राजनीति

This evolution has created an acute democratic tension. Citizens register to vote to exercise a civic right. Few realize that this single public registration record becomes the anchor for a commercial profile packed with data they never provided and political judgments they never expressed. The public nature of a voter roll should not place commercial inferences beyond civic accountability.

Two Different Kinds of Information

Modern voter files conflate two fundamentally different categories of data:

• Verified Vote History: Official election records showing turnout in previous primary, general, or special elections. This administrative paper trail allows vendors to categorize citizens as high-, medium-, or low-propensity voters based on actual civic conduct.
• Predictive Models: Algorithmic scores derived from commercial consumer databases estimating candidate preference, partisan lean, or policy stances.

One measures a verified civic act; the other constructs a commercial prediction. Because the secret ballot protects actual choices, official records show how often a citizen participated, but never how they voted. Everything else—including candidate scores and ideology rankings—is simply a vendor’s educated guess.

According to federal Election Assistance Commission data, more than 40 percent of voter registration transactions now occur through routine "Motor Voter" interactions at state DMVs. Completing that errand does not mean a citizen understands how their record will be enriched, nor does it provide them any mechanism to inspect the resulting profile. Political organizations routinely purchase and act upon commercial claims about citizens, while the citizens themselves are denied any opportunity to review or challenge them.

Independent Voters and the Fallacy of Binary Modeling

Independent voters expose the flaws of this machinery most clearly. Gallup’s long-term polling found that 45 percent of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025. While many lean toward one party, they deliberately claim an independent identity; for them, leaning preferences and independent self-conception coexist.

These self-identified independents overlap with—but are distinct from—formally registered unaffiliated voters. Under Oregon’s automatic voter registration system, for instance, citizens are registered as nonaffiliated unless they affirmatively select a party. Others deliberately opt out of party registration. Neither path reveals where they stand on specific candidates or ballot measures.

Yet an official registration marked "unaffiliated" routinely acquires a commercial label of "likely Democrat" or "likely Republican." That label then dictates whether and how campaigns engage the voter.

Consider an unaffiliated voter in Colorado who typically votes Republican but strongly favors a local school bond. A commercial algorithm branding them "likely Republican" may lead a bond campaign to write them off entirely. Conversely, an unaffiliated voter who leans Democratic might oppose a municipal tax measure; if partisan lean is treated as a catch-all proxy for policy stance, campaigns will miss the specific concern driving their vote.

A flawed estimate does more than waste ad dollars. It sidelines citizens from civic outreach or subjects them to appeals built around beliefs they do not hold. Most never discover why they were targeted—or ignored.

From Polling People to Predicting Them

At Price Research, we specialized in California school bond and tax measures governed by the state’s stringent two-thirds approval requirement. Survey inference was central to our work, but an answer supplied directly by a voter and a conclusion drawn by an analyst remained fundamentally distinct. We asked voters about project priorities, tax thresholds, and counter-arguments before revisiting the ballot question. Even voters who shared an initial response rarely arrived at it for the same reason. "Undecided" reflected a temporary position, not the underlying values shaping it.

Modern political analytics operates on an entirely different scale. As political scientists David Nickerson and Todd Rogers noted in their landmark 2014 study on campaign big data, survey responses from 1,200 individuals are routinely leveraged to project preferences onto millions of voter records. The 1,200 supply real answers; the millions receive algorithmic assignments. That statistical scaling is technically impressive, but it is no substitute for democratic dialogue.

Empirical research reinforces why independent voters defy simple modeling. A North Carolina study by J. Michael Bitzer, Christopher A. Cooper, Whitney Ross Manzo, and Susan Roberts revealed that unaffiliated registrants consistently differed from major-party registrants in both attitudes and voting behavior. Among more than 207,000 unaffiliated voters who participated in three consecutive presidential primaries (2012, 2016, and 2020), nearly half—47 percent—voted in different parties' primaries across those cycles. While primary participation does not dictate general election behavior, it demonstrates an electoral fluidity that static party-lean scores in commercial voter files invariably blur or erase.

Similarly, a 2026 study by Philip Moniz, Kyle Endres, and Costas Panagopoulos confirmed that commercial policy predictions deteriorate rapidly when a voter’s views diverge from orthodox partisan lines. While their study excluded nonaffiliated voters and thus did not prove independents are uniquely unpredictable, it demonstrated that partisan heuristics are unreliable guides to specific policy views.

Data vendors themselves recognize these vulnerabilities. A GoodParty.org campaign guide cautions candidates to validate commercial scores through real door-to-door conversations. That is sound advice for the campaign buyer; the profiled citizen deserves a fair mechanism to inspect those claims as well.

