The Democrats may be celebrating today, but make no mistake, their stunning success in the US midterms isn't because the party has suddenly become wildly popular.

Listen to this article

After all, voters haven’t forgiven them for the apparent cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. Nor have they forgotten the party’s unhealthy obsession with identity politics during the ‘peak Woke’ era of a few years ago. But the Democrats had one big advantage yesterday: they weren’t the party of Donald Trump.

At times over the past 12 months, it has seemed as if the president was almost trying to engineer the perfect conditions for a Blue Tsunami. His trade tariffs were already pushing up prices when he decided to launch a disastrous war with Iran that sent them skyrocketing. This ran counter to the two biggest reasons people voted for him in 2016 and 2024: a sense that he could run the economy better; and his ‘America First’ policy of ending so-called ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East.

To make matters worse, Trump ensured several disastrous candidates ended up as the GOP nominees in key races. In Texas, for example, Trump refused to endorse incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn. His justification was that Cornyn had been “disloyal”, even though he’d offered only the mildest criticism of Trump over the years. Instead, Trump backed the state’s highly controversial Attorney General Ken Paxton - a man who was impeached by his own party for bribery, was indicted over fraud allegations, and whose wife filed for divorce last........

© LBC