‘We outvoted the billionaires’: What comes next after the US midterm elections?

Among the faces in the crowd waiting to congratulate James Talarico in Austin, Texas, was Luci Baines Johnson, 79 years old now and the youngest daughter of Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ).“I’m so glad you got my father’s job,” she said, taking hold of the younger man’s shoulder in a gesture reminiscent of her father’s imposing tactility. Although Tuesday night’s midterm election results represented a dynamic, sweeping demand for an immediate change in governance and national spirit, it was also a night of ghosts. The returns from the electorate delivered an urgent message from across the country along with the sudden reversal of power that leaves the Democratic Party with a 253-157 majority in the House and a 54-44 command (and counting) of the Senate. They are firmly on course for the biggest midterm gain since the 1974 elections and the fallout from Richard Nixon’s resignation.After almost two years dominated by genuine if sometimes overwrought fears that Donald Trump’s disruptive administration would subvert or ultimately suppress the American democratic process, the deafening electoral roar which swept from coast to coast with the speed of a prairie fire in these midterms will stand as the most appropriate and powerful marker of the 250th year of the United States. They represent the latest chapter in the noisy, often fractious and always passionate national conversation that began almost as soon as the framers, lauded and sentimentalised in book and documentary and sound throughout the anniversary year, put pen to paper to figure out a lasting blueprint for their new world. READ MOREThe questions that select group of white men asked themselves then were precisely the same that informed the campaign speeches, the often bitter and ugly debate exchanges and the dismal avalanche of attack adverts paid for by corporate and political interests.What is this Republic? What could it become? And what should it aspire to be?Jon Ossoff has, over the course of the year, made the switch from the least lauded but most effective Democratic senator to the shining star of the movement.“It’s not because he’s so put together, it’s not just because he looks like a Kennedy, all handsome in the videos,” said Barack Obama at a closing rally in Atlanta last week. The comparison did not seem entirely coincidental. Already, Ossoff is regarded as the front-runner in the intensifying speculation on the candidate-rich list for Democratic presidential nominee. Ossoff has repeated his determination to complete his full term as senator. But one of the features of his campaign has been the sophisticated, floor-level films of the candidate at the campaign stump, burnishing contemporary events with a cinematic and historical gloss. On Tuesday night in Atlanta, he set the tone for what the returns meant in the stark and prosecutorial tone he uses for senate committee hearings of Republican officials.US senator Jon Ossoff speaks at an election night watch party in Atlanta after winning re-election. Photograph: Nicole Craine/New York Times “In sweeping and decisive victories, the American people have rebuked the depravity and corruption and incompetence of the failed lame-duck president, Donald J Trump. And if at times these last two years amidst the ceaseless onslaught of brutality and indecency you doubted whether our republic would survive, let tonight’s results give you courage that the first light of dawn is on the horizon.”In fact, the Democratic celebrations had started in cities such as Austin long before dawn.The results produced a national fireworks display of fabulous and unexpected political renaissances in areas that the Democratic movement had long quit as a lost cause. A pastor from Kansas winning the party’s first senate seat there since 1932. Michigan sending the first ever Muslim senator to Washington. New Mexico electing its first female Native American governor. Mississippi on the threshold of electing its first black Democratic senator since Hiram Revels went to Washington in 1870, when the roles of party progressivism were reversed. Revels was a Republican and faced down attempts to block his advancement by a slew of Democrat lawmakers indignant at the presence of a black senator.“Mr Revels showed no embarrassment whatever, and his demeanour was as dignified as could be expected under the circumstances,” reported the New York Times on the February day of his swearing-in.“The abuse which had been poured upon him and on his race during the last two days might well have shaken the nerves of anyone. The vast throng in the galleries showed no sign of feeling one way or the other and left very quietly.”Alan Colvin, from Fulton County, Georgia at a voter rally before Tuesday's vote. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times Those long-gone spectators saw what no American has seen since: the swearing-in of a black senator from The Sipp. As Tuesday night unfolded, bridging that historical gap became a strong possibility. The midterm results produced so many changes and emerging stories over the space of a few hours that it was almost impossible to follow the significance of each. But when the smoke cleared, around midnight, it was obvious that an unanticipated popular revolt had occurred. It was chiefly a vote against the folly of the current administration and its glowering 80-year-old figurehead, as Bernie Sanders outlined the following day.