US midterms 2026: Did voters embrace Democrats or reject Trump? | This Is America

This is America, and this is a country that's just delivered a stunning rebuke to President Trump by putting Democrats in control of Congress. For Republicans, it was a disaster, losing strongholds like Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina. But were voters putting their trust in Democrats to make things better, or is it more a rejection of the Republican Party leadership? Let's go to our DC studio and Alex Marquardt. Thank you, Mike. Welcome to a special edition of This is America. I'm Alex Marquardt in Washington. When Americans went to the polls on Tuesday, they had plenty of issues that were weighing on their minds. The cost of living, the war in Iran, heavy-handed immigration enforcement, and maps that were redrawn to favor politicians rather than the people they represent. So was the message sent by voters on Tuesday an endorsement of Democrats' policies, or was it more of a rejection of Donald Trump's actions over the last two years? of this second term. Here's what some voters across the country told us. How much is this about being a check on Trump for you? A massive check on the power and just the things that I've seen transpire without any accountability. So to me, this is my way of showing up. And saying, what I am seeing going on in the day-to-day here in America is not okay. And I want change. I went blue all the way. I voted for Democrats and against Trump. Was your vote for Troy Jackson or more so a protest vote against President Trump and his policies? I would say a little bit of both. You know, as a person that grew up in a very political family, I know a lot about politics and things of that nature, and he wasn't my first option. Our other option wasn't great either, but also our president is a terrible option. So again, I guess a little bit of both, if you could say that. Well, nationally, you know, I'm a Trump guy, but to be perfectly honest, I'm not very happy with the tariffs and all that other stuff. Now, three days later, the counting of votes from the midterm elections is still underway in some states, but in others, the process of formally certifying their votes has already begun. State election officials will prepare certificates to be sent to the House and the Senate to allow for the creation of members' roles, while the debate about the lessons learned will continue. Our Mike Hanna reports now from Washington. A myriad of factors came together to make these midterm elections the perfect blue storm. And all parties are now beginning to look at what these factors were. Ready to vote? Yeah. In this vote, foreign affairs loomed large, in particular the war with Iran. No more so than in Virginia's 2nd District, which is home to the world's largest naval base and in which a significant proportion of voters are either active service members or veterans. The Democrat candidate took the seat by 9 percentage points. This is a 12% flip since losing to the same Republican by 3% in the midterms two years ago. One poll indicates that more than 70% of voters nationwide said the war played a role in their decision. The war had a massive impact on the economy in terms of increasing energy prices. This at a time when a surge in the cost of living was already well underway. Inflation has risen to around 3.7%, nearly double the 2% goal of the Federal Reserve. Predictions are that next month the basic interest rate will rise to 4% or above, indicating that things are going to get worse before getting better. Affordability was the number one factor in the vote. With the Supreme Court go-ahead, Republicans altered the boundaries of voting districts in a number of areas in a bid to exclude minorities expected to vote for the opposition. It had the opposite effect in states like Georgia and Texas, where affected groups voted in unprecedented numbers in a display of deep anger at the Republican action. Both states went from red to blue. Results showed not just a repudiation of the Republican Party, but also of its leader. President Trump insisted voters regard him as being on the poll, and it's clear they listened. I mean, if I were on the ballot, we would have won. Maine has always been a largely blue state where a Republican served as governor for five terms. The removal of Susan Collins after three decades confirmed the vote was not just a swing towards Democrats, but one away from President Trump and the party he leads. The new Congress convenes on January the 3rd, with perhaps new lessons learned about what drives the vote. Mike Hanna, Al Jazeera, Washington. So let's dig into what some of these lessons learned were with our guests. We have Christian Ramos, he is a Democratic strategist, and Tim Constantine, who is a Republican strategist. And it's clear, guys, thank you, first of all, for joining me, it's clear that the lessons will continue to be learned, that, you know, we're still kind of reacting and, you know, the smart folks are diving into the data to parse what the voters did and what they are telling us. Obviously, some big themes are quite clear. Tim, I want to go to you first. When it comes to the Republican candidates, what do you think they misjudged