The United States’ all-blue night

What was bound to happen has happened. And it is what has happened in 13 of the last 15 mid-term elections: the President’s party has lost control of Congress. But even the pollsters – who had got it wrong with Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris and whose credibility had plummeted – got it even more wrong this time. Rather than a blue wave, there has been a blue tsunami. If this was a referendum on Donald Trump, as he himself described it, then Trump has lost. Trumpism has lost; a president who abandons Ukraine, who attacks Iran without bringing about regime change, who cannot manage the economy, has lost. The brazen and overbearing presidentialism has lost, as has the notion that one can blame the previous administration for petrol prices even after two years. He has lost a president who sends ICE officers to arrest alleged illegal immigrants in schools and ships them off to Central America. Iowa, Kansas, Texas. In states where the president had won by wide margins in 2024, the Democrats have secured seats they had not held for at least thirty years. In Kansas, there had not been a Democratic senator since 1932 – since the Great Depression, since the America depicted by John Steinbeck. In these mid-term elections, the Democrats won control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, bringing a new generation of Democratic lawmakers to Capitol Hill, who often had to take on the now-familiar faces of Trumpism. There were also several milestones that appeal to progressives: the first openly gay senator, the first ever Black female governor, the first Latino governor in California, the first African-American Speaker of the House… But the most significant signals are precisely those linked to conservative strongholds, where donors such as Elon Musk have invested small fortunes to back the GOP candidate. Take Texas, for instance, where the religious candidate James Talarico – who famously declared, ‘God is non-binary!’ – won, and where the Democratic candidate for governor, the Hispanic Gina Hinojosa, also triumphed. Or North Carolina, where Richard Ojeda II ousted the Republican MP Richard Hudson, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee – the man in charge of the GOP’s House election campaign. Even in states such as Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi, although the Republicans won, the margin was narrow. In Maine, Susan Collins, the incumbent senator, was defeated by a Democratic candidate who was brought in at the last minute to replace a mad oyster farmer. Talarico spoke of a David versus Goliath battle, where, he said, his sling “was the people of Texas”. The new wave within the Democratic coalition—the DSA, the Democratic Socialists—is also celebrating results described by NPR as ‘historic’, with at least five members of the House of Representatives elected. 

President Trump called his favored network, Fox News, and, commenting on the results, said: “I’m a bit surprised. I thought they’d do better.” He appeared subdued, lacking the coup d’état verve he had displayed on 6 January. He had urged the electorate to imagine that he was on the ballot paper. Voters did exactly that, which did not help weak candidates such as businessman Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio or Ken Paxton in Texas. The Washington Post, which has grown closer to the president in recent years, ran the headline: “Trump suffers historic rejection”. However, it remains to be seen whether the Republicans will abandon Trump, having used him to win while allowing him to dominate them for ten years, and whether they will seek to build a new GOP from tomorrow onwards. Or whether the MAGA serum has now poisoned the little elephant. 

Giulio Silvano