Was it the Iran war? Corruption? The cost of living? Data centers? By now, everyone has a pet theory to explain why the Democrats flipped both the House and the Senate—and why voters rebuked U.S. President Donald Trump and his Republican Party. What matters now is how the two sides interpret the results and navigate the political battles to come. And broadly, how the world reacts to the shifting political landscape in the United States.
On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Susan Glasser, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the former editor in chief of Foreign Policy. The full interview is available on the video box atop this page, or on the FP Live podcast on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: I want to start with the big picture. You wrote in your last column: “For now and for forever, the midterm election of 2026 will be known as one of the most decisive rejections of an American president.” Say more.
Susan Glasser: You have to go very far back in history to see a result this explicit, loud, and across-the-board. A lot of people have been comparing it to the post-Watergate elections of 1974 and 1976. If you look at the popular vote, it is the widest midterm margin for Democrats since 1976. Right now, they are trending toward a 13-percentage-point advantage.
However, if you look at the consequences in Congress and how many seats Democrats picked up, you actually have to go much farther back in time to find an election that was this decisive of a swing to either party. The last time this happened was in 1946 and 1948. You have a more than 35-seat pickup for Democrats in the House of Representatives—so far—and as much as an eight-seat pickup in the Senate. That combined House and the Senate pickup hasn’t been seen since the postwar era in American politics.
What’s different about this election compared to other recent ones, such as the 1994 wave that brought Republicans to power in Congress, is that it is a campaign centered around the person of the president, his policies, his leadership, and what he had done with his party. That’s what makes this result so resounding and impactful.
RA: Not in my lifetime have I seen states like Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas come into play in this way for a blue wave.
Many of us were quite stunned to see a post on X from U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance the morning after the election, not only for its speed, but for its analysis. He said, quite simply, “The reason we lost is the [Iran] war.” Do you agree with that?
SG: That was an amazing document. It is pretty much without modern precedent, and I think we have only begun to see what the ramifications of that will be. U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to respond to it, but for a man who has remade the executive branch of the federal government around the single criterion of blind loyalty to him, to have his own vice president attack his signature policy is … wow.
RA: It’s notable that as reporters have looked at how the Iran war has played out in the White House, Vance tends to emerge as the person who was most against the war. He himself is probably the source for many of those claims, so we should take them with a grain of salt, right?
SG: Vance, according to himself, was nobly against this war that is extremely unpopular with the American public. We’re seeing a number of factors at play here. One, Vance is desperately trying to see if there is a path forward for him to run for president in 2028. Two, you will see a number of Republican officeholders and MAGA pundit types like Sean Hannity climbing aboard this argument that it was just the Iran war that lost them the election, because it absolves them of some of the other catastrophes that Trump has wrought on the American public. It’s a convenient foil for them if they can try to win the battle of the narrative around what just happened here.
In my view, the Iran war and the subsequent spike in prices was quite disastrous for Trump and the Republicans politically. However, I believe that this election is a broader repudiation of the Trump administration. That is part of what Vance and Hannity and others are trying to head off.
RA: I agree with you, but just to play devil’s advocate for a minute here: One of the things I think Vance was getting at is that when voters, especially the people who supported Trump in 2024, voted for the Trump campaign’s version of America First, part of that bargain was that there would be no more wars. There’s an argument then that what they really want is just less foreign policy.
The other point to make is that if affordability is the one big-ticket item, which is connected to everything we’re discussing at some level—certainly the Iran war, certainly the tariffs—then how much of what we’ve just seen this week is a secular problem of people swinging from one party to another because they’re unhappy with the current economic conditions? Or how much of it do you think is going to be attributed to the Trump administration’s very unique policies and Trump’s persona?
SG: In politics, as in life, if you start lying to yourself and believing it, you’re in big trouble. Republicans may well come up with an explanation for this election. If it’s a wrong one, or a BS one, they’re going to pay future political consequences.
If you look at a recent Wall Street Journal survey and a number of others, the top issue many Americans said they were bringing to the polls with them wasn’t affordability but corruption. Vance isn’t going to talk about corruption, but we are witnessing the looting of the American presidency on a massive scale. The self-enrichment of our president and a small coterie of his family and other insiders defies all precedent in American history. It’s not partisan to say that people in Kansas are probably pretty offended by the idea of the president of the United States making more than $2 billion off of the presidency in his first year back in office. He himself has admitted it. In an interview earlier this year, he said that he tried to follow the rules—which he didn’t—and it turned out nobody cared.
Corruption has been a powerful force in this election, as it has been in a number of other recent elections this year. The Hungarian election that ousted [Prime Minister] Viktor Orban is one good example, but there are a lot of others. My no. 1 explanation for this election outcome would be the perceived and actual self-enrichment of this out-of-touch leader and his disinterest in the concerns of the electorate around their own economic situation. It encompasses a lot of issues, including taking the country to war. That’s not how our system is supposed to work, for the president to be so disdainful of the country that he doesn’t even feel a need to explain to them why he went to war. There will have to be some fallout from the election.
RA: Let’s talk about what next. I’m curious how you think Democrats are going to use this majority in the House and the Senate. What are the topics and items you think they’re going to pursue in their first few months, knowing full well that Trump has already posted on Truth Social an image of a red cap with the word “VETO” on it? There are limits to what they can do, but what are they going to try?
SG: They may be recalibrating because the scale of their victory is so big. I had a conversation a few weeks ago with Chris Coons, who’s going to be the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At that time, he was hopeful that the Democrats would win the majority, but he certainly didn’t think they would have 55 seats. What Democrats may be able to do with 55 seats and a number of centrist Democrats coming in from places like Kansas, North Carolina, and Texas is a different ball game.