Giving Citizens a Voice in Their Dossiers

Campaign access to public voter files and vendor accountability to the electorate need not be mutually exclusive. States can balance both by explicitly bringing commercial political data brokers under state consumer data privacy frameworks. Such rules should apply strictly to commercial vendors licensing compiled dossiers to multiple campaigns, leaving internal party and volunteer databases distinct.

A clear precedent already exists. In a 2022 formal opinion, the California Attorney General affirmed that qualifying inferences drawn by a covered business fall under the California Consumer Privacy Act’s (CCPA) "right to know"—even when those inferences stem from public records. This precedent provides a legal framework for treating commercial inferences separately from the public voter rolls used to generate them.

A comprehensive, administratively feasible transparency framework—mirroring consumer data protection standards in credit and employment reporting—should establish four baseline standards:

1. Data Provenance Labeling: Every field in a political file must clearly state its origin: administratively recorded (e.g., official turnout), self-reported (e.g., donor records or direct survey responses with dates), commercially appended (e.g., credit bureau or vehicle data), or modeled (e.g., ideological or candidate scores).
2. Score Plain-Language Standards: Predictive metrics must disclose what they measure, explain their numerical scale (a score of "60" is meaningless without context), and report their production date.
3. Right of Inspection and Correction: Citizens should have secure, verifiable portals to review their profiles and correct factual errors in commercially appended source records. (Factual errors originating in official election records would remain subject to standard correction procedures through local election authorities.)
4. Contested Inferences: While a citizen cannot simply demand that a vendor delete a proprietary model, a voter should have the right to register a formal dispute against modeled labels. Whenever that profile is licensed, a dispute flag—or the voter's self-reported affiliation—must accompany the record.

Vendors can satisfy these requirements by disclosing general modeling methodologies and input categories without disclosing proprietary source code or model weights. State privacy regulators already oversee similar disclosure standards across credit and employment reporting.

Accountability to the Citizen

These protections will not eliminate campaign missteps or stop every targeted political ad. They will, however, give citizens a practical mechanism to inspect and challenge consequential commercial assertions made about their civic lives.

Forty years ago, the administrative voter file was used simply to locate citizens so campaigns could talk to them. Today's commercial dossiers decide what to expect from citizens—and whether they are worth talking to at all. That shift demands accountability not just to the political clients buying the data, but to the sovereign citizens described within it.

Independent voters do not need to be easily predictable to deserve democratic respect. Americans deserve to be engaged as citizens who can speak for themselves, not as commercial estimates engineered to speak for them.

Kent C. Price is a retired political science professor with four decades of experience in applied public‑opinion research, including extensive work on large two‑thirds revenue elections in California.

New Zealand faced the prospect Sunday of weeks or even months of political wrangling after a knife-edge election that produced no clear winner.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon declared his right-wing coalition has a mandate to form the country's next government -- while conceding results remained too close to call definitively.

Preliminary results have his National party winning the most seats, giving them a very slim majority of just two if combined with their coalition partners, the populist NZ First and the libertarian ACT.

"New Zealanders have given us the biggest seats in parliament, forty-two seats as it stands today, and a pathway to form a government," Luxon told journalists on Sunday.

"There's no doubt about it. We've got a mandate."

He said his National party had done well given the war in the Middle East and subsequent global fuel shock that has been widely blamed for New Zealand's economic difficulties.

"What we achieved, I think, was pretty good last night."

Opposition Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins has joked that while the country had spoken, "it may take us a little bit longer to figure out exactly what it is that you've said".

But the results show he has only a very narrow path to power for his left-wing grouping, which also includes the Green Party and the Maori party.

- 'Everyone's over politics' -

Luxon will run a caretaker government until the final votes are announced on November 27.

"I think everyone's over politics, so let's all just have a bit of a break for the next three weeks," he said.

That final tally will include nearly 400,000 so-called "special votes" -- among them around 100,000 votes cast overseas and by people within New Zealand but outside the local electorate in which they live.

Historically, special votes leaned left, potentially giving the Labour or Green parties an additional one or two seats at the expense of the right-bloc.

This week's knife-edge poll drew intense attention to the country's minor parties, in particular the upstart centrist Opportunity Party.

Under the country's mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) system, voters must tick two options -- a general party list as well as an individual member to represent their electorate.

Results put Opportunity winning seven seats, potentially giving the party a kingmaker role in the next government.

Luxon said Sunday that while it was "unlikely" he would need the party to form a government, he was willing to work with leader Qiulae Wong on issues on which they agree.

"We can work with our current coalition partners to form the government," he said.

"What I've also said, though, is that there is a need for us to go forward in cross-party collaboration in a lot deeper way."

