In the midterm elections held on November 3, voters delivered a strong rebuke to a Republican administration and Congress that have consistently refused to address the affordability crisis afflicting the working class. Democrats won majorities in both houses of Congress, numerous governors’ races, and majorities in several critical state legislative chambers where Republicans have held power for over a decade.

Virtually all observers agree that voters’ move toward the Democrats — the largest such shift since the 1974 election following the Watergate scandal — was driven by a hunger for candidates who will address the affordability crisis and by disgust at government corruption and the power of billionaires. Eric Blanc, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, found [1] that 78 percent of Democratic Senate candidates explicitly blamed billionaires for working people’s economic difficulties in their campaign materials. Of the 20 candidates who were not incumbents, 17 — 85 percent — ran on anti-billionaire messages, including all 12 of the non-incumbents who won. (If Democrat Mary Peltola wins the Senate race in Alaska, which has not yet been called, that number will rise to 13.) The three non-incumbent candidates who declined to name billionaires in their campaign materials all lost.

In a statement [2] released on November 6, UE’s officers declared that “the credit for these wins belongs not to the Democratic Party — whose leadership has offered at best tepid resistance to the Republican agenda over the past two years — but to the working people across the country who have spent the last two years organizing and fighting back in their communities and workplaces.

“From bringing food to neighbors too terrified of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to leave their homes, to confronting ICE in the streets, to turning out in the largest demonstrations in our country’s history, everyday working people created the momentum that led to this point. Trump’s approval ratings began to fall after the working people of Minnesota demonstrated in January that it was possible not only to stand up to, but to defeat his authoritarian agenda. Tuesday was not just an electoral victory, but an organizing win.”

“Too big to rig”

With Trump’s approval ratings falling to record lows in the spring, his administration began to float a variety of schemes to ensure that his party would retain power, making baseless claims about “voter fraud.” These schemes ranged from having the federal government take over elections, to requiring that the U.S. Postal Service only deliver ballots to people on a federal “state citizenship list,” to demanding that the state of California purge 20,000 voters from its rolls.

Most of these efforts were blocked by the courts, but working people also organized to protect democracy. The American Postal Workers Union launched a campaign against the scheme to use their employer to suppress the vote, and Labor for Democracy, a coalition of unions which UE helped organize, ran trainings to prepare union members to take action in the event of election interference. Throughout the fall, UE Local 1186 in Madison, Wisconsin collected pledge cards [3] from both their own members and other working people which committed the signers not only to vote for pro-labor candidates, but also to participate in actions, including an “economic blackout,” to defend the election results if necessary.

In the end, the margins were “too big to rig,” as a source within the Trump administration admitted to CNN, and the President made no effort to dispute or disrupt the results.

A more serious threat to democracy stemmed from two Supreme Court decisions, 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder and this year’s Louisiana v Callais, which gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act and cleared the way for a variety of measures designed to disenfranchise Black voters. Louisiana v Callais, which the UE officers condemned [4] as “an attack on all workers” opened the door for Republican legislators to, in the UE officers’ words, “gerrymander their way into permanent majorities,” and a number of Republican-controlled state legislatures attempted to do just that, creating new Congressional maps which they assumed would bring them an additional 15 seats in Congress.

However, their efforts seem to have backfired. Angry over attacks on the Voting Rights Act and redistricting schemes, Black voters turned out at record rates, and Republicans have so far won only two of the fifteen seats they thought they would flip (a third is headed to a run-off in December). Latino voters also turned out at record rates; exit polls indicate that they were motivated not only by economic concerns, but by anger at the Trump administration’s aggressive and violent immigration enforcement efforts which targeted their communities.

Changes at the State Level

The “blue wave” was also in evidence at the state level, where Democrats won majorities in numerous state legislative chambers, including several which will have a real impact on UE members’ lives.

In North Carolina, all seven of the candidates endorsed by UE Local 150 — four candidates for the state house, one for state senate, a candidate for the state supreme court and a county commissioner — won their elections. Democrats won a large majority in the house and reduced the Republican majority in the senate from a veto-proof 30-to-20 advantage to 26-to-24.

In an email to the local’s membership, President Sekia Royall called the results “a monumental victory for public sector employees and the entire working class across North Carolina.” She noted that, “Working-class voters showed up to elect champions who answer directly to public service workers rather than corporate interests.”

Local 150 members volunteered and distributed thousands of flyers at the polls in Mecklenburg, Granville, Wayne, Durham, Orange and Wake Counties to support the local’s endorsed candidates and to oppose three constitutional amendments which were on the ballot. Despite the local’s efforts, the amendments all passed, which will result in $17 billion in continued tax breaks for the rich and corporations, robbing resources from the public sector where the majority of Local 150’s members work. “While we certainly are celebrating the massive shift towards a pro-worker, progressive agenda represented by the Democrats winning a majority of the seats in the NC House, and a near-majority in the NC Senate, we know that our work is just starting,” wrote Royall.

