America’s midterms: History rhymes half a century later

People might call this feeling “deja vu.” In the U.S. midterm elections Tuesday, James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian and former middle school teacher, was elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas.

As I listened to his acceptance speech, full of love and hope, broadcast live on Fox News, I was instantly reminded of the 1976 presidential election. At the time, I was studying political science at the University of Minnesota and had experience volunteering in presidential and House of Representatives election campaigns in the state.

The Democratic presidential candidate back then was Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist peanut farmer — a devout man, untouched by scandal or dirty money — who appeared like a comet and won the presidential election. Having experienced that political process firsthand, I sensed that the 2026 midterm elections would, as in 1976, mark a major political turning point in the United States, the kind that occurs only once every few decades. Perhaps it is because I still believe in the transformative power of American democracy, something many Americans, it seemed to many outsiders, had all but given up on in recent years.

A half century earlier, U.S. domestic politics was reeling from the Watergate scandal. In the summer two years before the presidential election, then-President Richard Nixon announced his resignation in the face of congressional efforts to impeach him. I happened to be in Minneapolis at the time, watching the live broadcast of his resignation news conference. In the midterm elections held a few months later, many newcomers — young, energetic reformers — were elected to Congress. They came to be known as the “Class of 1974.”

Similarly, future historians may come to refer to the young lawmakers elected in the overwhelming Democratic victory in this week’s midterm elections as the “Class of 2026.” The reason for my sense of deja vu is that the 1974-1976 election cycle and the 2026-2028 cycle seem eerily similar. So, in what ways are this year’s midterm elections the same as those of 48 years ago and in what ways are they different? Here is my assessment.

A few days before Election Day in November 1976, my roommate at the University of Minnesota asked me, “Who do you think will win — Carter or Ford?” I replied instinctively: “As a political scientist, I have to say it’s too close to call, but as a historian, Carter should win. When corruption and social problems reach a breaking point, American voters have historically sought change — as seen in the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement.”

Of course, American voters do not change their voting behavior based solely on such a broad historical perspective. Their voting criteria ultimately come down to their own economic well-being, their family’s health or their children’s education. Even so, when Americans in the “New World” feel that “something is wrong,” they have historically favored change over maintaining the status quo. As a 22-year-old at the time, I thought this was a major difference from people in the “Old World,” who tend to fear change and seek refuge in the status quo.

In 1976, what we refer to as the American Dream was still going strong. Many Americans believed that “if you change something, things will improve.” But what about now? In a United States that has matured as it marks its 250th anniversary, political and business elites enjoy their vested interests and the country is gradually losing its “New World” character. Even if people express their distrust of the Trump administration, it is difficult to expect American society, so deeply divided, to change overnight.

It is not difficult to criticize the Trump administration, but the administration is a result, not the cause, of social division in the United States. Eighty-one years have passed since the United States began pursuing an enlightened and liberal international order after World War II. Yet, due to the IT revolution and the dog-eat-dog nature of the new capitalist economy since the 1990s, social inequality has not narrowed. If anything, it has widened. It is by no means a coincidence that the United States has once again begun to seek the kind of “stability through collusion among hegemonic powers” that existed before World War I.

On Nov. 2, the day before the last U.S. midterm elections, I had the opportunity to speak about the future of the world’s “middle powers” at an international forum in Cairo, Egypt — the very place where, 47 years ago, I studied Arabic as a member of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Unfortunately, my remarks at the forum were tragically realistic. I began by stating that the relatively happy, predictable era of the past 80 years, based on freedom, openness and the rule of law, had come to an end, and that a new era of so-called “civilizationalism,” which underlies the second phase of Trump’s foreign policy, had begun.

The “civilizationalism” I refer to here, unlike liberal internationalism, is a worldview in which hegemonic powers such as the United States, China and Russia coexist without interfering with one another while respecting each other’s spheres of influence. It is difficult for “middle powers” to unite and counter this. Furthermore, even if they were to unite, they would amount to nothing more than an “alliance of the weak,” giving rise to the fallacy of composition.

In short, while it would be ideal if “middle powers” — all of which benefit from liberal internationalism — could unite, if that proves impossible, they will have no choice but to rely on one or more of the hegemonic powers. In Cairo, I concluded that the key factors in such a scenario would be which hegemonic power represents the best option for each individual “middle power” and which is most compatible with a free, open and rule-of-law-based democratic international order.

Unfortunately, the “vote of no confidence in Trump” in the 2026 midterm elections likely does not mean that the United States will return to liberal internationalism. On the contrary, despite this big “no to Trump” moment, it may only increase the likelihood that the United States will pursue a more civilizationalist “America First” policy through more sophisticated means. Given this probability, I can only pray that the hope I felt in Minneapolis in 1976 will not fade in the years ahead.