Early this morning, I was woken up by a text from my daughter in Atlanta, nine hours behind Sharjah, UAE, where I’m currently located. Dems are leading, she exclaimed. Can you chat for a quick second? Before I called her, she sent another text, saying, it’s breaking news: Keisha Lance Bottoms is the projected winner as Governor of Georgia. My daughter, who has lived in Atlanta since she went to university there in the early 2000s, was ecstatic beyond measure.
Our celebratory chatter woke up my wife, a political scientist and keen observer of American politics. The ancestors must be smiling, she proclaimed with giddy excitement. We switched on the television and followed the elections on American stations we had access to, including CNN International and Bloomberg, while simultaneously perusing newspapers including The New York Times and The Guardian.
The more we talked and thought about the unfolding election results, I couldn’t help and filtering the elections through Africanist and global lenses, the clearer it became that this stunning blue wave, which polls had been predicting, represented political triumph in five dimensions, what I would the 5Ds: democrats, democracy, diversity, demography, and development.
The Democratic Victory
The Democrats won a resounding victory. Their victories swept the electoral map in Congress and across red states, as they held on to their constituencies. It was a political tsunami that routed President Donald Trump and the Republicans in a stunning rebuke of their failed policies and divisive politics, in which diversionary and inflammatory cultural wars trumped the deteriorating material conditions and interests of the electorate.
Democrats seized both chambers of Congress. Their candidates flipped seven Republican seats in Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas, red states some of which had not elected a Democrat in decades. They retained seats in five states, namely, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia.
At the time of writing, the Democrats had flipped 35 seats previously held by Republicans in the House, including multiple seats in states won by Trump by more than 10 points such as Texas, Iowa, Florida, and Pennsylvania, along with key wins in Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Utah. They successfully defended all or nearly all of their incumbent districts , including 22 that were considered vulnerable because Trump carried them by more than 10 points in the 2024 election, and are projected to win 242 to 258 seats when all the votes are counted, 40 more than they need to form a majority.
In a tectonic shift, at the time of writing, with 32 of the 36 seats contested, Democrats had also flipped five state governorships from Republicans in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, and Nevada, and successfully defended 15 states. They won a total of 29, earning a majority of governorships for the first time since 2010.
So far, with final calls still processing, Democrats have flipped 12 of the 88 state legislative chambers on the ballot from Republican control in Pennsylvania (Senate; they already controlled the House), Wisconsin (both chambers), Arizona (putting Republicans in a legislative minority for the first time in 26 years), North Carolina (House), and drastically broke Republican supermajorities in states like Florida, South Carolina, and Indiana. They successfully defended 25 legislative chambers, including competitive ones in states like Maine, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington, where they were able to preserve existing Democratic trifectas.
Similarly, Democrats dramatically outperformed Republicans in races for attorney general and secretary of state offices. For the former, the biggest upsets were in Texas and Georgia, while key defensive holds included Nevada and Michigan. Democrats also won the majority of contested secretary of state offices, seizing several from Republicans and holding those they held before.
The Resurgence of Democracy
America’s beleaguered democracy won. Electoral democracy in the United States has always been compromised by gerrymandering, voter suppression, politicization of the judiciary, and the financialization of politics. funding. This is why a conservative outfit like The Economist considers the United States a flawed, rather than a full, democracy compared to its increasingly alienated Western allies such as Canada.
Gerrymandering spectacularly backfired for Republicans. They redrew congressional boundaries across seven states, including Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana) hoping to flip 15 vulnerable or targeted seats. Democrats succeeded in redrawing maps only in California, seeking 5 pickup opportunities, and Utah an additional seat was created after a court order that struck a Republican map.
Democrats won or held onto at least 10 of the 15 seats targeted by Republican gerrymandering, while successfully defending their own incumbents in heavily redrawn territory. In California and Utah, the Democrats successfully swept all six of their projected pickups, including 3 critical flips in California and won Utah’s court-ordered 1 redistricting seat. This might be one of the most consequential results of the election: the erosion of gerrymandering as a potent political weapon.
Voter suppression involves the imposition of legal, administrative, or logistical measures to discourage or prevent specific segments of the population, mostly racial minorities, from voting. Republicans have become increasingly adept and brazen in trying to use voter purges, strict identification requirements, targeted closure of polling places, restrict mail-in and absentee voting, and raise administrative and psychological barriers through constant and often last-minute changes to voting rules.
