The midterms are coming at Trump’s weakest moment since he entered the political arena on a golden escalator. The domestic consequences of the humiliating impasse in the war on Iran have pushed Trump to seek solutions to an impending energy crisis elsewhere, extending his gaze to Russia and Ukraine. His disapproval ratings have reached new highs, in no small part due to an affordability crisis exacerbated by war, tariffs, and Trump’s immigration policies. Underlying this is a looming economic crisis that is only papered over by investment in AI. The Supreme Court has ruled against Trump in several important cases, including his attempts to end birthright citizenship and deny healthcare to incarcerated trans people. Most recently, Trump suffered a shocking and resounding blow in Brazil with the defeat of Flávio Bolsonaro in the second round of the presidential election, after blatant interference through companies like Meta — a defeat that could reverberate across a region struggling under the boot of U.S. imperialism.
In contrast to the days following the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when Trump was able to strengthen his position in the party, today the war on Iran has further fragmented the coalition that defined Trumpism in the last decade, with key figures in the party like Marjorie Taylor Greene turning on the president. But these cracks were already at a breaking point with the backlash against Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities, which hit Trump hardest in what had long been his strongest issue: immigration. The midterms are shaping up to paint a larger picture of how the fracturing of that coalition is expressed within Trump’s base, and will carve out the initial contours of the post-Trump terrain.
In other words, what’s at stake on November 3 is not just who controls Congress, but how deep the discontent with Trump and Trumpism runs, and whether new energy in the Democratic Party from progressive populists is able to capture the imagination — and contain the anger — of sectors that are fed up with the status quo.
That last part is important. No election can or will solve the deep crisis facing the bipartisan regime. A cornered and therefore more dangerous Trump, and a Democratic Party trying to set the terms of its progressive insurgency from above, face an impatient populace fed up with war, ICE, and a soaring cost of living from below. The stage is set for deepening fractures within the two capitalist parties, and continued politicization that could break through the dam of the electoral cycle and turn into struggle from below.
Trump’s Coalition Breaks
According to multiple major polls, the Republican Party is expected to be hit hard by anger at Trump — anger at the war and Israel’s genocide in Palestine, a relentless ICE surge across the country, a deepening affordability crisis, and Trump’s threats to democratic rights. Early voting data suggests that this anger is primarily mobilized among the Democrats’ base, but it’s also coming from within Trump’s own pool of supporters.
Latino voters who went to Trump and the Republicans in 2024 are now abandoning the GOP. Some of this support has shifted in favor of Democrats, but over 42 percent of Latino voters say they do not trust either party. The New York Times’s podcast, “The Daily,” is filled with accounts of Trump voters who refuse to vote for the GOP and are now looking to the other side of the aisle for a change, drawn in by Democrats with an anti-Trump, anti-establishment populist message. Trump has lost the trust of a significant portion of farmers, who were once a bastion of support for him; this proved to be such a crisis that Trump announced an emergency “Harvest Fuel Relief Fund” of $8 billion to give farmers one-time payments in the hopes that they will be lured back to his side.
But his base’s shifting support goes beyond the last two years. The war on Iran may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but the promises Trump has run on for over a decade ring hollow: an end to forever wars, rebuilding American manufacturing and agriculture, and bringing down the cost of living. It remains to be seen whether the White House’s red-baiting and racist scare tactics will be persuasive enough for traditionally Republican voters to see voting GOP as a lesser evil.
In that sense, the bipartisan regime has made a truism of the age-old political axiom that the party in power suffers in the midterm elections. The Democratic Party now has a significant chance of winning both chambers of Congress — Nate Silver puts the chances of a Democratic House at 95.1 percent and the chances of a Democratic advantage in the Senate at 77.7 percent.
However, this apparent advantage speaks less to the ability of the Democratic Party to capture the imagination of voters than it does to a politicized election where a growing sector of voters is entering the political fray to reject not only Trump, but the political “establishment.” The most novel aspect of the election is the upsurge of progressive populist candidates in the Democratic Party competing in contested races at the state and federal levels — many of whom are aligned with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and/or running as part of a bloc of candidates from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Sanders has backed over 80 candidates this election cycle, and his campaign reports that over 75 percent of them won their primaries. One hundred and twenty-three DSA candidates won their primaries, including nineteen candidates for Congress and five for statewide office.
