The Trump political juggernaut has hit a wall. But while Democrats are celebrating, the battle for America’s political future is only just beginning.
In the year America celebrated its 250th birthday, voters delivered a once-in-a-century election result signalling a break from a president who has dominated US politics for the past 10 years.
Donald Trump, to mark both the US semi-quincentennial and his own 80th birthday in June, put on a cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House. At these midterm elections, he was repeatedly body-slammed by voters. This was a very personal repudiation of a pharaoh-like figure who had tried, implausibly, to convince Americans they were enjoying a “golden age”.
It represented the rebuke of a leader with authoritarian leanings who has sought to turn the White House into something akin to a palace, and Washington into a monument to himself.
Needless to say, exit polls showed voters were angry about the spike in fuel, food and, in rural states, fertiliser prices caused by a trade war that Trump framed as a “Liberation Day”. The conflict with Iran had turned every gas station in America into a billboard for the Democrats. But alleged government corruption was also prominent in voters’ minds, even higher in some exit polls than cost-of-living concerns.
Ahead of the election, a poll by Fox News showed alleged government corruption was actually the number one issue.
The billionaire president and his family have been getting ostentatiously richer while many Americans are suffering personal recessions.
Hard-pressed voters eyed decadence in the gold-bedecked walls of the Oval Office when their own quality of life was deteriorating. When Trump flew into the heartland to campaign, he did so aboard a $400 million Boeing 747-8 luxury airliner gifted by the Qatari royal family.
This wasn’t simply an “it’s the economy, stupid” election. It was also about the self-enrichment of Trump, his family members and acolytes such as Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire. American voters were rejecting the excesses of an increasingly imperial presidency. Ending his campaign in front of the renovated Reflecting Pool in Washington seemed to many voters the perfect expression of his narcissism and tone-deafness.
Fantasy politics for the Democrats
More so than winning this election through the attractiveness of their policies, Democrats became the beneficiaries of the anti-Trump backlash. And theirs was a landslide win. The stuff of fantasy politics.
In regaining control of the US Senate, they took deep red Republican bastions: Texas, Kansas, even South Carolina.
In the House of Representatives, Democrats will enjoy at least a 50-seat advantage. It is the kind of lopsided congressional majority not seen since Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 which took a couple of successive waves to achieve. The cumulative vote in all the House seats, which gives the national picture, showed the Democrats had close to a 13-point lead over the Republicans.
To put that in historical perspective, in the famed “Republican revolution” of 1994 the GOP beat the Democrats by 6.8 points.
For the first time in 16 years, the Democrats will control a majority of governorships. These include noteworthy racial firsts. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman ever elected governor of an American state. Texas will now have a Latina governor, Gina Hinojosa. Disquiet and fear amongst Hispanic voters over ICE raids helped her triumph.
Not only the landscape but the face of US politics changed. For the first time in the country’s history, the House of Representatives will have a Black speaker, New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries.
Small wonder, the term “bluenami” is being used. But it is also a red meltdown.
This is the first time in the Trump era his Republican Party has been severely punished. This result recalls the post-Watergate midterms in 1974 when Republicans were punished for the transgressions of Richard Nixon. Nixon had been forced to resign the presidency less than three months before Election Day.
That 1974 election brought about a generational shift. The Class of ’74 included the so-called “Watergate babies”. Remarkably, 87 members of the new Congress were aged under 40.
This election hasn’t produced quite such an infusion of young blood. Still, at a time when Capitol Hill has often looked like a gerontocracy, the average age of lawmakers will be significantly lower. James Talarico, the Presbyterian seminarian with choir boy looks who won in Texas, is 37. Incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff, who comfortably regained his seat in the Republican target state of Georgia, is 39. Abdul El-Sayed, who will become the first Muslim US Senator, is 42. Annie Andrews, who took South Carolina, is 46. Melat Kiros, who was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America in Colorado’s first district, became the first Gen Z woman elected to Congress. She is just 29 years old.
