After the blue tsunami

The voters of the United States have spoken. They have delivered Donald Trump and the Republican Party one of the worst electoral defeats in modern U.S. history, one that rivals the defeat of the GOP after Nixon’s impeachment. To capture its enormity, pundits have grasped for ever more dramatic metaphors from wipeout to earthquake, tsunami, and deluge.

The damage done to Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party is hard to exaggerate. None other than outgoing Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis described it as “an extinction level event…. To call it a wave, I don’t think would be fully accurate. It’s the political equivalent of a meteor strike that went all around the United States, blue states, red states, everything in between.” He predicted it might take a decade for his party to recover.

As the results continue to pour in, the Democrats have swept Congress, winning as many as 260 seats in the House and potentially 56 in the Senate. And they now hold the majority of governors’offices throughout the country. All the Republican gains from 2024 have been erased.

The mass, cross-class resistance is responsible for this defeat ofTrump and the Republican Party. For the last two years, millions of people have protested, defended their communities, and fought for basic democratic rights in the face of the administration’s massive, violent, and sometimes murderous repression. This resistance and the broader radicalization against Trump turned people out in record numbers to kick out his cronies and replace them with Democrats.

On the one hand, this massive vote reflects enormous anger and disgust with Trump, his billionaire backers, and the capitalist system that has impoverished workers and brutalized our communities. That rage opens new horizons for building class and social struggle.

On the other hand, the turn back towards the Democratic Party and the Left’s predominant electoral strategy inside of it risks derailing the movement. We’ve all seen the devastating consequences of this strategy many times before; outraged by Republicans, insurgents voted for the Democrats, but then sat back waiting for change, only to have their hopes betrayed, opening the door for the Republicans to pose as the only alternative and return to power.

To break this cycle, the Left, unions, and social movements must abandon this strategy and, instead, carry out a two-front battle. First, we must continue to defend ourselves against the Trump administration, which remains a clear and present danger. It appears to be doubling down on a program of racist, reactionary nationalism, as reflected in the promotion of white supremacist Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff.

Second, we must force the Democrats both to enact immediate reforms, like the restoration of Medicaid funding, and to fight for much more radical ones like Medicare for All and the abolition of ICE. In the process of this independent struggle, we must set our sights on building a new party of our own, a workers’ party.

Rage against the Trump machine

The meteor that hit the Republican Party in the midterms was none other than Donald Trump. He told voters to pretend he was on the ballot. And they did, voting against him in every corner of the country from north to south and east to west. As one voter said, “I would crawl on my belly over broken glass to vote against that awful man.”

Usually, the midterm electorate is older, wealthier, and whiter. This year, it was more multiracial, more working class, and younger. And these voters came out against Trump in unprecedented numbers and opposed him on every major issue.

Remember, Trump had promised to end the forever wars, bring down the cost of living, and stop mass migration. He instead launched the deeply unpopular war on Iran, which, in combination with tariffs, spiked prices on everything from groceries to gas.

On the issue of immigration, he transformed what had been a source of popularity into a liability. People were repulsed by his deployments of ICE, construction of concentration camps, and mass deportation, especially after his goons murdered Alex Pretti and Renée Good in Minneapolis.

Every single demographic swung against Trump and the Republicans, in particular Latinos and young men. The electorate voted against ICE, the Iran War, the tech oligarchs’ AI data centers, class and social inequality, corruption, and greed. And they sent a clear message: they want reforms that address and improve their lives.

This blue wave was not just in traditional Democratic Party strongholds, but in the heartlands of the so-called red states. The Democrats took Lindsey Graham’s seat in South Carolina, swept Texas, won a Senate seat in Kansas for the first time in 94 years, and, at the time of writing, were poised to win Senate seats in Mississippi and Alaska. The Republicans’ iron grip on the red states, including the old Confederacy, has cracked.

And, in the face of psychotic redbaiting and racism, a slew of candidates in the Democratic Socialists of America won local, state, and congressional elections. This is a sign of the radicalization to the Left, especially among young people. In a stunning development, one-third of young voters nationally considered themselves socialists, more than three times the number that identified as MAGA.

Even in DeSantis Land, aka Florida, DSA member Angie Nixon—with no support from the DNC—came within three percentage points of winning a Senate seat. Some pundits contend that if she had been a moderate, she would have won. But that misses the point that in a deep red state, a Black woman and member of DSA came close to victory.

