{"id":14986,"date":"2026-11-10T10:54:53","date_gmt":"2026-11-10T13:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipa-aip.org\/?post_type=statement&p=14986"},"modified":"2026-11-10T10:58:57","modified_gmt":"2026-11-10T13:58:57","slug":"psl-statement-the-democratic-wave-and-the-fight-ahead","status":"publish","type":"statement","link":"https:\/\/ipa-aip.org\/ar\/statement\/psl-statement-the-democratic-wave-and-the-fight-ahead\/","title":{"rendered":"PSL Statement: The Democratic wave and the fight ahead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Party for Socialism and Liberation<\/em>, November 4, 2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voters handed Donald Trump and the Republican Party a crushing defeat on Nov. 3. Democrats took both houses of Congress, flipping Senate seats in Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, where James Talarico became the first Democrat elected to the Senate since 1988. Alaska and Mississippi may be called for the Democrats too. It was the same story in the House, where Democrats won in districts Trump had carried by 15 points in 2024 (like Kentucky\u2019s 6th) and even newly gerrymandered districts in North Carolina and Alabama. The national popular vote in the House is projected to show a Democratic margin of about 13 points, the largest margin for either party in 50 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The election was a referendum not just on Trump as an individual but on the reactionary MAGA agenda to shred democratic rights and put the whole country on the platter for the billionaires. The country voted against not just the price of groceries and fuel, but against an unprovoked war on Iran. In the NBC News exit poll, 62% of voters said Trump made the wrong decision in starting the war, and about three-quarters called it a crucial or major factor in their vote. Even the \u201ccost of living\u201d issue has to be placed in class terms to be properly understood. The issue is not just economic hardship in the abstract, but that this pain comes at a time when billionaires\u2019 wealth has surged upwards by 32% in just the last year. The S&P 500 is up 28% since Trump\u2019s election. While the recession is already here for huge sections of the working class, the country\u2019s 977 billionaires are doing better than ever before. Everyone can see that the mass introduction of AI will only deepen these trends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump and Fox News have tried to spin this loss, deflecting blame onto individual Republican candidates. But the electoral map provides an indisputable single picture. According to a Washington Post analysis, voters moved at least 15 points toward the Democrats in every kind of county: whether rural, suburban or urban, racially diverse or majority-white. MAGA\u2019s supposed inroads among Black, Latino and Gen-Z voters \u2014 which many exaggerated to begin with \u2014 proved to be a short-lived and passing phenomenon. The shifts were stark in areas that have been wrongly called \u201cTrump Country\u201d for the last decade; now that term can be retired. Democrats won Senate seats in South Carolina, Iowa, Kansas and Texas, and may even win Mississippi; Trump carried every one of those states by 13 to 23 points in 2024. This means they swung between 17 and 26 points toward the Democrats in just two years time \u2014 a stunning reversal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The vote in rural states and regions requires special attention. Farm bankruptcies have jumped 85 percent over the last two years, largely due to Trump\u2019s tariffs, combined with the bungling and chaotic response to other nations\u2019 retaliatory tariffs. Then the Iran war choked off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, so diesel prices soared by nearly 70 percent and fertilizer and farm equipment, the other key input costs, followed. \u201cCompared to last year, our fuel bill is $50,000 higher,\u201d Kansas farmer Vance Ehmke told the Hastings Tribune. When grocery prices became a political problem for consumers, Trump quadrupled the quota for low-tariff Argentine beef, hitting cattle producers a second time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more detailed election results will allow for more in-depth local analysis but already these swings disprove the  caricature of all Trump voters as some sort of solid fascist bloc. In 2020, millions of working people voted for Joe Biden in hopes he would make life more bearable. Instead, the COVID-era social support programs expired, consumer prices soared anyway, and in 2024 many of the same voters gave Trump a chance to deliver on his promises to improve their lives. Now he\u2019s failed them too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The limits of Congress and the Democratic Party<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Anyone disgusted by Elon Musk\u2019s attempt to buy the elections will delight in his failure. Anyone who has suffered under this administration, or has been outraged by MAGA\u2019s extreme racism, will no doubt enjoy watching Gina Hinojosa unseat Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and watching South Carolina\u2019s Black working class turn out in droves to remove Darline Graham, appointed to the seat after the death of her brother Lindsey Graham. That Mississippi may end up with its first Black Senator since 1881 is historic, and itself a searing indictment of white supremacy. It cannot be disconnected from the recent upsurges in response to the police killing of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley and the apparent cover-up in the Nolan Wells case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the feeling of satisfaction of seeing MAGA defeated must not turn into illusions about the role of Congress or the Democratic Party that now holds it. Put simply, there is no indication that the Democrats have either the will or the program to fight on the issues that drove mass turnout: ending the war, bringing down prices, ejecting the billionaire class from power, defending civil rights, or stopping ICE terror. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t just about Democratic politicians \u201cselling out.\u201d The obstacles are built into the capitalist political system. Only a third of the Senate faces voters in each election cycle exactly so that these defenders of the capitalist system can\u2019t be dislodged by any voter \u201cwave.\u201d The filibuster survives as an internal procedural rule (not in the Constitution), and the lifetime-appointed Supreme Court sits above it all, for the same reason. In addition, nearly $12 billion was spent on these midterms \u2014 that\u2019s not just to win the race, but to purchase influence with whoever comes into office. The 50 largest donors contributed almost $2.8 billion of it, and OpenSecrets found that 1 percent of donors supplied 98 percent of the money given to outside groups. Small donors contributed less than 10 percent of the overall midterm funds raised. Big Money sets the stage for Election Day, and then kicks right back into motion the very next day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three times in two decades a wave election has handed the Democrats control of Congress: after the 2006 midterms, then in 2008, giving them 59 Senate seats in Barack Obama\u2019s first term, and then again the White House and both chambers in 2021. Each time they promised universal health care, immigration reform, climate action, a $15 minimum wage, a law protecting abortion rights, not to mention universal childcare, a permanent child tax credit, student debt relief, the protection of voting rights, and so on. Each time a section of the party exercised a veto on behalf of corporate America. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The political system is riddled with such \u201cveto points\u201d precisely to frustrate the popular sentiment for transformative change, and the Democratic Party, as a ruling-class party, always produces the figures ready to use these vetoes. This cycle of failure and frustration is what opened the road for Trump. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The longer historical record tells the same story. For the 48 years from 1933 until 1981, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress the entire time, except for brief windows from 1947 to 1949 and again from 1953 to 1955. Yes, those majorities passed the Wagner Act and Social Security in 1935, in the wake of the 1934 general strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco. But the same majorities let Southern Democrats filibuster an anti-lynching bill to death in 1938 and kept Jim Crow intact for another generation, until the civil rights movement forced the issue. What Congress delivered in terms of progressive reforms always depended on the forces built outside it, and it\u2019s a body that has not delivered anything substantial in favor of the working class in half a century. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The midterm vote was a gauge of mass consciousness and it measured the anger of the masses. But it did not magically transform this undemocratic political system into something new. On all the issues, super-majorities want the Iran war to end, want to stop AI-induced job destruction, want to win Medicare for all, and oppose ICE\u2019s campaign of terror. In a democratic system, the mass turnout yesterday would translate into immediate policy change. But that\u2019s not going to happen. Not one ICE detainee will be released because of this result. Trump can still order strikes on Iran at any second. The billionaires still control all the board rooms that set prices, wages and the introduction of job-destroying technology. What appears as a \u201cdemocracy\u201d is in fact the dictatorship of capital, and that is as true today as it was before the midterms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That makes it all the more necessary for people who voted for change to immediately start demanding it from the incoming Congress. The new Democratic majority has real powers if it chooses to use them. It could pass Medicare for All and legalization for the undocumented, and could make Trump veto them in public. Even if he does, this would create real legislative momentum that the next president couldn\u2019t ignore. Congress controls the power of the purse, and could hold up budgets until it claws back the money Republicans pushed through by reconciliation in June, which funds ICE through the end of Trump\u2019s term. It could use its investigative power, as the Church Committee did with COINTELPRO in 1975, to expose this administration\u2019s surveillance of activists and deportation of people for their political views. This is just scratching the surface of what can be demanded. People voted for real change, not to have one thousand meaningless committee hearings full of theatrical speeches made for social media and fundraising videos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the appeal of socialism<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Notably, Trump\u2019s anti-communist ads did not stop candidates who call themselves socialists, nor did it scare away Democratic voters. This attack line has become less and less potent, and voters are tired of it. A 2025 Cato Institute\/YouGov poll found 62 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 view socialism favorably, and when you look across all ages, the total number of people who hold such a view now numbers 100 million. The fog of anti-communism has lifted in a big way, even if the definition and understanding of socialism remains quite weak \u2014 in part because of the incorrect definitions given by many who proclaim themselves \u201csocialist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor did the issue of Palestine scare away voters. Quite the contrary. What last year was waved away as \u201cexceptional\u201d New York City, when Mamdani was elected, was repeated elsewhere. Abdul El-Sayed defeated Mike Rogers in Michigan to become the first Muslim elected to the Senate, and he carried real movement energy against the Gaza genocide and ICE, while speaking to working-class concerns. On Election Day, Trump