Aditya Chakrabortty argues class politics fractured Trump's midterm coalition

Texas flipped from red to blue despite a quarter of a billion dollars from Musk

A Guardian opinion column published on November 4, 2026, argues that Donald Trump’s coalition did not survive the midterms intact. Aditya Chakrabortty writes that the alliance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and blue-collar America that carried Trump into the White House “has been smashed apart by old-fashioned class politics.” The column’s central evidence is a set of results in which Democratic candidates won by making the price of everyday life the issue, and in which the coalition’s financial backers and its voters no longer moved together.

Texas is the sharpest example. Chakrabortty reports that the state flipped from red to blue on November 3, and that James Talarico, a Texas state representative running for the US Senate, won on what the column calls a squarely anti-datacentre agenda. The state matters to the argument because it is expected to become the centre of US datacentres, and because in just two years it is expected to supply more than a quarter of all the new computing power the AI industry takes on.

Talarico said after his victory in Austin: “The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom … The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets. But tonight, we sent a crystal clear message to the people at the top, we will not be conquered.”

The spending behind the Texas result did not go quietly. Before the midterms, ultra-wealthy donors including Musk poured billions into Trump’s proxies, the column says, and Musk alone put a quarter of a billion dollars into the Republican effort in Texas. Chakrabortty notes that the state changed parties despite that money.

The column widens the case from datacentres to the wider AI economy. It cites analysis conducted for The Economist which found Trump supporters flipping in large numbers where a datacentre sat near their homes, and it quotes Apollo’s chief economist Torsten Slok, who wrote in October: “Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America.” Slok’s analysis, the column reports, found that of the 500 companies in the S&P index only the seven largest technology firms were flourishing, with the other 493 seeing flat revenues and flat profits.

On the scale of those gains, Chakrabortty cites Jason Furman, a Harvard economist, who estimated that spending on AI infrastructure made up 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025. The column counts Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Jensen Huang among the beneficiaries of that spending, and argues that the gains are being raked off by a tiny number of people and funds.

Two Federal Reserve Economic Data readings, published as of the column’s own date, sit underneath the split it describes: the S&P 500 index stood at 7,541.4 on November 4, 2026, and the real gross domestic income series stood at 32,752.528. Both are published as raw readings; FRED describes the index as a large-cap equity benchmark used for asset-versus-wage comparisons, and the income series as covering the wage-income side of GDP.

The column’s argument runs through what it calls the struggle of ordinary Americans to afford the basics: record petrol prices in a car-centred society, huge swings in everything from eggs to mincemeat, and the battle to meet rent. It cites election analysts who say the struggle now “polls in a tier by itself.” Chakrabortty credits Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor whom the column describes as a democratic socialist, with turning affordability from a meme into a platform for winning elections a year ago, and argues that unaffordable basics reflect not only unreasonably high prices but unfairly low pay.

On the distribution of income, the column cites Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, whose new book, Grand Theft Capital: What Workers Should Know About the Affordability Crisis, argues that the share of national income going to ordinary workers has slumped from 30% in the 1960s to 20% today. It also notes that Republicans and Democrats have changed the tax code over decades — through Reagan and Clinton, Bush and Obama — to reward ownership rather than earning, leaving the richest 400 households paying lower tax rates than the bottom 50% of Americans.

Chakrabortty finds the same pattern outside Texas. Troy Jackson won Maine on a platform to abolish ICE, and Abdul El-Sayed took Michigan while pledging Medicare for all. The column reads the results as a turn toward what it calls anti-corruption, anti-war and anti-billionaire politics, and predicts that the Democrat who wants the 2028 ticket will sound more like Bernie Sanders. Going into the next battle for the White House, it writes, Mamdani now wields national influence.

The column is explicit that it regards the results as a break with a coalition rather than with a party. It argues that bankers and technology executives who read Trump’s return as a cultural opening were wrong about what the vote showed, and that the culture-war flashpoints of the past year displaced attention from pay. Chakrabortty cites one top banker telling the Financial Times that the change felt like liberation because he could speak without the fear of being cancelled, and notes a message from Elon Musk to Epstein asking: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”

The column ends on Trump himself. Chakrabortty writes that readers should for now “rejoice that a corrupt self-dealing bully is heading into two years of ignominy, of being treated even while in power as a back number,” and remember that when politicians and journalists claim there is nothing better on offer than “the same old rightwing rubbish,” they’re “usually wrong.” He recalls what Trump once said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? … It’s, like, incredible.” His verdict: “And truly, it wasn’t credible.”

What the column does not offer is polling. It names no pollsters for the finding that affordability “polls in a tier by itself,” and it supplies no survey data for its account of why voters broke with the president. That account is therefore Chakrabortty’s reading of the results, assembled from tax figures, income shares, corporate earnings, a Senate race in Texas and two statewide wins elsewhere.