Trump’s failure to derail democracy

The people defied Trump’s attempt to subvert democracy. After the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, Black voters turned out in mass numbers, asserting their rights and voting against Republicans everywhere.

Trump’s campaign to rig the election by getting state Republicans to gerrymander Congressional districts blew up in his face. With results still coming in, his GOP candidates lost in at least ten of the fifteen districts. Meanwhile, Democrats picked up five redistricted seats in California and one in Utah.

And the courts ruled against Trump’s more extreme plans to interfere with the vote. They blocked his attempt to seize voter rolls and rejected his attempt to prevent the certification of the Senate election in Alaska.

His attempt to buy the election, by promising to pay each voter $5,000 if the Republicans held on to the House and Senate, also backfired. So did Musk’s obscene spending spree. He wasted nearly half a billion dollars in a fruitless effort to boost GOP candidates.

On election day, Trump refrained from following through on his threat to deploy ICE at the polls. In the face of his racist authoritarianism, Latinos turned out in record numbers to protest the Republicans’ escalation of the war on immigrants.

In the end, the blue tsunami was so enormous that, in contrast to 2020, Trump could not question the results, let alone organize a mob against them. Demoralized and resentful in his White House bunker, he initially vacillated between promising to work with the Democrats and threatening to veto everything and rule through executive decree.

Shattering the MAGA coalition

Trump’s MAGA electoral coalition now lies in tatters. Only two years ago, armed with an authoritarian nationalist program, he had united the tech oligarchs, small businesspeople, and sections of the demoralized working class to win back the White House.

While Trump delivered tax cuts and deregulation for the rich, his administration screwed everyone else. Its wars and tariffs drove up prices for small business owners and cut into the living standards of workers. And Trump’s bigotry and scapegoating drove sections of oppressed people, particularly those Latinos who had, out of despair, fallen for his spell, back to the Democrats.

No amount of scapegoating of immigrants, trans people, Muslims, and socialists could cover up his corrupt enrichment of his own family or his naked service to a narrow section of the capitalist class. Bigotry simply does not compensate for spiking prices that threaten people’s ability to pay their bills and buy health insurance.

His policies demoralized even his hard-core supporters like some of the so-called Front Row Joes who stopped turning out to his election rallies. His increasingly bizarre speeches, combining comments about candidates’ asses, various vanity construction projects, and stale laugh lines from the past, evoked declining enthusiasm from even the most faithful.

And his candidate selection was a disaster. He confused politics with a mobster’s patronage system, backing people loyal to him but with no hope of winning, like the comically corrupt Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham, the unqualified sister of the late Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. They, among many others, were so bad that one of his campaign organizers mocked them, saying, “I have seen the enemy and it is us.”

Republican voters either did not turn out or broke from Trump to vote Democrat. The bulk of the capitalist class had already begun to turn against him, diverting their donations back to the Democrats. And, after the election, the stock market surged in the biggest single-day gain in over a year and the largest post-election increase in 44 years in hopes for the restoration of capitalist and imperialist stability.

The next day, however, they woke up, realizing the Democrats’ threat of regulation of AI data centers would undercut the sole source of growth in the U.S. economy, and panicked, reversing all the gains of the previous day. Now all the oligarchs are plotting new strategies to seduce the Democrats’ establishment and neutralize its Left.

As a result of the crack-up of Trump’s cross-class coalition, the Republican Party faces an existential crisis. Trump had transformed it from the main party of big business into a party of the far right, and then his policies and perceived betrayals tore it apart, dooming it to a truly historic defeat.

Already the wolves are circling around their pack leader. JD Vance blamed the Iran War— which he claims to have opposed—for the Republican defeat. DeSantis is sharpening his executioner’s ax. And many are now fleeing the sinking ship. For instance, the current House Speaker, Mike Johnson, has promised to step down from leadership and will not be the party’s minority leader, while he presumably waits for the rapture to rescue him from the Democrat’s coming inquisition.

The Democrats’ victory and its contradictions

The beneficiary of Trump’s crisis is the Democratic Party. Its candidates won their races across the country, with very few exceptions. Most of the victors, particularly in the red states, are pro-capitalist centrists, many of whom hold reactionary positions on key issues like abortion, trans rights, and immigration.

They denounced Trump’s extremes while promising to address the affordability crisis. Neither they nor their establishment backers, however, lifted a finger to oppose the wave of anti-trans referendums across the nation. Even worse, Josh Turek, the centrist victor in the Iowa Senate race, came out against transgender athletes participating in youth sports.

