US Election Results: A Blue Wave, the Same Shore

This piece continues the US Midterms, Techno-Capital and Algorithmic Politics (in Turkish), which we published a week before the election. The figures rest on the results announced by AP and the mainstream outlets as of the morning of 4 November 2026. Some races, and the exact number of seats in the House of Representatives, are not yet settled.

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First, the Summary

1. The result: In the 3 November midterms the Democrats took both the Senate and the House of Representatives out of Trump's hands. In the Senate, seats changed hands in North Carolina, South Carolina, Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Iowa and Maine; Michigan stayed with the Democrats. In Texas a Democratic senator was elected for the first time in 38 years. In Kansas this seat had not passed to the Democrats since 1932.
2. A vote of anger: About three quarters of voters are "angry" or "dissatisfied" with the country's direction. About nine in ten counted the cost of living as a decisive factor when they voted. Nearly two thirds held Trump responsible for high prices.
3. Shifting blocs: About seven in ten voters under 30, who in 2024 were split between Trump and Harris, voted for the Democrats this time. Among Latino voters the Republican vote fell from about four in ten to one in three.
4. But the most important figure is this: About six in ten voters also take a negative view of the Democratic Party, just as they do of the Republicans. So this election is less a Democratic victory than a punishment of the party in power.
5. Did techno-capital lose? The super PACs of artificial-intelligence companies spent more than 50 million dollars in the primaries. Key candidates they backed in the general election (South Carolina, for example) lost. There is a clear public reaction against artificial-intelligence money. But capital does not lose an election. It changes horses.
6. The historical pattern: In the United States the midterm pendulum is almost a law: 1994, 2006, 2010, 2018, and now 2026. Each wave was taken back by the next, because in none of them were property relations touched.
7. Our main thesis: The Democratic Party is one of the two wings of US capitalism. It was born as the party of the slaveholding South, bound the workers' revolt of the 1930s into the system with the New Deal, ran the Cold War and Vietnam, institutionalised neoliberalism with Clinton, saved the banks with Obama, and banned the railroad strike by law with Biden. This is not a deviation. It is the party's function: to absorb the energy of social movements and pull it back inside the manageable limits of capital.
8. The lesson: What there is to welcome is not that the Democrats won, but that the anger from below, and the youth, shifted left. If this anger does not turn into an independent workers' politics, into unions and into organising from below, in 2028 it will go to the other end of the pendulum again.

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What Happened on Election Night?

Let us put the facts down first. Before the election the picture was this: in the Senate the Republicans held 53 seats and the Democrats (including Sanders and King) 47. In the House the Republicans had a majority by a hair. Trump's approval rating was around 38 per cent on average. Early voting was at a record: AP counted about 10 million more early voters than at the same point in 2022 (Yahoo/AP live feed).

By the end of the night (PBS/AP):

State	Result	Note
North Carolina	Roy Cooper (D) won	The seat changed hands
South Carolina	Annie Andrews (D) won	The first Democratic senator this century
Kansas	Adam Hamilton (D) beat the incumbent, Roger Marshall	The first since 1932
Texas	James Talarico (D) beat Ken Paxton	The first Democrat in 38 years
Ohio	Sherrod Brown (D) beat Jon Husted	The seat changed hands
Iowa	Josh Turek (D) beat Ashley Hinson	The seat changed hands
Maine	Susan Collins was defeated	The seat changed hands
Michigan	Abdul El-Sayed (D) beat Mike Rogers	The first Muslim senator
Georgia	Jon Ossoff (D) was re-elected	Held
New Hampshire	Chris Pappas (D) won	Held
Florida (special)	Ashley Moody (R) won	The Republicans held it

In the House, the television networks called a Democratic majority around 10 p.m. The district engineering (gerrymandering) the Republicans carried out in Texas, Florida and Missouri had given them, on paper, an advantage of nine seats. Even so, the Democrats won in Florida even in the districts the Republicans had redrawn. In Missouri voters rejected the new congressional map in a referendum.

In the governor's races Keisha Lance Bottoms was elected in Georgia, the first Black woman elected governor in the history of the United States. Shapiro in Pennsylvania and Moore in Maryland kept their places. In Florida, Trump's candidate Byron Donalds won.

In the referendums the right to abortion won again: in Missouri the amendment that would have restricted abortion once more was rejected, and in Virginia "reproductive freedom" was accepted as a constitutional right. On the other side, tightened voter identification in Ohio, and "only citizens may vote" clauses in Arkansas and West Virginia, entered the constitutions (AP roundup). So the same ballot produced both an expansion of rights and moves that narrow the electorate. Let us keep this contradiction in mind.