A political realignment is on hold
What this election does not necessarily signify is a long-lasting political shift, or permanent realignment.
While the Republican Revolution of 1994 seemed to herald a period of conservative domination, just two years later Democrat Bill Clinton won his second term as president.
The 1974 midterm elections foretold that Republicans were set for a prolonged spell in the political wilderness. Yet Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, and Republicans dominated the presidency for the next 12 years.
Democrats, understandably, are joyous about the outcome of the 2026 midterms. Yet their celebrations should come with circumspection.
A poll conducted in the run-up to this election suggested 52 per cent of voters had an unfavourable view of the Democratic Party; only 29 per cent had a favourable view. For months beforehand, the Real Clear Politicspolling average showed the American public looked on the Democrats only marginally more favourably than the Republicans.
Nevertheless, this is a mighty political achievement, which raises an important question: has the curtain come down on the age of Donald Trump?
A Trump dynasty snuffed out
As always, it is dangerous to write off or underestimate Donald Trump.
Just seven weeks after the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 as Congress met to certify the 2020 presidential election results, I watched as Trump was greeted like a conquering hero at a conservative conference in Orlando, Florida. The event had the feel of a cargo cult.
Likewise, after Trump-backed Republican candidates failed to make expected breakthroughs in the 2022 congressional midterms, pundits composed obituaries for the MAGA movement which proved wildly premature.
Yet this week’s results are certainly a game-changer.
Any ambitions Trump might harbour of illegally defying the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms in office, have surely been snuffed out. The notion of Trump 3.0 is even more outlandish now. A Trump dynasty also seems more unlikely. The thought of President Donald Trump Jr taking the oath of office in 2029 or 2033 requires a giant leap of imagination.
Instead, Trump has been badly weakened. His fear factor, within a Republican Party that over the past decade has come to resemble a Trump Party, has been diminished. Signs of his waning power have come already from his Vice President JD Vance who, in a 600-word screed on social media, broke spectacularly with the president.
“The reason we lost is the war,” he wrote. “The president himself said so last night.”
But the president had not said so last night, and the ambitious vice president, who is eyeing a bid for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, is already trying to distance himself from a damaged brand.
In anointing his political heir, Trump might not be the all-powerful kingmaker after all. Maybe Republican presidential aspirants will not even crave his endorsement. When Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz published his own 1700-word election post-mortem on X — he described the midterms as “an ass kicking” — it did not include a single word of praise for a president who is used to sycophantic encomiums from his party.
Trump, however, still commands fierce loyalty from millions in his MAGA base. His approval rating among self-described “MAGA Republicans” is 96 per cent. Again, it is worth remembering what happened in the aftermath of January 6. Republicans could have banished Trump into the political wilderness. Instead, his grip on the party tightened. He successfully managed to purge the party of Trump critics, such as former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, and easily saw off the challenge from rivals such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primaries.
The MAGA agenda survives
This election was not only a rejection of Trump but a repudiation of his hyper-aggressive style of politics.
In Michigan, he slandered Democrat Abdul El-Sayed as a “jihadist” and “terrorist”, repeatedly called him “Mohammed”. But in this bellwether of bellwethers, El-Sayed won comfortably.
The defeat of Trump acolyte, Vivek Ramaswamy, was also emblematic. Ramaswamy aired one of the most vile political attacks in US campaign history, which featured the mother of his Democratic rival, Amy Aston, castigating her daughter as a liar for accusing her ex-husband, who had been criminally charged of rape and then fled from police, of sexually molesting her as a child. Senior Republicans, including the state’s outgoing Governor Mike DeWine, called for Ramaswamy to take down the ad. Trump described it as “very powerful”.
Voters overwhelmingly rejected that kind of hateful politics.
James Talarico, who Trump labelled “Talafreako”, made this yearning for a gentler kind of politics the centrepiece of his victory speech in Texas.