“I think the American people are sick and tired of a president who is an authoritarian, who doesn’t believe in a constitution or the rule of law, or somebody who lies all of the time,” he said. The 85-year-old independent senator from Vermont stands as a lodestar for the new cast of socially conscientious senators-elect who will join him in January.[ US Senate: Seven new faces to watch out forOpens in new window ]“Whether you are conservative or progressive, you don’t like somebody who is a narcissist, who thinks the world revolves around him, and someone who is running an extremely corrupt administration. The family is now $2 billion richer than before he resumed his role as president. But there is something else. We have an America today, the richest country on Earth, 60 per cent of our people living pay cheque to pay cheque. We remain the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a right. People can’t afford their rent. We’ve got 800,000 people who are homeless. People can’t afford their groceries, the basic necessities of life. Elderly people are not making it on social security. Older workers are afraid about what will happen when they retire. “And meanwhile when they’re struggling, people on top have never had it so good. More income inequality today than at any other time in America. [Elon] Musk himself owns more wealth than the bottom 53 per cent of American households. So, people are looking around and saying, what is going on? Why is Washington worried about the rich and powerful and they don’t even understand what is going on in my life? So, I think a lot of what last night was about was that. They want a government that represents working families and not just the 1 per cent.”That has been the tenor of the message of the Democratic campaign by candidates who began campaigning for this month more than a year before the world’s media spotlight shone on them. The broad theme of their manifesto sways from the unchanging political aspiration of the “American dream”, in its limitless iterations, to the more troubling reality that for hundreds of millions of Americans, life has become too overwhelming to have time to dream. In Iowa, Josh Turek ran one of the least flashy but most extraordinary political campaigns of the entire Democratic movement. A few weeks ago, he hosted a Monday night campaign event in Sioux City, on the state’s western border with Nebraska. It took place in a small college meeting room. The atmosphere had the local friendliness of a regular book club event. It was difficult to reconcile that it was part of this broader power struggle; that a senate seat was at stake and Turek himself had been targeted by Musk-sponsored adverts as outside spending exceeded $137 million. Iowa Democratic Party senator-elect Josh Turek. Photograph: KC McGinnis/New York Times Turek turned up wearing a Hawkeyes cap, a dark polo shirt, denim jeans and a few days’ stubble. He is at once an elite athlete, as a former Paralympian gold medallist and former wheelchair basketball player, and a blue-collar Iowan who has spent an inordinate amount of his childhood in the state healthcare system. He’s low-key in his demeanour and approachable.The story of his rise as a politician in a deeply Republican region of Iowa contains a wonderful madness. In his early days of campaigning for a state legislative seat in district 20, he wheeled himself around his home town of Council Bluffs door-knocking for votes and overcame the obstacle of houses with stoops by removing himself from his chair, pulling himself on to the porch landing, reseating himself and then ringing the doorbell. The pure physical toil at least guaranteed him a conversation. He won that election by six votes out of the 6,800 cast. When he decided to run for the senate, late last year, he was a rank outsider. A supporter in Sioux City told me that when he attended a Turek event earlier in the year, just 12 people showed up. There is something dauntless about Turek’s story. He visited all 99 counties in Iowa, a tour often referred to as “The Full Grassley”, a nod to a trick long perfected by the state’s 93-year-old senator Chuck Grassley. In his victory speech on Tuesday evening, Turek recalled the meat of some of those conversations he had over 448 days of campaigning.“Josh, I’m struggling just to keep food on the table, keep a roof over my head, pay my electric bill,” he quoted before running through his agenda for when he takes his place in the senate: ending the war with Iran; ending the Trump tariff policy; a farm bill for small farmers; raising the Iowa minimum wage from $7.25; overturning the “Citizens United” ruling which has allowed vested-interest corporate money to distort political campaigns and, most critically, correcting the scandal of domestic water pollution caused by agricultural run-offs which has Iowa leading the United States in cancer rates.