when they ran their races? Well, I think there are certain candidates like Paxson and Texas that were just bad candidates. You can't do anything about that. If you've got a bad candidate, you run the risk of losing. But it goes so much deeper than that. You had people, your report just talked in terms of Susan Collins, who has spent 30 years in the U.S. Senate. And so that wasn't a vote in favor of Troy Jackson over Susan Collins, who was the appropriations chair. That was clearly against... Trump against the Republican movement right now. But I think Trump, it was a big, big drag. That's not unusual in midterm elections. You know, Trump lost 40 seats in 2018. Obama lost the most ever in 2010, 63 seats I think he lost in 2010. Clinton lost 54 seats. So it happens, but there's always, you know, the why, the what, and the question here is Trump and the war... The economic impacts of the war are the reason, even Trump and Vance have acknowledged the war is the reason, but how much of a drag does Trump have over these next two years? Or can he somehow rehabilitate? I don't know. But in terms of what the Republican candidates could have done, I'm thinking about... Ashley Hinson, for example, in Iowa, Mike Rogers to some extent in Michigan, they did try to create a bit of daylight with the president, which I know is tough, but do you think Republican candidates should have been a little bit more distant from the president? No, I think at this point, and my point I didn't make perhaps very well, but with Susan Collins, and Susan Collins is literally the most bipartisan Republican in the United States Thank you. I think this was a wave movement, if you had red beside your name, you were in trouble, you had an uphill battle. We saw, Florida is a great example, Ashley Moody was the sitting senator. The Democrats didn't really put up a real candidate, it was a woman named Angie Nixon, a Democratic socialist who didn't know that Cuba, which is 90 miles away from Florida, was a communist country. She wasn't a credible candidate, but she still got 48 and a half points, 48 and a half percentage points. So that was just people angry at Trump and with the red side of the ballot. I want you to respond to that, Christian, but also want to ask, what are you seeing now that is the other side of the coin, that it's not just about voting against Trump, but that voters were responding to what the Democratic candidates were saying? Let's just start by saying this is the worst political shellacking since World War II, right? And I think I hear what my colleague here is saying, that, you know, this is Trump, this is the economy and everything else. This is also about the Republican Party. This is about a Republican Party that was once for the free market, that is suddenly pro-tariff. This is for a Republican Party that was supposedly non-interventionist in wars, that is starting wars all over the place. This is about a Republican Party that... Has allowed this president to raise prices on. All Americans. That has allowed diesel gas to be $6. So yes, Donald Trump is a terrible president, but the Republican Party has completely abdicated their role as a co-equal branch of the government. And that has been a huge disaster. But you're making the case again that Democrats and independents and even some Republicans were voting against Republicans. To what extent were they voting for the Democrats? They were voting for Democrats for three reasons, right? They want affordability, they want to bring down costs, they want us to go back in with the Affordable Care Act and they want us to restore those subsidies, they want us to fix Medicare and Medicaid. People don't realize because of the big ugly bill in January, a lot of people are going to be kicked off their health insurance, right? That's again, all the Republican Party. They want accountability. The corruption that we've seen from this administration, the double dealing with the Trump family and the amount of money they've made is outrageous when people are struggling to make their ends meet at home. And then I think the last thing that we're looking at is some sort of energy independence, right? The data centers, the AI stuff. The Republican Party is way over their skis on this stuff. And at the end of the day, you cannot afford to pay your groceries and heat your home this winter because of what Donald Trump and the Republican Party have done to our clean energy apparatus in this country. We need solutions here. We need... to find a way forward. I want to put up a tweet, a post, sorry, on X, from the vice president, J.D. Vance, who has been pretty clear-eyed about why this happened on a number of different levels. So he wrote, undoubtedly, there were places that we could have done better on turnout, but the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump-Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026. Tim, he also very clearly said the day after the election that the reason Republicans lost was because of the war in Iran. So he's being very blunt about this. Even Trump, to some extent, has said, OK, maybe it was the gas prices. How well do you think the White House is internalizing these results? Let me go back just for a minute, and