Many Kiwis are struggling to make ends meet -- the price of basic goods remains stubbornly elevated, and unemployment at its highest in more than a decade.

bes-oho/tc

Chuck Schumer is confident he’ll continue leading Senate Democrats after they captured the chamber’s majority in dramatic fashion on Tuesday. Not all Democrats are so sure.

During a post-election gathering Saturday in Washington, DC, two Senate Democrats — Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan — declined to back Schumer for the job, and Slotkin said she would not rule out running herself. A third Senate Democrat who appeared at the conference, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, said he planned to support Schumer but echoed calls for Senate Democrats “to do things differently than we’ve done before.”

“There should be no coronation of the next Democratic leader,” Van Hollen said. “I’ve said very clearly that we need to have a discussion in the Democratic caucus, we need to understand what the Democrats are going to do with this new responsibility and these new powers, and nobody should get a blank check without a full understanding of the caucus as to where we’re going to go.”

Van Hollen said he has urged Democratic colleagues to “withhold commitments” until Schumer outlines his vision. And Slotkin said Democrats should not give Schumer quorum — the minimum attendance required to conduct Senate business — until he answers their concerns.

Schumer remains a heavy favorite to become majority leader. He has no declared opposition and needs to win only majority support from Senate Democrats, whose ranks are poised to grow to at least 54 seats after Tuesday’s elections.

But Saturday’s comments showed how even Democrats’ sweeping midterm victories could not paper over their long-simmering disagreements about who is best to lead them. That debate may be especially elevated among Senate Democrats looking at potentially running for president in 2028, a group that includes Van Hollen, Slotkin and Kelly.

In addition to the reservations among the returning Senate Democrats, several incoming freshmen have vowed not to back Schumer for leader or at least withheld their support for now. Scott Colom, the Democrat in a Senate race in Mississippi that remains too close to call, has also been noncommittal on Schumer, calling for more geographic diversity among party leadership.

In an interview with The New York Times that published Friday, Schumer said he did not expect to face any opposition.

“Our caucus is focused on moving forward,” Schumer told the newspaper’s “The Daily” podcast. “Everyone’s very happy with what we all did.”

Several Senate Democrats have already said Schumer has earned his right to return as their leader after the better-than-expected outcomes in Senate races. Kelly added his name to that list Saturday.

“Chuck worked really hard to get this majority, so my plan is to support him,” Kelly told reporters after his appearance at the post-midterms summit, Crooked Con.

Slotkin struck a different tone as she addressed the conference, which booed and jeered at the mention of Schumer’s name throughout the day.

“If he wants to be majority leader, what is your plan for the first 100 days?” she said. “How are you going to do things differently so that Democrats get their sh*t together? If you can’t produce that, I’m not voting for you.”

Asked whether she would run for the top job, Slotkin said it was “an open field, and I think those conversations are happening rapidly.”

“I’m not ruling anything out,” she said.

Van Hollen, for his part, suggested he was unlikely to run, even though at least one incoming freshman — Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan — has said he could support him. Van Hollen told CNN on Saturday that running for majority leader was “not my focus” and that he was instead weighing a 2028 presidential campaign. He said he has not heard “directly” from Schumer since the midterms but expected to speak to him in the coming week.

Slotkin, who has long called for a “new generation of leadership,” said she hopes incoming freshmen follow the example she set in her first House run in 2018. She campaigned promising not to support Nancy Pelosi for House speaker — and followed through when she voted present in the speaker’s election in January 2019.

“These people who just won in tough places, I think, will have a hard time, both as leaders but also just as politicians, going back on their word as their first thing that they do,” she said.

The Trump political juggernaut has hit a wall. But while Democrats are celebrating, the battle for America's political future is only just beginning. 

In the year America celebrated its 250th birthday, voters delivered a once-in-a-century election result signalling a break from a president who has dominated US politics for the past 10 years.

Donald Trump, to mark both the US semi-quincentennial and his own 80th birthday in June, put on a cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House. At these midterm elections, he was repeatedly body-slammed by voters. This was a very personal repudiation of a pharaoh-like figure who had tried, implausibly, to convince Americans they were enjoying a "golden age".

It represented the rebuke of a leader with authoritarian leanings who has sought to turn the White House into something akin to a palace, and Washington into a monument to himself.

Needless to say, exit polls showed voters were angry about the spike in fuel, food and, in rural states, fertiliser prices caused by a trade war that Trump framed as a "Liberation Day". The conflict with Iran had turned every gas station in America into a billboard for the Democrats. But alleged government corruption was also prominent in voters' minds, even higher in some exit polls than cost-of-living concerns.

Ahead of the election, a poll by Fox News showed alleged government corruption was actually the number one issue.

