Kabaservice calls the result a political earthquake, not a political realignment
Democrats took control of the House and Senate in Tuesday’s midterm elections, according to a panel of commentators published by The Guardian, who said the results amounted to a repudiation of the Republican Party and of President Donald Trump. The contributors broadly agreed that voters were driven by the cost of living and by the unpopularity of the Trump administration, but divided over what the result means for the party and for the country.
Filipovic, an American author, wrote that the Democrats swept Tuesday’s midterms and that the Republican Party “has no one but itself – and its leader – to blame.” Democrats took the House, winning seats that had been “blood-red just two years ago,” and took the Senate by grabbing formerly Republican seats in the Republican strongholds of South Carolina, Texas, Kansas, Ohio and Iowa — all states Trump won in 2024 with significant margins, Filipovic wrote.
Filipovic wrote that voters “didn’t seem to be particularly enamored with the Democratic candidates” but “did, however, seem fed up with Republicans.” As voters worried about “the cost of gas and ground beef,” she wrote, Trump “obsessed over his new ballroom and the presence of algae in the reflecting pool.” Many people who voted for Trump did so in part because he promised to bring prices down and to refuse to enmesh America in messy wars in the Middle East, Filipovic argued, but he instead decided to go to war with Iran, which has sent prices “skyrocketing at the pump.”
Filipovic also pointed to datacenters built “even in the face of intense community opposition” even though Americans on the left and the right have made clear they do not want them in their backyards — and to a president who has essentially told people to get over it. Filipovic contrasted the Republican Party’s talk of “freedom” and its warnings about Muslims taking away Americans’ rights with the loss of safe abortion access across a significant chunk of the country, which Filipovic attributed largely to conservative Christians. And as Americans see their real spending power decrease, Filipovic wrote, the Trump family and friends have used their power to make “billions in corrupt deals.”
There were, Filipovic acknowledged, “some very bad Republican candidates in the race,” from “Lindsay Graham’s unqualified sister in South Carolina to the charisma-vacuum Ken Paxton in Texas,” along with Georgia’s Mike Collins — and “some excellent Democratic ones”: “the competent doctor Annie Andrews in South Carolina,” “the let’s-all-get-along seminarian James Talarico in Texas” and “the future president Jon Ossoff in Georgia.” But “while candidate quality may have taken Democrats across home plate in some of America’s reddest states, it was Trump who got them to third base,” Filipovic wrote. As Republicans consider their party’s future two years from now, when Trump is leaving office for good, Filipovic said the lesson is clear — the president has made their brand toxic — and Republicans should “do their best to excise him from their systems now.”
Sunkara, president of The Nation and founding editor of Jacobin, wrote that Trump has been “a disaster for our country,” citing incoherent economic plans, a war with Iran that is making inflation worse, complicity in what Sunkara called “Israel’s crimes in Gaza,” and other acts of lawlessness that Sunkara said included “the extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean” and “the kidnapping of Maduro” — all combined with what Sunkara called “a continuing coarsening of American culture.” Sunkara wrote that the country now shows more casual racism, more moral depravity and more selfishness than at any point in the recent past, and that “the rot starts in the White House with a man who’s the personification of vice.”
Sunkara said voters are making Trump pay, but that the fact that even a victory like this leaves Republicans with so much support shows “the extreme polarization of the country and the limits on how much electoral punishment a disastrous administration can expect.”
Sunkara said “Democrats can’t rely on Trump to deliver them elections” and must “do better in rural and semi-rural areas” while reversing class dealignment by making the party the party of working-class interests: higher wages, stronger unions, affordable housing and health care. Trump cannot be counted on to keep gifting Democrats elections “through his erratic rule,” Sunkara warned: a normal Republican administration “can be almost as dangerous to working-class interests” while presenting “nowhere near these opportunities,” and Democrats “need to give voters something to support beyond their opposition to the man in the White House.”
Sunkara called for “a durable popular supermajority for progressive change” and wrote that “I have no confidence they’ll even attempt to build one.”
Nwanevu said a blue Texas alone would have “set the mind reeling” and that what followed was “the most consequential midterm result in decades, big enough that this is already being discussed as a realignment election.” Nwanevu also credited the polling industry, which had spent a decade under scrutiny over missed forecasts of Trump support, saying the large Democratic margins predicted before the election “couldn’t possibly have been real” before concluding: “Well, they were.” What mattered, Nwanevu wrote, was an ailing economy and high prices, an “idiotic war abroad,” and a war being waged “here at home, against American cities and immigrant families that in no way resemble the criminals and vagrants the right has been ranting and raving about for years” — along with “naked corruption in Washington in the service of adding filigrees to the president’s fascism.” Those things, Nwanevu concluded, did matter even to voters who had been willing to give the Trump circus multiple chances at the ballot.
But a realignment to what, Nwanevu asked. The majorities Democrats have won comprise candidates on both sides of the party’s internal divide — both the left and the center will have victories and near misses to crow about and parse. The question of where the party should go will remain unanswered, Nwanevu wrote: it is not altogether obvious how Democrats will collectively decide to handle even the next two years of the administration, pulled as they inevitably will be between camps “rightly demanding a crusade against Trump” and camps “rightly insisting” that Democrats prove to voters they are attentive to the policy concerns that sent so many voters their way. Bridging those two tasks, Nwanevu wrote, “will take bold, but shrewd political leadership” — and it will become clear very soon whether there is any of that “to spare in the freshman class.”