Support for these nominees goes beyond anti-Trump rhetoric. It speaks to widespread discontent over austerity and war. But it is also an expression of the conclusions being drawn by widening sectors from movements from below that have touched the masses over the last decade. This is a political generation (of all ages) shaped by Black Lives Matter, anti-trans attacks, the international movement against the genocide, and the movement against ICE that rocked Los Angeles, Chicago, the Twin Cities, and cities all across the country in which immigrants and citizens are uniting to protect themselves and their neighbors. That energy has even spilled over into the labor movement, with workers organizing new sectors from below and fighting Trump’s agenda, as in the economic blackout in the Twin Cities.
In the immediate term, these sectors are likely boost Democrats’ showing — both at the polls and as volunteers canvassing for progressive candidates, many of whom are organized in DSA and progressive NGOs. But the question is whether more disaffected voters, including some sectors of Republicans and independents in states and districts that went for Trump and the GOP, will go the other way and turn blue, shifting the electoral map ahead of the 2028 presidential elections.
The Races to Watch
The possibility of capitalizing on discontent with the Trump administration has put the focus on a few key races. In North Carolina, Democrat Roy Cooper is expected to pull ahead of Republican Michael Whatley for Senate, while the Senate race in solidly red South Carolina is now regarded as a toss up. Democrats are hoping that this will be the year that they finally flip Texas, with James Talarico facing off against Ken Paxton. Each party is sending in its key players — and sparing no expense — in last-minute bids on the campaign trail.The Democratic Party sent in Barack Obama to stump for Jon Ossoff in Georgia. Trump himself is touring states he won handily in his three runs for president but which now are up for grabs. In another sign of just how toxic he’s become, some Republicans are distancing themselves from the president in the final days before the election; Trump has now canceled several appearances in battleground states in favor of tele-rallies.
With so much of the electorate up for grabs, both parties smell blood in the water. This has become the most expensive election in history with total political ad spending and campaign costs surpassing $11.2 billion to $11.6 billion. Billionaires like Elon Musk — the single largest donor in the election, who is pouring money to bolster Republicans’ chances in places like Texas — are putting their fingers on the scale in an effort to both save Trump’s government and stave off the potential effects of a progressive wave within the Democratic Party.
Other races have particular weight because of the specific candidates on the ballot. They will be a barometer for how much power a progressive populist message — generally centered on affordability, universal healthcare, an end to aid for Israel, taxing the rich, AI and data center moratoriums, and anti-establishment rhetoric — will have as a potential future for the Democratic Party that could usher working-class voters back into its embrace.
No race is more emblematic of these tensions than Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate race in Michigan. It perfectly encapsulates the contradictions facing the insurgent wing of the Democratic Party and the challenges they face both from the Right and from their own party. To make himself more appealing to moderate voters and garner more support from the establishment of the Democratic Party, El-Sayed distanced himself from DSA during his primary, saying unabashedly: “I believe in capitalism.” Yet this has not stopped the GOP from lobbing vicious racist and Islamophobic attacks at him. Trump himself called El-Sayed a “jihadist” at recent rallies across the country. The fact that Trump is weighing in on a Senate race in Michigan only proves how important this race is. From the other side, AOC and Sanders have both poured $1 million each to El-Sayed’s campaign, as it will serve as a test of progressive populist candidates who are able to appeal to moderates and anti-establishment sentiment without strictly identifying with DSA and its program.
On another level, the elections are a national test of how well DSA candidates — who openly associate themselves with the word “socialism” — will fare in a general election after a strong showing in the primaries. Figures like Claire Valdez and Darializa Chevalier in New York, Melat Kiros in Colorado, and Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania are safe bets to win their seats. But there is also Angie Nixon in Florida, a DSA member who may become the first Black senator in the state’s history. She decisively won her primary on a platform of Medicare for All, universal childcare, a national rent freeze and an eviction moratorium, stronger union protections, and taxing the rich; she sued the state of Florida for not allowing her access to “Alligator Alcatraz,” the horrific immigrant detention center. Now she faces off against Republican Ashley Moody. The fact that a DSA member is running a competitive campaign in the same state as that has long-served as a bastion of the GOP and is home to presidential hopeful Marco Rubio is a particularly salient example of the contradictions in the American political landscape.