The billionaire president and his family have been getting ostentatiously richer while many Americans are suffering personal recessions.

Hard-pressed voters eyed decadence in the gold-bedecked walls of the Oval Office when their own quality of life was deteriorating. When Trump flew into the heartland to campaign, he did so aboard a $400 million Boeing 747-8 luxury airliner gifted by the Qatari royal family.

This wasn't simply an "it's the economy, stupid" election. It was also about the self-enrichment of Trump, his family members and acolytes such as Elon Musk, the world's first trillionaire. American voters were rejecting the excesses of an increasingly imperial presidency. Ending his campaign in front of the renovated Reflecting Pool in Washington seemed to many voters the perfect expression of his narcissism and tone-deafness.

Fantasy politics for the Democrats

More so than winning this election through the attractiveness of their policies, Democrats became the beneficiaries of the anti-Trump backlash. And theirs was a landslide win. The stuff of fantasy politics.

In regaining control of the US Senate, they took deep red Republican bastions: Texas, Kansas, even South Carolina.

In the House of Representatives, Democrats will enjoy at least a 50-seat advantage. It is the kind of lopsided congressional majority not seen since Barack Obama's victory in 2008 which took a couple of successive waves to achieve. The cumulative vote in all the House seats, which gives the national picture, showed the Democrats had close to a 13-point lead over the Republicans.

To put that in historical perspective, in the famed "Republican revolution" of 1994 the GOP beat the Democrats by 6.8 points.

For the first time in 16 years, the Democrats will control a majority of governorships. These include noteworthy racial firsts. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman ever elected governor of an American state. Texas will now have a Latina governor, Gina Hinojosa. Disquiet and fear amongst Hispanic voters over ICE raids helped her triumph.

Not only the landscape but the face of US politics changed. For the first time in the country's history, the House of Representatives will have a Black speaker, New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries.

Small wonder, the term "bluenami" is being used. But it is also a red meltdown.

This is the first time in the Trump era his Republican Party has been severely punished. This result recalls the post-Watergate midterms in 1974 when Republicans were punished for the transgressions of Richard Nixon. Nixon had been forced to resign the presidency less than three months before Election Day.

That 1974 election brought about a generational shift. The Class of '74 included the so-called "Watergate babies". Remarkably, 87 members of the new Congress were aged under 40.

This election hasn't produced quite such an infusion of young blood. Still, at a time when Capitol Hill has often looked like a gerontocracy, the average age of lawmakers will be significantly lower. James Talarico, the Presbyterian seminarian with choir boy looks who won in Texas, is 37. Incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff, who comfortably regained his seat in the Republican target state of Georgia, is 39. Abdul El-Sayed, who will become the first Muslim US Senator, is 42. Annie Andrews, who took South Carolina, is 46. Melat Kiros, who was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America in Colorado's first district, became the first Gen Z woman elected to Congress. She is just 29 years old.

A political realignment is on hold

What this election does not necessarily signify is a long-lasting political shift, or permanent realignment.

While the Republican Revolution of 1994 seemed to herald a period of conservative domination, just two years later Democrat Bill Clinton won his second term as president.

The 1974 midterm elections foretold that Republicans were set for a prolonged spell in the political wilderness. Yet Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, and Republicans dominated the presidency for the next 12 years.

Democrats, understandably, are joyous about the outcome of the 2026 midterms. Yet their celebrations should come with circumspection.

A poll conducted in the run-up to this election suggested 52 per cent of voters had an unfavourable view of the Democratic Party; only 29 per cent had a favourable view. For months beforehand, the Real Clear Politicspolling average showed the American public looked on the Democrats only marginally more favourably than the Republicans.

Nevertheless, this is a mighty political achievement, which raises an important question: has the curtain come down on the age of Donald Trump?

A Trump dynasty snuffed out

As always, it is dangerous to write off or underestimate Donald Trump.

Just seven weeks after the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 as Congress met to certify the 2020 presidential election results, I watched as Trump was greeted like a conquering hero at a conservative conference in Orlando, Florida. The event had the feel of a cargo cult.

Likewise, after Trump-backed Republican candidates failed to make expected breakthroughs in the 2022 congressional midterms, pundits composed obituaries for the MAGA movement which proved wildly premature.

Yet this week's results are certainly a game-changer. 

Any ambitions Trump might harbour of illegally defying the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms in office, have surely been snuffed out. The notion of Trump 3.0 is even more outlandish now. A Trump dynasty also seems more unlikely. The thought of President Donald Trump Jr taking the oath of office in 2029 or 2033 requires a giant leap of imagination.

Instead, Trump has been badly weakened. His fear factor, within a Republican Party that over the past decade has come to resemble a Trump Party, has been diminished. Signs of his waning power have come already from his Vice President JD Vance who, in a 600-word screed on social media, broke spectacularly with the president.

