I really hope that the Democrats understand that the main reason they managed to win, and win big, is because of how poorly Trump and all his helpers have done since he was re-elected.
Trump made the economy his main point in 2024, then prompty crashed it so that he and other wealthy people could cash in. Then he decided to do whatever Netanyahu wanted, and now we’re at war with Iran.
lays out how midterm voters delivered a massive rebuke to Trump’s war on Iran, ICE terror, and soaring cost of living, electing insurgent progressives across the country.
People are fed-up with Trump and Team Red. It isn’t that they love the Democrats or that they approve of them more (they still have a shit approval rating), they just didn’t want two more years with zero opposition to Trump. Dems are already talking about building bridges . . . which seems like code for “move to the right.”
– Unknown
via social media
November 4, 2026
via social media
November 4, 2026
Following is a 14-minute segment of Democracy Now! in which hosts Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh examine the results of Tuesday’s historic U.S. midterm elections with Daniel Nichanian, editor-in-chief of Bolts. And just how historic were these elections? Well, in addition to taking back the House and Senate, Democrats also made major gains at the state level and will control a majority of governorships for the first time in 16 years. Democrats also flipped 12 state legislative chambers.
“The size of the wins for Democrats in statewide races was wild,” says Nichanian. He identifies protecting abortion access, bolstering unions and ending police cooperation with ICE as some of the priorities Democrats are likely to pursue.
The broad strokes of the midterms are clear: a massive repudiation of MAGA’s fascist wave has ended the Trump 2.0 era of congressional complicity with his authoritarian takeover. Trump’s lame duck presidency now begins.
This lopsided electoral rejection is historically rare: Flipping control of both the House and Senate in a midterm has only occurred three times since World War II (1946, 1994 and 2006). The breakthroughs are astounding: the first Native American female governor and senator, five Black governors, the first majority of Democratic governors in 16 years, and critical downballot wins like the first Democrat to win as Texan oil regulator since 1990 and the first openly transgender state legislator in Alabama.
Authoritarians do not do well when trapped — and with a famously norm-busting president, anything is possible. But, critically, election deniers like Darline Graham and Greg Abbott are conceding their races. Donald Trump is already saying he’s “absolutely willing” to accept the results and told CBS, “Congratulations to the Democrats, and I look forward to working with you for the good of our country.”
[. . .] The wins were not universal, as some big losses cut deep. There’s a reality that all of this is ephemeral if Democrats cannot govern a policy of change – if we only manage an economic status quo it will disillusion and likely result in yet another whiplash election in the other direction.
Further, the attacks on elections were treasonous. I won’t list the complete litany of federal assaults – but we have a Department of Justice captured by authoritarian forces using its power nakedly for partisan goals. The far right openly prepared sham legal theories to refuse certification of Democratic representatives. While we did not get systematic federal law enforcement terror at polls, we saw National Guard throughout Washington, D.C. We still have too many election officials committed to the Big Lie. And ongoing structural impediments to a fair election are consequential: In Mississippi, the Senate margin remains tiny while any win may be marred by equipment trouble, poll changes, and voters unexpectedly removed by data purges from the voting rolls.
Notably, the election maps themselves have been gerrymandered by racists to ensure power – though their greed rebounded multiple losses in these redistricted seats. (Groups like Black Voters Matter deserve a huge shout-out for fighting in the South and in races Democrats had abandoned.)
Despite all that, we managed a pro-democracy win that was too big to rig. The country delivered a shellacking to MAGA politics – an encouraging sign for all of us who are hoping for a better future. Ultimately, the election proceeded with voters refusing to be intimidated.
– Daniel Hunter
Excerpted from "Voters Repudiated Trump.
Grassroots Momentum Will Shape What Comes Next”
Waging Nonviolence
November 4, 2026
Excerpted from "Voters Repudiated Trump.
Grassroots Momentum Will Shape What Comes Next”
Waging Nonviolence
November 4, 2026
Folks are celebrating all the blue this morning. Blue wave. Blue tsunami. Historic wins for women, Black and Brown candidates. But do the Democrats really know what to do with power once they have it?
Seriously. Because for the past two years, we have been watching Democrats behave like apathetic, helpless, timid, and perpetually concerned spectators to their own government. Every week there has been another outrage, norms shattered, institutions gutted, executive power grabs, and so on from the Trump regime. And too often the response from the Dems has been issuing a strongly worded statement, a cable-news appearance and somebody in our inbox telling us to donate $15.
Well, come January, the excuses are over! The Dems got the House. The Senate. You’ve got committees, subpoenas, hearings, confirmations and the power of the purse. I don’t wanna hear shit about “turning a page” or about healing, or unity, or “reaching across the aisle” or “restoring normalcy.” DO A PURGE! Purge every racist policy, MAGA parasite, grifter, Christian nationalist infestation and every piece of authoritarian rot they spent two years embedding in the government. The MAGATs have governed ruthlessly with a sledgehammer!
