November 13, 2026

Divine discourse sweeps US midterm elections

topic:	Election
tags:	#US elections, #Religious Left, #love, #affordability crisis, #Democrats, #pendulum politics
located:	USA
by:	Joshua Simon

Can the Democrats’ historic win in the midterm elections last week provide a new horizon for the US and the world? With Trump 2.0 inequality and cruelty rejected at the ballot box, could there be another kind of politics that can lead the US?

The fall of MAGA (Make America Great Again) and the rise of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America); Democratic female governors in Ohio, Georgia and Texas; a remedy to post-2008 financial crash cynicism and to the political failures since; a backlash to persecution and bigotry, corruption and inequality; an acute affordability crisis producing an unbridgeable gap between US median income and political class of millionaires in the service of billionaires – commentators found in Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral success in New York City, and in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show the signs for the midterm madness: diverse, loving, defiant, hopeful, inclusive.

Let’s remind ourselves how we got here. DOGE, the Elon Musk-led ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the president’s own domestic military-like force of vigilantes, have shown the extent to which Trump 2.0 is invested in cruelty as policy and as means to achieve said policy. Faced with extreme inequality and the decimation of welfare and social programmes, foreign aid, and research funding, Americans felt the brutality of this new American carnage, through intense inequality, with the biggest layoffs and reductions of federal employment in US history, cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the elimination of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the dismantling of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), the freezing of grants for medical research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the dismantling of major foreign aid and global health programmes through the closure of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the slashing of funding for programmes under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the targeting of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices, contracts, and scholarship programmes. Mass deportations, ICE abductions and manhunts in broad daylight forced civilians to ask themselves questions they thought were of a distant past – of the age of totalitarianism.

From wishing to organising

Epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic senator-elect from Michigan, is the first Muslim man to be elected senator in the US. His victory speech was peppered with confrontational rhetoric defying the Islamophobic attacks on his campaign, for example being called a ‘terrorist’ by President Trump. He summed up the speech invoking God, saying: ‘You might have noticed I always say Inshallah, or God Willing, whenever the outcome of this race was mentioned. But today, tonight, we can turn Inshallah into Alhamdulillah.’ Praise the Lord, in Arabic. El-Sayed’s attitude towards religion is not so different from that of seemingly more amenable candidates, like Presbyterian pastor-to-be James Talarico, Democratic senator-elect from Texas, and Methodist minister Adam Hamilton, Democratic senator-elect from Kansas. They are the first Democrats to win these seats in almost a century (Hamilton) and almost half a century (Talarico). Both are of the Religious Left. Together, these newly elected senators all invoke the word of God to preach for love and equality. That is the political proposition that won the midterms for the Democrats.

Pundits were clear that it is not merely the case that the Republicans lost the House and the Senate, but that the overwhelming successes of Democrats in national and local elections last week all attest to a political change. While the soon-to-be-impeached Secretary of War (formerly of Defence) Pete Hegseth has been preaching the scripture of Pulp Fiction in his Pentagon worship service sermons, invoking a vengeful god of wrath and force, Talarico and Hamilton repeatedly quote the parable of the sheep and the goats from Matthew 25: ‘For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. […] Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ (Matthew 25:35–40).

African-American studies scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor of Princeton University described it thus in a recent interview: ‘This coalition needs to be organized. It cannot be wished into existence.’ It was made into existence through organising in street fights with ICE in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, objecting to data centres in Memphis and St Louis, in mutual aid and debt collectives, and in students’ and tenants’ unions.

What’s next?

When US tech lords stood together at Trump’s inauguration, they aligned their excessive wealth with his regime. They made it their business to be part of political repression at home and military aggression abroad. In these midterm elections, all levels of government were filled by women and men challenging the overwhelming power of tech – namely, resisting data centres and inequality. Data centres have become an environmental point of contention that allowed for unpredictable political alignments. Local coalitions, for example in Texas, brought into office a new Democratic governor, Gina Hinojosa, who will be in charge of reining in these destructive and expensive nodes of pollution and noise – excessively wasteful in energy, resources and drinking water. Musk, who made Texas his home and his business headquarters, after leaving ‘woke’ California, discovered that the $500,000 he spent on Republican candidates nationwide (a quarter of which in Texas) did not pay off.

On 20 January 2025, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, at Trump’s post-inauguration rally, Musk made a Nazi salute. Today, in Atlanta, Georgia, MLK’s birthplace, the Democratic governor-elect, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic attorney general-elect, Tanya Miller, and the Democratic secretary of state-elect, Penny Brown Reynolds, are all Black women. They will work with former documentary filmmaker and incumbent senator from Georgia Jon Ossoff, who draws inspiration for his career from the Jewish-American alliance with African-Americans in the civil rights movement.

A horizon opens now, as it did back then – what is the economic model after this tech-autocracy? What could be a project for equality and peace? How can digital and financial platforms be democratised? US politics in recent decades has developed a pendulum dynamic – either conservatives take all power or progressives do. By now it has become reminiscent of a Latin American country where authoritarians and democratic socialists fight an ongoing winner-takes-all game. Maybe Proposition 40, which was on the ballot in California to tax 5 per cent of the uber-rich in the state to finance healthcare, failed for now, but so did the conservative proposition of the abundance camp in the Democratic Party. What won was the ability to organise and localise demands for things to be otherwise everywhere. The most unpopular war without an anti-war movement, the failed US-Israeli war in Iran, opened a rupture within the Republican Party that should keep them busy for some time. For now, Stephen Miller as Trump’s chief of staff proves that the government will double down on its cruelty and aggression. Even without the Supreme Court and the presidency, Democrats are positioned to stop the pendulum and create a hegemonic project wherein some things will be just self-evident in the US from now on. As far as policy goes, this means providing public healthcare and affordability, reinstating government agencies like USAID, delivering moratoriums on data centres and rolling back ICE.

In politics, the saying used to be that ‘if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu’. With the House and Senate, the Democrats definitely have a seat at the table. Senator-elect Talarico likes to invoke Jesus in Jerusalem driving the merchants and money changers out of the temple during Passover: ‘It’s time to start flipping tables’.