What just happened? Eight takeaways from our event on the US midterm elections

Why did Democrats win so big? What do Americans want from the next Congress? And what do these results tell us about the 2028 presidential election? These were some of the questions at the heart of a special event we organised in partnership with the Rothermere American Institute (RAI) at the University of Oxford.

The panel, moderated by RAI’s director Adam Smith, included political journalist Molly Ball, podcaster Galen Druke, professor of US politics Ursula Hackett and our own director, Mitali Mukherjee. In this summary piece you’ll find insights on the way news consumption influenced the result, the impact at state level, the ongoing realignment in American politics and the reasons why US elections are much more open than in the past. Here are eight takeaways from the event.

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1. Why did Democrats win so big?

“A wave is indiscriminate,” said Molly Ball, describing the broad national swing towards the Democratic Party that has resulted in its control of both bodies of Congress, as well as a swathe of state-level and local wins.

“The reason we reach for these hydrological metaphors is because a wave is indiscriminately destructive. It takes out everything in its path, and that is what we saw in this midterm,” Ball explained. “[This happened] whether you were a good candidate or a bad candidate, whether you were a centrist or a left-wing Democratic candidate. Or, in some cases, just some teenager who decided on a whim to put their name on the ballot.”

But why did Democrats win so decisively? Several panellists put Donald Trump at the heart of the result. “It was about the alleged betrayal of the American electorate by Donald Trump, a president who very clearly promised to bring down prices and then took various actions that contributed to inflation continuing above targeted levels,” said Ball. “A president who very explicitly promised not to start new wars, including explicitly not to go to war in Iran, and then did exactly that.”

“America has gotten used to voting against people, not for people,” said Galen Druke, comparing the Democrats’ defeat in 2024 with Republicans’ rout two years later. “In 2024 Americans used Trump to punish a failed Biden administration,” he said. “Kamala Harris was not a good candidate, but was in an unwinnable situation once she was slotted in for Joe Biden. This time around, Americans are using Democrats as a tool to punish Donald Trump.”

2. Why did Republicans do so badly in the South?

One of the brightest spots for Democrats was their candidates’ rise in Southern states. They won back governorships in Georgia and Texas, and flipped Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and potentially even Mississippi. Some of these results can be attributed to the quality of some of the candidates, who took moderate positions on issues such as immigration or climate change. But rejection of Trump’s most radical policies and African American turnout played a big role in the election too.

The most extreme example is Mississippi, a state where Donald Trump won by 20 points just two years ago and which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1982. At the time of this writing, votes are still being counted, with the Democratic candidate ahead by a wafer-thin margin.

“Mississippi was really not on anyone’s bingo card,” said Druke. “What’s important about Mississippi is that the electorate is 40% black. So it’s really easy to get to 40% in Mississippi as a Democrat. But it’s really hard to get a majority because the white electorate generally tends to be Christian, and some of the most inelastic voters in America are white Christians.”

Inelastic voters are those who tend to always vote for the same party, regardless of the circumstances. This means that elections depend on which side manages to bring more of its voters to the polls. “We saw on Tuesday night that there was essentially close to presidential level turnout amongst black voters, and something like 80% of presidential turnout in counties that were overwhelmingly white,” said Druke, who thinks this is what may have produced such a stunning result.

3. Wasn’t redistricting supposed to help Republicans?

Since Trump was reelected in 2024, six Republican-led states introduced changes in their electoral districts to try to create some partisan advantage. According to panellist Ursula Hackett, who just finished a book on the impact of redistricting, most of those changes either didn’t have the intended impact or even backfired (as in Florida), creating a more favourable playing field for the opposite side.

“The extent to which Republicans have failed to capitalise on those very explicit efforts to inject partisan bias into these maps is extraordinary,” she said. “Some of these efforts can be described as a dummy-mander, a situation in which not only do you fail to gain the expected benefits from the gerrymander, but it can also backfire on your party. We are now able to say the Democrats have positively gained because of this Republican redistricting.”

4. Did news consumption influence results?

The Reuters Institute’s director, Mitali Mukherjee, said many of the Democratic candidates emulated New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani in his use of social media to connect to voters where they are.

According to the Digital News Report 2026, 50% of Americans use social media for news, up from 27% in 2013 and more than any other news source. This figure is even higher among those aged 18–24 (67%) and among those on the left (68%). “Across 30 of the 48 markets we track, a majority of people now access the news via social media”, Mukherjee said. “In many ways this has a democratising nature.”

Mukherjee also pointed to the Institute’s recent research on how audiences perceive news coverage of a few contentious issues. Across the world, our data suggested people were unhappy about news coverage of conflict, immigration and climate change.

As the chart below shows, dissatisfaction cuts across the political spectrum with most right-leaning and left-leaning Americans critical of how news organisations report on these six issues. The right is especially unhappy about coverage of Donald Trump. The left is especially unhappy about the way the news media report on climate change.

