The ‘red wall’ that brought Trumpism to power is crumbling. But the left, too, has serious weaknesses

Ten years ago in November, a wall came down in America – a momentous event whose effects are still being felt today. It was not a physical barrier like the one that divided Berlin during the Cold War, but rather an imaginary political landscape: a vast blue stronghold – the colour of the Democratic states – which had, amongst other things, enabled Barack Obama to reach the White House and served as the reservoir from which the party drew strength in its bid to gain the upper hand. It wound its way through the Rust Belt around the Great Lakes, and it was here – in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – that Hillary Clinton was defeated in 2016, paving the way for the decade of Donald Trump in which we are still immersed. The Blue Wall was replaced by a Red Wall, with its foundations further west, in the Great Plains states, and extending as far as Iowa and Ohio. Joe Biden barely made a dent in it in 2020, but the red wall did not crumble entirely and helped to return Trump to the presidency in 2024.

A decade after the historic turning point of 2016, just a few days before the mid-term elections on 3 November, Trump is desperately trying to plug the leaks that keep appearing in his ‘red wall’.

It is trying to weather what looks set to be a powerful blue wave. If the polls are to be believed – and they have been wrong on several occasions, especially when it comes to Trump – the Democrats seem on the verge of a ‘double flip’, the reversal of control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, something not seen since 2006 (the Bush presidency) and which has happened only four times since the end of the Second World War. The challenge of the 2026 mid-term elections lies precisely here: will the president manage to pull off the miracle of stemming the blue wave, reducing it to a high tide that might cost him only the House, or are we on the eve of the beginning of the end of Trumpism, which began ten years ago?

Trump and his running mate J. D. Vance are engaged in a frantic tour de force to rally the demoralised Republican ranks in red states that should not even remotely be on the agenda for the President’s late-October campaign tour in an election year: places such as Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio and as far north as Alaska. The aim is not only to defend the Senate, but also to help certain gubernatorial candidates who are in dire straits (thirty-six out of fifty are up for election), as well as to prevent the Democrats from taking control of state legislatures and other local offices in states hitherto considered safe for the Republicans. This is a daunting task for a president whose approval rating is in freefall: the latest New York Times–Siena University poll indicates that only 36 per cent of Americans approve of his performance, the lowest figure in any of the polls conducted by the same institute on him in recent years (though the Washington Post/ABC poll puts him at 33 per cent and Reuters/Ipsos as low as 31 per cent).

The House of Representatives looks like a lost battle for the party currently in the majority, and the Democrat Hakeem Jeffries is already brushing up on the rules governing the Speaker’s duties: in January, when the 120th United States Congress convenes, the Republican Mike Johnson will almost certainly hand him the gavel – the ceremonial wooden mallet symbolising control of the chamber. The numbers explain why. Today, the House has 218 Republicans and 214 Democrats, with two vacant seats. The Democrats need just four more seats to secure a majority. The Decision Desk HQ model gives them a 77 per cent probability of success and projects them to win 235 seats.

Yet a year ago, the Republicans believed they had found the antidote. Trump had urged states governed by his party to redraw constituencies midway through the decade – an unusual practice. The calculations promised sixteen additional seats: five in Texas, four in Florida, two in Ohio, and one each in Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee. Then the battle over the maps became more complicated. The courts blocked the plan in Missouri. Gavin Newsom’s California responded with five constituencies tailor-made for the Democrats, and a judge in Utah created one in Salt Lake City. Even in the Midwest, the wall showed internal cracks: in Indiana, the Republican-majority state Senate said no to the White House, and in Kansas, the votes simply weren’t there. According to Axios, in the worst-case scenario, redistricting could net the GOP just a single seat. It was an umbrella designed for a storm, not a hurricane.

It was the Latino vote in particular that proved decisive; a vote that Trump seemed to have secured in 2024 but which now appears to be shifting in the opposite direction, largely due to the state of the economy, the cost of living and the excesses of Trumpism in the fight against illegal immigration. The Republicans spent $133 million on adverts across fifteen redrawn constituencies that were supposed to be a formality. In southern Texas, a stronghold of the Hispanic vote, they have already written off Henry Cuellar’s seat. The most worrying sign, however, comes from Iowa, the state that Trump has won three times. All three Republican seats are in the balance, and according to the Cook Political Report, two are already leaning towards the Democrats. In Omaha, Nebraska, the seat vacated by Don Bacon is up for grabs. In Ohio, the constituencies redrawn to take two seats from the Democrats may end up yielding none at all.

