American voter’s long wait: How 2026 midterms put Trump’s mandate to the test

In Toledo, Ohio, they make Jeeps. On the outskirts of the city, the car assembly plant is still working, though around it are quiet buildings: the glass factory and steelworks that once employed whole families over generations. The same families have heard promises from every politician for the past 35 years, to no avail. On November 3, they vote again, in a district that has been gerrymandered to favour Trump’s party. But it has been held for more than four decades by a Democrat who fought the free-trade deals that emptied its factories, and lost. Toledo is a good place to ask what those promises have been worth, and whether they will ever be kept, even by a new representative.

For more than three decades, the American voter has been waiting for a promise to be kept. Successive presidents have addressed it differently, but the heart of the promise was always the same: that America’s success in the Cold War and its extraordinary power would make the lives of average Americans better. This has not happened. The 2026 midterms are very much part of this long arc of historical betrayal of the ordinary voter.

THE WORLD AMERICA BUILT, BUT THE AMERICAN LOST

When the Cold War ended in 1991, America stood on top as the victor. The Clinton administration immediately began to build a world of open markets in which America was the one that wrote the rules. It stood up the World Trade Organization, which enabled American companies to work across continents. It also brought China into the global economic fold through the WTO. It assured Americans that this move would bring trade and markets to America and would slowly open China itself. By many of the measures that Washington noted, this paid off, as the country grew richer and Americans had access to a plethora of cheap goods.

Inside America, the gains and losses fell to different constituencies. The corporations and the national economic indicators gained. The losses were felt most acutely in towns, factories and households. The country may have become richer even as a town lost the factory around which it had been built.

For the American worker, globalisation became a brutal personal assault. He watched in despair as the factory where he had spent three decades was dismantled, its machinery unbolted and its production lines crated and shipped to China. He was compensated in pennies for the loss of a lifetime’s work, a job he had hoped his son might inherit.

Economists would later confirm the catastrophic consequences that followed in such hard-hit towns: fewer jobs, lower wages, falling house prices, rising poverty, broken families and early deaths. The damage outlasted the shock that caused it by years and decades.

This closure was only the beginning. The diner across the road lost its lunch customers. The tax base diminished, the schools shrank, and the young people who could leave did. In the Rust Belt, idleness and lack of purpose fuelled drug addiction, particularly the abuse of opioids and methamphetamine.

What was broken was more than just a job. It was the American dream: the faith that hard work would buy a home, a decent retirement, and a better life for one’s children. A man could accept almost any change if he believed that his son would inherit something better; however, in these towns, that faith was destroyed. Parents watched their sons earn less than they had, and their daughters move away for good. The question then became whether the system still connected employment to dignity, community and a prosperous future.

Then came the financial crisis of 2008. The government immediately rescued the banks, and that prevented the crisis from becoming worse. But the average voter, with pennies in his pocket, received no such rescue and suffered a catastrophe. Millions of families lost their homes; some ended up in shelters, in their cars or on the street. The house, the home, was what made the American dream solid, and the banks that caused the collapse were the ones that were saved, even as they took the houses back. To millions of households, this seemed like a betrayal, and that anger remained.

Meanwhile, the wars went on. Afghanistan and Iraq consumed two decades. It was the rural and small-town poor who filled the ranks; they were the foot soldiers of the war on terror. They gave their lives in Helmand and Fallujah, even as the share prices of America’s defence manufacturers soared, along with the fortunes of the congressmen who invested in them. By then, the voter had been let down by the establishment in three ways: globalisation had taken his job, a financial crisis had taken his house and two long wars had taken his children.

TRUMP 1: THE REVOLT

In 2008, America elected its first Black president, and for a moment it seemed the country could get past its oldest wound. Barack Obama brought the economy back from the edge it had reached under president Bush, and the national numbers recovered. However, he could not undo the structural changes that were already in place, and the small towns that had lost their factories felt little of this relief, if any.

His presidency also threw up something darker. For some Americans, a Black family living in the White House symbolised the country changing faster than they could bear. The birther conspiracy (the false claim that Obama was not born in the United States), the fury of the Tea Party and a hardening racial resentment ran through the two Obama terms. A cultural fury grew alongside it and moved to the centre of public life, and many working-class voters heard in those debates the voice of a coastal elite lecturing people whose lives it had never seen or experienced. To these ordinary voters, this felt like contempt: first their jobs had been lost, and now their values were being mocked. Obamacare was Obama’s signature achievement, yet his most consequential legacy may prove to be Donald Trump.

Donald Trump exploited that anger, the economic and the cultural together, and gave it a voice. He had entered politics as the loudest champion of the birther claim. He then cleverly wove China, trade, immigration, lost factories, Washington’s elites and the endless wars into a single compelling narrative: the system had stopped working for people like you, and the people who ran it looked down upon you.

For voters who had felt neglected, scorned and invisible for years, that was the recognition they craved. In 2016, they rejected the politically experienced and worldly-wise Hillary Clinton, the sensible, politically correct choice who would have been America’s first woman president and had dismissed half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables”. Instead, they chose the maverick who played on their grievances and fears. It was a revolt against the system and settlement that had governed American politics since the Cold War. It was resentment against the cultural order that had grown up around them.

During his first term, he faced institutional constraints. The Congress, the courts, the bureaucracy and indeed members of his own administration either stopped, slowed or disrupted what he wanted. Investigations, scandals and turmoil consumed most of his term, which ended with defeat at the polls and the events of January 6.

