There is something reassuring about the predictability of midterm elections in the United States. In the twenty midterms that have taken place since the end of the Second World War, the party of the sitting president has seen a swing against it in all but two instances. It’s not unusual for the governing party to lose control of one or both Houses of Congress, even when the president is relatively popular.
This reflects something of the reactive nature of modern democratic politics. Voters overwhelmingly tend to rebuke rather than reward — and midterm elections are an effective way of communicating their grievances or their sense of the unresponsiveness of the sitting government.
But the 2026 midterm elections did not just “send a message” to the Trump administration. The size and extent of the swing against the Republican Party represents as thoroughgoing a repudiation of the first two years of a presidency as we’re likely to see.
The Democratic Party, which was decimated and demoralised after the 2024 election, saw a swing in the popular vote of 13 points, delivering a huge majority in the House of Representatives. More importantly, this voter surge flipped seven states that were overwhelmingly Republican — five of which (North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Texas and Kansas) were carried by Trump in 2024 by more than 10 points — delivering them a larger than expected majority in the Senate.
In the aftermath, Trump has claimed, defiantly: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” But it’s hard to interpret these midterms as anything other than a referendum on Trump himself. After all, 47 times over the course of the campaign, he told rallies to “pretend I’m on the ballot”. Voters were clearly fed up with high fuel prices due to the ongoing war in Iran, the heavy-handed and sometimes lethal conduct of ICE agents, the economic effects of tariffs and the reports of indecent profiteering and outright corruption on the part of Trump, his family and his closest associates — to say nothing of Trump’s obsession with certain vanity projects in Washington, DC. Voters did regard Trump as being on the ballot and voted accordingly.
The scale and size of the Democratic victory presents some difficult questions, however. Was this really a vote for Democrats, or simply a vast repudiation of Trump? If the latter, does this give any guidance for how Democrats should use their congressional majorities? Should they seek to prosecute Trump, once again, for his corruption and conduct in office? Or given the success of moderate Democrats, should they suppress such an overtly partisan stance and focus instead on addressing cost-of-living pressures, healthcare, data-centres, unemployment, and so on?
After all, given the reactive nature of contemporary democratic politics, the majority that was given to them in 2026 could just as easily be taken away in 2028.
Guest: Brendon O’Connor is a Professor of US Politics and US Foreign Relations at the University of Sydney, where he holds a joint appointment in the United States Studies Centre.
