An American law exchange student at Bocconi looks at the 2026 U.S. midterms, in which Democrats won both the House and the Senate. The piece covers likely reasons why voters swung against Trump’s party, from the Iran war and gas prices to the cost of living, and why record spending and redrawn maps didn’t change the outcome. It looks at what the results mean for Washington, for Trump and the 2028 race, and for Italy, where Meloni’s opponents claimed the result as their own. Also included are takeaways from Bocconi’s reception of the midterms.
Midterms are beautiful, and the system works, but the question remains whether it only dreams in total darkness. This decade has brought billionaire spending into state elections as much as nationwide races, gerrymanders pushed by the president and ugly campaigns, too. In the weeks before the vote, the question wasn’t just who would win, but whether the loser would accept it. The Trump administration sought to sequester ballots in California and sued to block certification in Alaska. On Tuesday, November 3rd, the world, watched Americans prove they cannot be bought. A[MK1] nd Milan, the city that has swept me up during my semester on a law exchange, watched with it.
For many, uncertainty marked the start of Election Day. A Democrat scorned endorsed a Republican. A Republican candidate aired an attack ad so controversial that it gained intra-party condemnation, and the president defended it. All of it played out in the foreground of a far-right movement rapidly gaining popularity worldwide. Going into Tuesday, Democrats held zero Senate seats in the states Trump had won three times over. By Wednesday, they had six, and five came from states he carried by double digits just two years ago.
In the all-night spectacle, Democrats broke the Republican trifecta–its control of the White House and both chambers of Congress–and with it, the president’s free hand over federal spending and oversight. The party flipped Senate seats in Maine, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. The Kansas seat had been held by a Republican for nearly a century. South Carolina hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1998. Roy Cooper is North Carolina’s first Democratic Senate winner since 2008.
Five states that Trump won by more than 10 points in 2024 voted for Democrats this time, and Democrats are on track for their largest House majority since 2008. Democrats in Texas took both a Senate seat and the governor’s office, winning statewide for the first time this century and giving the state its first Democratic governor in more than 30 years. And these are just some of the headlines from election night 2026.
Trump set the temperature in 2016 and him sensationalizing politics has been stoked by the opportunistic right ever since. However, as termed by political scientist Christopher Wlezien, voters have a “preferred policy temperature” in mind and the thermostatic electorate set the dial back. Louisiana Republican and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson conceded the House but insisted that Americans “made the same decision that has been made in all but two midterms in the last century.” Trump made the same historical point to Fox News, though Johnson’s count was off by one midterm: the president’s party actually gained House seats three times over the last century. In other words, voters nearly always punish the party in the White House in the midterms. However, Johnson’s not-so-carefully crafted attempt to downplay the loss for Republicans ignores that this result went well beyond the historical norm. Voters rarely follow the trend so emphatically: for only the fourth time since World War II have both chambers flipped in a single midterm, and this year the result was set against a historic House margin and Trump’s exceptionally low approval rating, 38% – on track to be the lowest for any president at a midterm, already lower than George W. Bush’s rating when his party lost both houses of Congress in 2006.
At the same time, Americans may be experiencing buyer’s remorse. Across the globe, broad disenchantment with politicians and the elite has bolstered far-right populists. But populism is not a step on the road to an ethnonationalist rightwing, and it is not only the right’s domain. Economic frustration at home and a war abroad proved toxic for Trump’s party. Fox News’s Sean Hannity put this notion into words: it would have been “100 percent” a different night without the war, and Trump acknowledged that voters were probably not ready “for the short-term consequence of the price of gasoline.” Trump’s comment downplays the impact of the war, which halted oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz and set off a global energy crisis. The swing to the left was made by nearly every part of Trump’s coalition, including white working-class voters in Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania, a dramatic shift from the 2018 swing driven by suburban women. Counties with many 18-to-34-year-olds swung toward Trump by more than seven points in 2024 and to the left by nearly 23 this year. Hispanic voters were among the night’s biggest swings: one-third of Hispanic voters backed Republican House candidates, while roughly 4 in 10 voted for Trump two years ago.
The midterm results indicate a combination of the fading appeal of Trump’s vanity-over-pragmatism approach to politics and nationwide ideological shifts. At the end of both roads sits a divergence from the MAGA playbook. Even in defeat, Trump reached for the old script, blaming Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s loss on his having become a “RINO.” But the results don’t support him. Voters ousted Republicans who embraced Trump and those who kept their distance alike, and Abbott lost to a Democrat, not to someone further right. Trump-era politics have had strangleholds on pockets of the country for the last decade, and the results of the midterms highlight the failure of several moves from the Republican playbook:
- The many beat the money. Tech billionaire Elon Musk gave $474 million to Republicans in the 2026 midterms. $168 million went to the Senate Leadership Fund and its predominant backing of Ken Paxton. Seminarian James Talarico won anyway. Per Talarico’s campaign, he raised $64 million from July to September, with 97% of donations under $100, in sharp contrast with Musk’s spending. A crypto super PAC spent about $46 million to stop Sherrod Brown. Billionaire money flowed to Democrats too: Mike Bloomberg gave over $84 million to Democrats in September and October, Reid Hoffman gave $16.5 million to back Talarico, and self-funded billionaire Rick Jackson spent $200 million and lost to Bottoms. Talarico won, Brown won, Bottoms won, and money didn’t decide the outcomes, whichever side spent it.
