Blue wave? 2025 off-year elections in the former United States: false hope, and the ballad of a dying democracy

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Honest question: how elated ought we truly to be that the Democrats have swept a smattering of off-year elections held almost entirely in a few blue and blue-leaning states and districts? I do not relish being perpetually the voice of gloom—though, as an independent, I am happily no mouthpiece nor cheerleader for the Democratic Party, particularly after the disgraceful manner in which President Joe Biden was treated by his own. Far more vital than my opinion of that ineffectual rabble, however, is the task of subduing and removing from power the Christian-nationalist populists and other right-wing zealots who enable our criminal president and have debased the GOP. None of that, not even a faint suggestion of it, occurred on Tuesday.

Indeed, in one instance—namely the election of an actual Marxist zealot as Mayor of New York City (as opposed to the traditional liberal who routinely gets mislabeled as such by right-wing twats)—they have very likely galvanised the #MAGA base. You should have voted for Cuomo, citizens of Gotham. This Zohran Mamdani fellow is becoming the new emblem of why the Democratic Party can no longer command majority support in the former United States, even under the most propitious of circumstances.

How many times over the past decade have we thought something along the lines of, “Right, this is it—at last, the Trump farce is finished; he’s going down this time”? Even on the single occasion when he was genuinely defeated—the presidential election of 2020—we were denied any true sense of vindication, for Trump spent the remainder of his term propagating demonstrably false allegations of electoral fraud, before proceeding to mount a coup attempt (albeit a botched and lamentably inept one). And yet, scarcely a soul speaks of it now.

In any other era of American history—or indeed in any other modern, civilised democracy—he would have been charged with sedition and condemned to hang. Jair Bolsonaro now languishes in a prison cell for attempting the same stunt in Brazil. Plain and simple, it was an act beyond criminality, and yet not even the faintest slap on the wrist was administered to Donald Trump in the four years between his reigns of terror. If the American people could not bring themselves to compel their populist folk hero to face justice under a Democratic administration—and make no mistake, the reason that administration did next-to-nothing to stop Trump was because of fear of a mass uprising by the growing ranks of armed rednecks and assorted yokels that are holding all of us hostage—there is ZERO possibility whatsoever of it now that the tyrant has been restored. The US presidential election of 2024 represented the public’s tacit endorsement of sedition and decay—with a conspicuous torrent of old-fashioned American racism. Still, this truth is almost universally dismissed—shrugged off—even by many who claim to detest Donald Trump, and most stridently of all by those whose silence rings the loudest.

A principal reason—the predominant one—that this nightmare has persisted for so long is that the average white American despises the Democratic Party. Whatever electoral victories the Democrats secure at the national level following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 are almost invariably the product of exceptional circumstances or catastrophic failures on the part of the GOP: Watergate; the manifold disasters of the Bush 43 presidency—the Iraq War, the calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina, and the economic collapse of 2008; and, of course, one man’s historically deranged and criminally negligent mismanagement of a global health crisis in 2020. Yet every one of these transgressions by Republicans is swiftly forgiven by the American people. The electoral reckoning of 2008 gave way, within two years, to a Republican landslide in congressional races; and in 2024, Donald Trump was received once more with open arms by an adoring white-majority public that wanted nothing whatever to do with being governed by a black woman—and it scarcely helped that the woman in question possessed neither charisma, integrity, nor honour, nor any genuine solutions to anything. But that is a tale for another time.

The Democrats control very little beyond the major cities and a miniscule number of states with Democratic super-majorities in their legislatures, yet we are expected to believe that a Democratic wave is imminent in 2026 because they secured the governorships of two states that are reliably blue in presidential contests, and because an extremist on the party’s fringes captured the mayoralty in perhaps one of many five-to-ten municipalities—large or small—out of approximately 20,000 in the entire nation that would entertain such a candidate. When will we learn not to count our chickens before they hatch?

Indeed, my instinct tells me the GOP will enjoy a resounding year in the 2026 mid-terms, even as everything collapses around us and Trump’s dementia-fueled buffoonery continues to stun and amaze. He mishandled the gravest public-health crisis in a century and then blundered through a half-baked coup attempt; at present, millions go without sufficient food because he is toying with their benefits for political sport. Yet upwards of sixty per cent of Americans either cheer him on or avert their gaze, while most of the remaining forty-ish per cent dash about like headless chickens, either vainly attempting to halt this fascistic delirium or just avoid suffering a nervous breakdown.

Add to that the gerrymandering and other institutional barricades now entrenched by Republican legislatures across most states, and the alarming speed at which young men are being radicalised and politicised within the online Manosphere, and one begins to discern the outline of an electoral bloodbath—one that shall greatly delight the orange god-king and effectively transform the former United States into one-party rule. ALL OF THIS is both enabled and sustained by tribalism, not reason, nor any sincere concern for the nation’s welfare by the majority of its citizens. The American people no longer yearn to heal their country; the majority do not even bother to vote, but they do yearn to hurt and kill one another.

This spirit of evil and bloodlust was simply not in the air when I was young, in the 1980s and 1990s. There were plenty of racists, though they were almost always discreet about it and sometimes semi-apologetic when such views were expressed in private conversation, even among exclusively lily-white people. At least that was my experience growing up in the greater Boston area of Massachusetts. There were always problems: crime, poverty, pollution, corruption, religious zealtory—but citizens and authorities were a lot more level-headed about addressing these maladies. It was a far less ideological age, but the clear beginning of the end came on 11 September 2001. We never recovered from that day—and we shall never recover from having permitted a crooked property magnate and television showman, beholden to sworn enemies of the United States in Moscow, to occupy the presidency.

No, a so-called ‘blue wave’ is not coming, so let us be realistic and cease giving ourselves false hope; nothing in this rotten world wounds more deeply than hope betrayed. There is no crueller evil one may visit upon oneself. Please, stop doing this to yourselves. It is over but for the shouting. We must now turn our thoughts towards bare survival. And if I am wrong, then so be it. It is far safer to presume the worst in all things, for thus one is spared the full weight of disappointment—and may even feel a flicker of relief when events prove only half as dire as feared. —Arthur Newhook, 7 November 2025.

Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.