JD..Habibi!
Voters delivered a heavy rebuke of president Donald Trump in the 2026 midterms, reversing his 2024 gains with Latinos and youth, delivering control of both houses of congress to the democrats, and facilitating democratic victories in regions that used to be decidedly red. Trump tried to ensure victory for his republican party by telling voters to imagine he is on the ballot, it turned out that was precisely the worst thing he could have said. Over the course of the first half of his second term his approval rating has hit record lows with voters largely blaming his policies for the rise in the cost of living and the repressive ICE presence in communities across the country (and indeed the war in Iran responsible for the shuttering of the strait of Hormuz leading to world market shocks and ICE surges ripping communities apart were both Trump initiatives).
As such the massive blue wave was less a vote of confidence for the democrats and more a vote against Trump putting the democrats in a decent position to take back the white house when Trump is forced to permanently give it up in 2028. Trump's failures have in fact thrown the future of the MAGA movement seriously into question for likely the first time. With such a shattering defeat, such animosity from the American electorate, and many republicans nationwide making the strategic decision to distance themselves from the president, its quite possible that if right-wing populism continues in the United States it will have to do so post-MAGA. This however, is far from guaranteeing perpetual democratic victory.
Voters may not disapprove of democrats as much as they disapprove of Trump, but they are generally unfavorable to either party given how little either has been able to do to halt the many worldwide crises making their lives harder, much less actually implement policies that make their lives easier. Further the democrats are divided over the party's identity between centrists and progressives, i.e. between those who will be more friendly to Israel and the rich and those who seek prioritize the protection of minority populations and members of the working class. Two senate races that ended in hopeful results for progressives were the elections of Texas democrat James Talarico and Michigan democrat Abdul El-Sayed.
Talarico is the first democrat senate elect for Texas in decades and El-Sayed the first ever Muslim US senator. Both senate elects took a similar approach to their campaigns emphasizing a progressive liberal democratic approach to faith whether Christianity in Talarico's case, or Islam in El-Sayed's. Something important to remember is that the 'progressive/centrist' democratic divide is not a philosophical one. The democratic party in general represents a technocratic approach to liberal democratic politics which has been dominant in the United States since FDR. For democrats in particular the philosophical underpinning of this approach to politics is a kind of centrist liberalism where a homogenous set of rights and obligations is to be guaranteed by the existence of a constitutionally regulated democratic state power.
The difference between progressives and centrists is then merely a policy difference. The use of social scientific policy mechanisms by liberal democratic states since the WWII has made most political differences into differences of policy; what specific pieces of legislation to enact as opposed to others. This technocratic vision of democracy is justified by the idea that when the public elects its leaders it does not elect them to realize a grand ideological program, but elects them to make informed policy decisions on their behalf. You might follow some social scientists and refer to this as the 'McDonaldization' of politics given that it turns political involvement into choices on a policy menu which particular campaigns and think tanks pay money to advertise to you. The progressive democrats are trying to sell the 'progressive' menu items (minority rights, non-interventionist foreign policy, protections for workers and consumers, and a bigger social safety net) while centrists are selling the 'centrist' items (support for Israel, concessions to conservatives on minority rights, and more market mechanisms as opposed to state intervention).
So while Talarico and El-Sayed will be backing progressive menu items, the pull that they have over their voters has actually issued from the way they have combined religious affiliation with the liberal democratic political philosophy they share with the rest of the party. In Texas, Talarico has attempted to use the religious values of the conservative state to his advantage. Instead of fighting fundamentalist and Christian dominionist sentiment by generalized appeals to secularism, Talarico has fashioned a liberal democratic version of Christianity utilizing his academic knowledge of bible and theology. He has appealed to the meek and mild aspect of Jesus' message in the New Testament that emphasizes kindness to outsiders and communal support for the less fortunate in order to sell Texans on support for minorities and prioritization of middle/working class Americans' needs over the preferences of the rich, policy bundles they would have otherwise seen as against their religious values.
By putting inclusion and civil rights for Muslim Americans in a secular democracy along with criticism of Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians at the forefront of his campaign El-Sayed has tapped into the Muslim American electorate that is tired of chafing under the boot of post-911 Islamophobia in which fear of Muslims as antithetical to the values of western civilization is weaponized for the agenda of the security state and the far-right. Both candidates have thus employed religion as a central theme in the justification of a more inclusive liberal democratic political community arguing that accommodating religious rights and values requires an inclusive framework of civil rights that facilitates a cultural melting pot as well as an activist state which does not hesitate to represent the needs of average people when the designs of the rich step out of their political lane. However, despite the success this strategy has had for both candidates, that success is indeed a symptom of the inherent limitations of its philosophical backing.
The United States is already a liberal democracy, liberal democracy is not a goal of either Talarico, or El-Sayed, rather they are trying to facilitate the swinging of the liberal democratic cultural and policy pendulum to the left. They are looking to counterbalance those elements in liberal democracy that represent social interests opposed to those of minorities and middle to lower income Americans. The reason they have to do this, however, is because of the very structure of the liberal democratic state. The point of the liberal democratic state is to carefully balance opposed social interests against each other so that each can get more of what it wants over time; conservatives vs liberals, workers against capitalists, poor against the rich, dominant groups against minority groups, all under the fundamental assumption that each member of the set of opposed interests has a legitimate claim to representation within the democratic polity.
In a liberal democracy human beings do not freely associate without class divisions and cultural/political coercion. Rather class, culture, and politics divides human beings into separate interest groups whose rights and obligations are balanced against each other by the coercive machinery of the state. In a liberal democracy humanity is not at one with itself in self-determination, it is pitted against itself via the coercive exercise of hierarchical and bureaucratic political power. The effectiveness of the liberal state to accomplish this balancing act is rapidly receding according to the structural crisis of the capitalist world-system. Climate change, social struggles between minorities and majorities, a decline in the actual production of goods and services and an increase in financial speculation, are all prying apart the liberal democratic state at the seems. To avoid barbarism humanity will be forced to go beyond liberal democracy to achieve a true human community.
Sources
https://theconversation.com/the-democrats-blue-tsunami-is-a-strong-repudiation-of-donald-trump-now-they-will-look-to-replicate-it-in-2028-295856
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c893z55pxrewo
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6n8dnn09jg7o
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/02/james-talarico-texas-senate-midterm-elections
Politics, Tansey and Jackson
https://postcomprehension.medium.com/mcpolitics-moderate-technocracy-with-fries-8814866e3eb1
Sociology, Plummer
Structural Crisis, or Why Capitalists may no Longer find Capitalism Rewarding, Wallerstein
Marx's Ethical Vision, Wills