“Our campaign finance system is broken and nasty campaign commercials bought by billionaires trying to buy off our elections make it even worse. But tonight, Iowa, we outvoted the billionaires. We outworked the corporate PACs, and we told every single corrupt politician: enough is enough. In Iowa, Elon Musk does not decide our elections. Iowans do.”Throughout the campaign, Turek was adamant that he should not be labelled as a Democratic socialist. Instead, he branded himself a “prairie populist”, a term forged by the People’s Party in the late 1890s just 90 miles south in Omaha, Nebraska.Political signs at a downtown polling station in Austin, Texas. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times Two days after Turek spoke in Morningside College, Donald Trump held a rally in Sioux City. The venue, whose location had been withheld until the eve of the event, turned out to be a small airport hangar – really just a corrugated shed – on the outskirts of the city. The day was gorgeous: mid-20s balmy and clear-skied. A big crowd had gathered by lunchtime, the entrance to the field parking had been commandeered by a small group of protesters holding signs about Jeffrey Epstein and Vladimir Putin. The group remained stationed at the entrance well after sunset.The event was reminiscent of the rallies Trump held two years ago on his way to re-election, but on a vastly reduced scale. The merchandise was, as ever, at once menacingly triumphalist and playful, with the usual Trump and Maga T-shirts and hats along with wallets, socks and badges, including one featuring the president in mafioso black and white, American flag sunglasses. He is flipping the bird with both middle fingers and beneath him the caption reads: “You Missed Again, Bitches.”Trump supporters wait to enter Crossroads Arena before his visit to Corinth, Mississippi to campaign with senator Cindy Hyde-Smith before the midterms. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times People waited for four hours as a succession of speakers, including Turek’s opponent Ashley Hinson, entertained them. Shortly before 7pm, the lights darkened and a big screen showed a four-minute film, set to an evocative piano score which cast the president in a Biblical light.“God said I need someone willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting with the heads of states, so God made Trump,” said a narrator in grave baritone.On it went, montage after montage of Trumpian highlights while the narration spoke of a man “who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation, who will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon but then put in another 72 hours; so, God made Trump”; a man who “will finish a hard week’s work by worshipping in church on Sunday and then his oldest son turns to him and says, ‘Dad, let’s make America great again; let’s make a country to be the envy of the world again.’ So, God made Trump.”It was slick, evocative propaganda. Towards the end, the screen showed Trump in silhouette leaving Air Force One and then, a few seconds later, the lights came on, the anthemic Proud to Be an American played on the sound system and suddenly Trump himself was among them, in the airfield, in the prairies. The welcome was rapturous.But the entrance felt like the emotional high point of the night for the president’s supporters. As Trump eased into his long, digressive speech, the energy and expectancy melted away into the night. The surging momentum he somehow harnessed in 2024 was absent. There was a last-night-at-the-fair quality about the evening. The same was true at other Trump rallies. The president’s appearance at a hockey rink in Youngstown, Ohio was, within days, seized upon by the researchers for the late-night satirists as pure gold. That was the night that Trump had delivered a strange and detailed ode to the physical condition of senatorial candidate John Husted, the night he said: “I don’t do this with men very often. I started examining his body, because I didn’t know he was a great athlete. And I looked up and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass, and I looked at the whole – and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands! He’s got these, like, claws!” [ Why does Donald Trump drool over men’s bodies?Opens in new window ]But to those of us in the arena that night, the oddness of the moment hardly registered. The acoustics were poor. People were wandering in and out to the concession stands. Babies cried. They were there to see Trump as much as to listen to him because, after a decade, was there anything new to hear? The Maga crowd showed up, but in lower numbers, and now they were listening to Trump as a president who had already hauled the country through a non-stop wild ride of tariff warfare, of brutal Ice raids on the streets, of foreign adventurism and berserk threats against Greenland and the Panama Canal, of cryptocurrency adventurism, of personal family investments, of the bombing blitz on Tehran that killed the Ayatollah Khamenei and led to boasts that the conflict would be over in a matter of days. Since then, the Trump regime has been reduced to a litany of internal soap-operatic dramas, with the high-profile departures of woefully inadequate appointment picks such as Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem. Even Karoline Leavitt, with timing that is beginning to appear masterful, quit her role as press secretary to spend time with her young family. Through all of this, the spectre of Jeffrey Epstein has refused to vanish. Trump had been in power for almost two years, and nothing about the day-to-day quality of ordinary American lives had improved. But Trump’s personal fortune had improved by an estimated $2 billion. Maybe he began to understand as he embarked on what was almost certainly his farewell tour of the US interior, that the jig was up.Pastor Jay Augustine of the Big Bethel AME Church in Atlanta, Georgia before a voter rally in advance of the midterms. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times Collateral damage included the would-be heirs once Trump leaves office in 2028. JD Vance’s hollowness was exposed by his decision to back a despicable advert run on behalf of the campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, the gubernatorial candidate for Ohio. The advert, exploiting the awful childhood experiences of Democratic opponent Amy Acton, who was taken in by social services at the age of 12 after allegations of sexual and physical abuse by her stepfather, featured Acton’s estranged mother, who called her daughter a “liar”. The denunciations were general, including a call from Ohio’s exiting Republican governor Mike DeWine, to remove it. Instead, Vance, parroting his president, offered a trenchant defence – or an attack on a woman who had allegedly suffered childhood sexual abuse. His presidential aspirations shrank there and then. [ The race for the 2028 US presidential election has begun. Who’s in the lead?Opens in new window ]The morning after the elections, Vance delivered his first independent thought as vice-president when he issued a social media post stating that the war against Iran was to blame.“The Maga movement’s completely dead and Trump himself is the one that killed it,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Georgia congresswoman and Trump loyalist said on ABC News after the results came in. She had already called on the GOP “to kick Donald Trump out of the party”.“He has absolutely destroyed it, and the current state of the GOP is warmongering, corrupt, corporate entity that does not at all reflect the conservative values of its voters. It’s a lie,” she wrote in a post, predicting that if the Republican Party persists in its current guise, it “won’t be able to win nationally for decades”.Trump’s decision to make these midterms about himself was based on a gamble that he could use the familiar carnival tour to rouse the base; that he could make them believe the old warnings and promises one more time. But the fatigue was generalWhatever about its death, the disintegration of the Maga movement is under way. Taylor-Greene is, like Vance, a political creation of Donald Trump. When this period of political history is parsed by the historians, Taylor-Greene’s decision to break from Trump, primarily over his Epstein files, will be recorded as a rare instance of moral backbone by any leading figure in the Maga-GOP movement. Along with Thomas Massie, the Kentucky representative, and Nancy Mace, the South Carolina representative, Taylor-Greene endured Trump’s wrath. All three have lost their seats. Massie was “primaried” for his disloyalty, with Maga donors contributing about $37 million in attack adverts in his race against Ed Gallrein, and lost district four, having previously won some 70 per cent of the vote. Mace decided not to run for office this year. Now, all three are an integral part of a reformed-Maga alliance, trenchantly on the right in their viewpoints but vindicated by their break from Trumpism as speculation intensifies as to who will lead the Republican Party in its next iteration – and what, exactly, is left to lead.The small town of Archer City, Texas, home state of Lyndon Johnson. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times Because the broader message carried from the millions of votes cast, as New York mayor Zohran Mamdani framed it, is of “an American fatigue with the status quo”.One of the enduring mysteries of Trump’s magnetic hold over a significant swathe of the American populace lay in his dark genius, as a maverick Republican candidate a decade ago, for convincing people in places he had never been that he could champion their cause, be it in the vast farming communities that never fully recovered from the inflation crises of the 1980s, or the neglected rust belt cities and towns effectively abandoned by state and federal governance once the factories around which they had thrived closed and moved elsewhere.[ Why did Donald Trump win the US election? From travelling around the country, it’s clear why his message resonated with votersOpens in new window ]The one commonality between Trump and the cast of socially conscientious candidates such as Turek, and Adam Hamilton, and Talarico, is that they promise a better future. Once the Democratic euphoria dies down, the party will have to find a way to accommodate a crop of newcomers who are Washington outsiders and, in some cases, openly critical of the leadership.