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What Do the Exit Polls Say?

The figures from the AP VoteCast and SSRS exit polls show the core of this election (PBS/AP, Lee/AP):

• About three quarters of voters are angry or dissatisfied with the country's direction.
• About nine in ten counted the cost of living as a decisive or important factor. Nearly two thirds held Trump responsible for high prices.
• As the most important problem, about four in ten named the economy and three in ten "the state of democracy". Immigration and crime, on which Trump built his whole campaign, lagged far behind both.
• About six in ten think Trump puts his personal interest ahead of the country's. Nearly 70 per cent want Congress to check the presidency more.
• Among those under 30 the Democratic vote rose to about seven in ten (in 2024 this section was split almost in half).
• Among Latino voters the Republican vote fell from about four in ten to one in three. Seven in ten of this section say Trump's policies made economic conditions worse.
• And the key figure: about six in ten voters also take a negative view of the Democratic Party, at almost the same rate as their view of the Republicans.

The last item sums up everything. The American voter did not say "yes" to a programme. They said "no" to the government. They had two options, and they like neither. This is the two-party system at its most naked: the only door anger can go through is the door the previous anger came out of.

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What Did Techno-Capital Do in This Election?

In our pre-election piece (in Turkish) we took up how the owners of the platforms became a side in the election. Looking at the results, the picture grows more interesting still.

According to The Intercept's analysis (The Intercept, 29 October):

• Leading the Future, fed with 25 million dollars by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife, and the rival network Public First, backed from around Anthropic, together spent 50.7 million dollars in the primaries. About 21 million dollars of this was spent against a single person, Alex Bores, who was writing state-level artificial-intelligence regulation in New York. Bores lost.
• In the general election, most of Leading the Future's spending in competitive races went to the Republican candidate in South Carolina. That candidate lost.
• In a poll taken in Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, about three quarters of voters said they were less likely to vote for a candidate backed by an artificial-intelligence super PAC.
• Leading the Future ran more than 30 million dollars of spending through newly formed Delaware companies. Complaints went nowhere, because the election watchdog, the FEC, had no quorum.

It would be naive to conclude from this that "techno-capital lost". For two reasons:

First, this money flows to both parties. While Brockman's network backed Republican candidates, it also spent against pro-regulation candidates in the Democratic primaries. For capital an election is not a horse race. It is portfolio management: you bet on both horses, and whoever wins, your person is at the table. As we showed in our piece on the artificial-intelligence bubble, regulations that would dump the debt of data-centre investment onto the public are on the agenda of both parties.

Second, the real power is not in PAC money. It is in the feed itself. The place where the voter sees the election agenda is the ranking algorithms of Meta, Google, X and TikTok. The owner of this infrastructure did not change. Whoever wins the election, the next election will be held in the same feed.

There is still a fact that has to be recorded: a spontaneous anger against artificial-intelligence capital is accumulating among the American people. The electricity bill, the layoffs, the pulling up of the ladder of learning. This anger is not yet a class consciousness. But it is a raw material.

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Social Dynamics: A Historical Reading

To understand an election you have to understand the social structure inside which that election is held. The two-party system in the United States did not fall from the sky. It was shaped, in different stages of capital accumulation, as two apparatuses carrying different class alliances.

The Party of the Slaveholding South: From the Founding to the Civil War

The Democratic Party was founded in 1828 around Andrew Jackson. With the language of "the man of the people" it gathered white small farmers and the urban shopkeepers under the same roof as the slaveholding plantation aristocracy of the South. Jackson's name is also tied to the Trail of Tears, the driving of indigenous peoples from their lands. Until the Civil War the party was the political shield of slavery.

After the Civil War the Democrats became the party of the "Solid South". A structure that took back the gains of Reconstruction, wrote the Jim Crow discrimination laws, stripped Black people of the vote with poll taxes and literacy tests, and was intertwined with the Ku Klux Klan. This history is not a footnote. The South's regime of cheap and unorganised labour was one of the foundation stones of US capitalism, and the Democratic Party was the keeper of that regime for a hundred years.

The Swallowing of the Populists: 1896

At the end of the nineteenth century, farmers sunk in debt and railroad workers founded an independent party: the People's Party (the Populists). It wanted the nationalisation of the railroad monopolies, an income tax, and the regulation of banking. In 1892 it took more than a million votes. In 1896 the Democrats adopted the language of this movement by nominating William Jennings Bryan, and the Populists backed Bryan too. Bryan lost, and the People's Party never recovered.

