Democrats won control of the United States Congress in the country’s midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3, in a crushing rebuke of US President Donald Trump’s second term.
The Republicans lost at least seven Senate seats in states that have traditionally been strongholds for the right-wing party. The party also lost over two dozen House districts to the Democrats. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump had won some of these districts by double-digit percentage points.
Kansas will have a Democratic senator for the first time in nearly a century. North and South Carolina and even Texas have flipped to the Democrats in an unprecedented shift for those states. In one of the most closely-watched races in Michigan, progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed won the senate seat by 7% percentage points.
The sweeping defeat comes after $12 billion dollars was spent. mostly by billionaires on both sides of the aisle, on what analysts are calling the most expensive midterm elections in history.
A condemnation of Trump and the administration’s priorities
A total of 435 seats in the US House of Representatives were up for election and 35 seats of the US Senate’s 100 seats were also decided. These two chambers, the Senate and the House of Representatives, make up the US Congress.
While the president himself is not up for election, various analysts have characterized these midterm elections as a referendum on US President Donald Trump. And the resounding defeat for the Republican Party is seen as a profound rejection of the administration and its priorities over the last two years. Corruption, inflation, rising fuel prices, and the Iran war are cited as some of the top concerns on voters’ minds.
“The reason we lost is the war,” said Vice President JD Vance in a post online.
Speaking to BreakThrough News on election night, Trita Parsi, Iranian-Swedish international relations writer and political analyst, spoke about the deep unpopularity of the Iran war as a driver of the election result.
“I don’t think we have seen an election in recent memory in which the war is such a decisive issue – not a factor – but a decisive issue.”
Parsi also spoke about President Trump’s claim just before elections on a morning talk show that US funding to Israel will cease by the end of 2026. This funding is another widely unpopular aspect of US policy.
“The Israelis came to the conclusion over a year ago that they have lost the American public,” he said. The plan is to “hide the money,” using joint ventures inside the Pentagon budget in a way that is “outside of the scrutiny of Congress” and the American public. He argued that funding could actually increase through this model.
Because support for Israel has become such a political liability, Amanda Yee, host of The China Report, explained that AIPAC announced in October that it would stop making endorsements and direct donations to candidates.
“AIPAC isn’t actually stopping any of its spending, it’s just changing the way that it spends,” Yee said.
She said the United Democracy Project (UDP), AIPAC’s affiliated super PAC, now operates as a “cover for AIPAC money.” UDP has already spent millions to unseat representatives critical of Israel, such as Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.
Israel and foreign policy aren’t the only points of dissatisfaction for people in the US, however. Various domestic issues have become major political pressure points US politics, one of the biggest ones is related to AI development.
AI data centers become a national flashpoint
John Russell, a journalist with More Perfect Union, spoke to BreakThrough News about the increasingly unpopular development of hyper-scale data centers to power the AI boom.
He said data centers are “job-killing super computers” that “explode your utility rates” if they are hooked up to the grid next to you. If they’re not hooked up to the grid, then the massive power plants they require “burn dirty fossil fuels that kill our planet.”
All of these impacts sustain vast computing that is “just shoveling money up to the top of the economy, to the already fantastically rich.”
“This is a uniting issue no matter who you’re voting for,” Russell said. “People can see that this is just a big club and we’re not in it.
Russell argued that despite the Democratic Party claiming victory in these elections, the masses of working people are actually looking for a party that will stop “the absolute gains for the richest people on earth” and do something that actually makes life easier and more affordable for the majority.
Democrats attack independent socialist candidates and the left
During the BreakThrough News election coverage, Zoe Alexandra highlighted a bizarre “mailer-gate” scandal during a race in the state of Ohio that has drawn condemnation of both the Republican and Democratic parties.
The Ohio Senate race, won by Democrat Sherrod Brown, involved not just Republican Jon Husted, but also independent socialist candidate Greg Levy, who received 94,509 votes.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DfTa0tNM0tE/?obrf=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D&srtk=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D
In this “mailer-gate” scandal, a MAGA-linked super PAC spent 2 million dollars on mailers that mimicked Greg Levy’s socialist platform.