In Wisconsin, where Republicans have controlled the legislature for 16 years, Democrats won control of both chambers, along with the governor’s race. Until Democrat Tony Evers was elected governor in 2018, Republicans used their control of state government to pass a variety of anti-worker laws, including Act 10, a 2011 law that stripped public-sector workers of their collective bargaining rights, and a so-called “right to work” bill in 2015. Democrats are expected to overturn both Act 10 and right to work, expand Medicaid, increase the state minimum wage, and enact paid family leave legislation.

In Pennsylvania, the Democrats maintained the governor’s office and control of the state house, and won a majority in the state senate, giving them a “trifecta” for the first time in over thirty years. In both 2023 and 2025, the Democratic state house passed legislation granting unemployment benefits to striking workers, only to have the Republican state senate block it. In addition to legislation strengthening the right to strike, Democrats now have the opportunity to raise the state’s minimum wage, still at the abysmally low federal rate of $7.25 per hour, and guarantee workers paid sick days and paid family leave.

Union Members Elected to Office

One of the new members of the Wisconsin state assembly, Dan Gruber, is a member of AFSCME Local 1215 and one of the plaintiffs in a pending court case to overturn Act 10. Gruber defeated an incumbent by 12 points in a traditionally conservative, Republican district.

Gruber was not the only union member to claim victory on Tuesday. In what The Guardian labor reporter Michael Sainato called [5] a “banner election year” for the labor movement, many of the new Democrats in Congress are current or former union members. James Talarico, who won an open Senate seat in Texas, was a public school teacher before entering politics and a member of both the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel and the Texas State Employees Union/CWA Local 6186. Troy Jackson, who defeated 30-year Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine, has been a member of the Painters, Machinists, Operating Engineers and Laborers, as well as the United Auto Workers (UAW). Bob Brooks, the former president of the Pennsylvania Professional Fire Fighters Association, flipped Pennsylvania’s seventh congressional district, and Ironworker Brian Poindexter ousted incumbent Republican Max Miller in Ohio’s seventh congressional district.

The new Senator from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, is a former member of the American Association of University Professors, and that union’s endorsement of his candidacy was the first time AAUP had made a national political endorsement. El-Sayed was also endorsed by the UAW. He campaigned heavily on his support for Medicare for All, proving that providing healthcare for all Americans is a winning issue in swing states like Michigan.

Joining El-Sayed, Talarico and Jackson in the Senate will be returning Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who provided important support [6] to UE Locals 718 and 777 when their plant closed in early 2024. Brown, who lost narrowly to Republican Bernie Moreno two years ago, was elected to the state’s other Senate seat on Tuesday, defeating incumbent Jon Husted in a special election. In his three terms as Senator and seven terms as a Congressman, Brown was a staunch opponent of job-killing “free trade” agreements, and frequently received a 100% rating on the UE Congressional Scorecard.

Making Congress Look More Like America

The election results will also make Congress, and the nation’s governors’ mansions, look more like America. El-Sayed is the first Muslim to be elected to the Senate, and Chris Pappas of New Hampshire will be the Senate’s first out gay man. Peggy Flanagan, who was elected to the Senate from Minnesota, will be the first Native American woman to serve in that chamber. Talarico, 37, will become the chamber’s youngest member.

Democrat David Crowley in Wisconsin, Republican Byron Donalds in Florida, and Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia will become the first Black governors of their respective states; Bottoms will also be Georgia’s first female governor, and the first Black female governor in the country. In New Mexico, Deb Haaland will be the country’s first female Native American governor. In Texas, former labor and civil rights lawyer Gina Hinojosa will be the state’s first Latina governor.

And in what was one of the most unexpected results of the elections, Mississippi — one of the most reliably Republican states in the country for the past several decades — has elected its first Black senator since 1881, Democrat Scott Colom.

“The wave only broke as big as it did because working people voted”

Reflecting on the election results, Western Region President Michael Tomaloff told the UE NEWS:

The fact is that the wave only broke as big as it did because working people voted. They voted because they were paying attention, and they were paying attention because other working people took the time to reach out to them. They knocked on doors, made phone calls and sent texts, went to meetings, rallies, and town halls, and a whole lot of them were union folks.

Regardless of how we feel about party politics and our imperfect democracy, doing the work of getting people out to vote, ensuring our fellow citizens are safe from intimidation or disenfranchisement at the polls, and safeguarding our elections from fraud, are all great ways to build connections and foster solidarity.

The role of working people and working-class issues in the midterms has already led to calls for change in the Democratic Party. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen announced this week that he will challenge New York Senator and current Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the quintessential establishment Democrat, for leader of the new Democratic majority in the Senate. In an op-ed published on November 13 [7], Vermont Senator and longtime UE ally Bernie Sanders wrote that the contest for Senator leader “is not a personality contest. ... It is a debate about whether the Democratic party remains a top-down party dominated by billionaire campaign contributors, inside-the-beltway consultants and 30-second TV ads, or whether we can transform it into a grassroots party of, by and for the working families of our country.”

As UE’s officers note in their statement, “Democrats must demonstrate that they are serious about improving working people’s lives by passing meaningful legislation and setting the stage for electing people up and down the ticket in 2028 who will fully enact that legislation. Otherwise they, like the Republicans before them, will deservedly face voters’ wrath.”