Leading to the midterm elections advocacy groups raised the alarm about these tactics, abetted by the erosion of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) by the Supreme Court that in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted pre-clearance provisions of the Act which required states with a demonstrated record of racial discrimination to get federal approval before changing any voting laws or closing polling places, which was reinforced by the 2026 Louisiana v. Callais decision that raised the legal bar for opponents of biased maps to prove intentional malice rather than just discriminatory results.
Cumulatively, these changes to the VRA shifted the burden of fighting voter suppression to more individuals rather than monitoring the state, thereby legalizing voter suppression. However, it backfired as these blatantly anti-democratic measures provoked mass resistance, especially among Black and Latino voters whose early voting turnout surged. The architects of voter suppression were also stalled by defeats in the courts that struck down gerrymandered maps and denied last-minute efforts by the Trump administration to block mail-in ballots and mass purges just before Election Day,
Thus, the highly coordinated voter suppression efforts were neutralized by a combination of historic voter mobilization and decisive judicial interventions, underscoring the fact that popular will and institutional guardrails could withstand the weaponization of voting by anti-democratic forces inspired by the restrictive political covenants of the pre-civil rights era of white supremacy.
Unusual among Western democracies is the scale of the financialization of American politics, which has turned the electoral process into a high-stakes, multi-billion-dollar industry in which megadonors seek to buy political candidates, messaging, and power primarily to serve their interests rather than those of the electorate. They seek to turn elections into empty performative rituals to reproduce state capture and consolidate oligarchic self-enrichment. According to OpenSecrets, the 2026 midterm elections are the most expensive in U.S. history, costing an extraordinary $11.9 billion.
This is the logical consequence of the systematic dismantling of post-Watergate campaign finance laws, in which the Supreme Court ruled that money is a form of constitutionally protected speech. This dates back to the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which stipulated that while the government could limit direct contributions to candidates to prevent bribery, it could not limit independent spending by individuals or campaigns.
Sanctifying the financialization of elections was the landmark 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, which declared that corporations, non-profits, and labor unions have the same First Amendment free speech rights as individual people. Also in the same year, the SpeechNow.org v. FEC and McCutcheon v. FEC decisions facilitated the creation of Super PACs and megadonors as vehicles for massive funding of elections by allowing individuals, corporations, or unions, as long as they didn’t directly coordinate with candidates, to contribute any amount without restriction.
Subsequent Court decisions and election rules legalized pop-up dark money, loosened relations between candidates and Super PACs, and removed restrictions on how much candidates could raise after the elections to pay themselves back for personal loans made to their campaigns. This is the landscape that allowed megadonors such as Elon Musk to donate between $445 and $483 million to Republican candidates and Michael Bloomberg to donate $116 million to Democratic candidates.
Overall, many Republicans relied on large donors while many Democratic candidates boasted about a broader base of small-dollar individual contributions. In the final 10 weeks of the election cycle, Pop-up Super PACs spent a massive $637 million collectively, with Republican-linked late groups outspending Democrats two-to-one while keeping their initial donor identities legally hidden past Election Day.
Financialization undermines American democracy in so far as massive political contributions are increasingly viewed by corporations and billionaires as capital investments that expect a return on investment through targeted tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks, government contracts, or favorable economic policies. This compromises accountability as lawmakers are trapped in a vicious cycle of “permanent fundraising,” shifting their time and accountability away from everyday constituents toward their megadonors.
However, the returns diminish as the media landscape becomes deluged with continuous attack ads, which creates public fatigue, exhaustion, and cynicism about the political process. The results of the election would seem to suggest limits to the financial capture of elections by megadonors. In many cases, their candidates in the primaries of both parties lost, and in the elections the billions spent by the titans of the tech industry and the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) to support Republicans amounted to a spectacular waste of money, showing the limits of buying democracy for a population fired up by their own economic and existential interests.
The Triumph of Diversity
Disparaged diversity won. There will be more minority governors, senators and representatives in Congress than ever before in American history. Altogether, the lone Black governor, Wes Moore of Maryland who won his re-election, will be joined by four new Black governors: three of them Democrats, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first Black female governor in U.S. history, David Crowley, who made history as Wisconsin’s first Black governor, Aaron Ford, who flipped the Nevada governorship out of Republican hands, and one Republican, Byron Donalds, who became Florida’s first Black governor.