The first stop for Democrats looking to affect national security and foreign policy is appropriations bills and the power of the purse. They can attach policy riders on a must-pass defense authorization bill or put provisions into appropriations bills that outline how money can and cannot be spent. Those are things we definitely will see, especially because there’s a real bipartisan consensus, in particular on Ukraine.
I think we will see, at a minimum, much more aggressive efforts to stop Trump from switching sides in the war. I could see some of those very questionable deals that are being discussed between special envoy Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and the Russians—business deals with Russian entities that might enrich Trump insiders and that no American companies actually want—being a quick casualty of this midterm election result.
RA: I’m imagining that the Kremlin is not going to be looking at these results and smiling. I’m sure they’re a bit worried, although simultaneously it’s also clear that Ukraine needs America less today than it did two years ago. They’re trying to become more resilient, and they’re looking at this election quite warily.
I’m curious how you read this election when it comes to shifting attitudes toward Israel, which just had its own elections. What does it mean for broader U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East?
SG: There is a backlash in both parties, interestingly, about Trump’s embrace of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and Israel in such an unequivocal way. That’s some of the tone, certainly, of the kind of emergent Vance wing of the party (to the extent there is a Vance wing). There is definitely a backlash in both parties about America’s traditional commitment to Israel in the face of how Netanyahu has prosecuted a scorched-earth war with the Palestinians. That’s true for Democrats in a very dramatic way.
Let’s wait and see what the consequences of Israel’s recent election are. Let’s not forget that they just voted to reject Netanyahu. But given the particularities of that system and his incredible ability to survive, we’ll have to wait and see. Whether Netanyahu or someone else is leading Israel will affect the politics here in Washington.
It’s the Gulf Arabs who have been the engines of a lot of Trump’s foreign policy, not to mention the piggy banks for him and his family. Somebody said to me recently that all the things that we suspect are happening between Putin’s Russia and Trump actually are happening—in terms of vast amounts of sums being directed to Trump and his family—from Gulf interests.
But I think the Gulf Arabs are also very unhappy with Trump. They’re finding out what many others have found out: that Trump doesn’t view relationships as mutual and loyalty is a one-way street with him. Not that long ago, a very senior official from the Middle East asked me: “Why do we have all these American bases and buy all this American military technology to protect ourselves if in fact it’s now the reason that we’re at war? What’s the point of paying the protection money?” It suggests we are at a larger pivot point in the Middle East in terms of geopolitics and the alliances than escaping this narrow quagmire with Iran would suggest. We’re likely looking at a rearrangement of a lot of things in the Middle East in the next two years.
RA: I’m curious how you are thinking about what comes next from the Democratic Party’s side. We’ve all been noting how they won with a very broad tent. There’s a broad slate of candidates, from a Methodist minister in Kansas to a Muslim doctor in Michigan. Are you beginning to detect some coalescing around a coherent foreign policy for the Democrats at this point, or is that a long ways away?
SG: The short answer is “no.” Will Rogers said it a long time ago: “I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.” Democrats are by definition the more big-tent party in American politics, and they have leaned into that in recent years. Trump spent the last two years campaigning against the very idea of diversity as a strength. So there are some coherent principles that separate these two parties.
Democrats do not have one single coherent view. [Former President Joe] Biden was a backward-looking president in many ways, including with respect to foreign policy. He believed in the possibility of returning to a status quo ante, as a man who was shaped by the foreign-policy debates of the Cold War and perceived threats, opportunities, and alliances through that lens. So there’s a generational shift that’s taking place. I think you’ll see much younger Democratic presidential candidates in 2028. There is also a radical shift in the Senate. This is something people haven’t paid enough attention to. A huge percentage of the Senate is turning over, a much higher percentage than is normal. I think we’re looking at nearly 20 new senators, and the average age of those senators is somewhere in the 50s, and as compared with the average of the people who just left, who would be well into their post-retirement years if they were anybody other than a politician. So a generational shift is definitely going to have consequences on the foreign-policy orientation of the Democrats.
RA: It’s quite literally out with the old.
One thing that we haven’t touched on yet is how this past week could be seen as a repudiation of all the things you’ve said, but also of Big Tech. Elon Musk is the other big loser from this week. He literally poured hundreds of millions of dollars into campaigns, and voters have been quite clear: They’ve rejected data centers. They’ve supported candidates who promised regulation.
SG: It is incredible. Five hundred million dollars is more money than has ever been spent on any election by an individual in the history of ours or any country, by a large order of magnitude. That obscene amount of money produced literally zero victories for him. It’s a remarkable moment. It’s one that will be studied. It happened to play right into a campaign theme that Democrats already had across the country, which is a kind of populism of the center slash center-left. It’s this idea that billionaires and a small circle of oligarchic crony capitalists were conspiring with Trump to make sure that they face no legislative or regulatory roadblocks to reinventing the future however they wanted to and in their own self-interest. So this obscene amount of money came at the exact moment when it was already the message for many Democrats around the country.
Does it mean the new Democratic Congress is going to join hands with the Trump administration and regulate artificial intelligence? I’m going to say “no,” in part because the Democratic Congress, as well as the Republican Congress, opted out of any meaningful regulation in the last round of tech innovation in the era of the internet. They basically punted. They talked and talked and never did anything in a meaningful sense. So I’m very pessimistic about major legislation. But I think this could be probably a defining issue, if not the defining issue in the 2028 presidential election. We may be talking a lot less about Trump and a lot more about AI.