- Gerrymandering attempts backfired. The White House-driven redraw started in Texas and spread to North Carolina, Ohio and Florida. A 6–3 Supreme Court ruling, split along ideological lines, weakened the Voting Rights Act and pushed the redraws into Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana, but the Democratic surge overwhelmed some of the new GOP seats. In Alabama, Rep. Shomari Figures won a district Trump would have carried by 14 points.
- No more low-blows. Playing dirty doesn’t work unless you’re Trump, and hateful rhetoric was rejected. Vivek Ramaswamy ran an ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother. Trump called it “powerful” and Vice President Vance defended it, while Republicans such as Governor Mike DeWine called it “deeply troubling.” Acton won and became Ohio’s first elected female governor. Abdul El-Sayed faced a last-minute endorsement of his Republican opponent by the moderate Democrat he had beaten in the primary and Trump’s repeated claims of him being a “jihadist.” In his victory speech, Dr. El-Sayed gave his answer to supporters who asked why he never called his attackers racist or hateful: they were targeting “the very idea of America.” He became the first Muslim elected to the Senate.
- Candidate quality vs. party. When Trump was asked by Fox News’s Bret Baier whether he regretted backing Ken Paxton and Darline Graham, the latter being appointed to her late brother Lindsey’s seat by Trump, he disregarded the ‘quality’ question and answered with a grievance instead: he “just wasn’t a fan” of Paxton’s primary rival, Senator John Cornyn, whom he called “a disloyal guy.” Paxton’s thumping reads as a rebuke of corruption, and both losses underscore the depreciating value of Trump’s endorsement.
- Collins’ hold on Maine is broken. Susan Collins, who had repeatedly beaten Democratic challengers, conceded to Troy Jackson. Jackson cast her as an enabler of Trump.
The midterms provided lessons for Democratic hopefuls and hammered home that populist anger over prices is not the right’s to keep. Six Democratic Socialists of America members won House seats, their victories marked by economic populist policies like universal healthcare and childcare but also rooted in more polarizing stances, such as abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Moderates won too: Roy Cooper in North Carolina and Bobby Pulido in South Texas. Sherrod Brown’s hammered pocketbook concerns like affordability, championed the interests of the working class and avoided giving airtime to the alienating language at the heart of outsized culture wars. He returned to the Senate and showed that talking to voters is more successful than talking at them.
House Democrats further demonstrated awareness of the unifying message from voters: they have been elected to make life more affordable and hold the Trump administration, in all of its unpredictability, accountable. The ambitious 100-day agenda signals that the message has been received and the new class will focus on delivering caucus-wide campaign promises on these popular issues. But while Democrats gained favor from voters who wanted to deliver a blow to the far-right radicals, they shouldn’t read an economics-first win as a rejection of socially liberal positions; after all, DSA candidates won on both.
These midterm elections had some other notable records too
- Governors: Democrats hold a majority of governorships for the first time in two decades. Only three Black governors had ever been elected. Four more won: Bottoms, Crowley, Donalds and Ford.
- Women: Karrin Vasby Anderson calls it the “female presidentiality paradox”: a woman qualified enough to be electable becomes unelectable when voters want change, and some argue it helped sink Kamala Harris in 2024, but on Tuesday, in a change election if there ever was one, voters made Keisha Lance Bottoms the first Black woman elected governor in American history and Amy Acton the first woman elected governor of Ohio. In all, at least 17 women will serve as governors in 2027, and at least 100 Democratic women will serve in the House.
- Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, is the first woman elected to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate.
- Deb Haaland, a former Interior Secretary, is the first Native American woman elected to lead a state.
- Gina Hinojosa is Texas’s first Latina governor.
Let’s attempt to analyze what exactly this means, and what it entails:
- Real power shifts. 71% of voters, including 41% of Republicans, said there isn’t enough congressional oversight of the presidency. When the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027, Democrats will have veto power over Trump’s judicial and administration nominees and will lead the committees that can subpoena officials. Rep. Robert Garcia, poised to chair the Oversight Committee, had a warning for the administration: “Lawyer up.” Senator Ron Wyden’s one-word statement was “Subpoenas.”
- Republicans at a fork. Will 2028 hopefuls move to the middle, or double down to energize Trump voters? The White House’s line, “President Trump’s resolve to stop the Radical Left is only going to become stronger. Buckle up,” suggests doubling down. In an indication the party itself still might not know, JD Vance, the heir apparent who had embraced the losing playbook all election season, sought distance from the unpopular conflict with Iran in a lengthy statement on Wednesday: “The reason we lost is the war.”