A minority of the victors are pro-capitalist progressives. The most significant of these is Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. After the Democratic Party establishment, along with AIPAC, tried to block his victory in the primary, he secured the nomination, overcame Mike Rogers’ Islamophobic campaign of hate and bigotry, withstood the defection of his primary opponent, Haley Stevens, and won the election to become the first Muslim to secure a Senate seat.

Democratic Socialists also scored victories across the country. These were mainly in traditional Democratic Party heartlands like New York City. Nonetheless, many of the candidates aligned with DSA were new “members” whose affiliation to the socialist movement may have more to do with a perceived path to electoral success than any principled commitment to Marxism. Indeed, many, like Angie Nixon in Florida, distanced themselves from socialism, and others like the newly elected LA Mayor Nithya Raman, who was backed by a hedge fund manager, declared herself pro-capitalist.

These progressives and Democratic Socialists, as establishment analysts have pointed out, underperformed compared to the centrists. They won by narrower margins and in some cases lost. In Vermont, for instance, voters split their ticket. They voted for establishment Democrats, who swept the state, and for the incumbent Eisenhower Republican, Phil Scott, who attacked progressive Amanda Janoo’s campaign platform as “unrealistic.”

Significantly, progressives and socialists who did win will be a minority in a party dominated by the capitalist establishment. All of this means that the Democrats’ massive victory in the midterms will largely prevent progressives from advancing their agenda. The establishment doesn’t have to rely on them as a voting bloc to rule and pass legislation. So, the progressives will not be able to use normal parliamentary means to pressure the party into advancing reforms like Medicare for All.

By contrast, the enormous centrist bloc will likely ensure the reelection of the establishment’s Congressional leadership. It will take not only petitions, but also mass protests to prevent Hakeem Jeffries from becoming House Speaker and Chuck Schumer Senate Majority Leader. Both are corporate and AIPAC bagmen.

Mistakenly, left-wing stalwarts like Mamdani, AOC, and El-Sayed have pledged support to Jeffries, preemptively undercutting the possibility of dethroning him. This is a dead-end tactic of parliamentary horse-trading with the establishment in the vain hope of winning their support for a more progressive platform.

It will not work. The establishment’s program will at best promise to restore the wretched status quo ante with some mild reforms that pale in comparison to what’s desperately needed. For instance, on immigration, they will not legalize all migrants nor grant them equal rights, but will conduct a “kinder, gentler” border enforcement and enact “saner” immigration policy that under Obama and Biden, led to as many, if not more, deportations than under Trump.

And the establishment will certainly not abolish ICE; they are just as likely to increase funding, as they already have done, to pay for so-called reforms like training and body cameras. We can expect the same centrist nonsense from them on gender, reproductive, and trans rights as well as policing. Even supposedly socialist stalwarts like AOC have dismissed radical demands for equality with quips like “woke 1.0 was crazyyyyy.”

By contrast, what capital demands of the establishment, they will deliver. And that is to restore order in the state bureaucracy, rebuild its damaged sections, especially its military brass, push for an end to the Iran War, reverse Trump’s idiotic protectionism, and repair the damage done to U.S. imperialism’s network of allies.

No doubt, they will demand a pound of flesh from the Trump regime; they will investigate all the corruption, including Elon Musk’s dubiously constitutional DOGE operations, and they will likely impeach the incompetent, testosterone-addled “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth, among other underlings.

Incoming Democratic Party House oversight chair Robert Garcia has already warned the Trump cabinet to “lawyer up.” But Jeffries and Schumer have announced that they will not focus on investigations, impeachment, and convictions. Instead, they have promised to address the affordability crisis.

Even assuming they had the political will to reign in the rapacious billionaire donor class and reshape this new gilded age of capitalism – which they do not – their ability to do so is constrained by their lack of a veto-proof majority. So, barring mass pressure from below, they can only win what Trump will agree to and sign into law. And he will likely veto almost everything they propose.

The battle for 2028

That reality will set up the battle for the 2028 presidential election, which has already begun. The Democrats smell blood in the Republican waters. All the party’s factions will prepare their candidates to fight for the nomination with confidence that the victor will win the presidency.

The battle will be between the capitalist establishment and the progressive wing as it has been for the last several cycles. The establishment, party bureaucracy, and their ruling-class donors will cohere around a centrist with a restorationist program and some mildly liberal planks that address the affordability crisis. Already, progressives and the DSA are rallying to push AOC to follow Bernie Sanders’ example and run for the nomination.

