“President Trump’s Republicans just found out the hard way what other political parties are seeing across western democracies: Voters are fed up, they have lost trust in political parties and they don’t have much patience when they feel politicians aren’t listening,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The massive shift in the midterm elections is a sign of a new political era taking hold from Paris, Texas, to Paris, France. Voters are becoming less attached to the parties their parents voted for and are more likely to try out new parties or new political pitches, on the left and right.”

“And while they are willing to give insurgent parties or populist figures like Trump a shot, they will also lose patience quickly if they don’t deliver.”

David Graham: “When Donald Trump completed his own presidential comeback in the 2024 U.S. election, one common explanation was that a fundamental change had occurred in American politics, realigning demographics, parties, and policy for the long run.”

“A competing narrative, especially popular among comparative scholars, focused on a wave of anti-incumbent results in elections around the world. In this view, the results were more a rejection of Joe Biden’s administration and his vice president, Kamala Harris, than they were an embrace of Trump—and part of a broad trend of dissatisfaction among voters in many countries.”

“The specific motivations of the global anti-incumbent wave have never been entirely obvious. They include a post-COVID hangover but also deeper running dissatisfaction with democratic systems of government. Whatever the reasons, the trend is an important shift.”

“The 2026 elections are shaping up to be another terrible year for working-class representation in Congress,” Bloomberg reports.

“Of the 919 candidates running as major-party nominees for the U.S. House and Senate this November, only seven had a working-class job when they got into politics. That’s less than 1%, despite working-class jobs making up about half of the U.S. labor force.”