"The reason we lost is the war," he wrote. "The president himself said so last night."

But the president had not said so last night, and the ambitious vice president, who is eyeing a bid for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, is already trying to distance himself from a damaged brand.

In anointing his political heir, Trump might not be the all-powerful kingmaker after all. Maybe Republican presidential aspirants will not even crave his endorsement. When Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz published his own 1700-word election post-mortem on X — he described the midterms as "an ass kicking" — it did not include a single word of praise for a president who is used to sycophantic encomiums from his party.

Trump, however, still commands fierce loyalty from millions in his MAGA base. His approval rating among self-described "MAGA Republicans" is 96 per cent. Again, it is worth remembering what happened in the aftermath of January 6. Republicans could have banished Trump into the political wilderness. Instead, his grip on the party tightened. He successfully managed to purge the party of Trump critics, such as former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, and easily saw off the challenge from rivals such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primaries.

The MAGA agenda survives

This election was not only a rejection of Trump but a repudiation of his hyper-aggressive style of politics.

In Michigan, he slandered Democrat Abdul El-Sayed as a "jihadist" and "terrorist", repeatedly called him "Mohammed". But in this bellwether of bellwethers, El-Sayed won comfortably. 

The defeat of Trump acolyte, Vivek Ramaswamy, was also emblematic. Ramaswamy aired one of the most vile political attacks in US campaign history, which featured the mother of his Democratic rival, Amy Aston, castigating her daughter as a liar for accusing her ex-husband, who had been criminally charged of rape and then fled from police, of sexually molesting her as a child. Senior Republicans, including the state's outgoing Governor Mike DeWine, called for Ramaswamy to take down the ad. Trump described it as "very powerful".

Voters overwhelmingly rejected that kind of hateful politics.

James Talarico, who Trump labelled "Talafreako", made this yearning for a gentler kind of politics the centrepiece of his victory speech in Texas.

"We are tired of being told to hate each other," said Talarico. "It has been 10 years of this kind of politics, politics as blood sport, politics as trolling and owning, politics as professional wrestling."

Much of the MAGA agenda, however, will survive. Strong borders. Economic nationalism. A rejection of globalisation and frictionless free trade. The insistence that US allies must cough up more money for their own defence.

Democrats will be more wary of pushing what might be called "woke" issues. Even New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remarked in August that "Woke 1.0 was crazy".

Democrats have already made concessions to Trumpism.

This election they focused on economic issues rather than identity politics. Crucially, however, in the 11 years since Trump came down that golden escalator he has not managed to create a pre-eminent new political order.

For much of the past century, as the historian Gary Gerstle noted in his 2022 landmark study, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, US politics was dominated by two political orders.

First, the New Deal created in the 1930s by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, marked by broad consensus between Democrats and Republicans on the role of the state in regulating capitalism and providing a basic welfare safety net for the economically disadvantaged.

Next, from the 1970s to the 2010s, came the neoliberal order, based on a reduced role of government and greater emphasis on the market, which was championed by Reagan and acquiesced in by Clinton, who presented himself as a market-friendly "New Democrat".

Since the Great Recession of 2008, however, no party has managed to impose its ideas on the other, or accrued enough power for long enough in Washington to do so. Instead, we have entered what Gerstle describes as an "interregnum characterised by disorder and instability".

This election offers further proof that we remain in this liminal phase, with neither side establishing lasting dominance.

Trump believed there had been a conservative vibe shift in 2024 after he regained the presidency by winning all seven battleground states. Republicans also controlled both houses of Congress. Two years later, Trump and his party have been hammered.

Where to for the left?

In a chronically polarised nation, we are witnessing a period of unusual political volatility.

At the presidential level, three consecutive two-term presidencies (Democrat Bill Clinton, Republican George W Bush and Democrat Barack Obama) have been followed three consecutive one-term presidencies (Republican Trump, Democrat Joe Biden, Republican Trump).

Not since the late 19th century, when Grover Cleveland lost the presidency only to win it back four years later, have we seen the presidency switch quadrennially between the parties. Likewise, no party has managed to command Capitol Hill for an extended period. Already this century the House has changed hands five times.

In the entire second half the 21st century, during which Democrats dominated the House of Representatives, that scenario has only occurred three times. In the final 25 years of the 20th century, the Senate changed majority control just three times. In the first 25 years of the 21st century, it has flipped eight times.

Now we will see divisions not only between the parties but within them. Progressive Democrats will point to the success of El-Sayed in Michigan, and the energising effect of Zohran Mamdani's 2025 mayoral victory in New York, as proof that a left-wing version of economic populism can succeed at the national level.

