> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebelnews.ie/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # US midterms: Trump trounced, a new radicalism, openings for socialists - URL: https://www.rebelnews.ie/us-midterms-trump-trounced-a-new-radicalism-openings-for-socialists/ - Published: 2026-11-11T06:32:44.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-11T06:32:44.000Z - Author: Editor The US midterms and their rejection of Trump mark a political watershed. The Democrat victory wave was much bigger than expected. They won Senate seats in Republican strongholds such as Texas, Kansas, South Carolina and North Carolina, took Maine, Iowa and Ohio, and won major victories in Michigan. The Democrat share of the popular vote for the House was the largest of any election since 1976. The elections showed that Trumpism and the power of the big tech oligarchs can be defeated. Elon Musk spent something like $445 million to keep the Republicans in control of Congress – and he lost. The results echo a mood elsewhere in the world. In Brazil, Bolsonaro's far right was defeated in the recent elections. In October, the 'student list' swept aside the authoritarian Vučić's rule in Serbia. Mounting protests and strikes in France, Spain, Germany and Italy are challenging years of neoliberal rule and genocidal complicity. Here in Ireland, the US election results also expose our government's crass refusal to stand up to Trump, vindicating the many who demonstrated against Trump in September. ## Radical wave The Democrats' Blue Wave took hold amid rising fuel costs, the Iran war, tariffs, aggressive immigration enforcement and Trump government corruption. But it was on-the-ground organising that delivered the high voter turnout: local campaigns against data centres, and mass mobilisations in Minneapolis and elsewhere earlier this year against the hated ICE regime. Young and Black voters voted Democrat in large numbers. Texas elected Gina Hinojosa, the first Latina governor, and Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed will be the first Muslim US senator. Wisconsin Democrat David Crowley will be the state's first Black governor and Chris Pappas of New Hampshire the first openly gay man in the US Senate. Bentley Hudgins will be Georgia's first nonbinary and first Japanese American lawmaker in Atlanta. Trump's racist, misogynist, repressive agenda was decisively shot down. But the vote was not only against Trump; it was also against the old Clinton/Biden/Harris leadership of the Democratic Party. In the 2024 election, the Democratic Party's mainstream caution, its corporate arrogance and Biden's support for Israel's genocide in Gaza were rejected. In 2026, the people took this further to the left and voted in the very people that the mainstream Democratic National Committee criticised. Abdul El-Sayed was one example. He stood up against Democratic leadership on Palestine and called for an end to US aid to Israel. He was witheringly attacked for it by them, and yet still won the seat. Palestine and US complicity in the genocide, despite the thousands of dollars thrown at pro-Zionist candidates by AIPAC and others, was a key radicalising thread in the midterms. Post election, there will be a battle within the Democrats between right and left, and the extent of the Democratic victory may well embolden the party leadership to stamp out dissent. ## DSA At the centre of this battle will be the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA and DSA-supported candidates have now won a handful of state-level races, including key mayoral races like in New York and Los Angeles. They have gained at least five new House Representatives. DSA 'squad' members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and BDS campaigner Rashida Tlaib have been re-elected in New York and Michigan. The DSA claims now to have more than 130,000 members, with 130 DSA chapters across all 50 states. This is no mean feat. They have proved that standing on a radical platform – backing Medicare for All, opposing the tech oligarchy, US imperialism and the genocide – can win. They have the largest number of socialists in Congress in US history. The DSA have made socialism popular: almost half of young Americans, according to a recent Fox News poll, now hold a favourable view of socialism. Some sections of the DSA are only too aware that winning office is not the same as winning power. They rightly argue that more trade union organising and building working class organisations is needed to do this. ## Strategy However, strategy involves more than organising from below, important though that is. It is also about from which political base you do this. Being with the Democrats is a dampener to mobilising on the ground. The Democrats are the graveyard of social movements, as socialists have long recognised. Their links to corporate America confine them to mainstream politics – as the DNC's recent haranguing of the 'hard left' on the campaign trail demonstrated. The Democratic Party – originally the pro-slavery party – has long operated within the capitalist system as one of the country's two major ruling parties. In the midterms, they increasingly countered Republican taunts of socialism by openly declaring themselves proud capitalists and advocates of a market-based economy. This makes them a bit different to how European social democratic parties present themselves – or indeed popular nationalist parties like Fianna Fáil, in the past. The Democrats are openly a bosses' party, working within a two-party duopoly – a situation which we are somewhat familiar with in Ireland. We, in Rebel, have argued that the only way to strengthen socialism in Ireland is for People Before Profit to reject any participation in government with either right-wing party, never mind entering their ranks. But even in attempts of socialists to work within the more worker-based British Labour Party, as history has repeatedly shown, right-wing mainstream social democracy inevitably wins out. More worryingly for our times, the fallout from centre-left governments who unashamedly implement right-wing policies and austerity is a feeling of betrayal, which opens the way to the far right. The pressure now for the DSA to accommodate to the mainstream Democrats will be strong. Their candidates, absorbed indistinguishably into a Blue Wave, will have little ability to shift the Party to the left once in office. We believe that these encouraging election results call for a clear left political alternative – outside the Democrats – to be forged. Some on the American revolutionary left are trying to do this. This is a vital and urgent task: to unite socialists who have no truck with the Democrats and one which, alongside bottom-up organising, can really take this historical radical moment forward.