The Nov. 3 midterm elections were a mass vote against Donald Trump, his war on Iran and his terror campaign against immigrant workers. At the ballot box, the two-party system gave working people only one way to strike at the administration, and tens of millions of them took it. The party that collected those votes, the Democrats, will now work to bring that anger back under control.
Engels called universal suffrage, the right of every adult to vote, the “gauge of the maturity of the working class.” He compared it to a thermometer, in a passage Lenin quoted in The State and Revolution. An election shows where workers are breaking with the capitalist parties and where those parties still hold them. That reading, and the openings it gives to organize workers for struggles beyond the ballot box, matter more to communists than the count of votes and seats.
On Nov. 3, the thermometer registered three things. Working people broke with Trump’s party in the states it called its own. They voted against the war, against ICE and against the billionaires. And with no party of their own on the ballot, they cast that vote for the Democrats, a capitalist party that will use it to cool the temperature.
Where workers broke with Trump’s party
The Republicans lost the House of Representatives in a landslide and lost the Senate as well. Democrats took seven Republican-held Senate seats and lost none, for a majority of at least 54 seats, with Mississippi still too close to call. In the House, Democrats are headed for their biggest majority since 2009.
Texas, the biggest state under Republican rule, fell from top to bottom. Gov. Greg Abbott, seeking a fourth term, conceded to Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who will be the first Latina governor in the state’s history. James Talarico routed Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general hand-picked by Trump, to become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas since 1988. Democrats also won the elections for lieutenant governor and attorney general and will control the Texas state government for the first time since 1995. In California, Democrat Xavier Becerra is set to become the first Latine governor since 1875. After years of Trump’s racist demonization of immigrants, above all Mexican immigrants, the two biggest states will be led by the children of Latine families.
The vote broke through in states the corporate media have called Republican strongholds for two decades. Kansas elected its first Democratic senator since 1932. In South Carolina, pediatrician Annie Andrews defeated Trump-endorsed Darline Graham, who was appointed to the seat after the death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham. Republicans spent heavily to paint Andrews as a radical for defending transgender youth and abortion rights. She won. The “red state” picture of the working class did not survive the night.
The vote also opened offices long closed by racism and bigotry. Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first Black woman governor in the history of the United States. Deb Haaland of New Mexico and Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota will be the first Native women to serve as a governor and a senator. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire will be the first openly gay man elected to the Senate.
Republican-drawn district maps, carved out to lock in Republican House seats, broke under the weight of the vote. In North Carolina, where Republicans held 10 of 14 seats, Democrats may now win a majority of the delegation. Rep. Richard Hudson, who ran the Republican campaign to hold the House, lost his own seat there.
A vote against the war
The election was a verdict on the war on Iran, which the Pentagon launched on Feb. 28.
The war serves the banks and monopolies that rule the United States. A fifth of the world’s seaborne oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula. One purpose of the war is control over that passage and the oil and gas of West Asia. Whoever holds it has a hand on the energy supply of the whole world.
The oil monopolies want that control. Wall Street needs the oil trade to keep running in dollars. The arms makers — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics — are paid for every missile fired.
For a capitalist system in decline, war is how its rulers hold on to the world they dominate.
The war is also making them rich. In the six months after the war began, more than 50 major United States oil and gas companies nearly tripled their profits. Chevron’s refining profits more than quadrupled in the third quarter. Days before the vote, Trump bragged that United States energy companies are “making a freaking fortune.” Higher gasoline and diesel prices have cost the country about $1,100 for every household, a Brown University study estimates. Arms maker RTX has a record pile of orders as the Pentagon restocks the Tomahawk missiles it fired at Iran.
That is why the war has the backing of the whole ruling class, and why large majorities of both parties vote the Pentagon its budget year after year.
Six in 10 voters told exit pollsters the war was the wrong decision. Three in four said the war weighed heavily on how they voted. Even among Republican voters, about one in five said the war was wrong.
Voters recoiled from the United States–Israeli genocide in Gaza and from the Pentagon’s bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, on the first day of the war. Medics say a second strike hit the rescuers as they reached the children. The attack killed 168 people.
They also felt the war at the gas pump and the grocery store. Diesel hit a record price in September. In North Carolina, Republican candidates had to admit the war was ruining farmers.
The Pentagon kept bombing right up to the vote. On Nov. 2, the eve of the election, United States warplanes struck Qeshm Island, Iran’s largest island, which sits at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, and the Gulf monarchies, which rule at the pleasure of the United States, were told to prepare for new operations as soon as the voting was over.
Eight months into the war, the Pentagon has not broken Iran. Iran holds the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is losing the war, and on Nov. 3 the voters told him they want no more of it.
Trump’s answer came the same night. As the results came in, he told the New York Times that going to war with Iran was “a very wise decision,” and he posted that he would have won “IN A LANDSLIDE” if he had been on the ballot. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told senior staff that anyone who expects the administration to take its “foot off the gas” over the next two years is mistaken.
Immigrant workers fought back
This was the first national election since federal immigration agents killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January, and since ICE raids and killings spread from Texas to Maine. Communities answered with mass protests, rapid-response networks and neighborhood defense. On Nov. 3 they answered at the polls.
More than half of all voters opposed the gestapo tactics of ICE. Six in 10 Latine voters and seven in 10 voters under 30 backed Democrats for the House. In the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico, Democrats won by wide margins three House seats that Trump carried in 2024.