Among the Democratic victors on Tuesday were a record number of candidates backed by, or affiliated with, the Democratic Socialists of America. Centrists will cite the breakthrough in Texas of Talarico, a moderate Christian Democrat, and the mega-church pastor Adam Hamilton in Kansas as evidence that the party should occupy the middle ground.

All the party's winning presidential candidates since World War II — Harry Truman, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — have been pragmatic centrists.

The orthodoxy that only a moderate can win the White House will now be challenged, and contested, ahead of the 2028 presidential election.

Where to now for the right?

On the right of politics, what remains of the more traditionalist wing of the Republican Party might argue the party has to move away from its Trump branding and become more recognisably Reaganesque. Reagan was a free-trade internationalist who backed traditional conservative governance, compared with Trump's populist nationalism that embraces economic protectionism and rejects global alliances and institutional norms.

MAGA diehards will remain faithful to Trump, though some will argue he has not been MAGA enough, especially by launching an unpopular war with Iran. Think-tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation which produced the controversial policy blueprint Project 2025, have lurched a long way to the right. So, too, have media channels such as Fox News and NewsMax, whose "angertainment" business models are based on stoking culture war outrage.

So, it is by no means inevitable that the party will move back towards what is sometimes called the sensible centre.

How could the Republicans remain viable if MAGA voters withdrew their support? Some are now likening the Trump Republican Party to the Trump casino empire. That did not end well.

If, moreover, Texas becomes the new California — the Golden State voted Republican in every presidential election between 1968 and 1988 but Democrat ever since — then it could face a prolonged shut-out from the White House. Try gaining an Electoral College majority without at least one of the country's two most populous states.

Looking to the future, the youth vote does not augur well for the Republicans. Nationally, in House elections, exit polling suggest 66 per cent of voters aged 18-29 voted for a Democrat candidate.

Always, though, we must be wary of over-extrapolating in the aftermath of what look like transformative elections. I have seen too many victorious parties over-reach and then face push-back from voters. Remember the heady talk after Barack Obama's election in 2008 that suggested he would usher in a phase of post-partisanship, and even post-racialism.

As a correspondent in the US at the time, I witnessed how the country's first African-American president was followed into the White House by the untitled leader of the Birther Movement, who placed himself at the head of the anti-Obama white backlash. As Obama himself described the shift after Trump's victory in 2016: "History doesn't move in a straight line. It zigs and zags."

Democrats have authority to scrutinise

For the past decade, anti-incumbency has so often been the driver of American politics. That, and the negative partisanship that comes with it. Voters often cast their ballots against a party rather than for a party. In these midterms we saw it again. In a 50/50 nation, where for much of this century the results of elections have been far narrower than on Tuesday night, politics has been marked by deadlock not dominance.

What we do know for sure is that the Democrats have just won the authority to scrutinise and investigate. When the new Congress meets on January 3, expect Democratic lawmakers to use those subpoena powers to the full.

Robert Garcia, the top ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which tends to spearhead congressional investigations, has said already that allegations of Trump family corruption will be his main priority, with the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, coming under closer scrutiny. On election night, he posted two words on social media: "LAWYER UP!"

Garcia also released a statement pledging to take on "the Trump Crime Family, corporate corruption, DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and ICE abuses, and the cover-up of the Epstein files". Hakeem Jeffries has accused the "Trump Cartel" of "massive corruption" and warned: "We are going to hold the crooks accountable."

With a majority in the House, the Democrats could for a third time impeach Donald Trump (previously, only two presidents — Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton — have faced the charge of committing high crimes and misdemeanours). But winning a conviction in the Senate trial that would ensue requires 67 votes, the kind of super-majority the Democrats are not close to achieving. Besides, attempts to punish Trump have often worked in his favour, by allowing him to claim a political form of martyrdom.

The Democrats could also try to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for waging military hostilities without congressional authorisation, which is a violation of the 1973 War Powers Resolution. Moves are already afoot in what is now a lame duck Congress, spearheaded by the anti-Trump Republican Thomas Massie, to trigger an impeachment vote against Hegseth as soon as this week.

Accountability and action

The newly-elected 120th Congress, whose members will take their seats in the new year, could become known as the Accountability Congress. But House Democrats will also want to make it an Action Congress, by passing bills, on healthcare especially, that meet the concerns of struggling American voters — even though they could be blocked by Republican filibusters in the Senate, which require 60 votes to break, or vetoed by the president.

Ethics reform is an area the Democrats could highlight, such as beefing up financial conflict-of-interest rules in the executive branch and placing limits on presidential pardons. The post-Watergate Congress placed a heavy emphasis on ethics reform, with the creation of the Office of Government Ethics and independent Inspectors General within federal departments.