This is the first great example of a pattern that would be repeated again and again over the next hundred years. In the phrase of US historians, the Democratic Party is "the graveyard of social movements": it takes the movement's language, breaks up its organisation, and waters down its demands.

The New Deal: Who Was Saved?

The New Deal is the foundation of the Democrats' "labour party" legend. That is why it has to be looked at carefully.

After the 1929 crash, unemployment in the United States rose to one in four. In 1934 general strikes broke out in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco. In Minneapolis the teamsters were organised by Trotskyists, and in San Francisco the longshoremen by unionists close to the communists. In 1936–37 General Motors workers in Flint occupied the factories. The Communist Party was organised in the neighbourhoods through councils of the unemployed. So what stood before Roosevelt was not only an economic crisis. It was the possibility of a class revolt.

Roosevelt's own statement is plain: to save capitalism. The Wagner Act (1935) recognised the right to unionise, but at the same time bound the unions into a legal frame under the state's control. The Social Security Act, under pressure from Democratic senators in the South, left agricultural workers and domestic servants outside its scope, that is, the great majority of Black workers. The New Deal contains real gains won by the pressure of the working class. But the function of the Democratic Party was to channel this pressure not toward a revolutionary direction, but toward cooperation with capital. This has to be read together with the general dynamic we described in What Did the October Revolution Give the World?: the welfare concessions in the West are not independent of the fear that 1917 created.

Cold War Liberalism: The Taming of the Unions

In 1947 the Taft–Hartley Act came in: solidarity strikes were banned, a "I am not a communist" oath was made compulsory for union officials, and a path was opened for the states to weaken unions with "right-to-work" laws. The law passed a Republican Congress despite Truman's veto. But part of the votes that overrode the veto came from Southern Democrats, and Truman used this law against strikes again and again throughout his presidency.

Then came McCarthyism. The unions were "cleansed" of communists. The CIO expelled eleven left-leaning unions. The US labour movement, by purging its most organised and most conscious cadres with its own hand, turned into a vote bank of the Democratic Party. The root of union density in the United States today having fallen to about 10 per cent, and to 6 per cent in the private sector, is here.

In the same period it was Democrats who ran the Korean War (Truman), the Bay of Pigs landing (Kennedy), and the escalation of Vietnam (Johnson). At the 1968 Chicago convention it was also the police of the Democratic mayor Daley who put anti-war youth under the baton.

The Neoliberal Turn: From Carter to Clinton

We usually start neoliberalism with Reagan. But the one who started deregulation in the United States is Carter: the liberalisation of airlines, trucking and railroads came in his period. Carter appointed Paul Volcker, the architect of the "Volcker shock" that broke the bargaining power of the working class by raising interest rates to 20 per cent, to the head of the central bank.

Clinton turned this transformation into the identity of the Democratic Party:

• 1994, NAFTA: The legal ground for the moving of industrial jobs to Mexico and then to Asia. One of the starting points of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania becoming the "Rust Belt".
• 1994, the Crime Bill: The expansion of mass incarceration. The burden was carried above all by Black and poor working-class neighbourhoods.
• 1996, welfare reform: With the words "we will end welfare as we know it", cash assistance to the poor was tied to a time limit and a work requirement.
• 1999, the repeal of Glass–Steagall: The wall between commercial banking and investment banking was torn down. One of the grounds of the 2008 crisis.

In this period the party shifted its base from the industrial worker to urban professionals, to Wall Street, and to the Silicon Valley that was being born. The educated middle layers that sociologists call the "professional-managerial class" became the party's cultural face. The working class was written out of the account, with the line "they have nowhere else to go".

Obama: The Banks Were Saved, the Houses Went

In the 2008 crisis millions of working families lost their homes. The Obama administration saved the banks and did not save the mortgage debtors. Almost none of the executives who created the crisis were prosecuted. The health reform (Obamacare) was built not as a single-payer public health system, but as a model that supplies the private insurance companies with state-subsidised customers. In the Obama years about 3 million people were deported, drone wars expanded, and the mass surveillance Snowden exposed continued. As we said in our piece on the 25th anniversary of 11 September: Bush built the apparatus, Obama normalised it, Trump turned it inward.

In the 2010 midterms the Democrats took a heavy defeat. In 2011 Occupy Wall Street went into the street with "the 99 per cent against the 1 per cent". The movement was broken up by police operations, and most of the municipalities that ran those operations were under Democratic administration.

The Road to Trump, and the Biden Interval

What carried Trump to power in 2016 was the anger of the Rust Belt worker whom the Democrats had abandoned over thirty years. There was a candidate who could have pulled this anger to the left: Bernie Sanders. The party apparatus blocked Sanders in 2016 and in 2020. In 2020 Biden met donors with the promise that "nothing will fundamentally change".