Then there is the mayoral race in Los Angeles, where progressive Nithya Raman is going head to head against establishment stalwart Karen Bass. Raman gained ground running as a referendum on Bass, who is seen as an ally to big business and the orchestrator of incredible repression against anti-ICE protesters last year. Los Angeles’s DSA chapter endorsed Raman, but its members and the national organization are questioning this decision in light of donations Raman’s campaign accepted from Zionist organizations and her refusal to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. While Raman may not be a DSA member herself, the tensions in the race show the challenges the organization faces nationally when its project of municipal socialism comes head to head with the machinery of the Democratic Party. This experience is reflected in growing criticisms of Zohran Mamdani ten months into his term as New York City’s democratic-socialist mayor.
What a Democratic Congress Won’t Do
If Democrats get the sweep they hope for next week, it will be in no small part due to the popularity of progressive candidates within the Democratic Party and the efforts of millions of people who are energized by campaigns that promise a change from the status quo, many of whom have spent countless hours canvassing and raising money for them. DSA is likely to have more candidates in office at every level of government than ever before in the organization’s history. This opens a new period for the largest socialist organization in the United States and, with it, new challenges and contradictions as it works within a party led by and made up of billionaires and capitalists.
A Democrat-controlled Congress will be led not by a progressive wing setting the agenda outright but by an establishment mediating the relationship between its different wings and the growing aspirations of voters who do not trust the two parties. It is unclear how such a Congress can pose an alternative to the problems haunting the Trump administration. On the war on Iran, the Democrats have ramped up their anti-war rhetoric, but they have long sought to check the regional power’s influence and have no feasible way to check Trump’s promised offensive. And as we know, the Democratic Party did little but sit on its hands when it controlled the executive and both chambers of Congress in 2021; we saw the biggest rollback of reproductive rights in a century and infighting that hamstrung Biden’s lukewarm agenda and paved the way for Trump’s return.
In other words, the Democratic Party’s lack of compelling vision for its base does not translate into open space within Congress to win progressives’ agenda. While the party cannot fully reject its progressive wing, it will find ways to keep it in check, above all by invoking the need to unite to combat a volatile Trump in his last two years in office. The Democratic Party is more likely headed toward increased tensions among its wings as opposed to the complete shift to the left that Sanders predicts.
Certainly, a weakened Trump does not mean a less dangerous Trump. If Democrats take one or both chambers of Congress, Trump may take increasingly Bonapartist measures to impose his agenda — particularly on immigration, democratic rights, strengthening the executive, as well as internationally with the war on Iran. The United States and Israel have already threatened a renewed offensive after their respective elections. And while it seems unlikely that the relation of forces exists for widespread polling interference by the administration, Trump is certainly making a show of threats to this effect and it’s not out of the question that Trump or the GOP may try to contest election results in certain races.
Added to this is a renewed anti-immigrant offensive. The administration has opted for less visible ICE operations, but arrests by ICE have increased since June; this is largely due to cooperation with local police, the precedent for which was set in Minnesota Democrats’ de-escalation negotiations with Trump after the uprising in the Twin Cities. The surge in arrests has led to higher detention rates in the squalid, inhumane detention centers across the country that operate by denying medical attention and sanctioning abuse. Trump has even used his anti-immigrant spree to put his finger directly on the scale of the election by opening a viciously xenophobic investigation into Representative Ilhan Omar less than a month before Election Day, or ramping up ICE operations in California to scare people away from the polls.
The Democratic Party has done little to fight back against these attacks. Democrats have leaned on hatred of ICE in their campaigning; many candidates have won primaries openly calling to abolish ICE. But in practice, the party has worked with the Trump administration to avoid fanning the flames of class struggle unless it has no other option. The party’s leadership in both chambers of Congress supports tepid reform for ICE while keeping the bulk of the United States’s hyper-exploitative and xenophobic immigration policy intact. Hundreds of thousands across the country hope that a progressive bloc in Congress will fight to make the demands to abolish ICE and end Trump’s anti-immigration offensive a reality. Some of the candidates up for election have even put their bodies on the line more than once to defend immigrants, such as Darializa Chevalier; but the contradiction is that it was the police force in a city controlled by a fellow democratic socialist that pushed her to the ground. Mamdani’s negotiations with Trump following Oscar Belgal’s shooting show that pragmatic negotiations from above do not keep ICE off our streets or protect those who stand up to the agency free from repression.