I will answer that. Let me go back. When I hear it's the worst shellacking since World War II, I can tell I can tell you there are six different elections that were far more extreme than this. The worst shellacking since World War II was actually Barack Obama, who lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives and I think seven U.S. Senate seats. Four years later, he lost nine Senate seats. So Barack Obama lost more than any. Bill Clinton lost 54 seats in 1994. If you go back to World War II, you had. You had Truman lose seats. You had Eisenhower who was a Republican. But suffice to say, it was a historic night. I mean, there are comparable nights, but it was historic at that for Republicans. My point is that it is not even close to a worst shellacking. It's a big blue wave. I'm not doubting that. But when we say this is the biggest ever, there are six since World War II that are far larger than this one. Fair enough. This is not unusual. But to your point, when I think an important part, and we see this, you know, when The Democrats lost at different times. The media will proclaim, you know, is the party over? Is the party lost? But you regroup, you gather, you figure out. And I think the most important thing for a political party or for you and me in real life is if you can identify the problem, you can fix it. And within 24 hours, you heard both. The vice president and the president say it was the war. It was Iran. You also heard the president say, if I had been on the ballot, then, you know, Republicans would have won. So to me, that's less of an understanding. You did. You did hear him say that. And I'm not going to argue in favor of that argument. But I will tell you the difference is I was I've spent much of this year in the Middle East. And in March, when the war was first going on, everyone in the region was convinced that, oh, Americans must. feel passionate about this. They must be opposed to this. And I said, if you live in Kansas or you live in Utah or one of these small states, you do not wake up in the morning thinking about the war in the Middle East. This is in March. You know, you wake up and your kid's got to go to school and you're worried about work and that's the least of your worries. But fast forward a few months when that was impacting every single time you filled up at the gas pump. And your grocery bill every week, things that literally every American felt. Obviously, Americans are going to feel that. So when we talk about affordability, the Democrats did a great job staying on message. The question is whether or not they can deliver. Because the last time the Democrats were in charge of Congress and the White House, we had 9.1 percent inflation in 2022. And that's why they lost the election that year, although I think it was only nine seats. The affordability issue is one that clicks with Americans, but it's not one that Democrats have in recent history proven that they can tackle. Well, let's talk about how Democrats are interpreting this mandate, because they will tell you it's a mandate because of these now very large majorities in the House and the Senate. We are definitely going to see Democrats launch a blitz of investigations, possibly even impeachment proceedings into Donald Trump, almost certainly into Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense. Those things do little, Christian, to bring the prices down, to Tim's point. How are Democrats, do you think, interpreting the mandate that they've gotten? It's affordability, accountability, and restoring American values. And what that means in practice here, again, you've seen in the last two years, where this president has building ballrooms, he's doing the... The Reflecting Pool, he's doing all of these things. They didn't pass any legislation in Congress. They passed one piece of bill that took away health care, that took away SNAP benefits, that took away all these things from the American people that are creating more costs. They got rid of a lot of the energy subsidies that would have created more clean energy solutions. This Congress, Democrats, absolutely are going to come back and they're going to have a conversation about how do we restore the Affordable Care Act subsidies to make sure that people can have health care? How are we going to close? The loophole on Pell Grants to make college more affordable, how are we going to... Fix the Medicare stuff that is all about to go away in January, and then they're going to work on creating more clean energy solutions. They're going to think about that. They're going to think about how that works for this country, because gas, and diesel gas in particular, is $6. It's killing. So it's an all-of-the-above strategy, right? We need clean energy solutions. We need things that will make America's lives better. Meanwhile, Republicans are going to have to decide, are we going to vote for this stuff? Or are they going to vote against it? And this president, he says, oh, I've got the power of the veto. Great, you're going to veto? Raising subsidies for people to have health care, you're going to veto raising subsidies to allow people to heat their homes in the summer, in the winter, and cool their houses in the summer? Yeah. I