Bibi Netanyahu - foreign policy is going to be an important arena in the fight between Trump and Congress, opening up many avenues for the Democrats to further weaken the president’s power.
Congressional Democrats, argues Howard French in the magazine Foreign Policy should be “sorting through military appropriations with a fine-toothed comb and holding hearings that seek to extract clarity from the president’s military and foreign-policy appointees to an unaccustomed degree”. This could be done on the collusion with Russia in its war against Ukraine, on the illegal boat strikes and murky dealings in the US-adventure in Venezuela and on the deadly Trump policies concerning global health and international aid. With Republican Representative Thomas Massie starting impeachment proceedings against the Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth there will be plenty of occasion to castigate Trump’s foreign policy as scandalous, in violation of international law and detrimental to US interests.
Yet Europeans should not be too hopeful for a shift in US foreign policy with a democratic majority in House and Senate. Even if Donald Trump goes for another round of bombing Iran, the crushing defeat at the ballot box, writes Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times, “will lead to further retrenchment of America’s global role”. There is a foreign policy consensus from staunch MAGA supporters to left-wing Democrats that America’s role as the “world’s policeman” is definitely over.
Kiev and European governments are hoping that there will be enough traditional Republicans joining Democrats in trying to readjust the diplomatic and military support for the Ukrainian government in its defence against the Russian aggressor. One way would be to attach further funding to a bill Republicans can’t afford to reject.
Since the Hamas-lead terrorist attack killing almost 1.200 Israeli citizens and Netanyahu’s brutal war in violation of international law in Gaza US attitudes toward Israel have changed considerably over the last three years. The country’s favourability rating has fallen dramatically, particular among young Democrats, but even among older Republicans. The November elections have just translated this trend into modified campaigns and electoral victories for candidates opposing the traditional US support for Israel. The midterms have been a nightmare for the once powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) because its donor support for candidates turned out to be a useless investment or even backfired for the politicians of their choice. On election day President Trump pulled the annual four billion Dollar military assistance for Israel, and after the election defeat Vice-President Vance promised to “change our relationship to Israel” hoping to win back voters in 2028. This is bad news for Israel’s Premier Bibi Netanyahu but the relationship with Israel could also become a point of contention for the Democrats between its donor dependent establishment and the strong critics of Zionism on the left of the party.
Third, gas prices and the economy. Here it is easy to state what has not worked during the two years of Trump II. Overall, the economic indicators are not all that bad. There is considerable growth, low unemployment and even inflation is slightly lower than it was four or five years ago. But Trump promised to eradicate inflation and lower mortgage rates, and instead they increased to 3.7 % and 7 % respectively. People felt, that all factored in, wages did not keep up with the cost of living so that they can no longer afford the essentials of middle-class life: send their kids to college, buy a home and cover their health care for which costs have been rising dramatically. A certain degree of corruption has always been built into the American system. But with your own situation precarious the staggering gains of tech-billionaires and members of the Trump family have catapulted the issue of “corruption” to the top of voters’ concerns. A juxtaposition many Democrats used to win their seats.
And then there where Trump’s erratic tariff policies which, for instance, made fertilizers for farmers in Kansas unaffordable. The excessive tariffs failed to bring jobs to the heartland and showed the limits to MAGAs creed of economic nationalism at a time when – not only in the US - “the wave of anti-globalisation populism has peaked”, as Karthik Sankaran suggests in the Financial Times.
Whilst Trump’s bad and careless economic policies made Republicans lose the midterms it won’t be easy for Democrats finding ways to usher in small improvements on affordability over the next two years and prepare the country for more structural reforms once they occupy the White House in January 2029. Not to mention the big elephant in the budget room: the final need for spending cuts and tax increases.
In his Chartbook 483 After the midterms Adam Tooze is listing some of the conundrums the Democrats will be facing when they try to make “America come down from Trump’s speedball economy”. What these problems have in common is that all changes to the Trump economy will have to be painful trade-offs and none of those promise immediate reliev for struggling citizens. Doing away with protectionist measures will be resisted by the labour movement; devaluating the dollar instead of keeping tariffs high will make imports more expensive and raise inflation instead of purchasing power.
It is one thing to campaign on “medicare for all” as quite a few victorious Democrats in House and Senate races did. But introducing only a small measure of solidarity to the absurd markets of a monstrous health system would require a major legislative effort; a thorough reform, upping the convoluted Obamacare system, would be a generational project. In short, there is plenty of room for infighting among Democrats about future economic reforms on ideological and practical grounds – as is in defining America’s policies towards China. And what to do with Trump’s next budget if the Republicans do not cooperate and compromise? Go for a government shutdown, as it has been done in the past, and risk triggering a financial crisis in an already precarious and overextended bubble economy? Here the Congressional leadership - which has not exactly proven its worth over the past two years - will soon have to make tough decisions.
All this happening with a national debt of 40 trillion (that is 40,556 billion) dollars, the mighty United States indebted like miserable France, if able to borrow money cheaper in its own currency. It will be difficult to win elections by suggesting how to reduce this humongous deficit. Taxing billionaires alone, as it has just been rejected in a Californian referendum, won’t be enough. When and if at all Democrats will dare to promise a comprehensive and effective tax reform remains anybody’s guess.
Fourth, the backlash against AI and data centres. Artificial Intelligence, Elon Musk and the tech-brothers have been the big losers in these midterm elections. At state level 43 of 44 data centre moratoria passed, except in North Dakota. That indicates more local hostility to those large-scale battery farms than to prisons in the neighbourhood. On top of the governorship of Virginia there are now three new Democratic governors in Texas, Georgia and Ohio able to limit constructions in those states with the highest number of data centre projects.
