Democrats can ride ‘blue tsunami’ to White House

They should call 4 November 2026 “Liberation Day”. I made it 4.15am (GMT) when the US networks called the Senate for the Democrats, and the Trump era could officially be declared over. The results speak for themselves, and there will be no more silly talk about Donald Trump running for an unconstitutional third (or fourth, he’d say) term in 2028. Instead, because politics never stays still, we are asking ourselves who might be the Democrats’ candidate to succeed him in the “change” election of 2028?

A decade on from his first win against Hillary Clinton, and after being given a second chance through Democrats bungling the 2024 nomination, the Trump experiment has failed, and the White House is there for the taking in two years’ time. James Talarico, who becomes the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate seat since 1988, is a centrist who has electrified his party in a solid red state. Or could it be Jon Ossoff, the freshly re-elected Senator from Georgia, who will speak for his nation as well as his state? He did so last night in his usual magisterial style: “The American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption and incompetence of the failed, lame-duck president, Donald J Trump.”

A young man — just 39 last February — Ossoff has a statesmanlike quality beyond his years, and marks a sharp contrast with rambling, sleepy Trump, increasingly subsiding into his anecdotage, and is the personal embodiment of a new beginning, a passing of the torch to a new, impatient generation. American presidential elections are so often a “pendulum” affair, with a change of party control and policy accompanied by a change in what we now call “vibes” — Eisenhower to Kennedy, or Obama to Trump — then the coming transition from Trump to Ossoff would feel like a rebirth; indeed, almost a cleansing of a denigrated American democracy. Close observers of the scene had identified him as a plausible standard-bearer for the Democrats some time ago, admittedly in an uncrowded field.

Unlike many others in the coming wave of outstanding Democrat leaders — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani (New York congresswoman and mayor respectively), or Abdul El-Sayed (Senator-elect for Michigan) — Ossoff has more of a centrist vibe about him, but radical with it. Without wanting to be unhelpful, to Europeans he’s like a latter-day Emmanuel Macron of a decade ago: in short, charismatic. In the speech he gave at a rally in Atlanta with Barack Obama a week ago, there was a bravery to his challenge to the always-vindictive and bullying White House incumbent. “Each day, Donald Trump digs the moral pit deeper... the most corrupt administration of all time, and everybody knows it. If you’re involved in any of this, next year you’ll be raising your hand to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

There’s another comparison, too. A half-century ago, another politician from Georgia, Governor Jimmy Carter, decided to make a run for the White House and won, very narrowly, on a platform that he’d clean up post-Watergate, and that – unlike the recently departed Richard Nixon – he’d “never tell you a lie”, a promise he kept even if his presidency ended badly. Ossoff has dismissed any such presidential ambitions, but then again so did Senator Obama once, and no doubt many others before him. For change, the Democrats are in the unfamiliar position of being able to contemplate winning power with a choice of suitable politicians who would have little difficulty in dismissing Marco Rubio or JD Vance as hopelessly discredited figures.

If not Ossoff, then Governor Gavin Newsom of California, not up for election in this round and thus a little overshadowed, could take the fight to what’s left of the Maga movement, and a Newsom-Ossoff ticket might prove pretty popular. Now the “Dumocrats” don’t look so weak and stupid any more; it’s Donald Trump who qualifies for the ultimate of his insults – “loser”. They will, however, need a policy platform that doesn’t scare the hell out of people: it’s not all about personalities.

We in the rest of the world who yearn for America to be a strong, stable and prosperous ally cannot forget that the Dems have a record of throwing away their best chances, as the tragic fall of Kamala Harris should remind us.