TRUMP 2: BETRAYAL OF THE SECOND CHANCE

Joe Biden came to office promising calm, and he quickly put in place several ambitious and successful measures. His infrastructure, semiconductor and clean-energy laws were the first serious endeavours in a generation to rebuild American manufacturing. But the voter viewed the Biden years through prices and inflation, which had climbed faster than at any time in four decades. The new factories were still some years away from being built, while the bills had to be paid every month.

The perception of weakness emerged early in his presidency. In August 2021, Biden effected the retreat from Afghanistan, and the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul became the defining picture of a superpower in retreat. At the southern border, the crossings grew, and Washington seemed unable and unwilling to stop them. The president himself, visibly ageing and attacked relentlessly by the media, came to embody a tired and failing establishment.

The cultural battles of the Obama years sharpened, too. To many voters, the Democratic Party now sounded more concerned with identity, pronouns and diversity programmes than with the price of milk. Whether it was fair or unfair, the charge of wokeness stuck, and it was worsened by the fatal charge of weakness. Trump rose once again because the average Joe lived in a country that had grown richer around him, with a household that felt poorer and a sense that the politicians in Washington neither respected him nor could protect him.

So, Trump’s movement survived its defeat. By 2024, the voters knew exactly who Trump was, for they had watched him urge a violent mob to march on the Capitol, the seat of American democracy, on January 6, 2021. They elected him back anyway. On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned the rioters.

Trump’s victory and his revolt against traditional conservatives would now be tested. The Republican Party had remade itself in his image, and many of the old restraints had weakened or given way. Trump had shown the voters that the old system had failed, and he now had to show that he could create something better.

The first test for Trump was the same one MAGA voters set for him in 2024: the cost of living. Trump’s tariffs were supposed to bring manufacturing and factories home. To the average voter, however, they manifested as higher prices and more uncertainty. Most Americans now blame his policies for their crippling expenses.

Health care brought those worries even closer: six in ten voters fear that they cannot afford medical care for their families, and for a household that has already cut back on groceries, one hospital bill can completely undo a year of frugal saving.

Then came the wars. Trump promised Americans an end to global wars and that resources would be spent on them at home. Instead, the country took military action first in Venezuela and then went to war with Iran, and the costs followed. The promise of ending war has turned into nothing but bills and expenses.

His second term has tied the presidency to his family business: a memecoin bearing his name, crypto ventures courting foreign money, and a jumbo jet gifted by Qatar. His family’s fortunes have risen tremendously while he is president. The voter who sent a fighter to drain the swamp now sees that the swamp has moved into the White House.

Trump has been given the power his first campaign demanded. The voter is now weighing what Trump did with it. Still burdened by the concerns that brought Trump to office, the voter is now judging the man he trusted to address them.

On October 8, Trump found a scapegoat. At the White House, the labour secretary, flanked by the vice president, announced restrictions on eight companies, four of them India’s largest IT firms, from sponsoring their workers for green cards. Four weeks before the vote, the vice president called the Indians these companies employ “indentured servants”. Indian Americans are the country’s model minority, among its best educated and best paid. Insulting them is clear racism used as an election prop. Days later, a 19-year-old self-styled white supremacist drove to a Hindu temple near Chicago with a rifle, intending to kill Indians. Fortunately, the gun jammed; his co-workers informed the police. Contempt voiced at the White House informs such men that their hatred has company.

To an average voter who watched his factory crated for China, the engineer on a work visa looks like the same old story in a newer office. India is strategically essential to Washington but expendable in domestic politics: no voter loses anything when Indians are hurt. India will remember it. This is the cruellest betrayal of the second chance: a mandate to rebuild the American worker’s life has been squandered on finding someone else to blame.

THE VOTER WHO IS STILL WAITING

So, the American voter who walks into the 2026 midterms is carrying a long memory. He lived through the promise of the post-Cold War boom, saw his factory leave for China, lost his house in the financial crisis, sent his children to two long wars and felt his country change faster than he could follow. He saw his revolt of 2016 end in defeat and painfully experienced prices running faster than his wages. He then gave Trump one more chance to change the system.

The first betrayal was the system that had stopped delivering for him. The second letdown is the growing realisation that the man who promised to change the system has failed to do so. Fewer than one in five Americans now believe that Trump keeps his promises. Nearly half of Republicans say that he tries and fails.

The third betrayal may prove to be the greatest. He voted to make America great again. In the world, however, America now looks smaller: an ally that extracts costs from its friends, a superpower that calls engineers servants, a country that loots resources from another in a colonial fashion. It is now observed warily. The world once envied Americans; increasingly it pities them, and that pity is now curdling into contempt. In 2016 Americans could plead that they had gambled on a stranger. In 2024, they knew. They elected a man convicted on 34 felony counts, who tried to overturn an election and who treats truth, law and loyalty only as instruments of his own interest. A nation that spent a century lecturing the world on morality chose, with open eyes, a leader who has none. The voter who wanted his country respected has watched it be diminished in his name.

The voter is angry, disappointed and bewildered. For 35 years he has watched America grow richer and stronger while waiting for some of those riches to reach his own home. In Toledo, he will give his verdict on November 3.

Trump understood the question better than most politicians. He was given a second chance to address it, but so far, the answer seems unconvincing. The American voter is now waiting to see what that answer will finally be. And so is India.

The author is head of defence fellowship and research fellow (Americas), Takshashila Institution.