Just halfway through election night on Tuesday, Trump took to Truth Social to acknowledge the abysmal performance of the GOP in the midterm elections: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.” The irony, of course, is that Trump begged voters for months on the campaign trail to vote as if he were on the ballot — and that was exactly the problem. The fact that Trump himself conceded his party’s defeat before many of the races were officially called, and agreed to accept the results shortly after, is telling. The Democratic Party’s “blue tsunami” — handily taking both chambers of Congress — has shaken the political landscape on several levels. Above all, it is a resounding rejection of Trump, who arrived at Election Day at the weakest moment of his two terms.

The elections showed that the Trumpist vision for clawing the United States out of its imperialist decline failed to win majority support in the elections — if it ever commanded it. These elections were a rejection of imperialist war, tax breaks for billionaires and economic hardship for working people, violent anti-immigrant policies and ICE, genocide, and Bonapartist maneuvers to impose the president’s agenda. The Democratic Party has won big as a result of this discontent, but it still faces a deepening identity crisis and remains deeply unpopular. The Democrats may have bought themselves and the bipartisan regime some time, but we face a complex political scenario in which the aspirations of a politicized working class from below will clash with a floundering regime from above.

A Political Upset Not Seen in Decades

For once, the polls didn’t lie. At the time of writing, the Democratic Party gained a total of seven seats in the Senate and 25 seats in the House. The Democrats will control the House with 228 seats, a margin not seen since Barack Obama’s first term. They now have a clear advantage in the Senate, with 54 seats. The last time they controlled both chambers was after the 2020 elections. They also won control of state and local governments in races for governor and mayor. From Ohio to Iowa and Kansas, Democrats performed well in nearly all of the so-called “battleground” states, where either party had a chance to flip seats.

Among the Democrats’ big wins of the night was the white whale of Texas. Not only did James Talarico beat Ken Paxton by double digits in the race for Senate, but the Republican stronghold will now have its first Democratic governor since 1990. Elon Musk’s endless stream of money into the race did nothing to bolster Republicans’ chances. Just two years after Trump entered his second term on a wave of anti-immigrant hate, Gina Hinojosa beat incumbent Greg Abbott and will become the state’s first Latina governor and the third woman to hold the office.

This result is in no small part due to shifts among Latino/a voters in the state, which reflect broader trends across the country. Early exit poll data suggests that Talarico, for example, won up to 60 percent of the Latino/a vote — roughly the same level of support Trump won among this sector in 2024. Talarico’s support for AI regulations also boosted his victory, as massive opposition to AI has grown in the state, a major hub of AI investment.

The same holds true for Florida, which saw a massive swing of Latino support to the Democrats, reversing the inroads Republicans made in 2024. Though this sector is heterogeneous, what is evident is that Trump’s anti-immigrant policies have lost significant support over the last year as he set ICE loose on cities and communities across the country. Border towns in Texas have been hit especially hard; the state has the highest arrest rates in the country, and reports of abuse and neglect in detention centers are becoming alarmingly frequent. In the Sunshine State, a GOP stronghold for the last twenty years, a DSA candidate with almost no party support turned the Senate race competitive.

Democrats prevailed in many of the other contested races as well. Democrat Troy Jackson unseated Republican incumbent Susan Collins in Maine, despite a late change of candidate after Graham Platner exited the race following serious allegations of sexual harassment. South Carolina voters elected a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since 1998, flipping the state. A similar scenario played out in North Carolina, where Democrat Roy Cooper beat Republican Michael Whatley by nearly 20 points. Scott Colom is ahead in a narrow race for a Senate seat in Mississippi, a seat the leadership of the Democratic Party had all but counted out and did not spend significant resources on. If he wins, this would mark the first time a Democrat has controlled a Senate seat in the state since 1982 and Colom would be the first Black senator elected in Mississippi since the Reconstruction Era.

In one of the biggest upsets of the evening, Keisha Lance Bottoms decisively won the race for governor of Georgia, beating Republican billionaire and healthcare executive Rick Jackson even though he vastly outspent her with his own money. Bottoms, who previously served as mayor of Atlanta, will become the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history.

DSA Takes More Seats Than Ever Before

The Democratic Socialists of America had its best night ever at the federal level. NPR called it “a historic night” for the organization, as a record number of DSA-endorsed candidates won seats in the House of Representatives. At least five DSA candidates won spots in Congress: Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, Melat Kiros in Colorado, Donavan McKinney in Michigan, and Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania. They will join sitting DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, more than tripling the socialist bloc in the House from two to seven.

All five won in safe Democratic districts, so the decisive battles came months earlier, against the party establishment. Kiros ousted Rep. Diana DeGette, a 15-term incumbent and member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in July. Days before that, Chevalier narrowly beat Rep. Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in upper Manhattan and the Bronx. Valdez and Rabb won open seats left by retiring Reps. Nydia Velázquez and Dwight Evans. DSA members won at every single level of government, including state seats in deeply-red states, such as Georgia, Florida, and even Tennessee. In Florida, DSA member Angie Nixon narrowly lost her Senate race to Republican Ashley Moody. What it shows is that a candidate who openly associates with “democratic socialism” ran a competitive race in a Republican stronghold.