Among the challenges for the Democrats will be to restore the power of Capitol Hill, which has been the home for the past two years of an incredible shrinking Congress.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has sought to expand the power of the presidency and to govern almost by decree through signing so many executive orders with the flourish of his Sharpie felt tip pen. Already, he has signed 292 executive orders during his second term, well over 100 more than Joe Biden issued during his entire four-year term.

The conservative-dominated Supreme Court, while sometimes checking his power, has helped him create a more maximal presidency. In Trump v Slaughter, the court ruled in June that the president can fire the heads of independent regulatory agencies at his behest, without being required to show "cause". 

In its landmark Trump v United States ruling in 2024, brought in connection with the criminal charges he faced over his attempt to overturn the presidential election, it decided presidents possess substantial immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts taken while in office. Among the three branches of government, Congress has felt like the third wheel.

The founding fathers, however, had a very different power ranking in mind. The legislature was supposed to be the most powerful branch of government, which is why Congress was vested with the power of the purse. The presidency was meant to be second. The Supreme Court a distant third.

Democrats on Capitol Hill will attempt to restore parity with the executive branch, especially over trade policy, and to overtake the Supreme Court. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts has been a more influential figure than the departing Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. Incoming House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries will attempt to restore the sway of a role traditionally regarded as the second most powerful government position in the country.

Trump is no lame duck

After the Republicans' shellacking at the polls, it will be tempting to describe Trump as a "lame duck" president, the usual descriptor for an incumbent whose party loses control of Congress and cannot seek re-election. With Trump, that would be an act of folly. Normal nomenclature does not apply to such an abnormal president.

Trump will not be a lame duck until the final second of the final minute of his presidency. In his last supposed lame-duck phase, from his defeat at the 2020 election to inauguration day in 2021, he propagated the "Big Lie" about Joe Biden stealing the election, amassed his supporters in Washington and did little to restrain them when they first started storming the US Capitol.

Trump still has enormous executive powers at his disposal. He remains the commander-in-chief of the world's most powerful military. He still has control of the FBI and Justice Department, and could use both in an attempt to take vengeance on political opponents. Overcoming a presidential veto requires a two-thirds super-majority in both houses of Congress, which alone the Democrats cannot muster. Trump has issued 12 vetoes over the course of his two terms; congress has only overridden one of them.

By appointing as his new White House chief of staff arch loyalist Stephen Miller, the hardline architect of the ICE immigration crackdown, Trump is signally there will be no retreat from MAGA. Heading the West Wing is a figure who Trump will regard as a wartime consigliere, an aggressively combative figure in upcoming battles with Congress.

Often, if presidents are thwarted on the home front by an obstructionist Congress, they look to make their mark in the foreign realm. Trump could press for a peace deal in the Ukraine war, on terms that would likely be highly favourable towards Vladimir Putin. He could renew the kind of summitry with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, which became such a feature of his first term diplomacy. 

He might agree to carve up the world into spheres of influence as part of a grand bargain with Putin and President Xi Jinping of China, which would require concerns in Taiwan. Trump has made no secret of his desire for regime change in Cuba.

As the dust settles after such an extraordinary electoral event, it is worth noting what did not happen in the 2026 congressional midterms.

For sure, Donald Trump tried to disrupt the polls beforehand, by attempting to limit postal voting and demanding, unsuccessfully, that states surrender their voter registration lists to the Justice Department in Washington.

Yet worries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, or even federal troops, would be deployed at, or in the close vicinity of, polling stations on Election Day did not eventuate. Nor has Trump tried to interfere with the count. The Republican defeat, of course, was too big to rig. In a closer election, disputed contests could easily have become flashpoints. But it is worth pointing out that, although he has distanced himself from the results, he had not disputed them.

In the year America marked its 250th birthday, the country faced a democratic test, and passed.

Nobody was assassinated during the campaign. Election Day passed without violence. On January 3, when the new Congress is seated we will not see a repeat of the American insurrection that unfolded on January 6, 2021.

That alone, in a country as divided and fractious as America, is cause for celebration.

Credits

Words: Nick Bryant

Illustrations: Lindsay Dunbar

Photographs: Reuters

Editing: Catherine Taylor

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Democrat Scott Colom hasn't won Mississippi's U.S. Senate race, but the local prosecutor was welcomed as a historic figure Friday as he strolled through the Farish Street business district where civil rights leaders once organized.

"It's so wonderful! It's so wonderful to have Scott Colom as our representative," said Maati Jone Primm, who owns Marshall's Music & Bookstore in Jackson.