Kabaservice, research director of the Republican Main Street Partnership and author of Rule and Ruin, opened with an old Republican saying — that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have — writing that it turns out the saying “applies equally to Donald Trump.” Kabaservice wrote that the decision in 2024 to give Trump “unprecedented and almost dictatorial control” of the party delivered a victory on a scale that suggested populist majorities for decades to come, but that Trump, back in the White House without restraints on his worst instincts, brought misery to the party’s working-class base through tariffs and a forever war in the Middle East that Trump had specifically promised to avoid — ending in what Kabaservice called the party’s “worst defeat since perhaps the 1930s.” The 2026 midterms, Kabaservice concluded, were “a political earthquake but not a political realignment.”
Unfortunately for the country, Kabaservice wrote, the Democrats’ victory was “impressive in its dominance yet unlikely to determine the future direction of either party.” Both moderate and leftwing Democrats will claim their victories showed why their faction should lead the party, and they seem “likelier to spend as much time attacking each other as trying to find solutions to the country’s political dysfunctions and broken institutions.”
Kabaservice said the Republican Party has “no positive program, only the negative hope that voters who are perpetually frustrated with the party in power will turn against the Democratic Congress in 2028,” and that the party’s internal contest will be settled by Trump, who “will punish any Republican who dissents from his ruinous and erratic course.”
Bayoumi, a Guardian US columnist, opened on the promise at the center of the campaign season: “I guess we can all kiss that $5,000 goodbye.” The so-called Trump dividend had promised every adult voter $5,000 if Republicans held on to both the Senate and the House, and Bayoumi called the results “a total and complete repudiation of the Trump agenda.” Bayoumi said Trump had sought to shape the outcome from the start by pushing to gerrymander election districts across the country, weaken key elements of the Voting Rights Act, have the federal government “take over” running the midterms from the states, change the rules for voter registration and destroy mail-in voting — and that none of it worked. “Some gerrymandered districts still went for the Democrats,” Bayoumi noted, evidence that “maybe it’s not so easy to manipulate American democracy, after all.”
The election also brings “extraordinary responsibility” to the Democrats, Bayoumi wrote — a party that seems “far too comfortable in being perpetually divided over what it believes in beyond being anti-Trump,” and for which “impeachment hearings alone do not constitute a political agenda.” Bayoumi predicted the next few months may witness some “hopefully non-violent” tumult, as Trump may challenge the certification of some elections and exaggerate both noncitizen voting and voter fraud — and said Trump, who “excels in blaming others for his own failures,” will no doubt now exploit Democratic control over Congress as the reason for all his future failures.
Bayoumi said the result showed Americans rejecting “foolish and expensive wars,” rebuffing “inhumane immigration enforcement” and refusing “self-enrichment of the few as economic policy,” and that voters may now be showing that “full-throated American support for Israel is no longer a given in Washington.” Bayoumi added: “I’m relieved by this result. More than relieved.”
Guastella, a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and director of operations for Teamsters Local 623, called it “a wave election as predicted” and said tribunes of every progressive faction would claim a mandate in the results — progressives because the electorate is hungry for new, bold solutions; moderates because most voters do not want to be hassled over “woke moral citizenship tests”; and resistance liberals because people are fed up with Trump’s corruption. In important ways, Guastella wrote, each faction will be right.
Guastella said the larger lesson was that voters had “ferociously rejected Trump’s party” and that the swing from Trump in 2024 to Democrats in 2026 reflects “a long-term crisis” rather than the success of any given election strategy. Guastella said voters are “increasingly losing patience for party politics” and want someone to address stagnant wages, the rising cost of living, the cost of housing and insecurity in health care — and to restore an old social compact in which working hard and playing by the rules was rewarded with a comfortable life.
For Democrats, Guastella said, “affordability” is “a good slogan, but it is not an economic program nor is it a political roadmap,” and the party must be willing to break with the professional-class “woke” social values and with the donor-class’s pro-corporate economic agenda if it hopes to hold its majority in 2028. Guastella called the win “a precious and fragile gift” and said Democrats have two years to earn their trust.
Aronoff, a staff writer at The New Republic and the author of Overheated, wrote that it was “not smart” for Republicans to fashion themselves into “the party of pedophiles and tech oligarchs” aligned behind an illegal war driving up the cost of gas, fertilizer and just about everything else.
Aronoff said Democrats “won massively across the board,” noting that races where progressives were not polling especially well, including Angie Nixon’s Senate bid in Florida, came in much closer than expected. In Aronoff’s own Trump-leaning home district in South Jersey, a four-term incumbent — a Republican convert expected to win big — was kicked out by a relatively uncharismatic Democrat. The question now is who claims victory, Aronoff wrote: “Normie Dems won big. The Democratic Socialists America won big, too.”
Even riding high, Aronoff wrote, Democrats will have relatively limited control over how to govern, though they can exercise leverage through congressional oversight. To set themselves up for success, Aronoff argued, Democrats need an answer for the country’s economic future that does not revolve around the massively unpopular datacenter spending that now accounts for roughly a third of the country’s GDP growth. The election, Aronoff said, was “about the cost of energy” — driven up, Aronoff wrote, by datacenters and “a disastrous war in Iran” — and it was an election about Trump. Voters want “Medicare for All, affordable housing and monthly bills that aren’t tied to volatile energy markets,” Aronoff wrote, and Democrats should take the right lessons from their great night: the future means “delivering a better, cheaper quality of life for working people” and holding “the people making their lives more expensive accountable.”
Across the panel the diagnosis was shared and the prescriptions were not. The contributors agreed that the election punished the Trump administration and the Republican Party, and that the defining issue for Democrats is the cost of living. They disagreed over whether the result marks a lasting realignment, how much of it belongs to candidate quality rather than to the president’s unpopularity, and what Democrats should do with the power they have won.