In addition, two Latinos were elected Democratic governors: Gina Hinojosa, who pulled off a historic upset by defeating three-term incumbent Republican Greg Abbott, becoming the first Latina governor in Texas history, and Xavier Becerra, who became California’s first Latino governor since 1875. In New Mexico, Deb Haaland, a Democrat, made history as the first Native American female governor of a U.S. state.
In the meantime, 12 white women were elected as governors, four for the first time: Amy Acton (D-OH), who defeated the insufferable Vivek Ramaswamy to become the first woman governor in Ohio’s history, Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who became the first female governor in Minnesota’s history, Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who also made history as the first female governor of Tennessee, and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), who retained Republican control in a highly competitive race. Eight other incumbent white women governors retained their seats, six of whom are Democrats and two Republicans.
As for senators, two newly elected African American and African-descended senators, Juliana Stratton (D-IL) and Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) will join five sitting African American senators who were not up for election this cycle: Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) and Tim Scott (R-SC). As for Latinos, the newly elected Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and re-elected incumbent Alex Padilla (D-CA) will serve alongside four sitting senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Bernie Moreno (R-OH). The Senate will also have one new Native American senator, Peggy Flanagan (D-MN), as well as three sitting Asian American Democratic senators, Andy Kim (NJ), Tammy Duckworth (IL), and Mazie Hirono (HI). At the time of writing the election in Alaska has not been declared, and the democratic candidate, Mary Peltola, is Native American.
While we await the release of all House seats, it is more than likely that the number of minority representatives will be historically unprecedented. Among the highlights is the fact that Hakeem Jeffries is slated to become the first Black Speaker of the House. Another Black interesting development is that the number of House members who are African-born immigrants or first-generation children of African immigrants will grow.
Twenty-nine-year-old Melat Kiros, born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a Democratic Socialist, will join Ilhan Omar, born in Somalia, as the second African-born woman in the House, and the first Black woman from Colorado and Gen Z. In Maryland, 32-year-old Adrian Boafo, a son of Ghanaian immigrants, won his House seat, where he will join Joe Neguse, a son of Eritrean immigrants who won his reelection in Colorado, and Gabe Amo, a son of Ghanaian and Liberian parents, won his reelection in Rhode Island.
Other remarkable electoral victories include from the Asian American community Pia Dandiya (D-FL), a first-generation Indian-American, who enjoyed one of the most high-profile flips of this election cycle in a gerrymandered Republican district. From the Native American community, there is Claire Valdez (D-NY), who ran on a progressive platform and became the first Native American woman representative from the state of New York. Among the Latino community, Denise Powell (D-NE) flipped a Republican seat to become the first Hispanic representative ever elected to Congress from Nebraska, while Emily Randall (D-WA) made history as the first openly LGBTQ+ Latina ever elected to the United States Congress.
The diversity of the newly elected state governors and members of Congress constitutes a blistering rebuke of Trump’s chaotic, crass, corrupt, and cruel presidency, of resurgent white supremacy, of MAGA’s racist, reactionary and retrograde efforts to turn back to Reconstruction-era America. It also throws a harsh light on companies, institutions, and organizations, including businesses, media houses, universities, and law firms that unashamedly and hurriedly abandon diversity, equity and inclusion, often preemptively obeying executive orders or political pronouncements by Trump and his minions that went beyond the law.
The Power of Demography
Shifting demography won. It is often not well understood or fully appreciated that massive transformation of the American population is a product of the Civil Rights Movement. Three landmark laws were passed in response to civil rights struggles led by African Americans against centuries-long oppression, persecution, and marginalization.
The first was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and officially ended legal segregation in public places and schools. Second, the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, which banned discriminatory voting practices that had been systematically used in southern states to disenfranchise Black voters. Third, the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which abolished the “national origins” quota system that had severely restricted immigration from non-European countries since the 1920s, opening immigration to people from Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
The backlash against the changes wrought by these laws provoked racist revanchism among some whites unable to compete without the privileges of whiteness. They were cynically mobilized by radical conservatives increasingly coalesced in the Republican Party, whose conservative ideologues were burnished by a network of well-funded right-wing and populist institutions including think tanks, the media, professional associations, and even universities where affirmative action combined with neoliberalism created intense, racialized competition for the symbolic capital of access, certification, and professional status.
This explains why elite universities quickly embraced judicial assaults against affirmative action because they never believed in it; it only served a performative role, which lost its currency with the resurgence of a populist backlash against the Great Recession and the Obama Presidency, which turbocharged fears of white replacement. These fears fueled anti-immigration sentiments, culminating in the militarized brutalities of ICE raids in Democratic-led American cities.
