Voters Back Anti-Establishment Candidates for the Senate

By Grace Kim

What changed on Tuesday?

Texas elected a Democratic senator for the first time since 1988, and Kansas for the first time since 1932; Robert Reich says those results went beyond an inevitable midterm swing against the party in power.

Reich, a former U.S. secretary of labor, frames the reaction as the awakening of a U.S. sleeping giant. His account rejects a one-factor explanation for what happened on Tuesday.

He rejects a purely economic explanation for the result. Americans were unhappy with high prices, Reich acknowledged, but inflation was not out of control, the country was not in a depression or recession, and unemployment remained quite low.

Nor does he attribute the shift mainly to Donald Trump. Trump was not on the ballot despite repeated efforts to make voters pretend he was; most Republican candidates barely mentioned him, while many Democratic candidates emphasized local or statewide issues.

In Reich’s reading, voters delivered an anti-establishment verdict rather than a narrow protest over prices or Trump.

Why did voters turn on the establishment?

Reich says anti-establishment populism has erupted against three concentrations of power:

• Mammoth corporations that he says posted record profits while most Americans had to pay more.
• Mega donors and super PACs that have flooded U.S. politics with more campaign money than ever before, which Reich calls legalized bribes.
• Big tech billionaires whom Reich describes as the most powerful force in the U.S. economy and society, as well as visible backers of Trump and the Republican Party.

The movement has an irony for Reich. Anti-establishment anger propelled Trump into the presidency in 2016 and again in 2024, while many voters saw his politically incorrect rants and “America first” nativism as an expression of their anger at being disrespected and left behind.

During his 2024 campaign announcement, Trump cast himself as his supporters’ warrior. Reich says voters who had felt dismissed by politics now saw the second-term president acting like the establishment he had once attacked.

Reich says Trump’s second term brought:

• Tax cuts and subsidies for tech billionaires.
• Promotion of the tech billionaires’ AI and datacenters.
• A decision to put Elon Musk in charge of the so-called “department of government efficiency,” or Doge.
• Advocacy for crypto.
• A war in the Middle East that Reich says sent gas prices soaring, made big oil billions and enriched big-tech weapons makers and investors, including Trump’s family.

Trump said: “we’re making an absolute fortune in our country”. Reich said the war’s effects on fuel prices and the windfall to major oil companies exposed the gap between Trump’s anti-establishment image and his second-term policies.

Reich argues many people who backed Trump in 2016 and 2024 abandoned him because of corruption, crony capitalism and his eagerness to join the gilded side of what he calls the new Gilded Age. CNBC’s late-October poll found that corruption ranked as the top issue on voters’ minds.

The result, in Reich’s account, was a rejection of the billionaire-backed political order Trump had promised to disrupt.

What will Democrats do with the Senate?

Reich says the same populism has taken hold in the Democratic Party. Newly elected Texas Senate candidate James Talarico framed the stakes directly: “The biggest divide in this country is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom.”

In Ohio, Sherrod Brown regained his Senate seat, largely because of voter anger at datacenters and the tech billionaires behind them, Reich says. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed pressed voters against Mike Rogers, highlighting his opponent’s backing from major corporations and mega donors.

Kansas’s victorious Adam Hamilton rejected the leftist label his opponent wanted to impose. He also rejected money from corporate PACs, as did most Democratic candidates for the Senate.

Reich lists Hamilton’s campaign priorities:

• Make datacenters pay for their own energy.
• Ban lawmakers from trading stocks.
• Expand Medicare drug-price negotiations.
• Crack down on price-gouging.

Reich’s test for Democrats, who will control Congress in January, is whether they convert the new populism into three kinds of action:

• Enact Medicare for All, which Reich describes as a measure many Americans need.
• Pass tougher anti-monopoly laws and limits on campaign contributions, which he describes as reforms many Americans want.
• Use a constitutional amendment if required to limit campaign contributions.

Reich expects Trump to veto any such initiatives, but argues that the proposals can still lay down markers for the 2028 presidential election. He expects that election to be populist, judging from the midterms.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Guardian U.S. columnist. His book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out in the U.S. and U.K., and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com.

The result puts datacenters, corporate power and campaign-spending limits on an explicit congressional agenda, with their political fate now tied to the 2028 election.