US midterms weaken Republicans

The US midterm elections represented a limited ‘blue wave’ and an overall rejection of Donald Trump. Republicans were relieved their losses weren’t worse while many progressive workers and youth were disappointed the outcome was not more decisive. It came in the wake of an election campaign where Trump sought to mobilise his base by whipping up fear of immigrants and using overt racism. The Democrats focused on ‘rejecting hate’ and defending Obamacare but offered little that was concrete to working-class people.

At the same time, a number of left and progressive candidates, almost all standing as Democrats, reflected the intense desire of millions to push back against the agenda of the right by refusing corporate money and putting forward bold pro-working-class demands like Medicare for All, rent control, a $15 minimum wage and tuition-free college. A number of self-described socialists won, including Julia Salazar to the New York state senate, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, both heading to Congress. Tlaib is one of two Muslim American women elected to Congress, an historic first.

While the Democrats now control the House of Representatives, a vicious and reactionary regime is still in place in Washington. We urgently need to build a mass movement, centred on the social power of working people, that takes on the right and fights to push Trump out. In the coming months, the Democratic leadership and the new left candidates elected to Congress and state legislatures will be put to the test of rising expectations and demands.

Trump ramped up xenophobic hysteria to a new and horrific level, even for him, to drive turnout of his base. He declared the migrant caravan from Central America "an invasion" and ordered thousands of troops to the border to confront a peaceful procession of a few thousand desperate women, men and children fleeing the social chaos created by neoliberal policies promoted by US imperialism.

The Democratic leadership chose to focus on suburban districts, particularly on white women ‘with a college degree’ who had previously tended to vote Republican. On healthcare, they emphasised defending mandatory coverage of people with ‘pre-existing conditions’, a progressive element of Obamacare. But this was not combined with any bold proposal, along the lines of Medicare for All, for how to address the massive crisis in healthcare and the ongoing attacks of the Republicans.

Neither did the Democratic leadership attack Trump’s corporate tax cuts or answer the collapse of family wage jobs. Instead, the Democrats used the unprecedented diversity of their candidates as a key selling point. Showing how out of touch they are, Nancy Pelosi – who may well be Speaker of the House again – said that the Democrats will "seek common ground where we can" with the Republicans. She reiterated that trying to impeach Trump was off the agenda.

There was a massive turnout with 30 million more voting than in the last midterms in 2014. The Democrats have 232 seats in the incoming House of Representatives, out of 435, a 39-seat gain – with a few still to call – based on winning the popular vote by a 7% margin. The Republicans are on 198 seats. Since the election became in many ways a referendum on Trump this indicates that large sections of society reject his sexist and racist message. Significantly, at least 100 women were elected to the House, the vast majority of them Democrats, for the first time ever.

The Democrats also made modest gains at the state level. They flipped seven governor positions including in some key Midwestern states like Illinois and Michigan. Several particularly noxious reactionaries lost, including Chris Kobach in Kansas and the infamous union basher Scott Walker in Wisconsin. But only flipping six state legislative chambers was less impressive, partly reflecting the gerrymandering of state districts. On the other hand, Republicans expanded their Senate majority – the Senate is far less democratic in its composition given that every state has two representatives no matter how small its population.

Several outcomes were intensely disappointing to many progressive workers and youth. These included the defeats of Andrew Gillum in Florida’s gubernatorial race to the out-and-out racist Ron de Santis, and of Beto O’Rourke in the Texas Senate race by the odious Ted Cruz. Gillum and O’Rourke took a markedly bolder approach than the Democratic leadership.

The Democratic leadership is now claiming that the outcome vindicates its ‘moderate’ approach. As the New York Times put it: "The candidates who delivered the House majority largely hailed from the political centre, running on clean government themes and promises of incremental improvement to the healthcare system rather than transformative social change". It argued: "The theory – embraced by hopeful liberals in states like Texas and Florida – that charismatic and unapologetically progressive leaders might transmute Republican bastions into purple political battlefields, proved largely fruitless".

This is ridiculous. O’Rourke had an outstanding result in a state where no state-wide race has been won by Democrats in a quarter century. These and a number of other races actually show that the shift to the left seen in big cities and among young people has spread to the South.

Additional indications of the potential support for bold left policies came from some of the results on ballot measures. Florida voters restored voting rights to 1.4 million residents convicted of a felony who had served their time. Ending this utterly anti-democratic measure will benefit African Americans. Anti-gerrymandering measures passed in Michigan and several other states.

Three Republican states, Idaho, Nebraska and Utah, voted to expand Medicaid, San Francisco passed a corporate tax to aid the homeless, and Arkansas raised its minimum wage. On the other hand, massive corporate pushback defeated Prop 10, the California state initiative to expand rent control, and measures to restrict abortion passed in Alabama and West Virginia. Powerful conservative Democrat Claire McCaskill lost in Missouri, yet the state also voted to raise the minimum wage and recently overwhelmingly rejected so-called ‘right-to-work’ legislation.

The outcome of the midterm elections will broadly encourage those who want to fight back against Trump. However, the immediate pushback of the Democratic establishment against raised expectations is an indication of how the debate on the way forward will intensify. This is especially true in the context of the 2020 presidential campaign which will begin almost immediately.

There is a growing understanding among hundreds of thousands that we need a political force determined to fight for ordinary people as hard as Trump is prepared to fight for the interests of billionaires. The project of trying to reform the Democratic Party or push it decisively to the left, which has engaged a large number of young activists, is understandable but almost certain to fail. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016, in which he raised over $200 million in small donations for a pro-working class programme, pointed to the massive potential for a new independent left party based on the interests of working people and all the oppressed.

This year pointed the way with the enormous mobilisations of women, student walkouts against gun violence, and the highest number of strikes in nearly 20 years. The teachers’ revolt, concentrated in red (Republican) states, showed the potential of the class struggle to galvanise wider sections of society. They put forward bold demands, such as taxing corporate interests to fund education and reverse decades of cuts, that won mass support including among people who had voted for Trump.

In 2019 we will almost certainly see another wave of struggle. This must be combined with the building of an anti-corporate, left-wing political challenge to the establishment. That would be the beginning of putting Trumpism on the run for good.