don't think so. Well, in a sense there, it's win-win for Democrats, because either they get the legislation through or they're able to paint Republicans as obstructionists going into 2028. I want to play a little bit more from voters themselves, this time in Maine and Arizona, who explained what motivated them in their midterm votes. Take a listen. I want to, you know, see things be more equitable across the board and hope for more, you know, kind of government assistance and try to see. Like, you know, prices evened out. I have a baby at home, and he talks about child care and things of that nature. Those are things I'm really concerned about that the Republicans haven't really addressed, and so that's what I'm looking for them to deliver on. I mean, I'm definitely concerned about continued support for Israel. Oh, come on. About inflation domestically, about criminalization of immigrant communities. Unhappy, especially with the recent presidency, you know, things haven't been looking great for my community, the immigrant community, as well as the young community within Arizona, within the United States. There's a lot of unemployment right now, high rates of that. Also, things have just been more expensive in this economy. We're also going to a war without, you know, reason. On the campaign trail, Tim, both from candidates and some voters, and I was out there myself, I heard, you know, the culture war issues as well. I remember a voter in Texas and then Michael Watley in North Carolina talking about trans athletes and boys and girls bathrooms and that kind of thing. Was that just not a factor in the end? Yeah, that was certainly an issue a couple of years ago. That was an effective issue a couple of years ago, but it's not the message they should have been using in 2026. Most Americans don't support boys in girls' locker rooms or trans athletes, but that's not an issue right now. The price of groceries is, the price of gasoline is. I would just take exception with a couple of the comments made here that the Republicans I mean, I think it's a good thing that the federal government took away the healthcare benefits What happened was Obamacare expanded during COVID, and what was passed under the Democrat Congress was a temporary expansion. Their words, not mine. A temporary expansion with a expiration date. And the big beautiful bill did not renew what the expansion that was supposed to expire. So when you go back and say, oh, they took that away, no, they just honored the expiration date that the Democrats had promised when they passed the bill in the first place. But when I hear the young lady there say, well, we would like more equity and we would like more government benefits, that's just the fundamental difference between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party, is the Republican Party would like to see more equal opportunity. But there's still some personal responsibility, and many of these Democrat programs have, you're going to be penalized if you are out working hard and you're successful, because we're going to try to even the playing field. We're going to try to distribute income. We're going to try to distribute money everywhere. The same to everyone. More government, more government, more government. That's not a message in the long term that is going to be be effective. The final thought is just When I hear the little catchphrase of accountability and whatever the three words were, then I The Democrats won the election because they stayed on message very well. The first of the three words was affordability, and they stayed on message for affordability, and that's what people are worried about. But if they hit January and hit the ground running with impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, they're going to lose support very quickly, not because people love Pete Hegseth, but because people are going to perceive that as, oh, it's Washington as usual. How does this help me? And they're not going to have an answer. If affordability is the real question, the Democrats have to offer a real answer. I mean, just to push back a little bit, we do have Thomas Massie, who's leaving the Congress, who is pushing for a vote as soon as next week when it comes to Pete Hegseth. And there are certainly some Republicans who might now feel more emboldened to finish him off. Thomas Massie certainly wouldn't be representative of the Republican Party at large, though. He has the label, but he is not representative of his party. I do want to jump in here very quickly. The last of those three things that I said was American values, restoring American values. And one of the big American values is we help people. Right now, the American people are suffering from high costs everywhere. We do need to help them. We do. Democrats need to help them, and they're going to help them by rolling back a lot of the damaging things. Tariffs, right? We're going to exert our authority there. The president cannot just unilaterally run these tariffs. Republicans used to support that. Republicans used to be very anti-tariffs. We're going to get rid of that. And then I think the last thing on the affordability piece here, we've got to end the war in Iran. One of the first