“We are tired of being told to hate each other,” said Talarico. “It has been 10 years of this kind of politics, politics as blood sport, politics as trolling and owning, politics as professional wrestling.”
Much of the MAGA agenda, however, will survive. Strong borders. Economic nationalism. A rejection of globalisation and frictionless free trade. The insistence that US allies must cough up more money for their own defence.
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Democrats will be more wary of pushing what might be called “woke” issues. Even New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remarked in August that “Woke 1.0 was crazy“.
Democrats have already made concessions to Trumpism.
This election they focused on economic issues rather than identity politics. Crucially, however, in the 11 years since Trump came down that golden escalator he has not managed to create a pre-eminent new political order.
For much of the past century, as the historian Gary Gerstle noted in his 2022 landmark study, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, US politics was dominated by two political orders.
First, the New Deal created in the 1930s by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, marked by broad consensus between Democrats and Republicans on the role of the state in regulating capitalism and providing a basic welfare safety net for the economically disadvantaged.
Next, from the 1970s to the 2010s, came the neoliberal order, based on a reduced role of government and greater emphasis on the market, which was championed by Reagan and acquiesced in by Clinton, who presented himself as a market-friendly “New Democrat”.
Since the Great Recession of 2008, however, no party has managed to impose its ideas on the other, or accrued enough power for long enough in Washington to do so. Instead, we have entered what Gerstle describes as an “interregnum characterised by disorder and instability”.
This election offers further proof that we remain in this liminal phase, with neither side establishing lasting dominance.
Trump believed there had been a conservative vibe shift in 2024 after he regained the presidency by winning all seven battleground states. Republicans also controlled both houses of Congress. Two years later, Trump and his party have been hammered.
Where to for the left?
In a chronically polarised nation, we are witnessing a period of unusual political volatility.
At the presidential level, three consecutive two-term presidencies (Democrat Bill Clinton, Republican George W Bush and Democrat Barack Obama) have been followed three consecutive one-term presidencies (Republican Trump, Democrat Joe Biden, Republican Trump).
Not since the late 19th century, when Grover Cleveland lost the presidency only to win it back four years later, have we seen the presidency switch quadrennially between the parties. Likewise, no party has managed to command Capitol Hill for an extended period. Already this century the House has changed hands five times.
In the entire second half the 21st century, during which Democrats dominated the House of Representatives, that scenario has only occurred three times. In the final 25 years of the 20th century, the Senate changed majority control just three times. In the first 25 years of the 21st century, it has flipped eight times.
Now we will see divisions not only between the parties but within them. Progressive Democrats will point to the success of El-Sayed in Michigan, and the energising effect of Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral victory in New York, as proof that a left-wing version of economic populism can succeed at the national level.
Among the Democratic victors on Tuesday were a record number of candidates backed by, or affiliated with, the Democratic Socialists of America. Centrists will cite the breakthrough in Texas of Talarico, a moderate Christian Democrat, and the mega-church pastor Adam Hamilton in Kansas as evidence that the party should occupy the middle ground.
All the party’s winning presidential candidates since World War II — Harry Truman, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — have been pragmatic centrists.
The orthodoxy that only a moderate can win the White House will now be challenged, and contested, ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
Where to now for the right?
On the right of politics, what remains of the more traditionalist wing of the Republican Party might argue the party has to move away from its Trump branding and become more recognisably Reaganesque. Reagan was a free-trade internationalist who backed traditional conservative governance, compared with Trump’s populist nationalism that embraces economic protectionism and rejects global alliances and institutional norms.
MAGA diehards will remain faithful to Trump, though some will argue he has not been MAGA enough, especially by launching an unpopular war with Iran. Think-tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation which produced the controversial policy blueprint Project 2025, have lurched a long way to the right. So, too, have media channels such as Fox News and NewsMax, whose “angertainment” business models are based on stoking culture war outrage.