“Mailers and video ads called on voters to ‘Join the Revolution’ and support socialist candidate Greg Levy” and criticized Sherrod Brown for being anti-worker, Alexandra said.
The BT journalist said the maneuver was immediately condemned by Greg Levy and his team, who called it “a dirty trick” and a form of “digital blackface.” However, Alexandra emphasized that the Democrats’ response was not to join Levy and condemn the Republicans’ dirty electoral maneuver.
“Instead, the Democrats decided to turn on Greg Levy,” Alexandra said. “They went on the offensive and were very quick to say ‘Gregy Levy is working with Republicans’ and ‘Greg Levy is actually your enemy.’” She demonstrated various mailers that the Democrats paid for to disseminate these messages.
Alexandra also demonstrated headlines by corporate media outlets that blame socialist Greg Levy for potentially “spoiling” the Democratic victory in the state. A Newsweek headline read, “How a Socialist Could Undermine Sherrod Brown’s Ohio Comeback.” Another headline in The Washington Post read “PAC linked to GOP firm is boosting Ohio socialist in Senate race.”
The Sherrod Brown campaign went as far as taking out an attack video ad, that spread fear and suspicion about the Greg Levy campaign being influenced by the Republican Party to “split the tides” in the Ohio race.
“This is where they are directing their money,” Alexandra said. “Instead of the Democrats actually looking at their own race and asking, ‘Why is it that a socialist who’s saying we should have healthcare and education and not go to war is somehow becoming more popular?’ They’re saying, ‘Let’s attack him!’”
When it comes to both of the major corporate parties in the US, “they clearly are aligned on one thing which is that the left is a threat to their survival.”
Various guests on the show also spoke to the “war on the left” by the Trump administration and the far right and pointed out that if Democrats control both chambers, they would theoretically be able to do something to stand against the political repression of activism and progressivism in the US, although they have shown no opposition to that trend so far.
In yet another bold independent socialist campaign in the Bronx (New York’s House District 15) Andre Easton received 8.7% of the vote. He challenged Democratic incumbent Ritchie Torres, who was re-elected, but is increasingly unpopular because of his staunch pro-Israel stance and his consistant attacks on the left and progressive candidates, including Andre Easton.
Easton told BreakThrough News that it is the mass movement of workers throughout the other 365 days of the year and the multiple years between elections that truly produces the change people want to see.
“Your political responsibility exists beyond the ballot box,” Easton said. He added people should absolutely vote and mobilize their communities to vote. “But your political responsibility is so much more robust and so much wider and deeper than just a single bubble on a sheet.”
The socialist Bronx candidate says our political duty is carried out in “our streets, in our communities, in our classrooms and workplaces.”
He emphasized that his party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is committed to that work and will continue to do so every day after the midterm elections.
Renewing their commitment to organizing and mobilizing, various activists, journalists, and progressives have highlighted the limited progress that this crushing victory for Trump represents.
What does it actually mean for Democrats to control the US Congress?
Now that Democrats have decisively won midterm elections, a key question that has emerged is what can people actually expect from Democratic control of the US Congress? BreakThrough News Editor-and-Chief Ben Becker pointed out that historically, the Democrats’ have failed to use their majorities to advance meaningful progressive change.
“It feels good to see Republicans lose, but I don’t think we should translate that feeling into an irrational sense of hope in what the Democrats are going to be able to achieve or even want to achieve.”
He highlighted the euphoria for the Democrats winning the House and the Senate after the 2006 midterms, and even more so in the 2008 presidential election. They also had a majority when Joe Biden was elected in 2020.
“None of those promises were delivered,” Becker said.
“Wether it was student debt relief, universal healthcare, parental leave, universal childcare, climate legislation, immigration reform, codifying roe v wade, we could go down the list.”
This gridlock and “failure to deliver,” he argues, created the conditions for Trump to return with a far more extreme right-wing program in the first place.
“The euphoria – if it leads to sitting back and hoping the Democrats will do well – it will actually just lead to the return of the Republicans and Trumpism or even something worse than Trumpism.”
From BT News via This RSS Feed.