things I think that this Congress is going to do, have a vote on the War Powers Act. Let Republicans say, okay, we're all right with diesel at $6. We're okay with all of the gas costing as much as it does. Fine. Great. If you support this war, vote on it. If you don't want people to have health care, vote on it. Wonderful. American values. We help people who need help in this country. Christian, Tim just brought up Angie Nixon, who was, at least in the Senate, she was the only DSA candidate, Democratic Socialist of America candidate. There were a couple more who won in the House. But a clear tactic by Republicans this time around was to paint all Democrats as socialists. We even heard the word communist come out of the president's mouth a number of times. How damaging was that? How successful was that effort? It wasn't damaging at all, because the American people aren't stupid. You want to know what socialism is? You want to know what corporate socialism is? Letting the richest man in the world... Come into our government and do whatever he wants because he spent a billion dollars to elect that president. Letting a single person come in and just do whatever they want the way that they did? American people hate that stuff. Allowing richest 1% of this country to try to run everything, that is a disaster. So yes, we could talk about socialism, but what this administration has done will go down in history as the worst crony capitalism, the worst of the worst, allowing Elon Musk to try to buy another election in Texas. And what did that get the Republican Party? They got destroyed. Statewide. Statewide. They didn't win a single race. So yes. Please, let's talk about socialism when this guy is allowing corporations and the richest 1% of this country to do whatever they want. Nobody likes that. I think the lesson to take from that is if you are in the richest 1% and you're going to try to influence, you should try to do it more discreetly like George Soros. Well, hold on. But George Soros, in this election cycle, in this election, Elon Musk has spent more money than George Soros ever spent in his entire life. Yeah. In one election cycle. So please. All this stuff is pretty public. And the top three or four, I don't have it in front of me, are. I'm not arguing about 2026, but I'm saying the idea that somehow rich guys trying to influence the outcome is a Republican issue is a ridiculous statement. It is absolutely, utterly ridiculous. It's never been done at this level that Donald Trump, literally, if you look at his inauguration, it was Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, all of them just hanging out with him. I think it was a horrible idea to start with. We've had a program where the districts are set based on the census count every ten years. So, you know, within the next two years, you set that. We've had a program where the districts are set based on the census count every ten years. So, you know, within the next two years, you set that. I think it was a horrible idea to start with. Two years you've said that. I think that serves the United States very well. When you start trying to politicize any process, whether that's trying to gerrymander districts when you're trying to do that, I don't care which party you are, that's a bad idea. When I hear the Democrats want to expand the Supreme Court, but of course they only want to do it if there's a Democrat president, it's a bad idea. Don't change a system that isn't broken. When you want to get rid of the filibuster, you know, Don't do it. I didn't want my Republican friends to do that. I don't want the Democrats to do that. That process has worked and kept things in check. So I think the entire — I'd be the first one to say the entire effort on both sides to redistrict to political advantage five years, six years into the process, with just four to go until we have another census, horrible idea. We have less than a minute left, Christian. How careful do Democrats have to be to not get... I don't think this is an issue of being cocky or not being cocky. I think Democrats understand exactly the deep hole that our country is in right now. Iran, affordability, they're focused on those things. And accountability, yes. I don't expect a ton of going after various people, but you do at a certain point have to have accountability for all of the massive corruption that's happening right now. It is affecting the American people. I think it's important for Democrats to understand that accountability is important. I don't think this is an issue of being cocky or not being cocky. I think Democrats understand exactly the deep hole that our And Democrats are going to hold some people responsible. And the challenge is probably not to make it appear vindictive, but it will certainly be justified in a number of cases. Christian Ramos, Democratic strategist, and our Republican strategist, Tim Constantine, thank you both very much. Appreciate it. And that's all from the team here in Washington. I want to hand it back to Mike Hanna and Al Jazeera's global headquarters in Doha. Well, that's it from this edition of This Is America. We'll have a brand new episode on Monday at 18.30 GMT. That's 2.30 p.m. Eastern Time. We'll see you then.