The results of the midterm elections represent a repudiation of the cultural and civic wars of the American right, a powerful indictment of the governance failures of contemporary American right-wing populism, which has failed to address the pressing economic, social, technological, political, and geopolitical challenges facing the nation in a rapidly changing and highly competitive world marked by multilateralism and the relative decline of Euro-America.
America’s populism combines three strands: the age-old reflexes of white supremacy, the anti-immigration crusade of European right-wing movements, and the historic lessons of white minority rule from apartheid South Africa, eagerly financed and popularized by the South African mafia led by Elon Musk that has constructed the perverse myth of white genocide in post-apartheid South Africa that Trump and his MAGA base have fervently embraced.
When comprehensive election data is available, I expect that it will show racial minorities, women and young people, including those who gravitated to Trump in 2024, believing his grandiose lies and false promises, were in the forefront of the political tsunami that has swept the Republican Party from congressional power. Those who voted for Trump in 2024, either out of ideological conviction or in the vain hope that his retrofitted administration would improve their lives and livelihoods, have been rudely disappointed over the past two years.
Among Trump’s supporters in 2024, there were 69 percent of white men without a college degree, 53 percent of white women, 46 to 48 percent of Latinos, 37 to 40 percent of Asian Americans, 20 to 21 percent of Black men. Sequels are rarely better than the original show, so it is with Trump. He returned to power freed from institutional guardrails, eager to exact retribution on his enemies, real and imagined, surrounded by spineless and enabling sycophants, and more erratic and opinionated than ever, basking in his omniscience and omnipresence.
His administration took away reproductive rights from women, emasculated his white male supporters, including young men with diminishing wages and prospects for enjoying the American dream. It also ensnared Latinos with the otherization of draconian immigration crackdowns, and dismantled the promises of the model minority myth for Asian Americans as they faced rising racism. Further, it decimated opportunities for Black men in an economy waging war on Black employment and businesses in the crusade against DEI.
Above all, it raised the cost of living for everyone through his inane tariff policies and unprovoked war with Iran, as he simultaneously enriched his wealthy, feckless cronies and cheerleaders with unconscionable tax cuts and indulged in unprecedented corruption of any president in American history.
The Seductions of Decency
The desire for decency won. As they say, reeled from the shenanigans under the unbelievably inept and self-destructive second Trump administration, more and more Americans yearned for something better. They became exhausted by its relentless assaults to their sense of decency, by the mindlessness of its gratuitous meanness, and the endless embarrassment from the cringeworthy idiocy of their globally despised president. Americans, like other people, derive part of their national pride from the international reputation of their leaders. Trump has brought Americans widespread shame.
The midterm elections gave them an opportunity to exact their revenge, against the despicable misogyny, the wanton racism, the economic incompetence, the daily spectacles of vengefulness, the deepening partisanship and polarization, the public incivility and the sickening abandonment of moral values, the incessant pathological lying. They sought the ennobling possibilities of community, dialogue, and dignity.
The electorate also responded to the quality and conduct of the candidates. Many of the Republican candidates, some of whom were strongly supported by Trump, were not only patently unqualified but also known to be corrupt and engaged in vicious personal attacks mimicking their godfather, Trump, whereas the Democrats were focused on issues.
The Imperatives of Development
The search for development won. As in other parts of the world in both the developed and developing countries, the working and middle classes strive for the well-being and social stability that comes from living wages, access to good education, healthcare, social services and public infrastructure. They resent deepening inequalities, the unelected and unaccountable power of oligopolies and obscenely rich oligarchs, who see themselves as masters of the universe.
Especially unpopular are the tech bros, whose data centers are gobbling up massive water and energy resources, raising the utility bills of local communities, threatening jobs and the future of humanity in a mindless and unregulated chase for super-intelligence whose dangers are poorly understood or appreciated.
In this election, the legacies of more than forty years of neoliberalism, reframed by the Great Recession and Covid-19 pandemic, were on trial, so were cuts to healthcare and other welfare programs. In the meantime, people saw levels of national indebtedness rise, surpassing $40 trillion, and military expenditures on a new forever war in Iran exploded. At the same time, the war brought higher oil and gas prices and for other commodities whose production and flows have been severely disrupted by the war in West Asia. According to The New York Times, every demographic group, including White voters, Hispanic voters, Black voters, and young voters, moved left.