Parallel to this is the administration’s onslaught against the Left as socialism grows in popularity across the country; these McCarthyist attacks are replicated in workplaces and universities across the country. A sector of the Democratic Party has already disavowed “socialism,” though the popularity of democratic-socialist candidates limits how much the leadership of the party can distance itself from the word. But will the likes of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer defend Democrats who are targeted or threatened by the administration? If the experiences of Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib over the last eight years are any indication, they will often be the ones leading the charge.
A cornered Trump will lash out at home as well as abroad. The result is an assault on democratic rights and the targeting of the most vulnerable among the working class. Underlying all of that is an austerity agenda that is gutting social programs under the guise of rooting out fraud and corruption, while more money goes to creating data centers that destroy our communities.
Fighting Back and Fighting for More on Our Terms
What gets lost in the fray are the aspirations of working people to fight for better living conditions and fight back in an untenable scenario. This is expressed in the enthusiasm for candidates who openly align with socialism, and from another angle in Sanders’ standing as the most popular politician currently in office. It is expressed in distorted form in the hollow anti-establishment and anti-billionaire rhetoric of candidates from both sides of the aisle. But above all it is expressed in the millions of people who have taken to the streets in recent years against ICE, police brutality, imperialist war and genocide, anti-trans laws, and gender violence; those who have gone on strike for raises and better staffing ratios, who have fought against inhumane conditions at UPS and Amazon, and the teachers and other workers who faced off against masked men with guns to protect their immigrant communities.
That social force is not synonymous with the Democratic Party. In fact, it has stood up against governors and mayors in blue states and cities, and yelled in the face of genocide apologists with a “D” next to their name. This social force needs organization and representation to give shape to their demands: for universal healthcare and childcare, guaranteed housing, an end to genocide and imperialist war, the abolition of ICE and for full rights for immigrants, and against austerity and capitalist crisis. The outlines of a national program for the working class to confront capitalist crisis have taken shape in the last several years. The success of this general platform among progressive candidates even has progressives and left organizations like DSA eyeing the next election cycle and a presidential bid with AOC at the helm.
But the Democratic Party is not the vehicle for achieving our demands; it’s an obstacle. We’ve seen how quickly DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” program was disavowed by the Party, including several DSA-backed candidates and entire wings within DSA itself. Experience has taught us that the party changes politicians, not the other way around. Sectors of DSA and progressive figures ridicule those of us who call to break with a party of genocide and capitalist misery; but to do so is a devil’s bargain of short-term success at the polls in exchange for strategic failure when the true battles come. Spending our time rejuvenating the Democratic Party will not build a force capable of facing the fights to come head on. It merely teaches us how to water down our demands while calling it a victory and curb the self-organization of our class when it explodes in our schools, workplaces, and in the streets.
If we want to see another path, just look at France. Young people and workers — who are united with us in their hatred of police brutality, genocide and war, the Far Right, and capitalist austerity — are organizing themselves in the thousands from below in assemblies and meetings to decide together the way forward for a country-wide movement against the Macron government and its attempts to rob them of their futures. They have rejected each mealy-mouthed “concession” from the government because they know they deserve more and have the power to fight for it. They have chosen the way of struggle and organization. It’s become normalized here in the United States to say we are nothing like France, Spain, Serbia, or India; but our movements are part of the same phenomenon that has socialism on the lips of millions of people across the country and the world.
Let’s prepare the largest socialist organization in the country to run a candidate, but not in the Democratic Party. The working class needs its own candidates. It needs independent campaigns that unabashedly raise working-class demands; but they must do so to support the struggle from below, not use it as cover or as a pressure campaign to achieve concessions that merely pacify the exploited and oppressed instead of preparing them to fight for more. Because that struggle is what is decisive in taking on nothing less than the power of the capitalist class. And the fight against the Far Right and for our demands can’t wait for the next election cycle.
In other words, if we talk about elections, it can’t be as an end in themselves but as a challenge to create the kind of party we need to unite our demands against the two big parties of capital: a party of our own whose one goal is to organize and unite the struggles of the working class and oppressed where they appear and give voice to the demands that arise out of movements until our will becomes undeniable.
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