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The state is still tallying ballots that could make Colom the first Black senator from this Deep South state since post-Civil War Reconstruction. The possibility of Colom defeating Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith puts many Black voters somewhere between cautious optimism and outright celebration in a state where nearly 40% of the population is Black but the top representation for generations has been white.

"I'm so glad we are at the point where we are," said Sorie Tarawally, a 76-year-old attorney who has long known Colom's father. He called the 43-year-old candidate "the man, our messiah, our savior."

The contest remains too early for The Associated Press to call, and Colom's historic bid will hinge on a tedious process playing out in elections offices across Mississippi's 82 counties. Local officials are receiving and examining absentee and provisional ballots, called affidavit ballots, before deadlines next week. Volunteers and lawyers representing each campaign look on in anticipation of potential litigation.

Live Results: Mississippi Senate midterm election

"We're going to make sure everything is followed according to the law, and I have confidence in those local officials," Colom said. "They're doing their jobs. Got to be patient with them."

Colom said ballots tallied since Tuesday's election lean in his favor, and he chided Hyde-Smith for not explaining her strategy going forward.

"She's still our senator. Where is she? Why is she not doing any interviews?" Colom asked. "Why can't she explain what her pathway to success is?"

Hyde-Smith has not appeared publicly since election night, when she essentially declared victory despite a razor-thin margin with ballots still uncounted.

"We are not backing down," she posted Friday on social media. "This election is not over. Our team is working across Mississippi to monitor the remaining ballots and protect the integrity of the process. We will see this through to the very end!"

The precise number of outstanding ballots is not known

The pool of outstanding ballots includes absentee ballots, which can be counted in Mississippi as long as they are received by Tuesday, five business days after the election. The rest are affidavit ballots, which are cast at the polls when there's a glitch: Perhaps the person's name was not on the rolls or the person did not have proper identification, or a poll worker determined the person's identification did not precisely match the name on the list.

Citizens who had identification issues have until Tuesday to address those matters in person at their local elections office. For people who were not on a precinct's rolls, local officials can verify a person's status using previous records and information on the affidavit that person filed when filling out a ballot. That person typically has no responsibility to come to a local elections office; ballot status can be found on the Mississippi secretary of state's office website.

Counties have until Friday to certify complete results to the secretary of state.

Mississippi law has no provision for a statewide recount. Campaigns could seek court orders, usually county by county, seeking to examine ballots.

The seismic effect would be in Mississippi, not Washington

Democrats already have won control of the Senate, so the result in Mississippi would not change the balance of power in Washington.

But it would mark a seismic shift in the state, where white conservatives have dominated the Statehouse and congressional delegation for nearly 150 years. Through Jim Crow segregation and the Civil Rights era, those leaders were nearly all Democrats. After the Civil Rights Movement, they overwhelmingly shifted to Republicans. For Black Mississippians, the result was the same: a lack of proportional representation at the top levels of state government and in Washington.

Colom was initially viewed as a long shot, and it wasn't until late October that Senate Democrats' top campaign group started spending on advertising to support him. But the midterms revealed a broad backlash against redistricting efforts in the South that were aimed at boosting Republicans and, by extension, reducing Black representation.

Primm's bookstore, where Colom visited on Friday, opened in the 1930s and is recognized as the oldest Black-owned bookstore in the U.S.

She said the Farish Street neighborhood still represents Black Mississippians' "first migration, from the plantation to the city." Having Colom there as a potential senator "makes us so proud, and it gives us someone to aspire to. Our youth need to see the possibilities for their lives, and we do when we see our next senator from Mississippi."

READ MORE: The election brought a wave of historic firsts. Here are some groundbreaking winners

As he campaigned, Colom emphasized that he can represent all Mississippians, and he said President Donald Trump's policies — the war with Iran and tariffs, especially — cut across all demographic lines. He even celebrated the extended ballot counting process as a benefit to the state's 2.95 million residents.

"I'm so glad the national press is getting to see the beauty of our state," he said.

But Colom and his Black supporters also have never ignored the significance of his candidacy as a Black man.

"We are motivated by the gross inequalities we have seen in society and how only one side seems to benefit," said Tarawally, who was born in Sierra Leone and arrived in the Deep South to attend law school at the University of Mississippi. "So, we want a person who speaks to our benefit."

Colom ended his campaign with an ad set at the Jackson home of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was gunned down in 1963 in his own driveway, dying in front of his wife and children.

"It's a powerful reminder of the sacrifice to gain the ballot, and nobody sacrificed more than Medgar Evers and his family," Colom said Friday.

"What was important to me about that ad is we didn't ask people to vote for me. We just talked about the sacrifice, talked about the story," he continued. "We just wanted that to be the closing ad because I wanted that to be the last message that the people of Mississippi heard."