On November 3, American voters gave the Democratic Party control of the House and the Senate, as well as governorships and state legislatures that it hadn’t held in decades. From Spain, it’s tempting to read this as a verdict on Donald Trump and everything he represents: the moment the United States regained its sanity. It is an understandable reading, but probably wrong, and hides what is most likely to happen next.
A vote on the economy, not on values
Let’s start with what voters actually said. In CBS News’ exit poll, the economy was clearly the main concern, and those who said their personal economic situation had worsened greatly outnumbered those who said it had improved. Trump’s approval hovered around 38%, a historically low figure for a president in a midterm election. These elections, held at mid-term, almost always punish the party that occupies the White House, and this time the punishment was simply greater than usual.
But voting against the cost of living does not equate to a conversion. What happened was a rejection of Trump, especially his handling of the economy, more than a mandate for Democrats or an endorsement of his agenda. The concern for democracy did weigh in, as a second priority for voters, but especially among those who were already voting Democrat. According to public opinion data, what most likely moved voters in these elections was the economy. The backlash also showed up in who turned out to vote. A Brookings Institution analysis concluded that many disaffected Republicans did not switch sides, they stayed home. According to an AP voters survey, 49% of those who voted this year had supported Kamala Harris in 2024 and only 44% for Trump, a much more Democratic electorate than the one that returned him to the White House.
“What happened was a rejection of Trump, especially his handling of the economy, more than a mandate for Democrats or an endorsement of his agenda”
“The less welcome currents that Trump has managed to channel (intolerance, racism, populism, impatience with checks and balances, isolationism) did not disappear the night of the election. They remain rooted in the attitudes of a significant, though not majority, portion of American society, ready for the next politician who decides to mobilize them.
A president with plenty of power
Nor is it wise to overestimate what a Democratic-controlled Congress can do. A U.S. president facing a hostile Congress is far more powerful than a Spanish prime minister facing a hostile Parliament. Trump can veto any law passed by Congress, and overriding a veto requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers, something Democrats are far from having. He can also govern via executive orders and, as commander-in-chief, retains broad control over military action. Congress and the Supreme Court can reverse these decisions, but only afterward and through slow processes: hearings, lawsuits, appeals. In the meantime, the damage would already be done.
“A U.S. president facing a hostile Congress is far more powerful than a Spanish prime minister facing a hostile Parliament”
The usual expectation is that a president who has lost the Congress, in his final two years and with no constitutional possibility of seeking a third term, becomes a “lame duck”: weakened, prudent, focused on his legacy. I would not count on that. Trump has repeatedly shown he is vindictive and will lash out at everyone when his ego is wounded. After losing the 2020 election, he refused to accept the result and pressured state authorities to overturn it. There are few reasons to think he will handle this setback with more grace. One can expect erratic behavior aimed at harming Democrats and, potentially, the political system itself: new mass pardons for political allies and the continuation of Department of Justice investigations against political adversaries. The most likely scenario is two years of paralysis and open conflict among the White House, Congress, and the courts, in which much of the system’s energy will be spent not on governing, but on containing the damage.
Where real change will come from: the states
Yet Washington paralysis is not the whole story. If real political change arrives in the next two years, it is most likely to come from the states. On November 3, Democrats won the majority of governorships for the first time since 2010, wrested a dozen state legislative chambers from Republicans, and gained full control (the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature) in states like Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In Arizona they will control the state legislature for the first time in about sixty years, and in Texas they won the governorship and took the lower chamber of the state legislature for the first time in more than two decades.
“If real political change arrives in the next two years, it is most likely to come from the states”
“States have considerable power to decide policies across a range of areas, such as education, protection of rights and liberties or criminal law, among others. They have long functioned as laboratories of public policy, and change has risen gradually from them over generations. The novelty is scale. With so many states changing hands at once, one can expect in the next two years bold legislation, some of it deliberately designed to clash with the federal government, on issues ranging from the enforcement of immigration laws to public health or how elections are run. While Trump may try to slow these changes, his tools to do so are limited. Without control of Congress, it will be his administration and bureaucracy against the states, with the final say in the hands of the Supreme Court, which is probably much more favorable to the rights of states than many think.
