Why the Democrats routed the Republicans in the US midterm elections

US President Donald Trump spent the run-up to the midterm elections telling Americans they should vote as though his own name was on the ballot. They believed him.

Americans on Tuesday delivered a damning verdict on the first two years of Trump’s second term in the White House, voting to give the Democratic Party control over both the House of Representatives and the Senate. 

Democratic candidates campaigning relentlessly on bringing down the cost of living wrested House and Senate seats from Republicans across the map, including in conservative states that haven’t put a Democrat in the upper house in decades. Democratic victories in Texas, Kansas and South Carolina in particular are likely to send shockwaves through the Republican Party as the full force of the blue wave makes itself felt.

Joseph Ura, the chair of Clemson University’s Department of Political Science, said that the night had been a historic victory for the Democrats. 

“All the early signs suggest that the Democrats are going to get everything they could have reasonably hoped to win,” he said.

Read moreKey US Senate results: Democrats win upper chamber with victories in Texas and Iowa

The cost of war

The increasingly unaffordable cost of fuel and food triggered by Trump’s war against Iran appears to have done a great deal to turn voters against the Republican president. 

An Associated Press survey of some 80,000 voters across all 50 states pointed to widespread frustration with the rising cost of living as a worry that working families were unable to ignore. Three-quarters of respondents described the state of the US economy as “not so good” or “poor”, with four out of five saying that inflation had caused a “moderate” or “severe” level of hardship for their own household. 

While Trump would not be the first leader to be punished for soaring prices, his imperial approach to the presidency has made it easy for Democratic challengers to lay the responsibility squarely at his feet. 

Trump’s decision to launch the US-Israeli war on Iran in February directly drove up global energy prices as Tehran effectively closed off the strategic Strait of Hormuz, severely restricting the movement of oil and liquefied natural gas through the narrow waterway. 

Trump’s tough talk on trade that set the tone for his first year in office has also failed to bring the prosperity he promised. The president’s often-incoherent efforts to make US businesses pay tariffs on foreign imports and his on-again-off-again trade war with China placed the president front and centre in debates around the country’s economic health. 

Trump's tariffs hitting US small businesses

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Andrew Gawthorpe, a lecturer on US history and politics at Leiden University, said that anger around rising energy prices seemed to have helped the Democrats make inroads into rural communities that have until now been a bedrock of right-wing Republican support.

“This swing by rural white voters away from the Republicans towards the Democrats is very unusual,” he said. “In my view it must be driven by economics and particularly energy prices. I think gas prices are a huge part of this because in the US, people who live in more rural areas have to rely on a car, and they’re very, very sensitive to the price of gasoline.”

Ura said that Democratic candidates had been largely successful in hammering home the price of Trump’s war against Iran in parts of the US that in 2024 voted for a candidate promising a more isolationist approach to foreign affairs. 

“Democrats have done very well in big cities for some time – the places where they could do better were in more rural areas,” he said. “And those are the places perhaps hit the hardest by rising prices and rising energy costs in particular. And a place where I think maybe people were particularly disappointed in President Trump breaking his promise not to get involved in more foreign wars.”

Private enrichment

The tens of millions of Americans who voted for Democrats on Tuesday also pointed to allegations of rampant government corruption as a motivating factor.

More than half the voters polled by AP listed corruption and cost of living as having been “crucial” to their decision to cast a ballot, outstripping concerns around immigration enforcement, the data centre-building frenzy and even the war on Iran. 

Read moreMidterms 2026: Georgians on the front lines of the people’s war against data centres

Democratic politicians have repeatedly accused Trump and his family of having amassed billions of dollars by pursuing policies that benefit their personal business interests. 

Trump’s second stint in the White House has certainly put money in the first family’s pockets. The president’s own financial disclosures show that he made more than $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency business deals, including income from his $TRUMP meme coin and World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm co-founded by the president and his sons. 

Read moreFamily wealth, Epstein, ‘vanity projects’: How Democrats plan to investigate Trump after midterms

Investors linked to the United Arab Emirates invested half a billion dollars into World Liberty Financial days before Trump’s inauguration last year, which the Democrats have pointed to as a model for the kind of influence-buying they allege has become rampant under Trump.  

Gawthorpe said that voters seemed to be more incensed by allegations of personal enrichment by public officials than during Trump’s first term in office. 

“Voters are much more angry about corruption when they feel that their own economic situation is bad,” he said. “They forgave Trump for the things that he did when they had the idea that he was making the economy run well for them – but when you have taken decisions that have made everything more expensive and really harmed people's economic situation, and then you're busy making yourself and your family rich in a really blatant way, two things really connect in the minds of voters.”