The Biden period was presented as an exception: infrastructure investment, the semiconductor (CHIPS) act, pro-union language. But it was also Biden who, in December 2022, abolished the right to strike of more than 100,000 railroad workers by imposing through law a contract that a majority of the workers had rejected. The workers wanted paid sick leave. Biden's industrial policy was the subsidising, by the hand of the state, of capital's competition with China. The flow of weapons to Gaza was the product of the same "national security" consensus.

In 2024 the working class again went to the ballot in anger, and again shifted right. In 2026 the same anger shifted left. The pendulum is working. The mechanism stays the same.

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The Midterm Pendulum: Why Do the Waves Always Recede?

Year	Wave	What followed
1994	Republican wave (Gingrich), against Clinton	Clinton was re-elected by shifting right; the neoliberal consensus deepened
2006	Democratic wave, against the Iraq War	War budgets continued to be approved
2010	Republican wave (the Tea Party), against Obama	Austerity and debt ceilings
2018	Democratic wave, against Trump	Victory in 2020, and Trump's stronger return in 2024
2026	Democratic wave, against Trump	?

What this table has in common is this: every wave is the product of anger at the previous government. None of them lastingly changed the balance of power between capital and labour. Because what changes the balance is not who won at the ballot. It is who is organised in the workplace, in the neighbourhood, in the street.

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Why Can the Democrats Never Be an Alternative?

The answer to this question is not a matter of morals or of betrayal. To say "the Democrats did not keep their word" is an incomplete criticism, because the words that were given had already been given inside the limits of the system. The problem is structural. Let us gather it under five headings.

First: ownership

The programme of the Democratic Party has never contained a question about the ownership of the means of production. The health system is in private insurance companies, energy in private monopolies, the infrastructure of data and computation in five or six technology companies, housing in finance capital. Even the most advanced proposals of the Democrats aim to tax or regulate this ownership, not to question it. In the words of our three questions: In whose hands? Under whose control? To whose benefit? The Democrats never ask the first. To the second they say "light supervision by the state". To the third they say "everyone's".

Second: finance

In the United States a Senate race costs tens, sometimes hundreds, of millions of dollars. Since the Citizens United decision (2010), companies and billionaires can spend without limit through super PACs. As artificial-intelligence capital did in this election, the money flows to both parties. If a party's till is filled with someone's money, it is plain whose interest it will look after at the critical moment. Among the Democrats' principal donors are Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the big companies of Hollywood. The party stops every candidate who crosses the line these donors have drawn, as was seen with Sanders and with Bores, either in the primary or in the party apparatus.

Third: the imperialist consensus

In US foreign policy there is no strategic difference between the two parties. The expansion of NATO, unconditional support for Israel, the contest for hegemony with China, and the interventions in Latin America are the common inheritance of both parties. In this election, the fact that Haley Stevens, a leading figure of his own party, backed the Republican candidate in the final days because of El-Sayed's call in Michigan to cut the support given to Israel, shows how hard this consensus is defended. The governing party of a state that maintains world hegemony cannot at the same time be the party of the emancipation of that state's working class.

Fourth: the function of absorption and neutralisation

The Populists in 1896, the labour movement in the 1930s and 1940s, the civil rights and anti-war movement in the 1960s, Occupy in 2011, the Sanders movement in 2016–2020, Black Lives Matter in 2020: all passed through the same door. "Leave the street now, come to the ballot." Each time the cadres of the movement were drawn into the party apparatus, the foundations, the consultancy firms. Demands were made "realistic". The street emptied. The historical function of the Democratic Party is to take the energy that presses against the limits of the system and pull it back inside those limits. In this respect it is not less of an apparatus of stability than the Republicans. It is perhaps a more effective one.

Fifth: the absence of class representation

The United States is the only country among the developed capitalist countries in which a mass workers' party was never founded. We know how even European social democracy, as we discussed in AfD's 43.8 Percent Is Not a Deviation, abandoned class interests from 1914 to Hartz IV. In the United States it did not even come to that stage. The unions turned into sources of donations and votes dependent on the Democratic Party. The working class was left without an organisation that does politics in its own name. The great majority of those who sit in Congress are millionaires. The share of representatives of working-class origin is under 2 per cent. This picture does not change, whoever wins.

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And the Left Inside? Mamdani, El-Sayed, Talarico

There are names rising from inside the party in this election. The path opened by the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who won the New York mayoralty in 2025, continued in 2026 with El-Sayed in Michigan and Talarico in Texas. That young people turned to these candidates matters: a language built on rent, health, wages and Gaza finds a response in the masses.