Even if the DSA’s electoral strategy inside the Democratic Party increases the number of elected politicians, they will remain stuck in a quadruple trap. They remain within a hostile capitalist party, disciplined by a capitalist state mired in a growing fiscal crisis, and a global capitalist system already in a slump and headed for a recession when the AI boom ends, and the stock bubble pops. All of this leaves them, and the voters they lead, no closer to breaking and forming a party of their own.

Moreover, despite waves of class and social struggle over the last two decades, the balance of class forces still favors the ruling class. Socialist sentiment is not yet organized as a force at work sites and in the community, where our real power lies.

As a result, we have not managed to build sustained, insurgent movements with the power to scare the ruling class enough to force them to deliver reforms. The capitalist state, and the power of the global system have contained and neutralized all progressives elected on the Democratic Party ballot line to executive office, from Seattle’s Katie Wilson to Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, and Zohran Mamdani, and it will do the same to Nithya Rahman in LA.

As a result, the Democratic establishment will probably have an easier path to secure the nomination of one of their anointed centrists against AOC or some other insurgent this time than they had against Sanders, whom they struggled against the first time but trounced in the second contest.

Lame duck, angry duck, or tyrannical fowl?

One unpredictable variable over the next two years is Trump himself. Will he go silently into the dark night or rage, rage against the dying of his light? He is a discredited lame duck facing his own mortality. His authoritarian personality disorder, however, could turn him into, in Chris Christie’s words, an “angry duck.”

But it is hard to see what he can do now. He faces a population that despises him, his regime, and all of his policies. The Democratic-controlled Congress will both bog him down in investigation and demand that he enact modest reforms.

His party is in shambles. More cabinet members will look to flee the sinking ship, and perhaps, as one of his pollsters joked, find “asylum in Israel.” Others eager to salvage their lucrative careers will turn on their master, charting a new course to try and rebuild the GOP.

Nevertheless, this angry duck could buck the constitutional order, something he did with his failed coup on January 6, 2021, but not since. This gives the lie to the liberal panic, and lazy leftist hyperbole, that Trump is a fascist. He’s not; he’s an authoritarian nationalist fighting in our degenerating electoral system of competitive authoritarianism.

He could nevertheless morph into a fascist. But, given the widespread demoralization of even his most loyal base and the decomposition of the various far-right militias, he lacks the forces to break the constitutional order.

With Trump, however, nothing can be ruled out. His decision to replace Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller as his Chief of Staff is an ominous signal that, whatever wobbles in the dark of election night, he might be planning to re-galvanize his MAGA base behind an escalated war on immigrants and intensification of Trump’s Donroe Doctrine in Latin America and the Caribbean.

As the New York Times reports, Miller is the most authoritarian and racist figure in the regime. He advocated the “separation of migrant families at the border; the 2017 Muslim travel ban; directing the government to stifle critics of Mr. Trump; the ending of nearly all U.S. refugee programs; the widespread pressure campaign against U.S.universities; extrajudicial boat strikes that have killed hundreds; and purges of officials deemed insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump.”

But, the Times continue, “Miller’s most wide-reaching influence can be seen in Mr. Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which Mr. Miller has overseen. Mr. Miller helped set in motion militarized operations on the streets of American cities, pitting masked, heavily armed immigration agents against residents of cities like Minneapolis and Chicago.”

Miller is also one of the fiercest advocates of U.S dominance in the Western Hemisphere. When Trump was threatening the annexation of Greenland, he infamously told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

With this racist thug at the helm, Trump could morph from an angry duck into a tyrannical fowl. Whether he can carry out Miller’s sociopathic America First program in his dramatically weakened position remains to be seen. The resistance cannot wait to find out. We must stand ready to organize mass protests and mass direct action to stop him in his tracks.

The global tsunami

Regardless of what Trump does, his defeat will have enormous international repercussions. It is the latest setback the right has suffered from the defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić and Brazil’s Flávio Bolsonaro.

This string of losses fits the pattern of mass popular opposition to any party in power. This has created sharp whiplashes as voters alternately toss out the capitalist establishment, reformists, and the far right.

None have been able to address global capitalism’s multiple crises that have wrecked the lives of the vast majority. So, people have swung from various false and failing alternatives, desperately seeking a solution that’s not on offer.

Nonetheless, Trump’s defeat should inspire everyone around the world to rise up against the authoritarian nationalist right. It will boost the confidence of people to organize and defeat the AFD in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, Narendra Modi in India, and Vladimir Putin in Russia, to name just a few.

