Trump’s Toxicity Triggers ‘Blue’ Wave

As Donald Trump’s Republican Party suffers nigh unprecedented losses, George Binette reviews the results and asks: where next for the Democrats?

“Pretend I’m on the ballot,” President Trump repeatedly told rallies in the run-up to the mid-term elections. Evidently, many voters across large swathes of the United States did just that and rejected Republican candidates in one of the most humiliating defeats ever sustained by the Grand Old Party in Congressional elections since the Great Depression.

To nobody’s surprise, Democratic candidates erased a slender four-seat majority in the lower chamber, while also capturing the Senate with at least 54 of 100 seats (including two independents in the Democratic caucus, Bernie Sanders and Angus Snow). For only the fourth time since the Second World War control of both chambers switched.

In Kansas, a Democratic candidate for the US Senate won for the first time since 1932, while Democratic standard-bearer James Talarico easily defeated the Trump-endorsed Republican in Texas, which also saw the election of a Democrat as governor for the first time in 35 years. These results came despite Elon Musk pouring hundreds of millions into Republican coffers, not least in Texas.

From across the six New England states there are now no Republican senators, as former logger Troy Jackson scored a surprisingly comfortable win against five-term incumbent Susan Collins.

In the Deep South, Darlene Graham, sister of the recently deceased Republican senator, failed to hold his seat against Democrat Annie Andrews in South Carolina, while the Senate race in Mississippi ended in a virtual tie with Democrat Scott Colom having the slightest of leads. The result may not be confirmed until after 10th November, but the contrast with the 2024 presidential contest could hardly be more dramatic. Two years ago, Trump won the state by a 23-percentage point margin.

Elsewhere in the South, Jon Ossoff, a mainstream Democrat, widely touted as a potential presidential candidate in 2028, held his Senate seat with ease, and Democratic gubernatorial challenger Keisha Lance Bottoms also scored a substantial win to become the first Black woman elected as governor of any US state. Meanwhile, Democratic nominee Angie Nixon fell agonisingly short in Florida’s Senate contest. This Democratic Socialist-backed candidate, who had little backing from the party’s establishment, captured some 48% of the vote in a state that had become a Republican stronghold in recent elections.

In so-called rustbelt states, Democrat Sherrod Brown will return to the Senate after a two-year absence having won a long overdue special election for the seat occupied for two years by Vice President JD Vance. The Senate seat from Iowa also swung to the Democratic candidate, Josh Turek, a former wheelchair basketball star.

Crucially, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, the Democratic candidate, who faced a barrage of vicious attacks as a left-leaning, pro-Palestinian Muslim, secured a Senate seat with a six-percentage point edge even after the last-minute defection of his Democratic primary opponent to the Republican camp. Widely-cited polling suggests that some 60% of Michigan’s Jewish voters backed El-Sayed, underscoring the drastic erosion of support for Israel or at least the Netanyahu government, as well as the declining effectiveness of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which all told sank $39 million into the Michigan contest in the hope of blocking El-Sayed.

In the lower chamber of Congress, the party of the incumbent president almost invariably loses seats. The mid-term elections of 1998 and 2002 provide the only exceptions over the course of the last 80 years. So in itself, a shift to a Democratic majority in the 435-seat House of Representatives was no surprise. The scale of that shift did, however, far surpass expectations. With around 30 results still not declared by late Friday afternoon (6th November), the Democrats had already gained more than 40 seats, securing a clear majority. When the dust settles, Democrats may well hold more than 255 of the 435 seats. Even so, the party’s House caucus will still be more than 30 seats short of a two-thirds majority, required to override a White House veto.

Attempts by Republican legislatures to gerrymander Congressional districts over the last two years proved remarkably ineffectual (for example, North Carolina and Texas). At one point it appeared possible there would not be a single Republican representative from New England for the first time since the party first emerged in the late 1850s, though rabid right-winger Paul LePage now looks certain to have won narrowly in Maine’s second Congressional district.

The crass insensitivity, the ever more inane ramblings, the documented family grifts, the naked self-aggrandisement of a man obsessed with vanity projects from a new White House ballroom to a triumphal arch in Washington, DC – all doubtless fuelled disgust among many voters not just with the 47th (and 45th) president of the United States, but with his party as a whole. Those voters would have included more than a few who backed Trump just two years before.

But the roots of the Republican rout ran deeper: first and foremost, anger at rising inflation, which the Trump administration’s tariffs and failed war on Iran fed, against the backdrop of long-term wage stagnation. Compounding this was widespread unhappiness with the Iran war itself, an evident betrayal of Trump’s supposed rejection of neo-conservative military adventures.

Even the administration’s signature domestic policy of mass deportations had become increasingly unpopular, particularly after ICE’s lethal siege of Minneapolis during the winter months. Trump’s obsession with a brutal immigration crackdown may well have damaged Republican candidates’ chances in rural areas where farms rely heavily on migrant labour, while his enthusiastic embrace of AI and so the nigh- exponential growth of data centres clearly did not play well far beyond Democratic enclaves in major cities.

And for all the media coverage of ‘trad wives,’ the votes of women, particularly African-American and Latina women, indicated disgust not only at Trump, but with the ongoing assault in Republican-controlled states on reproductive rights.