- The Democratic 2028 bench:
- Ossoff’s race was called 15 minutes after polls closed, putting him in the top tier, though he has disavowed a 2028 run and says he will serve his full term.
- Governor JB Pritzker won a rare third term amid 2028 speculation.
- Wes Moore said voters were “exhausted” with the country’s direction under Trump.
- No imminent paradigm shift. The Democrats didn’t break through on a new platform; they primarily ran against Trump and his policies, and their work is cut out for them to make significant progress with Trump still in the White House. The shocking wins–and they are still shocking–showed a repudiation of Trump’s unpopular policies and the allies who enabled him. The Republican Party still has cause to celebrate, and it would be unwise to ignore the handful of razor-thin races, or the millions who still back Trump.
- Popular constitutionalism at the ballot box. Musk’s record $474 million backed far more losers than winners, and if donors conclude such spending doesn’t pay, voters may have done at the ballot box what the Court wouldn’t in Citizens United. Larry Kramer calls this popular constitutionalism: the Constitution belongs to “the people themselves.”
- Republican bright spots. Sen. Ashley Moody held Florida, and Byron Donalds became Florida’s first Black governor. Tommy Tuberville won the Alabama governorship with Trump’s backing. Additionally, as of Thursday, AP had not called Alaska or Mississippi.
Living in Italy, I feel obliged to cover how these midterms were received in the country. “Meloni, sei la prossima!” The comment by Member of the European Parliament Ilaria Salis translates to “Meloni, you’re next!” The left-wing MEP also called the result a “sconfitta cocente per Donald Trump…l’alleato-padrone degli pseudo-patrioti italiani ed europei,” or a “crushing defeat for Donald Trump…the ally-master of Italian and European pseudo-patriots.” Other Italian leftwing politicians celebrated the results, focusing on unity’s defeat of division: Matteo Renzi, the leader of Italia Viva and a former prime minister, commented that no division within Italy’s center-left was worth more than unity, and that if Democrats entered the midterms divided, Trump would be celebrating.
The midterms were not just a horse race in Italy. (In)affordability issues sank Republicans, and Milan saw large protests over the cost of living and stagnant wages in mid-October. Other issues remain globally relevant. Europeans have paid for the Iran war at the pump too, and AI and data centers were on the ballot: Talarico and Hinojosa campaigned on regulating AI data centers, while Acton said she wanted data centers to “pay their fair share.” Further, on the night his party lost Congress, Trump told Fox News that Italy “may not even survive.” The next morning, Meloni waved off reporters’ questions about his defeat: “We’ll talk about America another time”.
Just as in the United States, rebuking Trump at the ballot box does not do away with the caveat that Trump still holds the levers, and Democratic Congress doesn’t automatically make for a more accommodating administration. The tariffs will most likely stay. After the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s emergency tariffs in February, the administration moved them under Section 301 of US trade law. Congress can’t easily take that power away. Overriding a veto takes two-thirds of both chambers. Confindustria estimates that if the current tariff structure stays, Italian exports could lose over €16 billion a year in the medium term. Markets cheered anyway, and Italy’s FTSE MIB rose 1.2%.
There were reactions even at the university level. At Università Bocconi, Aleph Analisi Strategiche, “Bocconi’s only Geopolitics, Security and Political Economics student Think Tank,” hosted “Midterms: The Day After” with speakers Andrea Quartarone, Piero Stanig and Giunia Gatta. The event filled a classroom at 18:15 on a Wednesday with a mix of Americans, Italians and beyond. The event was not focused on either celebration or caution, but offered attendees the chance to hear three professionals’ analysis of various facets of the election cycle: campaign media, voting trends, and implications.
In brief, one speaker analyzed the shifting nature of campaign media and the use of AI to produce envelope-pushing ads in California’s gubernatorial election. Another professor analyzed shifts in voting trends and presented two possible futures: a return to traditional conservatism, and his colleague’s prediction of a faction more radical than the current right that could consume the party. And the final speaker closed with a discussion on the return to decency this election cycle presented and how the excess of funds, with projected spending at $12 billion, may chill hefty political donations. Attendees asked about the likely repercussions on globalization efforts, whether this rebuke of the right would hold, and more.
To conclude, Trump called it “[j]ust a point in time,” “a mood [was] in the air…” It was, and that’s the point. Through rigged maps, nearly half a billion dollars of Musk money and a president testing every rule, the votes were cast, counted and accepted. Mobilized, energized and informed voters made the system work, and election workers, state officials, advocacy groups and judges did too. The system may only dream in total darkness, but Tuesday showed it can work there too. The next test will come in January when the new Congress is sworn in, and in 2028 when no one can pretend Trump is on the ballot.
Hello! My name is Kenza, and I am an exchange student from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California studying law. I took two years off between undergraduate school and pursuing my JD to work and travel. I tutored adjudicated youth, lived in New Zealand, worked on farms and worked as a chef. I like to hike, read and am vigilant about staying informed on new legal issues, social matters, and the overlap between the two. Writing is how I digest and analyze my surroundings, and I am glad for the community this form of expression contributes to and builds.