The wipeout of the Republicans will also further weaken the hand of U.S. imperialism against its rivals. Until 2028, there will be no new helmsperson on the empire’s tiller. This will have contradictory effects.

On the positive side, it may impede Trump from carrying out the worst of imperialist plots. Despite his and Miller’s demonic fantasies, the administration will face more constraints on further gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, including against Cuba.

It is likely that Trump will also be forced to cut some kind of deal to end the Iran War, open up the Strait of Hormuz, restore shipments of fossil fuels and petrochemicals, and relieve those economies that the war has wrecked. Such a deal will be a setback for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and his decades-long ambitions to escalate the ongoing genocide in Palestine into yet more regional war.

The zionists are thus panicking. As one Israeli journalist close to Netanyahu wailed, “What happened in America last night is a catastrophe. Take AIPAC’s worst nightmares, double them, and you still don’t get close.”

Furthermore, Trump’s defeat should help undermine the transactional pact of Ukrainian blood for Russian oil that his administration has struck with Putin. Ukraine will more readily be able to secure weapons from Washington, D.C. to defend itself from Russian imperialism and its state terrorism against civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Lastly, Trump’s plan for a summit with Xi Jinping and Putin at the upcoming APEC summit, where the three powers would divide up today’s world into imperial spheres of influence like Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin did at Yalta after World War Two, is likely off the table. Xi and Putin will now regard the administration as a weak, caretaker regime and start planning for how to deal with the Democrats in 2029.

On the negative side, the U.S. ruling class will be determined to restore its imperial position in the wake of a second Trump administration that has further exacerbated its relative decline against its rivals in global capitalism. They will turn to the Democrats to carry out that project, especially against China, their main economic and geopolitical rival.

Without struggle there is no progress

Amidst all these contradictions, the most positive impact of Trump’s defeat is the mass popular sense of victory against a regime that had inflicted class war and vicious scapegoating on the majority of the country’s population. Our collective expectation of change has been raised.

But, and this is no surprise to most people, the Democratic Party is not a vehicle for the working class and the oppressed either to stop Trump or to advance our demands for reform. Therefore, the resistance must remain vigilant against Trump’s authoritarian threat and stand ready to stage mass, disruptive protests and strikes, including a general strike planned for May Day 2028, to protect our democratic rights and communities.

At the same time, we must organize and force the Democrats to enact immediate reforms. We should demand that they reverse the looming Medicaid cuts, restore funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and reinstate the 760,000 people kicked off Obamacare.

To win more thoroughgoing reforms, we will need to build independent mass class and social struggle from below. Without that, the Democrats will block substantial demands from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal, the abolition of ICE, and, yes, the defunding of the police.

Amidst this moment of raised expectation, the Left, social movements, and unions have an opportunity and responsibility to fight for such demands over opposition from the Democrats. Snide dismissals notwithstanding, Howard Zinn was right: “What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but ‘who is sitting in’—and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change.”

Two years of resistance have brought Trump to his knees. The worst mistake we could make is to sit back and wait for the Democrats to deliver now or in two years. That will only provide the decimated far right an opening to regroup, rebuild, and exploit disappointment in the Democrats to return to power in the future.

We have to break our epoch’s international pattern of whiplashing back and forth between the parties of the capitalist establishment and the far right. To do that, we need to build an organized and confident Left, with a growing and stronger revolutionary socialist wing, at the heart of a reenergized resistance. We should take lessons and confidence from what our siblings are doing in the wave of uprisings from France to India, Kenya, Albania, and beyond.

We have to adopt a new strategy of building independent class and social struggles, fighting for our demands rather than accepting the establishment’s inadequate reforms, and rebuilding the democratic structures of unions and movements. In that process, we can cohere a new militant minority and build a party of our own, a workers’party, that can challenge the Democrats and Republicans in a contest for state power.

With the Trump era appearing to come to an end, we can see the flickering light of a new day on the horizon. But to usher it into being, we cannot rest in the afterglow of the contradictory results of this midterm election nor wait with folded arms for the 2028 presidential election. Keep your marching shoes on, grab a picket sign, and commit to the long struggle for a society that puts people and planet first. A new world is possible, but we have to fight for it.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Antonioaesparza, RRC1701, Office of Senator Jon Ossoff, Sikis2021, Stimpus1, Leoniceno, ArenLeBrun, Conlan Houston, The Trump White House; modified by Tempest.