And behind this new rapid and surprising NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) phenomenon lingers a deeper anxiety about AI in general; with potentially grave consequences for the business model of the whole AI economy, from large players to smaller infrastructure start-ups. Fewer data centres and lower revenue growth will reduce the astronomical evaluations of AI companies at upcoming IPOs, like the planned one of Anthropic. Together with currently sliding tech-stocks this would slow down growth expectations in a sector on which the health of the whole US-economy currently rests. Technical obstacles to the AI economy like lack of compute, of memory and even of energy can be addressed, writes Ben Thompson on his blog Stratechery. Yet “the final political constraint is not only harder to solve, but it actually interferes with solving the other constraints”.
This situation offers Democrats some room for manoeuvre but also precarious political choices. They can and should try to confront the tech oligarchy by regulating AI companies and social media platforms. Weakened by the popular rebellion against data centres and the new scepticism about AI and chastened by their failed attempts at financing Republican candidates, tech leaders will have to reposition themselves after having tied their fate to Donald Trump and MAGA populism. Today Elon Musk and his ilk are less powerful and more politically dependent than they think. Yet Democrats should be wary of falling themselves into the tech donor trap. At the same time, they do not want to be seen to cause a collapse of the AI sector thus endangering the current growth path of the US economy - by what their opponents would then call “overregulation. It will be a difficult path to tread.
Fifth, the youth rebellion. Whilst European youths express their political dissatisfaction in the streets, young Americans reversed their flirtation with Trump and the Republican Party and went back in droves to Democratic House and Senate candidates. According to the data of the Tufts Center for Information & Research particularly young white and Latino men, of whom two years ago 63% had voted for Trump, now favoured Democratic candidates with 54% over Republicans. Behind the nearly 30-point preference for Democrats by youth in 2026 the flip back by non-college youth is the most remarkable. In general, economic security is the biggest concern of young voters. Yet this dramatic shift within two years does not necessarily mean a lasting realignment of the youth vote.
They might have voted in larger numbers for Democrats because their crop of candidates has finally put an end to the party’s gerontocracy in Congress. The 15 replacements in the Senate have come in at an average age of 55 years. This has reduced the average age of Senators in the least-age representative government in the OECD from 67 to 63 years. The new star senators James Talarico for Texas, John Ossoff for Georgia and the prominent House Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, all now being hyped as potential presidential candidates, will have barely passed the age of forty in 2028.
The midterm results have shown the utter popularity of Donald Trump and his corrupt coterie; the retreat of America from the role of the world’s policeman; the fear for the end of the middle-class dream; the unease about AI and the restlessness of young voters. They indicate an end to economic nationalism and a renewed acceptance of diversity, even a growing tolerance of some leftish ideas. The ballots show new geographic voting patterns, a shift among evangelicals from Old to New Testament thinking, and a general desire to turn back from authoritarian disorder to some kind of moral decency in the political sphere. Many trends for the Democrats to build on but nothing to bank on.
What will happen next? Over the last week the big loser in the brutally revamped White House has changed from first being dazed to adopting an even more Darwinist fighting attitude by replacing his wily Chief of Staff Susie Wiles with the Immigration tsar and white supremacist Steven Miller. Given Trump’s contradictory and at times tragically-mad utterances in his post-election interviews, the only predictable things over the next two years will be the president’s unpredictability and his mental decline.
And it will be mutual “lawfare” on all fronts: with calls for impeachment of the president and some of members of his cabinet. There will be blocked appointments, subpoenas, televised Congressional hearings and even Republicans suing their accusers for “extortion at the highest level” (Trump), meaning a threat to investigate Republicans without having the facts ready. Unlike after Trump’s first presidency US-Democrats now seem ready to pounce on the crimes and misdemeanours of his second regime and hold his government to account. Belatedly their so far lackadaisical Congressional leadership under Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries is adopting an aggressive tone of retribution. The committees now headed by Democrats are now heading are hiring the lawyers purged from a highly politicised Department of Justice who will use their saved files and institutional memory to confront Attorney General Todd Blanche with the corrupt shenanigans and illegal deeds in and outside of his department. Blanche and other leading members of the Trump administration have many reasons to worry. One week after their crushing defeat Republicans are turning on each other, with some already running to the aisles of compromise, but MAGAs most ardent followers still determined to hold them back.
But therein also lies the danger for the Democrats that the media spectacle of who will be impeached, accused and publicly quartered in talk shows and on X will overshadow their party’s most important task - to prepare a blueprint for future Democratic governance. They need to address the pressing problems in health care, education and housing. And to find answers to the many more pending questions: What about China? How to reverse the damaging Supreme Court judgments on voting rights and campaign finance? Can a wealth tax and minimum wage significantly improve affordability? Is AI an instrument to promote economic growth or will it produce even more inequality? What – apart from suing members of the Trump family – can be done about the more systemic forms of corruption which under this administration have become integral part of “a new strain of American capitalism” (Noah Shachtman) with its murky crypto and prediction markets? And may be most important: when is the moment to tell Americans the ugly truth about their country’s economic condition - that there will be no reducing the level of debt without raising taxes for quite a few?
Better sooner than later the answers to all these intricate questions need to be turned into a convincing and attractive agenda for the remaking of America. But after these midterms the good news is: the Presidential election of 2028 is one for the Democrats to lose.