“In Kansas, [Senate minority leader] Chuck Schumer is a liability for Democrats, and we’ve got to have leaders that can unite us, bring us together, not just Democrats, but bring together Democrats and Republicans to solve real problems,” Adam Hamilton said when asked if he would vote for Schumer as leader of the Senate. “And I think people are frustrated with the gridlock in the sense that people are not working together to solve problems.” Troy Jackson, who ended Susan Collins’s three-decade senate run in Maine, has already told Schumer that he will be voting for somebody new. Peggy Flanagan, the newly elected Minnesota senator, also expressed the wish for a new leadership. Abdul El-Sayed has said his stated preference is for Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland senator. Schumer will almost certainly have the numbers required to ascend to majority leader, but the internal tensions will remain.Trump’s decision to make these midterms about himself was based on a gamble that he could use the familiar carnival tour to rouse the base; that he could make them believe the old warnings and promises one more time. But the fatigue was general. Too many stayed away – or were now listening to the more localised promises of new Democratic voices. The president’s swift acceptance of the results late on Tuesday night may have been an early attempt to fend off the congressional investigations, and possible impeachment proceedings, that may be coming down the tracks. Even as Trump voiced a sudden enthusiasm for working with the opposition, California congressman Robert Garcia, the most likely chair of the House Oversight Committee, released a two-word statement: “Lawyer up.”“We should be very clear that the American people have spoken loudly and clearly – they want change,” Garcia elaborated on Wednesday.“They are tired of the destruction and the corruption of Donald Trump and this administration. The first is: we’re going to take on the Trump crime family. The amount of grift and corruption is unprecedented in American politics.”On Thursday, Trump held court with the press in the Oval Office. A red cap with the slogan “VETO” took pride of place on the Resolute Desk. There’s no reason not to turn a crushing midterm defeat into a marketing opportunity. After all, he wasn’t on the ballot. Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Thursday. Photograph: Alex Kent/New York Times So, what now?After two years of decrying the authoritarian antics and blatant profiteering of the Trump administration, senior Democrats might now find it difficult to respond to such an overwhelming electoral mandate by simply brokering deals and scoring minor wins from the fading Trump presidency. If they don’t use this power, they could yet pay a price. But it’s the newest Democratic senators – the very cast of “radical left communists” whom Trump had castigated at rally after rally – who are least interested in vendettas and revenge. They want to get on with the campaign promises of fulfilling the goals on which they ran, following Mamdani’s lead for dealing with a truculent and emotive president.“We have an immense number of policy disagreements and yet what we have focused on is finding those few areas of commonality,” Mamdani said this week of his relationship with Trump.Even as Scott Colom edged towards a historic senate win in Mississippi, the stations across the country still highlighted shocking gasoline and diesel prices in neon. The stock market – the apple of Trump’s eye – fell sharply on Thursday as investors absorbed the lurching shift in US sentiment. The grand problems – housing and healthcare and inflation – remain. So, too, the vast uncertainty of the next chapter in US political life, particularly for the younger generation who feel, as El-Sayed put it, “locked out of the system”.Lyndon Johnson was a full five years out of office when he sat down with Walter Cronkite at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas, to reflect on a political career and the landmark civil rights legislation he guided through Congress in the lame-duck phase of his presidency. Towards the end of the conversation, he reflected on the mood in the country – knowing little of the immense upheaval coming down the tracks.“We are living in a fast age and all of us are rather impatient and, more importantly, rather intolerant of [the] opinions of our fellow man, and his judgment, and his conduct, and his way of life,” he said then.“America was supposed to be the happy hunting ground for people of all religions and all faiths that could live life according to the dictates of their own ... conscience, and their own choice as long as they didn’t basically interfere with the rights of another man. But to deny that there is prejudice in the country just makes the wrong bigger and the quicker we get at it, just like getting at heart disease or cancer or anything else, the better off we will be. And I think we are making good progress.”Ten days after what was his last interview, in January 1973, Johnson died after suffering a massive heart attack. Even as his daughter passed the torch to Texas’s rising Democratic star on Tuesday night, America’s fast age, its impatience, and imperfect quest for progress continue.