It’s pretty rare (I can’t really remember the last time) that elections in this benighted country were so satisfying. A Democratic “rout” as the New York Times put it, that leaves the Democrats solidly in control of Congress. A Democrat elected to the Senate in South Carolina and Kansas! A Black Democrat currently leads by a few dozen votes in the Senate race in Mississippi against the incumbent! And I’m particularly happy for my friends in Texas, where polls actually understated support for the Democrats for Senate and Governor, who both won decisively (despite the scumbag Elon Musks’s pouring two hundred million-plus into that race). (Note that in Texas, that poster boy for the Texas Taliban, the vile Daniel Patrick, was also defeated in the Lt. Governor race, a very important position because of its influence on legislative agendas in the state.) Indeed, the margins of victory will make the typical “fraud” cries of the Trumpistas implausible.

Could Trump prove to be the prelude to a “third reconstruction” as it were, rather than the dawning of American barbarism?

One may hope, but then I remember my Achen & Bartels: the least informed voters decide elections, and negative news (including economic news) near an election is particularly salient for the outcome. After all, Trump won in 2024 because of post-Covid inflation that was wrongly attributed to Biden and which “magical thinking” led ignorant voters to believe Trump would solve. But Trump really has caused inflation and rising prices with his idiotic tariffs and war of aggression against Iran. Every gas station in the country might as well have had a neon sign above the gas prices blinking, “Trump sucks.” No amount of billionaire-funded advertising can compete with that salient reminder of what a disaster Trump has been. (I am sure at the margins the rampages of the ICE thugs and Trump’s brazen corruption didn’t help, but as with 2024, it was salient economic facts that drove the results.)

Whether this fortuitous outcome translates into a third reconstruction will depend on what the Democrats do with their new political power. And here it is important to remember that not all Democrats are alike. Some of those newly elected Senators are genuine social democrats or “New Deal liberals” in the Bernie Sanders mode, ready to wage open class warfare in response to the clandestine kind the Republicans have been waging: in that camp, I’d put el-Sayed in Michigan, Jackson in Maine (a genuinely working class guy who dispatched the longtime and pathetic incumbent Susan Collins), Talarico in Texas (recall), and, of course Sherrod Brown, who was returned to the Senate in Ohio. (The new Texas Governor, Hinojosa, a former labor union lawyer, is in that mold too.) Others are more conventional, less bold: Hamilton in Kansas, Cooper in North Carolina, Turek in Iowa, for example.

At a minimum, the new Democratic majorities need to immediately put forward legislation to end the war of aggression against Iran and rein in Trump’s reckless tariffs–then let Trump veto that legislation, and let the Republicans in Congress go on record refusing to vote to override that veto. The Republicans need to own this economic mess if 2028 is to yield an even more substantial change. (That will also require that the Democrats in 2028 not put forward one of their fake, corporate PAC candidates like Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom, but I’m getting ahead of the storyline here.)

Trump has, so far, “accepted” the results (I guess he has to given the magnitude), and is rationalizing it as resulting from the fact that he wasn’t on the ballot. Let us hope this self-deception suffices for his disturbed psyche. And let us really hope that the Democrats don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in 2027!

ADDENDUM: Today’s huge U.S. stock market rally might be due to the fact that the market was pricing in the risk of political deadlock and turmoil, but I expect it’s also because the profit seekers believe that a Democratic Congress will rein in Trump’s destructive economic policies, while being unable to meaningfully raise taxes on individuals and businesses.