5. On the future of MAGA (and the MAGA media landscape)

Panellists stressed the election might be a milestone in the evolution of the most Trumpian section of the American media landscape. Mukherjee mentioned the Institute’s recent research on impartiality, and how almost half of our US respondents said they preferred news that didn’t take any sides.

“[The rise of right-wing partisan influencers] has been masking this silent majority, a bulk of people who genuinely want to know different sides to a story. Now this MAGA movement that rose along with Trump is beginning to see some damage. You can certainly see this in Fox News’ [shrinking audience] and also on CBS News’ [shrinking trust figures].”

Both Druke and Ball highlighted Vice President JD Vance’s social media post on Wednesday blaming the Iran war for the Republicans' election losses as a sign many in the party will start distancing themselves from the administration and preparing for an open presidential contest in 2028.

“The 2028 election is going to be a battle of ideas on both sides,” Ball said. “You have a Democratic Party that has no idea what it stands for, a Republican Party that has no idea what it stands for. The map [melted] down in 2016. It’s just taken a decade for the American political establishment to come to terms with it.”

Ball pointed to a less reliable political landscape in which Democrats can’t take for granted the post-industrial states in the Rust Belt and Republicans can’t assume they’ll win every Southern state. “What is happening in the American electorate is a racial depolarisation,” she said. “People are voting less and less along racial lines, and so those preconceptions have fallen apart in an atmosphere where all of the electorate feels alienated from both parties and is sort of fundamentally up for grabs.”

6. How will these results transform the Democratic Party?

At the time of this writing, Democrats are 13 points ahead of Republicans in the race to win the national popular vote for the House of Representatives. But this doesn’t mean the Democratic Party itself is particularly popular.

“America has gotten used to voting against people, not for people,” Druke said. In 2024 the electorate punished what they saw as the failures of Biden’s Democratic administration by voting in Trump, and this year the opposite has happened.

The Democratic Party did not run on a unified national platform this year, the panellists noted, with candidates holding a wide range of policy positions, from more moderate to those taken by democratic socialists.

“This is primarily an anti-Trump election,” Hackett said. “This is an angry electorate. This is a fearful electorate, and it’s not necessarily clear which positive agenda voters want to set for these newly elected office holders.”

The panellists suggested that one possible faultline between moderate and socialist Democrats may be the US’s relationship with Israel and the war on Iran. But Ball stressed the next couple of years will be judged mostly on domestic issues: “The American public is still in pain. Nothing changed for them when the Democrats won the election, and they want to see results.”

7. What happened at the state level?

Another important, and perhaps less prominent, takeaway from the election was that Democrats won seats in state legislatures. Hackett explained that this reverses a trend established in 2010, when Republicans flipped hundreds of state legislative seats in the midst of the Great Recession and a couple of years into Barack Obama’s presidency.

Looking at ballot initiatives in several states, it also becomes clear that, despite a national rebuke of Trump, there are mixed messages regarding policy preferences, Hackett said. In Missouri, voters rejected the partisan redrawing of electoral maps, but in Maryland they approved a measure that could lead to exactly that practice, also known as gerrymandering. Similarly, some states voted to protect access to abortion, and others against its legalisation.

8. How will these results impact the 2028 presidential election?

The big question right now is what this all means for the next presidential election, a race with no incumbent on the ballot and with races quite open in both parties. Druke predicted that both Democrats and Republicans will opt for populist messages and suggested they will follow Trump’s lead in appealing to the working and the middle classes.

Which section of the electorate is Druke referring to? “The middle-income American who does not have the cultural tastes of the rich or the college-educated, of whom only 38% of Americans are, or the economic incentives of the poor, whom Democrats speak more to in terms of governmental assistance.”

Druke also argued Americans are exhausted by nastiness and division, and will want to elect “nice people”, something that was on display in some of the most successful candidates in this year’s election. “Ultimately, the most divisive campaigners were the biggest underperformers, even in the Democratic Party, on a night when Democrats did so well,” he said.

On the Republican side, and apart from Vice President JD Vance, Druke named Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and former 2024 contender; Marco Rubio, secretary of state under Trump who is reportedly preparing to resign and launch a bid for the 2028 Republican nomination; and even Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and former US ambassador to the UN.

On the Democratic side, Druke pointed to a couple of winners from the midterm elections: former investigative journalist Jon Ossoff, who was re-elected to a Georgia senate seat; and James Talarico, who won a Senate seat in Texas for the Democrats for the first time since 1994. Talarico himself is unlikely to run for president in 2028, Druke said, but he is the kind of candidate likely to do well: a moderate who opposes some of his party’s positions on some issues (immigration, oil and gas), and appears like a “nice guy”.