The affordability crisis, emblematic of the broken promises of the neoliberal development model, is evident in many parts of the world. Europe has been engulfed by escalating protests led by Gen Z and working people. This is true in many parts of the Global South as well. The political ramifications vary as some incumbent populist governments fall, for example in Hungary and Serbia, while elsewhere liberal regimes are threatened by rising disaffection and disorder that empowers populist forces as evident in Germany and France. In Brazil, the incumbent left-wing government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva survived the insurgent crusade of the populist right wing of the Bolsonaros, who fancied themselves as replicas of Trump in Latin America.
With this election, Trump has become the Bolsonaro of North America, his party decisively rejected by the electorate. Trump is now officially a lame duck president, a fate that befalls most presidents after they lose the midterm elections, which is often the case, especially during their second term. But Trump is different from his predecessors in that he is the first president in a century to serve two nonconsecutive terms.
Perhaps even more crucial is that this might portend something much larger: the collapse of the MAGA, the end of the Trump era that has dominated American politics during the past decade ever since he entered the race for the presidency in 2016. Trump has been a consequential president, not because his policies were good for America, let alone the world, but because he fundamentally transformed American politics and institutions, articulating and accelerating trends that long antedated him.
The Challenges and Possibilities of Change
Many analysts are concerned about what a lame duck Trump might mean for the world, in so far as many of his predecessors turned to foreign policy to burnish their legacy. Trump has no international legacy to build on. But he can cause a lot of damage as he lashes out against his political diminution and inquisition of his policies by a Democratic Congress in reckless foreign adventures including restarting the Iran war and embark on regime change in Cuba and elsewhere, or reignite his disputes with Canada and America’s NATO allies, collude with Russia and China to divide the world into three great power spheres.
As to be expected, the Democratic sweep has triggered a blame game among Republicans. For example, Vice President J.D. Vance blames the loss on the Iran war, in a veiled criticism of his boss. This presages the possibility that defiance, or at least disaffection and distancing from Trump’s policies, might grow.
But the victorious Democrats will also be under enormous pressure to check Trump and meet the demands and expectations of impatient voters. The president will wield veto power over their legislative initiatives, which would require them to work with chastened Republicans to override. They need to work on the cost of living crisis by rolling back tariffs, dealing seriously with government debt, which would require both raising taxes and entitlement reform, ending the war in Iran, regulating the AI industry, strengthening job training and improving education, robustly dealing with the climate crisis, and helping provide health care beyond the limited measures of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare.
I’m not sure if Democrats are up to the task. Not only is their tent in the new Congress more ideologically diverse than ever, but the party establishment is also timid, beholden to large donors and lobbyists, and they seem invested in the myth of the political center as the best political space to occupy. They need to abandon meaningless centrism and embark on bold, popular programs to improve the well-being of ordinary people, and worry less about the rich and their ideologues in the media and academy.
They also need to manage America’s adjustment to one major power among others in a multilateral world. American supremacy, indeed, imperialism, after World War II brought the country great benefits to its economy and standard of living. But it has now become an unsustainable drag on its economy. The party that manages America’s transition and its transformation into a nation that is not permanently embroiled in foreign wars will be good for itself and the world. Imperialism at home and racism at home reinforce each other.
One critical international relationship that is likely to become central in the United States is the relationship with Israel, a country that has an oversized impact on American foreign policy because of the role of the Israeli lobby. The fierce criticisms of America’s subservience to Israeli interests, what some regard as the tail-wagging-the-dog syndrome, by many Democrats, especially the Democratic Socialists, and among younger Americans, will force changes. Preemptively, on the morning of the election, Trump announced that the United States will cease providing its newest $4 billion annual aid to Israel.
It is unlikely that U.S. – Africa relations will change much given that the executive branch controls foreign affairs. However, with long-time Africa policy advocate Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) poised to take over as Chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there may be renewed scrutiny on foreign aid and agency cuts, efforts to reset relations with African nations, including South Africa, that have been battered by indifference, transactional diplomacy, and a focus on the extraction of critical minerals, data, and other resources, and a reevaluation of visa restrictions and travel bans.
America must strive to become an inclusive non-racial democracy. All this is a tall order. But Democrats must use their new power strategically and act decisively. If they fail to do so, the voters will punish them in two years, and the musical chairs of political switcharoo will come back to haunt them to the detriment of the American people.
