By Branko Marcetic
The American Left has been so conditioned in the Trump era to look aghast and horrified at election results that it is still hard to fully believe the outcome of November 3 midterm elections. Yet the historic events of last Tuesday night really did happen: Donald Trump and Republicans suffered a historic rebuke from voters, handing Democrats wins up and down the ballot all across the country, flipping both chambers of Congress in their favor, and handing them the largest congressional majorities they’ve had since Barack Obama’s election.
In many ways, the result is simple. Across poll after poll leading into the election and exit poll after exit poll leading out of it, the message from voters was the same: they think the economy sucks, they think prices are too high, and they’re angry at Trump and blame him squarely for this entire situation. To send this message, voters turned out in droves to hand power to a Democratic Party that these same polls show they have very little love for, sometimes viewing the Dems even more dimly than they do Trump.
Democrats were expected to take the House. They were not expected to win a majority of more than 250 seats in it, as current estimates have them winning. Nor were they expected to win a Senate majority, let alone a Senate majority of at least fifty-four seats. And they were not expected to flip deep red seats across the country, to sweep Republicans from control of Texas at nearly every level of power, and to win a majority of the country’s governorships, achieving wins and trifectas in states they’ve been practically locked out of for sometimes decades. Obama referred to his 2010 midterms rout as a “shellacking.” Last night was an annihilation.
This is not just good news for Democrats. For the Left, which operates within these Democratic majorities at both the state and federal levels, the results present a historic opportunity to turn its political priorities from words into tangible reality across the country, further building the power it has patiently and, for a long time, quietly been constructing from the ground up these past ten years.
That includes at the federal level. Even though Trump has two more years in the White House, and Democrats are threatening to zealously turn their powers of oversight on the vast record of abuse and criminality he’s racked up during that time, there is some, extremely slim reason to believe something could actually get done.
Trump phoned Politico last night to make clear he was open to working with the Democrats and didn’t “want to be just sitting there for two years vetoing everything.” The last time Trump was in the White House with a Democratic Congress, the pandemic, the United States saw the largest expansion of the welfare state in decades. Trump’s ideological malleability and the fact that he is currently looking at a legacy as a historic failure presents at least the possibility of an opening for something better to happen.
It’s an opening the Left will be able to take advantage of, too. The Left will enter this new Congress with far more formidable numbers than it’s had in decades: at least seven members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), creating the historic opportunity to for the first time form a distinct socialist caucus in Congress and a Squad-like progressive “Bloc” that could have as many as twenty members.
The massive Democratic House majority means “the Bloc” will not have the expected leverage of being able to block House Democratic leader’s Hakeem Jeffries’s bid for Speaker, or to hold up legislation Freedom Caucus–style. But it will have influence. Much of the generous pandemic policies of 2020, including both Trump and, later, Joe Biden’s stimulus checks, originated with the public demands of socialist and progressive members of Congress that later found their way into legislation on the back of their clear public need and popularity.
This time, the Left will be making these arguments in a world in which socialists have already transformed the way even centrist Democrats talk about politics. The party’s years-long obsession with “norms” and rescuing democracy having largely faded into the background in favor of the affordability-focused and anti-billionaire rhetoric popularized by, respectively, New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and the socialist duo of Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.
Just as importantly, it’s a world in which the Left, thanks to a spate of major wins last night, has thoroughly discredited the arguments used to marginalize and dismiss its basic case.
No left-wing victory on Tuesday night was bigger than Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan Senate win over Republican Mike Rogers by a whopping 7 points. It was the exact, hefty margin El-Sayed himself had promised he would win by back in May and defied the incessant predictions that he would end up badly underperforming.
There was arguably no more important race this year than for the purple state’s Senate seat: for the Left, which sought to prove progressives could run and win outside of blue strongholds; for corporate Democrats, a segment of whom feared losing the ability to fearmonger about supposedly risky left-wing candidates; for the pro-Israel lobby, which feared that the success of a stridently pro-Palestinian message would obliterate its claim that blind fealty to Israel was “good politics”; for Trump and the MAGA movement, whose loss of the key state could be a harbinger of even worse political defeat to come.