At rallies, Trump asks people to vote “as if I were on the ballot paper”. His candidates have responded by sidelining him. The New York Times has analysed AdImpact data: from 9 September to 17 October, Republicans spent less than one dollar in every hundred on adverts mentioning the president. In the primaries, the figure was fifty-five. It is a silent referendum, conducted through television advertising budgets. On Iran – the war that has driven up petrol prices – only the Democrats are hammering home the message, whilst for the Republicans it is the major embarrassment of the moment.

All attention over the coming days will shift to the Senate battleground, where Republican leaders have already begun making some strategic retreats in places where they know they can no longer win, first and foremost North Carolina and Georgia. The situation is more uncertain than many polls suggest, and Trump might pull off the coup of retaining control of this branch of Congress: a result which, at this stage, could be sold as a victory.

Currently, the Republicans have 53 senators and the Democrats 47. The Democrats need to win four more seats without losing any, because in the event of a 50-50 tie, Vance – who is the President of the Senate – will have the casting vote. The Decision Desk HQ model gives the Democrats 56 per cent, whilst The Economist goes as high as 58 per cent: it is still little more than a coin toss. In Washington, they are convinced that the coin will land in Ohio. “As Ohio goes, so goes the Senate,” a MAGA strategist told Politico, echoing an old adage from presidential campaigns back when Ohio decided everything. The by-election for the seat vacated here by Vance has already cost $466 million in ad spend, more than any other race apart from Texas. Jon Husted, appointed to replace the vice-president, trails 44 to 48 against former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in the latest Marist poll, although other pollsters have him narrowly ahead. Within his own party, he is being torn to shreds behind closed doors: “He looks like a quarterback, talks like a quarterback, but behaves like a water boy.” His own supporters accuse the muscular Husted of running the worst campaign of all the Republican candidates, while Trump continues to make bizarre remarks at his rallies about the candidate’s physique, his muscles and his bum: no one has worked out whether these are compliments or expressions of contempt.

Behind Ohio lies the rest of the wall. In Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, the Republicans are defending seats that nobody would have questioned a year ago. In Kansas, Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton is ahead of Senator Roger Marshall in three polls. In Texas, James Talarico is holding his own against Ken Paxton thanks to the Hispanic vote.

Yet the wall might hold. The Republicans are keen to cite a precedent. In 2018, the Democrats won 41 seats in the House of Representatives but lost four in the Senate – in North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana and Florida. The wave swept through the suburbs and crashed against the rural states. Even Tim Ryan, who lost to Vance in Ohio in 2022, is cautious: here, a Democrat needs to be five or six points ahead to win, because Ohio always ends up leaning to the right. And the Democrats have a weak spot on their own turf: Michigan.

According to independent analysts at the Cook Report, this is the only Democratic seat that is genuinely up for grabs, and for the party it is worth more than just one seat. Decision Desk HQ puts it in figures: if Mike Rogers wins it, the Republicans’ chances of retaining the Senate rise to 80 per cent. Rogers, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, lost to Elissa Slotkin by less than half a percentage point in 2024. This time, for the seat vacated by Gary Peters, he is facing Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor and the son of Egyptian immigrants, who won the primary in August by a one-point margin over the moderate Haley Stevens. In the latest polls, El-Sayed is four points ahead, but the race could tighten. In Michigan, the Republicans often make a comeback in the final weeks.

The stakes are set for 2028. El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but their movement has embraced him, and Bernie Sanders is acting as his mentor. If he wins, the faction that propelled Zohran Mamdani to New York City Hall will have proof that its candidates can also win in swing states, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s path to the primaries will be cleared. If he loses – and with him the Senate – the moderates will have a scapegoat ready and waiting. The reckoning would begin on the morning of 4 November, just as the race for the White House gets underway.