The US midterm elections delivered a comprehensive rejection of President Trump, shattering his billionaire-blue collar coalition through old-fashioned class politics, as voters responded to Democratic arguments against the country's inequality.
Just last year, columnists and corporate boardrooms declared that Trump's return meant the old rules of politics were roadkill, with one top banker telling the Financial Times: "I feel liberated. We can say 'retard' and 'pussy' without the fear of getting cancelled…it's a new dawn."
The core of Trumpism was forging a forever alliance between tech bosses and blue-collar America, yoking minimum-wage workers with the 1%, Latinos and black voters with those happy to dabble in light racism, and the Epstein-haters with the Epstein class. This was achieved by alchemising class antagonism into culture war.
Voters reject the coalition
Silicon Valley, Wall Street and east coast media owners saw Trumpism as a vibe shift to the right, but Tuesday night proved them wrong. Ultra-wealthy donors such as Elon Musk poured billions into Trump's proxies, yet the working- and middle-class base were not having it.
Election analysts observed that the struggle of ordinary Americans to afford the basics of life now "polls in a tier by itself", a response to record petrol prices, huge swings in food costs, and the battle to meet rent. The democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani turned affordability from a meme into a platform for winning elections, and now wields national influence as New York mayor.
Inequality at the centre
Mamdani reminded voters that when they can't afford the basics, it's not just because prices are unreasonably high, but because their pay is unfairly low, tying the cost of living to an argument about inequality.
Over decades, through Reagan and Clinton, Bush and Obama, both parties changed the tax code to reward ownership rather than earning, so the richest 400 households now pay lower rates of tax than the bottom 50% of Americans. As the economists Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster show in their new book, Grand Theft Capital: What Workers Should Know About the Affordability Crisis, the share of national income going to ordinary workers has slumped from 30% in the 1960s to 20% today.
Tech's empty promise
The "hottest country in the world" relies on AI for growth, with the Harvard economist Jason Furman estimating that spending on AI infrastructure made up 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025. Yet these gains are raked off by a tiny number of people and funds based overwhelmingly on the west coast.
The fund manager Apollo pointed out in October that only the "magnificent seven" tech firms were flourishing in the S&P index, with the other 493 seeing flat revenues and profits. Apollo's chief economist Torsten Slok wrote: "Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America."
The most reviled candidate on many ballots was the datacentre, with analysis for the Economist showing Trump supporters with a datacentre on their doorstep flipping in droves to the other side.
Texas flips blue
Texas flipped from red to blue on Tuesday night, despite a quarter of a billion dollars for the Republicans from Elon Musk. Texas is expected to become the US's centre for datacentres, providing over a quarter of all new computing power to the AI industry within two years. James Talarico won on a squarely anti-datacentre agenda.
As he said after his win: "The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom … The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don't notice that they are picking our pockets. But tonight, we sent a crystal clear message to the people at the top, we will not be conquered."
The Democrats who caught the national imagination were those who most stridently put the case against the US's unfairness, just as Mamdani did. Troy Jackson won Maine on a platform to abolish ICE, and Abdul El-Sayed took Michigan pledging Medicare for all.
These results suggest a new future for the Democrats: anti-corruption, anti-war and anti-billionaire. The Democrat who wants to get on the ticket in 2028 will sound more like Bernie Sanders. Trump is heading into two years of ignominy, treated even while in power as a back number, and the claim that there is nothing better on offer than the same old rightwing rubbish is usually wrong.