El-Sayed’s win has confirmed all of these. It represents not just a failure for MAGA, in the form of now two-time loser and career-long warmonger Mike Rogers. It’s an absolute disaster for the pro-Israel lobby and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in particular, which blew tens of millions of dollars over the course of both the primary and general to defeat El-Sayed and tried every trick in the book to defame and make voters, particularly Jewish ones, fear him.
Speaking of Bernie Sanders, as of the time of writing, seventeen of the twenty-one candidates endorsed by the socialist senator have won their races, while only two have lost, and two are in races that are still to be called. Sanders’s endorsements were less straightforwardly left-wing than those of organizations like DSA or Justice Democrats. They included candidates like El-Sayed and Jackson, but they also included more establishment candidates like Minnesota Senator-elect Peggy Flanagan, who beat corporate-friendly rivals in their primaries. They ran the gamut from DSA candidates like New York’s Claire Valdez and Colorado’s MelatKiros to candidates like Rebecca Cooke, the less progressive candidate in her primary but someone who flipped a Trump-voting, rural Wisconsin district that for decades was represented by a Democrat.
They also included William Lawrence, the Sunrise Movement cofounder who has flipped a swing district in the swing state of Michigan despite having one of the more left-wing résumés of any Democratic candidate — something that, like El-Sayed, we were told would make him a guaranteed loser. The fact that Lawrence left DSA mid-campaign and had to distance himself from old tweets that included calls to nationalize the fossil fuel industry should not take away from the magnitude of his win. On the back of a progressive populist campaign that pushed a data center moratorium and Medicare for All, Lawrence won a purple district that used to belong to the Democrats’ patron saint of centrism, former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin.
As of the time of writing, DSA has notched 130 wins in everything from state legislatures and city councils, to mayor’s offices and ballot measures, with forty-two losses and fifty-eight races still to be decided. While Angie Nixon fell short of her Senate bid, environmentalist Ashley Herrmann became only the second socialist to win elected office in Florida and the first to be elected to its state legislature in more than a century, flipping a swing district that the Republican incumbent had won with 58 percent of the vote two years earlier. Other notable socialist wins included Robert LeVertis Bell’s election to the Kentucky state house and Mathewos Samson’s election to the Georgia General Assembly, which, together with Gabriel Sanchez’s reelection, makes him one of two socialists in the state legislature.
Particularly notable are several mayoral races that were foregone conclusions after the primaries. Janeese Lewis George is now officially Washington, DC’s first socialist mayor, having won on the back of an affordable housing plan that combines “abundance”-style reforms with expanding rent stabilization. In Providence, Rhode Island, socialist David Morales has similarly cruised to an expected win and, together with a socialist-led city council, will now work to pass a robust rent control measure in the housing-crisis-stricken city — a measure the incumbent mayor he successfully primaried had vetoed.
More complicated is the Los Angeles mayor’s race, where socialist City Councilor Nithya Raman is currently on track to unseat Karen Bass as Los Angeles mayor. Raman’s candidacy was the subject of some controversy, after she was endorsed by the local DSA chapter despite not fully embracing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel and not being questioned about it, leading the DSA’s National Political Committee to nearly strip her of the endorsement, an effort that failed by one vote. If Raman does win, she’ll be the first candidate to unseat an incumbent LA mayor in twenty-one years.
This is on top of a host of progressive ballot measures pushed through by majorities of voters countrywide: the defeat of an abortion ban ballot measure in Missouri, a successful ban on dark money in elections in Montana, and divestment from Israel in Providence, to name a few. Maybe most notably, ballot measures restricting the construction of data centres have so far won overwhelmingly around the country, thirty-eight to one, with eight still to be counted — a clear public vindication of a position championed and popularized by the broad Left.
For the past decade, socialists and progressives have often had good election nights even when the Democratic Party has suffered, and they have had bad nights while Democrats rejoiced. Last night may be the first one where both the Left and the centrist party establishment have seen historic wins in tandem.
Over the past two years, the Left showed it was the force most willing to fight against Trump’s right-wing assault and to come up with an effective argument — affordability and fighting oligarchy — to do it. Last night finally proved left policies and rhetoric are not the electoral liability Democratic voters have been told for decades it is.
For decades, Democratic voters have had to make the agonizing decision every election to choose between their heads and their hearts. The Left may have just freed them of it. (IPA Service)
Courtesy: Jacobin
