For working-class voters who expected economic change, Tuesday’s midterm defeat has put the future of President Trump’s political project and the Republican Party’s path to 2028 under greater pressure.
Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times said Trump had neglected populism’s economic purpose and had become hard to distinguish from an earlier laissez-faire Republican. Trump and his associates made over $1 billion in pre-tax profits over the past year, with part of that coming from the digital currencies sector.
Trump is in his ninth decade and serving his second term. He will command the world’s mightiest armed forces for another 26 months. This fall, he urged voters 47 times to act as though he were personally on the ballot.
Almost half of Republicans said White House corruption, self-dealing and conflicts of interest concerned them before the midterms. Before polls closed on Tuesday, some GOP candidates had already begun to put distance between themselves and Trump.
Voters then delivered Democratic victories in Kansas, Texas and elsewhere. US Republicans lost both houses of Congress to the Democrats.
Men ages 18 to 29 shifted 38 percentage points towards Democrats in the midterms. Over three-fifths, or 61%, voted Democratic, compared with 37% in the 2024 election. The result exposed divisions in the MAGA coalition of white men who did not attend college and rural voters that had sustained Trump since 2016.
James Talarico, the Democratic senator-elect from Texas, told CNN after his victory: “They didn't send us to Washington for political retribution. They sent us to Washington to lower costs, to root out corruption, to get this economy back on track.”
Ronald Brownstein of Bloomberg said Republican hopes that Trump’s earlier victories marked a political realignment, built on greater support from working-class minority voters, had been reduced to rubble.
Other populist leaders have also suffered electoral reverses. Viktor Orbán lost power in April and faces allegations of crony capitalism. Aleksandar Vučić lost a presidential election in Serbia last month.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK polled 31 per cent in 2025 and has since lost ten percentage points of that support. Farage is under investigation over an undeclared gift of £5 million.
The New York Times said Trumpism may be receding, while Trump retains the power of the presidency for two more years. Bloomberg said his response to the midterm result would shape the GOP’s prospects for the rest of his term and in the 2028 contest to succeed him.
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