Another kind of candidate
“The fourth consequence is the hardest to forecast and perhaps the most interesting: what these elections imply for how parties pick their candidates. Many of the Democrats who won have profiles very different from the party’s typical mold in recent decades. Several are pastors or seminarians who spoke openly about their faith in conservative, religious settings. James Talarico, a seminarian, became the first Democrat to win a statewide election in Texas since 1994. Adam Hamilton, a Methodist pastor leading a mega-church, won a Senate seat in Kansas, a state that had not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Sarah Trone Garriott, a Lutheran pastor, wrested a House seat in Iowa from the Republicans. In total, at least seven newly elected Democrats in Congress will be ordained clergy, and several more have studied in seminaries or theology schools.
The elections also yielded a remarkable series of “firsts,” including the first openly gay man in the Senate and the first Black woman elected governor in the country’s history. The striking thing is how closely many of these candidates resembled the voters they needed to win over, something political scientists call descriptive representation. Abdul El-Sayed, who will be the first Muslim senator in the United States, won in Michigan, home to one of the country’s largest Arab and Muslim communities. Deb Haaland became the first Indigenous woman elected governor in the country, in New Mexico, where roughly one in ten residents is Native American.
It wasn’t something designed by the party. In the United States, candidates are chosen by voters in primaries, not by party elites through closed lists as in Spain, and many of these candidates won very competitive primaries. But the result may carry a lesson for both parties: rather than candidates who strictly follow the national party line, voters could reward those who fit the particular character of their district or state.
“Voters could reward those who fit the particular character of their district or state”
In a sense, it would be a return to the origins. Since Americans vote for individual candidates in single-member districts, Congress members, especially in the House, were for a long time characterized by their independence. Voting against one’s own party, something almost unthinkable with Spain’s party discipline, was rarely punished and was often praised as a vote of conscience or fidelity to the voters’ will. That independence has eroded in recent decades for two main reasons. The first is polarization: as voters increasingly see the other party as an enemy, they reward loyalty to the team over loyalty to the district, so a legislator who breaks party discipline gains little at home and risks a lot. The second is money: campaigns have become so expensive that candidates depend more and more on their party and on like-minded donors, who in return expect them to vote with the party.
Here is where primaries work in both directions. The same mechanism that opened the door to these new candidates is also what keeps incumbent lawmakers in check, since whoever breaks the discipline risks being challenged in the next primaries by a rival backed by the most committed and partisan voters in their own party. Which of these two effects dominates depends largely on who shows up to vote in the primaries, which tend to attract only a small and highly mobilized slice of the electorate. Much will also depend on the parties themselves. A party that sees itself as a “big tent,” capable of embracing representatives who sometimes diverge from the official line, has every reason to back this kind of candidate: a legislator who votes with you part of the time is better than an opponent who votes against you all the time. These elections show that district-made candidates can win, but they do not guarantee that the parties will learn the lesson.
A wake-up call?
“This leads me to a final reflection, perhaps too optimistic. In recent decades, polarization in the United States has grown spectacularly. Data from the Comparative National Elections Project place the country among the most polarized democracies in the world. More and more Americans view voters of the other party not as fellow citizens with differing views, but as enemies. That hostility is what has made party loyalty weigh more than loyalty to the district itself, and it is the breeding ground in which Trump’s way of doing politics took root. Yet these elections show signs of a crack. In several deeply Republican states, where Democrats could not have won by mobilization alone, approximately one in ten Trump voters backed the Democratic candidate, according to CNN’s voters poll. Nationwide, the figure was around 7%. In New Hampshire, many voters split their tickets: re-electing a Republican governor and sending a Democrat to the Senate. It isn’t the end of polarization, but it shows that the right candidate can still bridge it.”
“It’s not the end of polarization, but it shows that the right candidate can still bridge it”
“This shake-up could serve as a wake-up call for parties, lawmakers, and candidates: polarized division does not have to be the engine of politics, and representing the real people of a place can still win elections. One might even dare to dream that more citizens reach the same conclusion. Nor is it a lesson only for the United States. Also in Spain hostility between partisan blocs has grown strongly in recent years, and here too the same question arises: do we reward representatives who speak to the people in front of them or those who merely promise to defeat the other side?