In an obvious sense, Trump is an especially ‘lame duck’ president with just over two years remaining in his term. So far at least, the scale of the Democratic victories has deterred him from asserting absurd claims of electoral fraud. At one level he may not be hugely concerned about the make-up of the legislative branch, given his historically unprecedented reliance on executive orders, the absence of veto-proof majorities in either Congressional chamber, and the considerable extent to which a stacked Supreme Court has enabled him. He may well, however, encounter mounting difficulties come January with many judicial appointments requiring Senate approval. As a result, speculation has been rife that two senior right-wingers on the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito (aged 76) and Clarence Thomas (aged 78), will retire this month while Republican senators still control the confirmation process.

More significantly, the US president retains considerable autonomy in the realm of foreign policy, and, as Commander-in-Chief of the military, Trump faces minimal constraints under the War Powers Act of 1973. So far, he has not acted on barely veiled threats to intensify action against Iran, but the new Congress will not sit until January, offering plenty of time to launch a still more dramatic offensive whether with or without direct Israeli involvement. On the other hand, Trump just might be prepared to sacrifice his shamelessly gung-ho Defence Secretary Pete Hesgeth and paint him as responsible for the current debacle.

There are dark domestic scenarios where Trump chooses to reignite ICE’s reign of terror in US cities or perhaps seeks to mobilise a MAGA backlash on the streets even as air strikes on unarmed boats continue in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Ominously, Stephen Miller, a key architect of Trump’s deportation programme will assume the role of White House chief of staff replacing Susie Wiles, depicted as some sort of restraining influence on Trump.

What looks most plausible is an extended period of gridlock with the president exercising veto powers, potentially leading to protracted Government shutdowns and layoffs of Federal employees. Accompanying gridlock there are likely to be numerous Congressional investigations into the administration’s corruption and abuses of power, which are likely to generate much rhetorical heat, but little else.

The end of the Trump era, if indeed it is that, also signals the start of what is likely to prove an especially bitter succession battle within the Republican party. JD Vance’s extended post-election Tweet was clearly designed to place distance between himself and the president, but it was certainly not a renunciation of ‘America First.’ In short, the United States is hardly immune from what economic historian Adam Tooze has dubbed an ongoing “polycrisis,” which reminds me of a famous line uttered by Bette Davis in the Hollywood classic, All About Eve: “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

The Growth – and Limits – of the Left

Of course, there is little ideological coherence to the Democratic Party. As Rutgers University lecturer Eric Blanc noted, “Democrats of every political stripe won, so it would be silly for any faction to claim a national mandate for its entire program[me].” There is little doubt that arch centrists – Hakeem Jeffries in the House, Chuck Schumer in the Senate – will assume the key leadership positions in the new Congress, though Schumer may face a serious challenge, backed by some newly elected senators. Suffice to say, these leadership figures and indeed the overwhelming majority of Congressional Democrats are not champions of universal healthcare or taxing the rich, much less likely converts to fundamental shifts in US foreign policy.

The Democrats’ ‘big tent’ has, however, expanded in the past decade with substantial growth of a left wing that is broadly social democratic in the European sense of the phrase. Buoyed by the Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is an organisation that has achieved exceptional growth since 2016 and now reports some 125,000 members. It has claimed that more than 50 candidates it had backed won office in the early November contests. Following the Los Angeles mayoral contest, DSA-endorsed candidates will hold the mayoralties of the two biggest US cities with another DSA member also elected mayor of Providence, Rhode Island.

For all of Trump’s ranting about “Communist jihadis,” echoed by some Republican candidates, the stigma attached to the ‘socialist’ label has diminished remarkably in recent years. The left-wing academic and journalist, Corey Robin, wrote of the results that “by refusing to back down on trans rights, in the domestic context, and Palestinian rights, in the international context, and by foregrounding popular positions on affordability and economic privilege, the DSA and its candidates, as well as DSA-adjacent candidates, have shown that it’s possible to take principled stances on behalf of non-majoritarian issues while winning over public opinion and winning elections.”

On the one hand, Robin is correct in highlighting the success of DSA candidates in navigating culture war issues as well as giving an unprecedented voice to the Palestinian cause. They often won despite much smaller war chests than their opponents. More left-wing Democrats frequently secured union support. El-Sayed, for example, won the endorsement and active backing from the still powerful United Auto Workers with some 350,000 members, including retirees, in Michigan. He did so in part by spending hours on picket lines in the state rather than simply seeking a photo opportunity.

On the other hand, though Democratic candidates this year outperformed the party’s 2024 standard-bearers across every age cohort and demographic, the party still lags badly behind the Republicans among generally poorer sections of the white working-class electorate. And the capacity of hallowed institutions to domesticate one-time firebrands remains substantial. Some critics point to the most high-profile of the so-called squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as yet another example of a tamed radical.

For now at least, the Democrats’ centre of gravity has shifted leftwards. Representative Ro Khanna, a leading figure on the Congressional left, though not endorsed by the DSA, put forward a skeletal programme that could provide a rallying point for the Democratic majorities in both chambers: “Medicare for All; $25 living wage; End the Iran War; Zero aid [to] Israel. Tax the billionaires; Make Trump Hoover if he vetoes it.” (Herbert Hoover was the Republican president at the start of the Great Depression).

In the meantime, there is a compelling case for the still small but dramatically expanded left wing in Congress to form a caucus both to advance its own legislative programme and to build solidarity with strikes and other progressive resistance to Trump’s reactionary reign.

Source: Times Voter Trends preliminary 2026 estimates (New York Times, published on 4th November 2026)

George Binette, a Massachusetts native, is a retired union activist, vice-chair of Camden Trades Council and former Trade Union Liaison Officer of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donald_Trump_-_Caricature_(24854169213).jpg Source: Donald Trump – Caricature Author: DonkeyHotey, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.