But I am not naive. Democrats have spent too much time acting like the Republican Party’s fraternal twin. Democrats have a record of being committed to many of the same systems they suddenly condemn when Republicans take them to their ugliest extreme. Same militarism, surveillance state, corporate donors and same willingness to criminalize and cage Black and Brown folk when it’s politically convenient.
Come January we shall see what they do. They won the midterms but they did not overthrow racist-ass America. The architecture is still standing and the foundation is still rotten as hell. The same systems that made Trump and MAGA possible will still be here in January but jusy wearing a different congressional majority.
I remember in the wake of the 2024 election, some people speculated that we could be witnessing the end of the Democratic Party and its replacement by new, more effective channels of resistance.
If only it were that simple. While I believe that the general trajectory for an empire passed its prime like the U.S. is toward further polarization and the breakdown of the constitutional order, this general trend is punctuated by attempts from the forces of bourgeois democracy to stabilize the situation and hold capitalism’s contradictions together. I think we’re in one of those moments now.
The problem is: as the contradictions of capitalism accumulate and the empire’s capacity for plunder dwindles, these attempts at stabilization become more and more feeble, and the democratic rights they offer become more and more shallow. We can see this in the shift in Democrats’ rhetoric since 2018-2020. Back then, people like AOC were (correctly) calling the ICE detention centres “concentration camps.” They talked about defunding the police, believing sexual assault survivors, and defending trans rights.
This midterm season wasn’t just a rebuke of Trumpism, but also of the “Woke 1.0” civil liberties drive from the first Trump administration. This time, there was no talk about “concentration camps,” defunding the police, or Me Too. Trans rights were either ignored or treated with open hostility, such as in the Iowa Democratic Party. The gambit seemed to be that if they surrender the “culture war” to the right and strictly talk about the price of gas and groceries, they can win back their seats. That gambit turned out to be correct, but are we really in a better situation than we were in 2018?
I would say no. The Democrats were only able to win on the “affordability” question because they’re out of power, and can easily point to Trump as the reason for people’s problems. There’s no guarantee that they’ll actually lower people’s grocery bills if they retake the White House in 2028, and if the Biden-era economy is any indication, the opposite will happen. The GOP will come roaring back in 2030 and 2032, angrier than before, and the Democrats won’t even have the promise of defending civil liberties as a reason to keep people in the fold.
So while I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, the worst thing we can do right now is breathe a sigh of relief and think we can go back to brunch. It’s not our job to celebrate temporary slowdowns in capitalism’s trajectory toward fascist barbarism, but to expose the forces of co-optation as counterproductive to our struggle against the far right, and to build an independent, working-class alternative. They’re not going to just disappear or be transformed for the better – they need to be actively fought.
Following is a 13-minute segment of BreakThrough News in which host Rania Khalek “lays out how midterm voters delivered a massive rebuke to Trump’s war on Iran, ICE terror, and soaring cost of living, electing insurgent progressives across the country.”
“I am absolutely elated,” says Khaley. “But I'm also cringing because people like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are reaping the benefits of the backlash to Trump after taking zero accountability for the horrors their party unleashed.”
The Democrats won last night not BECAUSE of Jeffries and Schumer, but in spite of them. The credit belongs solely to the people of the United States. And they weren’t just repudiating old guard Republicans last night; they were repudiating old guard ANYTHING. Hearing Hakeem and Schumer speak today, they sounded frighteningly out of touch with what is going on here. They know it’s a tsunami, and they’re glad about it of course, but beyond that they seem to have little understanding of the power that’s washing up on the shore. Even much less, what it will be washing away. They seem not to understand that a tsunami, by all laws of nature, will inevitably remake the shoreline. The old will have to disappear, so new things can emerge.
Trump’s era has been so bad that a blue wave probably smells like relief. The naked fascism feels like it took a hit. But don’t be deceived. Capital is still large and in charge and if it needs more fascism to lock in its vision, any relief will be short lived. Democrats are capitalists. They are war mongers. They are part of the ruling elites army to ensure capital accumulation continues unabated.
If you go back to brunch and run cover for this new crop of capitalist administrators, you will be doing a grave disservice to the people of the world who suffer under blue or red imperialism. The campus crackdowns under Biden? Fascism. “China is the enemy” nonsense from Biden’s State of the Union address? Fascism. Gaza under Biden? Fascism/imperialism. ICE? Trump’s brownshirts? Flock cameras? AI job displacement?
DSA is capitalist. They do NOT pose a threat to the rule of capital. The dictatorship of capital remains unfazed. They are imperialists as well. They are not socialists and they are content as class collaborators.
So breathe. . . . Yes it was good to remove some of the visible unchecked power. But it isn’t a real victory and those who pretend otherwise are not to be trusted. They are class collaborators as well.
