Democrats routed Republicans in the US midterms. But can they capitalise on it?

One of the reasons journalistic coverage of US elections is so interesting is because of the scale of reach required to communicate what is at stake and what preoccupies so many different voters in disparate places. British journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson’s US travels saw him visit 48 of the 50 states during his journalistic career. His stocktaking resulted in numerous books, including, 50 years ago, America in Our Time, an excavation of the post-second World War “liberal consensus” and its perceived breakdown. He suggested US citizens, for the first time, were asking “not how to solve their problems, but whether problems could be solved”. Decades later, in The Myth of American Exceptionalism (2009), he challenged the “distorted and selective narrative of exceptional virtue” in the US, driven by “hubris and self-interest into what is now a dangerous basis for national policy and for the international system”.

There is a multitude of other state-of-the-nation theses, none definitive, but they are a reminder of the preoccupation over decades, and well before the era of Donald Trump, with a “Disunited States”. In 2009, for example, a year after Obama won the presidency, New York Times journalist Roger Cohen wrote: “These are the worst of times for those who believe the United States has a special mission to further the moral and political emancipation of the world. Two intractable wars and the implosion of the nation’s financial system have given a convincing impression of a great power in decline. The tarnishing of American ideals under former president George W Bush has deepened a debacle offset only by the reaffirmation of American possibility in the identity of his successor. Equally diminished in the wreckage, it seems, is the American idea itself.”

That “American idea” was horribly repackaged by Trump in 2016, with a campaign The New York Times described as “vile”. This week 10 years ago, it was all about Trump rallies that decried “crooked” Hillary Clinton, his opponent, with chants of “lock her up”, and, away from the coarse rallies, predictions that “a silent America” was going to vote for Trump, who at that point was insisting a Clinton victory would cause “an unprecedented and protracted constitutional crisis”. It is also blackly hilarious to read Melania Trump’s comments that same week in Pennsylvania: “Our culture has gotten too mean and too rough ... we have to find a better way to talk to each other, to disagree with each other, to respect each other.”

But most concerning at that point was that Trump refused to say whether he would accept the result of the election if defeated. After the Republican Party rout this week, the question of Trump’s acquiescence in the result was again one of the first issues addressed in media coverage.

That is a reminder that, for all the relief and talk of redemption from those who loathe Trump, there is still precarity given his fascist instincts. This week’s results were partly about the exhaustive corrosiveness of a deranged, mendacious, lazy, bigoted, compulsive liar. But as has been well aired, the voters’ verdict was also rooted in fuel costs, tariffs, unnecessary wars, the treatment of immigrants, Big Tech and the indulgence of grotesque billionaires.

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The power of voters to reject this agenda was gloriously on display, but another question is whether the Democratic Party can manage its victories well enough to continue to deflate the Maga movement. Those who wrested some power from Trump have regularly been described as a “loose coalition”, but they are operating a system of competing blocs. What message does the Democratic Party craft now? In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, the first Muslim elected to the Senate, said he wanted to “stand with the people locked out” from the system. “I think that anybody who wants to win in the future here has to recognise that we are past left/right politics.”

But what does that look like for the next presidential election? Are those feeling “locked out” going to be offered a coherent “affirmative case” for voting for a Democratic Party whose autopsy on the failed 2024 presidential campaign identified that case as lacking, the message instead about preventing Trumpism from enduring? It should not be forgotten that one of the descriptions of Trump voters in 2016 was similar to El-Sayed’s: a “coalition of the dispossessed”, who Trump promised “will be forgotten no longer”.

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The analysis of Hodgson in 1976 still seems relevant to counter both the long-established fault lines and the decade-long Trump malaise: Hodgson suggested then the new watchwords needed to be “down to earth. Limited resources.” The Democratic Party’s main challenge now is to acknowledge this and find an effective way to handle the tensions and grievances that propelled Trump, not just curbing him and his acolytes.