Editorial | CARICOM post-US midterm elections

The shellacking of the Republican Party in the US midterm elections suggests that while it may have been badly stressed, America’s institutions didn’t collapse. The country’s democracy remained intact.

The questions still to be answered, however, are whether Tuesday’s vote was primarily a response by Americans to domestic economic concerns, or a fundamental repudiation of Trumpism and, therefore, its implications for the global environment.

While the mercurial Donald Trump still controls critical levers of power in the US government and may continue to lash out at perceived enemies, the potential for congressional checks on his worst instincts during the final two years of his presidency is cause for optimism, especially for small countries like Jamaica and its partners in the Caribbean. They may find some breathing space from the frenetic and febrile pressure from the Trump administration for uncritical obeisance to Washington.

In that regard, the 14 independent members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) should urgently convene a special summit to coordinate how they navigate the final years of Mr Trump’s term. Failing to do so before Mr Trump’s assumption of office meant they largely had to scramble separately to deflect the whimsy and extremism of the president’s policymaking. The result in many cases was meek acquiescence.

FAR-RIGHT

After more than a decade of Mr Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party – which he essentially transformed into a far-right, largely ethnocentric movement that, with little regard for small countries or a rules-based global order – the scale of his and the party’s defeat this week was monumental. The Democratic Party beat the Republicans in the congressional races by an estimated 13 percentage points for a swing, compared to the 2024 midterms, of 15.6 percentage points.

Only in the 2010 elections, at the height of the Tea Party movement, did rampaging congressional Republicans achieve a swing of 17.3 percentage points. However, you have to go back to the post-Watergate period, after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, for a margin of victory (16.8 percentage points) at this level, or surpassing, what the Democrats accomplished this week. They are assured of at least 250 House seats and 54 in the Senate, giving them majorities in both chambers.

Democrats won among all demographic groups: seven in 10 among people aged 18 to 29; six in 10 among Hispanics, nearly half of whose votes Mr Trump gained in 2024; nine in 10 of Black voters, against eight in 10 who supported Kamala Harris for president in 2024; voters of all educational levels, except for high school graduates, who almost evenly split, voted strongly for Democrats. Even among rural voters, the Democrats made significant headway, moving their support from 29 per cent in 2024 to 41 per cent on Tuesday.

Even in states where Republican support was deeply and historically entrenched, Democrats flipped seats. For example, Kansas is sending a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in 94 years. And before this week, the last time Texas elected a Democrat as either senator or governor was in 1988 and 1990, respectively.

Indeed, the outgoing governor of Florida called the defeat of members of his party, up and down the ballot across the country, “a close to extinction level event for Republicans”.

What is not clear as yet is what motivated this revolt by voters, apart from oil-price-driven inflation from the US/Israeli war on Iran, and to a lesser extent, Mr Trump’s unilateral imposition of higher tariffs on imports from countries across the globe. A muscular immigration policy in which supposedly undocumented workers were often forcefully scooped up, denied due process and shunted out of the country, has also caused anxieties among voters.

DEEP CONCERNS

For most Caribbean countries there are deep concerns about Mr Trump’s reiteration of the Monroe Doctrine of US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, and Washington’s pressure to sideline relations with China, which, in recent decades, has been their primary source of cheap capital for infrastructure projects. The US administration has also leaned on Caribbean countries, including Jamaica, to end health service agreements with Cuba, while it has intensified its economic blockade of Havana.

It is partly because of this pressure that Jamaica controversially abstained from an annual UN resolution calling on the United States to end its economic embargo on Cuba, and why it is believed Kingston didn’t vote on a resolution to accept the annual report from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which the Trump administration wants to dismantle.

Claiming them to be illegal combatants engaged in war against the United States, Mr Trump has used its military to blow up alleged drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean Sea, which experts not only say breaches domestic and international law, but undermines the declaration of the Caribbean as a zone of peace.

If the electoral chastening of Mr Trump causes a cooling of this behaviour, it will be good for the Caribbean. CARICOM should not be passive on the matter. It must consider how it deals with the White House while engaging with the Democrats who now control Congress.