No one faction of the Democratic Party can declare victory after the midterms. The Republican implosion is so great that all Dem factions won, from democratic socialists to corporate centrists. Fascism is not defeated by one election (it can always be reconstituted into something even more dangerous) but it can be defeated, and we know how to do it – with left economic populism. Too radical? Wrong. One of Trump’s most significant legacies is that he exploded the Overton window. Anything is possible - for worse and for better. That means Democrats no longer have any excuse not to run on – and deliver – the policies that will actually meet people’s basic needs and address our most pressing crises, from systemic political corruption to climate breakdown. Bold, people-first policies is how we beat back fascism for real.
Alright, we’ve all enjoyed seeing the Republicans get thrashed. I don’t think anyone here is upset about that. But now we have to focus on a new problem: liberal complacency.
The Obama years taught us some important lessons. Leaving the Democrats on auto-pilot only leaves them to enact the same kinds of policies we would get under Republicans, only with a quieter media presence. There will be absolutely no material gains if we are not constantly disrupting the day-to-day and forcing them to acknowledge the will of the people. We have seen that liberals can at least mobilize on demand with the No Kings assemblies. Now expand on that. Keep protesting. Build up unions. Do not let your elected officials rest if they are plugging “across the aisle” rhetoric. Our society, and the entire planet, cannot afford the passive attitude that allowed Biden-Harris to sell missiles to Israel without impediment.
While keeping liberals in check is important, leftists also have an immense workload on their own plate. Expanding mutual aid networks is going to be vital, as there is still no real sign of economic recovery on the horizon. We need to continue educating, getting theory into the hands of as many people as we can (our album Theory for the People is a good place to start) in order to continue building a new level of class consciousness in the U.S. We need to be building up labour unions, tenants unions, and any other organization that directs political power into the hands of the proletariat.
I won’t pretend that I am not exhausted, and that these tasks don’t sound trying even as I write them out. But if we can keep pushing back against capitalism in every arena that it appears, I believe that we will see a new world in our lifetime. Keep struggling, comrades.
The “Blue wave” isn’t going to change the system underlying Trump and prior elitist presidents. I see many people wasting so much energy pointing to Trump as if removing him solves the problems today. It’s an entire system, an entire culture, and an entire empire.
We need more system level thinkers at the forefront of dialogue. But social media algorithms keep rewarding narratives that uphold the system and bring the chaos agents to the forefront. Then again, perhaps our culture is still addicted to that.
Related Off-site Links:
Abdul El-Sayed Becomes First Muslim Senator as Democrats Rout GOP Across the U.S. in Rebuke to Trump – Democracy Now! (November 5, 2026).
Hawaiʻi Green Party Candidate Pāʻele Kiakona Makes History, Edges Democrat – Chad Blair (Civil Beat, November 4, 2026).
Trump’s Endless Lies, Deceit, Cruelty, and Corruption Comes Crashing Down – Bradley Blankenship (Common Dreams, November 4, 2026).
These Leftists Trashed Trump in the Midterms – Novara Media (November 4, 2026).
The Democrats Have a Mandate for Peace – Here Are 4 Urgent Priorities – William D. Hartung and David Cortright (Waging Nonviolence, November 4, 2026).
After Blue Tsunami, Progressives Don’t Trust Schumer and Jeffries to Lead Congress – Jessica Corbett (Common Dreams, November 6, 2026).
“The Jig Is Up”: Voters Resoundingly Reject Republicans Who Wanted to Run Elections – Alex Burness (The Bolt, November 6, 2026).
Petition Calling for House Speaker Other Than Hakeem Jeffries Hits One Million Signatures – Jon Queally (Common Dreams, November 7, 2026).
See also the following Wild Reed posts:
• In Minnesota, Greens Secure “Minor Party” Status
• Something to Think About – November 3, 2026
• “It’s Very Clear That Something Is Brewing”
• A Spirited Exchange on Voting
• “On to the General!”
• Campaigning With the Green Party of Minnesota
• With the Green Party at Twin Cities Pride
• Andy Thomas Schuler: Quote of the Day – October 10, 2026
• MPR’s Major (But Unsurprising) Failure
• Pāʻele Kiakona: Maui’s Green Party Candidate
• Walid Hakim: Green Party Candidate for South Carolina Governor
• Mickie Kato: Quote of the Day – October 21, 2026
• “Green Wave 2026 is Global”
• Meet Some of the “People-Powered” Green Party Candidates for 2026
• “It Is Our Responsibility to Make a Third Party Viable”
See also:
• An Essential Read Ahead of the 2022 Midterm Elections
• Progressive Perspectives on the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections
• On the Eve of the 2018 Midterms, Three Insightful Perspectives on the Voting Process in the U.S.
• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Quote of the Day – November 7, 2018
• Something to Think About Before Voting Today (2010)
• Progressive Perspectives on the 2010 U.S. Midterm Elections
Opening image: Michael J. Bayly
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