But the figures have to be looked at too. According to Brookings' review of August 2026, the great majority of the 282 candidates backed by DSA chapters ran at local or state level, and they concentrated in regions already inclined to the left (Brookings). El-Sayed is not even a DSA member.

Two conclusions follow:

1. The rise of these candidates is happening despite the party apparatus, not thanks to it. It is valuable as a sign of the shift to the left among the masses.
2. But these candidates still have to work inside that apparatus, by its rules, at the same table as its donors. History is full of examples in which the strategy of "transforming the party from inside" ended in being transformed by the party. The question discussed on the US left as the "dirty break" is exactly this: can these candidates, and the movements that elect them, one day be the core of an independent workers' party, or will they be the "realistic" Democrats of the next generation?

The answer will be given not by election results, but by organising. We said the same thing when we read Lula's victory as hope in Hope Came from the South: hope is real to the extent that it turns, beyond the ballot, into an organised class power.

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Two Readings Side by Side

The liberal reading	The class reading
Democracy won, Trump was stopped	The party in power was punished; anger flowed not to a programme but to the other wing
The Democrats won back Latino and young voters	The cost of living pushed these sections against the government; the view of the Democrats is also six in ten negative
Artificial-intelligence money lost	Capital bet on both horses; the ownership of the feed did not change
Congress will now check Trump	Congress can check the president; who will check capital?
Mamdani and El-Sayed herald a left Democratic Party	They herald masses shifting left, not the party
In 2028 the White House will be taken too	In 2028 the pendulum can turn again; the only lasting thing is organised power
The problem is Trump's personality	The problem is the regime of accumulation that produced Trump, and the two-party order that sustains it

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The Link with the Turn in the World

It would be misleading to read this election on its own. Let us look together at the election pieces we have written in the last few months:

• In Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, the AfD approached 44 per cent (AfD's 43.8 Percent Is Not a Deviation).
• In Brazil, Lula beat the Bolsonaro family again (Hope Came from the South).
• In Serbia, student plenums passed Vučić at the ballot (Algoritmayı Yürüyerek Geçtiler (in Turkish)).
• In the United States, Trump's party lost Congress.

The common ground is this: everywhere in the world the masses are refusing to pay the cost of the crisis, and they express this refusal with the first tool in their hands, the ballot. Anger sometimes flows right and sometimes left. What sets its direction is whether there is an organised class alternative in that country. In Serbia there were the plenums in the street. In Germany the left was scattered. In the United States there is the two-party cage. Where the anger goes depends on whose hands the channel is in.

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Concrete Tasks

This is an American election. But there are lessons for us to draw.

• Read election results with class data: Against commentary that reads voter behaviour through identity categories (Latino, young, woman), bring forward the economic conditions under those categories (rent, prices, wages).
• Expose the "lesser evil" trap: There is a similar two-pole squeeze in Turkey too. Tell how the logic of "first let us send this one off, the rest comes later" has worked in the United States for a hundred years.
• Follow techno-capital's election money: Document, in Turkey too, the relation of platform companies, advertising networks and data brokers to politics, and build open-data and common research tools in the frame of Organising 2.0.
• Follow the base organisations in the United States, and learn: Carry into Turkish the lessons of the unionisation campaigns at Amazon and Starbucks, of the UAW strike of 2023, of the tenants' unions, and of the organising of technology workers.
• Build an international link: See the youth shifting left in the United States not as "Americans", but as comrades struggling against the same capital, and keep alive the horizon we discussed in Red Scare Again.

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Dear young comrades,

Last night a wave rose in the United States. In Texas, in Kansas, in South Carolina, results unseen for decades came out. Young people and migrant workers answered at the ballot a government that humiliates them. Let us not belittle this anger. That anger is ours too.

But however high the wave, it breaks on the same shore. The shore is the garden of a house with two doors: you go out of one door and in through the other, and the owner of the house does not change. For two hundred years the Democratic Party has been one of the doors of this house. It protected slavery, calmed the workers' revolt, tamed the unions, moved the factories, saved the banks, and banned the strikes. It did this not out of ill will, but out of its function.

A real alternative is born not by a change in a party's name, but by the worker organising in the workplace, the student in the school, the tenant in the apartment building. The ballot is a thermometer. It measures the fever. It does not cure the illness. The name of the illness is capitalism, and the name of its medicine is organisation.

The machine is new, and the chain is old. What will break the chain is not who went in through which door. It is organised labour, which asks whose the house is.

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