How the US midterm elections challenged Trump's political agenda

US President Donald Trump dances after speaking at a midterm campaign rally at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, Florida on October 30, 2026. [AFP]

The recent US midterm elections, in which the Democrats trounced the Republicans in contests for both houses of Congress and in gubernatorial races from Georgia on the Atlantic coast to California and Oregon on the Pacific, were a testament to the fluctuations in American political moods that date back to the country's founding.

Apart from electing an Indian-American as Mayor of Los Angeles, Nithya Raman,  the results sent waves across the globe. “It was incredible to see the blue wave,” said New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, describing the results as a referendum on President Donald Trump’s brand of politics.

Like Trump, Mamdani is the son of immigrants, except that his parents are Ugandan, while Trump’s family roots are German. The tide had turned against the New Right Movement because of its excesses in trying to overturn established norms of American political behaviour.

The political culture of the United States is characterised by regular elections, as envisaged in 1787, when 55 elite men representing 12 states gathered in Philadelphia to draft a constitution.

They agreed on only two things. First, they wanted to create a government strong enough to handle national challenges but not so powerful that it would become tyrannical. Second, they disdained and did not want ‘democracy’ because it implied governance by misfits and assorted ‘lowlifes’. After much haggling, they settled on a ‘republican’ form of government that would balance various interests among the states while ensuring that decisions remained in the hands of the state elite or the well-born.

That haggling produced an electoral system for the presidency and a legislature with two houses designed to balance and counter each other in catering for population sizes and state interests: the House of Representatives for the people and the Senate for the states. They created an Electoral College to decide who should become president, irrespective of the voters' wishes, and fixed the presidential term at four years, between the six-year terms for senators and the two-year terms for members of the House of Representatives. They required those representing the people to return to the voters every two years to establish what they wanted, turning elections into a regular political ritual.

In the 230 years since Philadelphia, adjustments have been made through waves of populism to accommodate the whims of the despised ‘democracy’. These changes appear to swing back and forth like a political pendulum. The Electoral College lost its ability to override voters' wishes, senators became answerable to voters rather than state authorities, and previously non-existent political parties became the main determinants of political activity.

First came the Jacksonian populists, who popularised ‘democracy’ for white men and created the Democratic Party, whose symbol is a donkey. Second were activists opposed to the presence of black people in their midst, an issue that became more pronounced as slavery expanded. They created the Republican Party in the 1850s, which was consolidated by Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 and the subsequent Civil War. The party adopted an elephant as its symbol, with cartoonist Thomas Nast reinforcing the imagery in the 1870s. With every election thereafter, the two parties outwitted other emerging political formations and became entrenched in the American political tradition.

There have been times when the rivalry between the Democrats, represented by the donkey, and the Republicans, represented by the elephant, has marked turning points in American political orientation. The Great Depression and World War II buried the 19th-century laissez-faire attitude towards almost everything and made the State responsible for liberating people and systems. Subsequent electoral competition in the post-World War II period hinged on whether the State could help citizens attain certain rights. The 2026 midterm elections were one of those defining contests, with ramifications both within and outside the United States.

The competing campaigns were ideologically intense, focusing not only on candidates for the House and Senate, as well as gubernatorial seats, but also on the political orientation of the United States. Two presidents of immigrant descent, diametrically opposed in temperament, emerged as political gladiators representing antagonistic movements: Obama and Trump.

Obama is the biracial son of a student romance in Hawaii between a Kenyan man and a white American woman from Kansas. A symbol of post-World War II US liberal attempts to remake the world in the American image through accommodation, Obama's election in 2008 was essentially a fulfilment of what Tom Mboya's friend, Robert Kennedy, had predicted in 1968, before he was assassinated: that ‘a Negro’ would be elected president in 40 years. The Kennedys personified the liberal ideals of the United States, which were housed in the Democratic Party.

Trump, a grandson of a German immigrant, is the son of a real estate and saloon dealer and a Scottish immigrant woman. He told Oprah Winfrey in 1988 that he was “tired of seeing the country ripped off ....I really am tired of seeing what is happening to this country, how we’re really making other people live like kings and we’re not.” This was a precursor of what Trump would do if he became president. He uses the Republican Party to advance his agenda.

Trump, “tired of seeing what was happening in the country”, decided to seek the US presidency and “Make America Great Again” by destroying the post-World War II institutions that had enabled Obama, the son of a Kenyan, to become president.

He emerged as the leader of the New Right Movement, which emphasises two things in its attempt to reverse the gains made during the post-World War II liberal era. The first is organised hostility towards migrants who are not of European heritage, in an effort to preserve white ‘gardens’ in Europe and North America. The second is a determination to destroy the educational and intellectual environment that allowed what Trump considers ‘bad’ people to penetrate, integrate into and take over American institutions.

Not the kind of leader the Constitution's framers had envisioned in Philadelphia, Trump wants to dismantle what others had achieved. In trying to reverse the political tide, he overreached himself and aroused natural political survival instincts, which played out in the 2026 campaigns.

Obama came out to campaign for the Democrats, highlighting what he considered wrong with Trump's domestic and foreign policies and urging voters to turn out. They voted in such large numbers that they trounced Trump's Republicans.

Outside the United States, Trump's political trouncing was received with considerable interest, and in some quarters, gleefully. Israeli opposition leader Yair Golan, for instance, claimed that the results “reveal just how toxic Netanyahu had become” to American voters.

To Iran's Parliament Speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, “Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message....If the US government betrays their public ..., it will learn our NO comes with a Nightmare.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said the results were “very good news”, reflecting a “sudden swing” as young Americans mobilised “to take back control, to make their voices heard.”

The results, argued Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, were a rejection of Trump's politics of impoverishment, hatred, sexism and privileging “the elite”, similar to what had happened in Brazil.

For South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa, the election was a turning point in international relations that would “introduce a new era in world relations.”

Kenya's 2027 presidential hopeful Edwin Sifuna wrote of feeling “very nice to see good people winning elections .... Bad people have been winning too much bwana. What a night for the Democratic Party in the US midterms. Blue wave, sindio?”

The US midterm election results reinforced messages from Serbia and Brazil that the New Right Movement's wave of reversing past gains in human endeavour might have peaked.

The upsurge of ‘unhappy’ young people choosing to protect their countries by voting out political misfits reinforces faith in the power of the ballot. It also warns would-be tyrants that there are limits to how far they can push their luck in destroying institutions to aggrandise themselves, as Trump has done.