Republican losses were not just confined to the type of swing districts that parties usually worry about on election night. The scale of the losses was staggering. They lost Senate seats in deep red states such as Texas and South Carolina. They lost districts they had gerrymandered and in which they were supposed to be unbeatable. They lost seats that even the sharpest analysts thought were safe.
Why? For months, surveys have shown that voters are fed up with high prices, with the war in Iran, and with what is increasingly being talked about as the Trump administration’s corruption. A president who was narrowly elected on the promise of a steady economic hand instead spent two years pursuing an extreme ideological agenda favoured only by a minority of Americans. He ignored what voters were saying, and now they have delivered a harsh verdict.
But these results have implications beyond just the remainder of Trump’s presidency. They break some of the patterns that have defined American politics for decades. Democrats are suddenly winning in places where they have been counted out for a generation. Suddenly, the American political map looks different.
Take Texas. The last time a Democrat won election as a senator there was 1988. Democrats have not won a presidential election in Texas since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Yet last night, Democrat James Talarico powered to a convincing victory. If elections in Texas become politically competitive on a permanent basis, it will become much harder for Republicans to take the presidency in the future.
The Republican Party will now be looking nervously towards the 2028 election. For the first time since 2016, there is likely to be a serious debate within the party about whether to move on from the aggressive nationalism and bigotry of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. Democrats, meanwhile, face their own questions about how to capitalise on their victories.
Foreign policy futures
But for the rest of the world, change might not come so quickly. Despite the fact that his party has suffered this electoral setback, Trump remains president until 2028. And because despite its constitutional role in declaring war and ratifying treaties, Congress tends to be less involved in foreign policy, there is still a lot that he can do with that power.
Indeed, US presidents whose parties perform badly in midterm elections often become more active in foreign policy than they had previously. With the chance of passing a significant domestic agenda mostly beyond their reach, they have a more time on their hands to think about America’s relations with the rest of the world. The same is likely to be true of Trump.
The fact that the midterms are over also means that Trump no longer has to be so careful about the political consequences of his actions. As the midterm elections got closer, the president has backed down from major military confrontation with Iran and sought a truce in his tariff wars. Now, with political constraints lifted, he could become more erratic and unpredictable.
Congress would not be completely powerless to stop him, at least in theory. But most actions it can take – such as cutting off funding for the war with Iran or seizing tariff power back from the president – require margins of control in both chambers that Democrats are unlikely to have, despite their formidable victories.
They would need to have a two-thirds majority to override an almost certain presidential veto on any attempt to pass laws to achieve these outcomes. So a key question is whether this midterm drubbing was serious enough to make some Republican members of Congress get serious about joining Democrats in restraining Trump.
Something that Democrats will definitely be able to do is launch all manner of investigations into the conduct of the Trump administration and some of its officials. Their efforts are likely to focus on the war with Iran, Trump’s personal financial dealings with foreign leaders, and the management of the Pentagon by secretary of defence Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth, indeed, could be an early casualty of these efforts – there is speculation that he will resign or be fired rather than face possible impeachment.
But ultimately a change of direction in US foreign policy depends on the decisions of Trump himself. A changing of the guard among his advisers, or in Congress, can only do so much to influence a president who has never willingly submitted to constraint.
The world should prepare itself for the possibility that a politically wounded and angry Trump could now decide to vent his frustrations abroad.
Andrew Gawthorpe, Lecturer in History and International Studies, Leiden University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.