So, it is by no means inevitable that the party will move back towards what is sometimes called the sensible centre.
How could the Republicans remain viable if MAGA voters withdrew their support? Some are now likening the Trump Republican Party to the Trump casino empire. That did not end well.
If, moreover, Texas becomes the new California — the Golden State voted Republican in every presidential election between 1968 and 1988 but Democrat ever since — then it could face a prolonged shut-out from the White House. Try gaining an Electoral College majority without at least one of the country’s two most populous states.
Looking to the future, the youth vote does not augur well for the Republicans. Nationally, in House elections, exit polling suggest 66 per cent of voters aged 18-29 voted for a Democrat candidate.
Always, though, we must be wary of over-extrapolating in the aftermath of what look like transformative elections. I have seen too many victorious parties over-reach and then face push-back from voters. Remember the heady talk after Barack Obama’s election in 2008 that suggested he would usher in a phase of post-partisanship, and even post-racialism.
As a correspondent in the US at the time, I witnessed how the country’s first African-American president was followed into the White House by the untitled leader of the Birther Movement, who placed himself at the head of the anti-Obama white backlash. As Obama himself described the shift after Trump’s victory in 2016: “History doesn’t move in a straight line. It zigs and zags.”
Democrats have authority to scrutinise
For the past decade, anti-incumbency has so often been the driver of American politics. That, and the negative partisanship that comes with it. Voters often cast their ballots against a party rather than for a party. In these midterms we saw it again. In a 50/50 nation, where for much of this century the results of elections have been far narrower than on Tuesday night, politics has been marked by deadlock not dominance.
What we do know for sure is that the Democrats have just won the authority to scrutinise and investigate. When the new Congress meets on January 3, expect Democratic lawmakers to use those subpoena powers to the full.
Robert Garcia, the top ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which tends to spearhead congressional investigations, has said already that allegations of Trump family corruption will be his main priority, with the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, coming under closer scrutiny. On election night, he posted two words on social media: “LAWYER UP!”
Garcia also released a statement pledging to take on “the Trump Crime Family, corporate corruption, DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and ICE abuses, and the cover-up of the Epstein files”. Hakeem Jeffries has accused the “Trump Cartel” of “massive corruption” and warned: “We are going to hold the crooks accountable.”
With a majority in the House, the Democrats could for a third time impeach Donald Trump (previously, only two presidents — Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton — have faced the charge of committing high crimes and misdemeanours). But winning a conviction in the Senate trial that would ensue requires 67 votes, the kind of super-majority the Democrats are not close to achieving. Besides, attempts to punish Trump have often worked in his favour, by allowing him to claim a political form of martyrdom.
The Democrats could also try to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for waging military hostilities without congressional authorisation, which is a violation of the 1973 War Powers Resolution. Moves are already afoot in what is now a lame duck Congress, spearheaded by the anti-Trump Republican Thomas Massie, to trigger an impeachment vote against Hegseth as soon as this week.
Accountability and action
The newly-elected 120th Congress, whose members will take their seats in the new year, could become known as the Accountability Congress. But House Democrats will also want to make it an Action Congress, by passing bills, on healthcare especially, that meet the concerns of struggling American voters — even though they could be blocked by Republican filibusters in the Senate, which require 60 votes to break, or vetoed by the president.
Ethics reform is an area the Democrats could highlight, such as beefing up financial conflict-of-interest rules in the executive branch and placing limits on presidential pardons. The post-Watergate Congress placed a heavy emphasis on ethics reform, with the creation of the Office of Government Ethics and independent Inspectors General within federal departments.
Among the challenges for the Democrats will be to restore the power of Capitol Hill, which has been the home for the past two years of an incredible shrinking Congress.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has sought to expand the power of the presidency and to govern almost by decree through signing so many executive orders with the flourish of his Sharpie felt tip pen. Already, he has signed 292 executive orders during his second term, well over 100 more than Joe Biden issued during his entire four-year term.