himself announced the end of U.S. military aid to Israel in the coming period. This is just an accounting trick, planned with Netanyahu himself, meant to hide full support for the apartheid state, but it does reflect the real change in consciousness that has taken place across the entire electorate, largely due to the work of the Palestine solidarity movement. That movement\u2019s nonstop organizing  and advocacy, its constant presence in the streets and on social media, has created such a powerful argument that it now impacts even the Republican base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the progressive and democratic socialist wing of the Democratic Party scored important victories, the strategy of changing the Democratic Party from within is nothing new. Throughout history the party has changed its insurgents far more easily than they have changed it. Elected without an independent base, they must observe a discipline set by party leaders and donors, starting with votes for Hakeem Jeffries as Democratic leader. On November 1, the New York Times reported that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is urging fellow democratic socialists toward a \u201cculture of welcoming\u201d over the \u201cpurity-minded litmus tests\u201d of the Gaza movement. This is ridiculous. Every political trend, from right to left, must draw lines. The question is whether backing the party leaders who armed a genocide falls inside them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Operating inside a party that by design does not hold members to its platform is what allowed Manchin, Sinema and now John Fetterman and Haley Stevens to do as they please. We must also recognize the Democratic Party, as an imperialist party, is wholly devoted to the idea of the encirclement of China and Russia, US domination over trade routes and energy supplies in the Middle East, the exploitation of Africa for its natural resources, and the management of Latin America as its \u201cbackyard.\u201d It was the Democrats in power that led the country into the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and, more recently, the US\/NATO-instigated war between Russia and Ukraine, and the genocide in Gaza. This isn\u2019t an incidental aspect of the Democratic Party, and for progressives to advance anything domestically, they\u2019ll be first asked to go along with the needs of the Empire. That\u2019s where AOC\u2019s \u201clitmus test\u201d comment is really headed.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Independent campaigns and the road ahead<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

PSL candidates ran against that machinery, and made significant inroads in the working-class with mass grassroots canvassing gaining new levels of visibility for the socialist program. Greg Levy, the PSL member who ran for Senate in Ohio, has about 94,500 votes, 2 percent of the total, despite exclusion from every debate and a smear campaign built on a Republican-funded PAC that promoted him without his consent. Joe Tache in Massachusetts faced the same debate exclusion, even while polling over 10 percent and meeting all the fundraising thresholds. He still built a campaign with the feel of a social movement, and brought around 55,000-60,000 votes after closing his campaign with a 700-person rally in Boston. Andre Easton, running for a House seat in the Bronx, is nearing a 9 percent total \u2014 which is the highest percentage of any House candidate representing a socialist or communist party since the early 1940s. Meanwhile, Frank Lara won his election for the school board of South San Francisco, campaigning on an anti-billionaires platform to put the needs of public school students and teachers first. The Peace and Freedom Party\u2019s Alexander Kraft, who was endorsed by the PSL, brought in a strong 39% running for mayor of El Cajon, in San Diego County, against a Republican incumbent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PSL candidates are distinguished from those running in the Democratic Party because they are beholden to the platform and perspective of the Party; it is not something they can cast to the side for short-term convenience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of these campaigns was run vigorously, and will produce many lessons that now must be studied and expounded further, which we will do in the coming days. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across the board, tens of millions went to the polls to politically punish Trump, and they succeeded. But they were also dreaming of peace, justice and good jobs \u2014 a dream that the capitalist system will not deliver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rebuilding a socialist movement in the historic heartland of anti-communism is no simple task. But the gap between what the majority wants and what this system will allow is exactly where the socialist movement can grow. That is what the PSL will keep doing, 365 days a year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14987,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":true},"tags":[16,21],"statement-type":[24],"class_list":["post-14986","statement","type-statement","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-anti-capitalism","tag-organization","statement-type-member-statement"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipa-aip.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statement\/14986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipa-aip.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statement"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipa-aip.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/statement"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipa-aip.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipa-aip.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipa-aip.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14986"},{"taxonomy":"statement-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipa-aip.org\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statement-type?post=14986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}