Crucially, DSA member Janeese Lewis George easily sailed to victory to become mayor of the country’s capital, Washington D.C. Though the race is too close to call, Nithya Raman pulled ahead late last night in the race for Los Angeles mayor and the results will be called in the following days. With DSA members or DSA-endorsed candidates now the executive in three of the most important important cities in the United States, DSA’s strategy of municipal socialism will receive a trial by fire — determining the relationship between these politicians and a Democratic Party establishment hostile to their program, a volatile lame-duck president, and a base that has expectations for real structural change for working people in urban areas.

DSA candidates’ performance expresses how deep discontent with both capitalist parties runs, among young people in particular. At this juncture, it also strengthens the sector of DSA that sees the strategy of pushing the Democratic Party to the left as a complete success. But there are challenges. DSA’s victories were not a landslide: establishment Democrats won big as well, especially in some of the major congressional races. This means the divides within the party are not going away.

We saw a taste of this in the final days of the Michigan Senate race between Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers. Though El-Sayed distanced himself from DSA and socialism on the campaign trail, he represents the same social force that brought several other DSA candidates to power — running on an explicitly pro-Palestine message, in favor of Medicare for All, and with a rhetoric against billionaires and for reforms that will make life more “affordable” for working people in Michigan and across the country. His defeated opponent in the Democratic Party primary, Haley Stevens, made shockwaves in the political scene after she publicly endorsed Republican Mike Rogers in the race in defense of Zionism and against any policies that touch capitalist profit-making in the state of the Big Three auto companies. The Party’s establishment lined up behind El-Sayed and he easily won his race, but it points to the types of divisions that remain in the party despite this historic result.

The progressive wing has grown enough to be a headache for the establishment, but the relationship of forces is still not in its favor, and establishment Democrats can and will maneuver against it. On the other hand, it means that Democrats — divided and without a clear message for the future — will have to answer to voters, from the wave of young people who support Palestine to workers fed up with inflation.

What Will Dems Do Now That They Have Both Chambers?

These elections have undoubtedly strengthened the Democratic Party. At the same time, yesterday’s results do not translate automatically into massive support for the Democratic Party. At the heart of the results lies the melting away of Trump’s political capital. In order to consolidate this support, Dems will have to respond to higher aspirations of the electorate.

Once this new cohort of politicians is sworn in next year, the question becomes: How will the Democratic Party use its new position?

Analysts point to the possibility of Democrats capitalizing on anti-Trump sentiment to go after the administration. The threat of impeachment hangs over Trump’s head, as does the possibility of new investigations into his business interests and his ties to the Epstein files. If Democrats go on the offensive this way, it will be to distract people from the party’s very bad track record when it holds majorities in both chambers of Congress. Much less clear is how they will address the real issues facing working people in the United States, from ending the war on Iran to abolishing ICE to the cost-of-living crisis.

This speaks to the lack of vision that still plagues the Democratic Party — and without a vision, the party lacks an orientation that could convince working people to come back into its vise grip. Right now, Democrats are banking on continued anti-Trump sentiment to buy themselves some time. But the blue tsunami doesn’t mean a realignment with the Democratic Party. Tensions within the party, and between the party and its voters, will emerge in a post-Trump moment shaped by an ongoing organic crisis and the decay of U.S. hegemony, exacerbated by two years of Trump in power.

The Fight Against the Far Right, War, and Austerity Hasn’t Come to an End

The midterm results signal the beginning of the post-Trump moment. Anti-Trump sentiment came together in these elections to reject a political vision based on the brutal, xenophobic persecution of immigrants, imperialist war and intervention, genocide, unbridled capitalist greed, and the strengthening of executive power. But this opens a new period of uncertainty and crisis for both parties of capital, which have faced deep discontent from below. With the Trump coalition shattered, the Republican Party is seeking a new direction. The Democratic Party claimed victory in the midterms, but this does not resolve its long-term problem of working-class voters abandoning the party of the neoliberal status quo.

The fact that so many states were “in play” compared to other recent elections speaks to a political moment in which both parties face deeper crises and the electorate is not convinced by the vision of either party of capital.

Some candidates in these elections refused to run on the Democratic Party’s ballot line, ran as open socialists, and still performed well as independents. Brittany Kubicek in Rhode Island won nearly 24 percent of the vote in her race for the House. Andre Easton, running for a House seat in New York as a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), won nearly 9 percent. And in Providence, Rhode Island, voters approved a city ordinance by roughly 3 to 1 to divest city assets from “foreign countries conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide” — a measure aimed at Israel and the first of its kind in the country to pass by popular vote.

Preparing for what lies ahead requires building on this healthy distrust of both parties to organize an independent working-class party that fights for socialism. The roots of that party found expression at the polls — in the millions of people who voted against the “status quo” of either party. The task now is to turn that rejection of the bad choice between Democrats and Republicans into an organized independent fight against ICE, imperialist war, austerity, and the genocide in Palestine.

The post Trump Lost the Midterms, but the Fight Against War, ICE, and Austerity Continues appeared first on Left Voice.

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