We're not in Kansas anymore

America held its mid-term elections on Tuesday. On 3 November, the Democratic Party won the largest popular-vote victory for the House of Representatives since 1976 and took control of the Senate, along with numerous state governor appointments. It’s been a stinging repudiation of the Republican Party and its mercurial President, one nobody could have predicted after Donald Trump’s extraordinary comeback in 2024.

For weeks, the polls have predicted a swing towards the Democratic Party large enough to secure a majority in the House of Representatives. For almost a century, the sitting President’s party has lost momentum in mid-term elections. As a result, these pollsters’ predictions were pretty much par for the course.

However, in recent weeks, polls began predicting the Senate would flip as well. Something unheard of a few months ago. Suddenly, a remarkable shift in national sentiment seems to be coalescing. Then, within hours of the polls closing, it became clear that the Democrats would command a ten-seat majority in the Senate and a 55-seat majority in the House of Representatives. Even more surprising, deeply conservative states like Texas and South Carolina elected a Democrat to the Senate, as did Kansas, a state that hasn't sent a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years.

To quote The Economist magazine, “In today’s polarised America, it would seem impossible to build a sizeable coalition of voters who agree on anything. But President Donald Trump achieved something remarkable in America’s midterm elections: he united much of the country in rebuking his presidency.” Overnight, Wall Street has responded in kind. S&P 500 jumped 1.6 per cent for its best day in three months. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rallied 1,569 points, or 3 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 1.4 per cent.

After two years of chaos, just maybe the US has come to its senses. Of course, the road ahead remains rocky, and the USA’s polarised political landscape hasn’t gone away. However, maybe the broader population has finally seen through the Republicans’ populist politics and discovered they’d been offered a Faustian promise. Raising tariffs would never reduce inflation or restore blue-collar jobs. Likewise, alienating global allies and isolating the nation globally would never make America great again.

This week’s election gives me hope. It angered me going back through my social media, including posts in the blog last year, looking for content that immigration officials might consider derogatory towards the President. At the time, I’d read reports of people being detained or turned away at the border because of their social media content, under the guise of an anti-terrorism measure. As a result, as Garry and I prepared to fly to New York, I was genuinely concerned a fickle immigration officer would make life difficult as we entered the country.

I’d normally dismiss this sort of news reporting as a sensationalist beat-up. However, my cousin’s daughter had recently been taken aside when entering the USA. Zealous officers had searched through her mobile phone’s content before allowing her to enter. Suddenly, these astonishing news stories weren’t apocryphal. Hence, it angered me that the very nation that prides itself on freedom of speech, human rights and markets itself as the land of the free, was now a place where I no longer felt safe expressing an honest, innocuous opinion.

As regular readers know, I’ve lived in the USA and travelled there regularly for business and pleasure for more than forty years. Hence, my opinions are shaped as much by personal experience as they are by mainstream media. As the years pass, I've found it bewildering to watch parts of America morph into beacons of intolerance, bigotry, conspiracy theorists and nasty, spiteful nihilistic populism. This isn't the USA I learned about at high school in upstate New York.

It also upset me to see the Australian media, and Australians in general, care more about this week’s election than the US itself. On Tuesday, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a seat counter at the top of its masthead, tracking results for the House and Senate as they rolled in. I cannot recall an Australian newspaper ever doing this. However, I needn’t have fretted. This week’s result reassures me that American democracy, for all its flaws, can still deliver change and generate hope for the future.