In Michigan, Trump’s racist, Islamophobic campaign against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed backfired. El-Sayed beat Republican Mike Rogers to hold the state’s open Senate seat and will be the first Muslim senator. Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign lost Michigan in large part because it was tied to the United States–Israeli genocide in Gaza. El-Sayed rose to prominence by denouncing the genocide and the war on Iran.
Against the billionaires
Voters also struck at the tech billionaires. Communities across the country have fought the tech monopolies over land, electricity, water and the tax breaks and government money handed to them. Of 41 ballot measures on data centers in 10 states, about two dozen that restrict or block construction appear to have passed. Hinojosa campaigned on keeping a moratorium on data center construction in Texas, the center of the buildout. The new governors of Ohio and Georgia, who defeated billionaire candidates, also favor restricting construction.
The results were uneven. In California, a tax on the wealth of billionaires appears headed for defeat. Silicon Valley billionaires led by Google co-founder Sergey Brin raised more than $379 million to kill it and outspent supporters 250 to 1 on advertising. For them it was pocket change. The tax would have raised tens of billions of dollars for health care, food assistance and education.
Where the capitalist parties still hold
Trump went into Election Day with a lower approval rating than any sitting president on an Election Day in nearly two decades. But voters gave the Democrats no vote of confidence either. Most voters had a negative view of both parties. Two in three said the economic system favors the wealthy, and more than half expect life for the next generation to be worse than it is today.
The results shocked the Democratic Party leadership as much as the Republicans. For two years, Democratic leaders told working people that Trump was too powerful to stop. The vote showed a population far to the left of the Democratic Party and determined to strike a blow at the administration.
The vote also split the Democratic Party. Five members of the Democratic Socialists of America won House seats in New York, Colorado, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and the number of socialists in the House will go from two to seven. Two of them unseated longtime Democratic incumbents in the primaries: Darializa Avila Chevalier beat Rep. Adriano Espaillat in upper Manhattan and the Bronx, and Melat Kiros beat 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver. They condemned the genocide in Gaza, called for ending military aid to Israel and refused money from corporations and the pro-Israel lobby, and some called for abolishing ICE. None has committed to backing Hakeem Jeffries for speaker. In Washington, D.C., democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George won the mayor’s office, and in Los Angeles, democratic socialist Nithya Raman is running even with Mayor Karen Bass.
Gaza runs through the split. In May, three in four Democratic voters told a New York Times/Siena poll they oppose economic or military support for Israel. In July, House Democrats divided almost evenly on a measure to end aid to Israel. Jeffries voted to keep the aid flowing. In a New York City primary, Brad Lander, who has accused the Israeli government of genocide in Gaza, beat Rep. Dan Goldman, the candidate backed by the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, by more than 30 points.
The party establishment showed which side it is on. The weekend before the election, Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens, who lost the Michigan Senate primary to El-Sayed, pulled her endorsement over his stand on Israel and endorsed the Republican, Mike Rogers.
The Democrats are the first to cash in on the anger at the polls, and their leaders will move to contain it. The working class is moving left, and that movement reaches into the Democratic Party. But the party’s leadership answers to Wall Street and the Pentagon. The same banks, oil companies and arms makers that profit from the war fund both parties, and a Democratic majority answers to them as surely as the Republicans did. Nothing in the class interests it serves gives the new Congress a reason to end the war.
What blue waves deliver
Voters have handed Congress to the Democrats in waves against war before.
In 1964, voters buried Barry Goldwater, the Republican who campaigned on widening the war in Vietnam, and gave the Democrats two-thirds of both houses of Congress. Within months, Lyndon Johnson began bombing northern Vietnam and sent United States Marines ashore at Da Nang, and the Democratic Congress paid for it.
In 1986, Democrats won all of Congress as the Iran-Contra scandal broke over Reagan’s secret arms sales to Iran to fund the Contra mercenaries making war on Nicaragua. The Democratic investigation that followed left Reagan in office and never took up impeachment.
In 2006, voters threw the Republicans out of Congress over the war in Iraq. Nancy Pelosi took impeachment “off the table,” and in 2007 the new Democratic Congress voted George W. Bush the money for his “surge” of tens of thousands more troops.
Liberal commentators now promise investigations, subpoenas and impeachment. In his first term, Trump refused to comply with the subpoenas of the last Democratic House, and the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States gave him broad immunity for official acts. Even with a majority, Senate Democrats are far short of the two-thirds needed to remove Trump or override his vetoes.
Congress has one power over the war that takes only a majority: the power to refuse to pay for it. A Democratic Congress used that power in 1973 to cut off money for combat in Indochina. It did so only after the Vietnamese had defeated the Pentagon and the antiwar movement had filled the streets, the campuses and the barracks.
The war still has to be stopped
Working people voted against the war. The White House says it will not let up.
Engels wrote that on the day the thermometer of the vote shows boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists will know where they stand. The thermometer is not at boiling point yet. On Nov. 3, it rose sharply against the war, against ICE and against the billionaires. The heat it measured came from outside the ballot box. It came from anger at a war that made the oil and arms monopolies rich, from the resistance of immigrant communities in Minneapolis and beyond, and from a generation that refuses to fight for Wall Street and the Pentagon. A Democratic Congress will not turn that heat into an end to the war. Working people, organized in the workplaces and the streets, can.
Join the Struggle-La Lucha Telegram channel