The conservative-dominated Supreme Court, while sometimes checking his power, has helped him create a more maximal presidency. In Trump v Slaughter, the court ruled in June that the president can fire the heads of independent regulatory agencies at his behest, without being required to show “cause”.
In its landmark Trump v United States ruling in 2024, brought in connection with the criminal charges he faced over his attempt to overturn the presidential election, it decided presidents possess substantial immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts taken while in office. Among the three branches of government, Congress has felt like the third wheel.
The founding fathers, however, had a very different power ranking in mind. The legislature was supposed to be the most powerful branch of government, which is why Congress was vested with the power of the purse. The presidency was meant to be second. The Supreme Court a distant third.
Democrats on Capitol Hill will attempt to restore parity with the executive branch, especially over trade policy, and to overtake the Supreme Court. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts has been a more influential figure than the departing Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. Incoming House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries will attempt to restore the sway of a role traditionally regarded as the second most powerful government position in the country.
Trump is no lame duck
After the Republicans’ shellacking at the polls, it will be tempting to describe Trump as a “lame duck” president, the usual descriptor for an incumbent whose party loses control of Congress and cannot seek re-election. With Trump, that would be an act of folly. Normal nomenclature does not apply to such an abnormal president.
Trump will not be a lame duck until the final second of the final minute of his presidency. In his last supposed lame-duck phase, from his defeat at the 2020 election to inauguration day in 2021, he propagated the “Big Lie” about Joe Biden stealing the election, amassed his supporters in Washington and did little to restrain them when they first started storming the US Capitol.
Trump still has enormous executive powers at his disposal. He remains the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military. He still has control of the FBI and Justice Department, and could use both in an attempt to take vengeance on political opponents. Overcoming a presidential veto requires a two-thirds super-majority in both houses of Congress, which alone the Democrats cannot muster. Trump has issued 12 vetoes over the course of his two terms; congress has only overridden one of them.
By appointing as his new White House chief of staff arch loyalist Stephen Miller, the hardline architect of the ICE immigration crackdown, Trump is signally there will be no retreat from MAGA. Heading the West Wing is a figure who Trump will regard as a wartime consigliere, an aggressively combative figure in upcoming battles with Congress.
Often, if presidents are thwarted on the home front by an obstructionist Congress, they look to make their mark in the foreign realm. Trump could press for a peace deal in the Ukraine war, on terms that would likely be highly favourable towards Vladimir Putin. He could renew the kind of summitry with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, which became such a feature of his first term diplomacy.
He might agree to carve up the world into spheres of influence as part of a grand bargain with Putin and President Xi Jinping of China, which would require concerns in Taiwan. Trump has made no secret of his desire for regime change in Cuba.
As the dust settles after such an extraordinary electoral event, it is worth noting what did not happen in the 2026 congressional midterms.
For sure, Donald Trump tried to disrupt the polls beforehand, by attempting to limit postal voting and demanding, unsuccessfully, that states surrender their voter registration lists to the Justice Department in Washington.
Yet worries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, or even federal troops, would be deployed at, or in the close vicinity of, polling stations on Election Day did not eventuate. Nor has Trump tried to interfere with the count. The Republican defeat, of course, was too big to rig. In a closer election, disputed contests could easily have become flashpoints. But it is worth pointing out that, although he has distanced himself from the results, he had not disputed them.
In the year America marked its 250th birthday, the country faced a democratic test, and passed.
Nobody was assassinated during the campaign. Election Day passed without violence. On January 3, when the new Congress is seated we will not see a repeat of the American insurrection that unfolded on January 6, 2021.
That alone, in a country as divided and fractious as America, is cause for celebration.
Credits
Words: Nick Bryant
Illustrations: Lindsay Dunbar
Photographs: Reuters
Editing: Catherine Taylor
Source: www.abc.net.au
