US midterm elections: cost of living, immigration, and a paradigm shift

On Tuesday, November 4, legislative elections will take place in the United States (REUTERS/Carlos Barria)Next Tuesday there will be midterm elections in the United States, and a couple of decisive issues have marked the months leading up to the vote. First, the cost of living. Second, immigration. There are signs that the results would be the manifestation of a paradigm shift that the cost of living and immigration themselves might help accelerate. In mid-2005 I began teaching at Northwestern University, on the outskirts of Chicago. I paid 1 dollar to have each shirt cleaned at the neighborhood dry cleaner. Today the same service costs 4.65. That is an increase of 465% over 21 years, six times the Bureau of Labor Statistics' estimated 72% inflation for this period. Surely the economists' calculations are correct. But sometimes those abstract numbers do not reflect the reality of everyday economics. And it is the money that comes out of one's pocket to pay for ordinary expenses that usually plays a decisive role when voting, more than what citizens hear from candidates or read in the media. The rise in the cost of living has been happening for many years, but it has increased notably recently. My partner and I love pistachios. A couple of years ago, a bag of nearly 700 grams cost 15.99 dollars at Costco, a wholesale supermarket with very good prices. This week we paid 21.99 for the same product. An increase of 37.5%, well above the 7% cumulative inflation for this period according to that government agency. Before teaching at Northwestern University, I taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), near Boston. The then-president of MIT, Charles "Chuck" Vest, had the habit of meeting once a year with the faculty of each school. I began working there in 2001. During the 2002 meeting, one of my colleagues asked him about the government's immigration policy issues after the events of September 11, and whether they affected MIT. Chuck replied that first-rate science could not be done without the contribution of foreigners (about 30% of MIT's staff, he noted) and that the restrictions imposed by the Bush administration undermined the competitiveness of the American scientific system—and therefore its economic and geopolitical power. He added that for this reason he and his colleague David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology during those years, were traveling often to Washington DC to convince the administration to modify the restrictions it had imposed. Not only did they succeed, but President Bush later offered Chuck the position of director of the country's Office of Science and Technology Policy, an offer he declined for personal reasons. The number of F1 visas for university students granted by the US government saw a reduction of approximately 50% comparing the summer months—the period of greatest activity in this area—of 2024 and 2025, according to a New York Times article. This decline suggests that many foreign students may currently feel not as welcome as before. Fewer foreign students today would lead to fewer foreign scientists in a few years, which would result in less innovation, economic competitiveness, and geopolitical influence in a few decades. The raids in search of undocumented immigrants regularly carried out by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) are another indicator of this trend. A good part of the citizenry has reacted negatively both to the ways in which the raids are carried out and to the expansion of the criteria applied to identify who to deport. By now many voters directly know people detained by ICE, or have heard stories about it from relatives and friends. This is something they often experience as a traumatic event. This trend is particularly pronounced among Latino voters, who were an important pillar of support for President Trump in 2024. According to polls, many of these voters seem to be shifting their support to Democratic Party candidates now. Two decisive issues and much at stake for both parties. President Trump was elected with the mandate to fix the economy and sort out the immigration situation, two issues on which a significant portion of the electorate judged President Biden's management to be deficient. At the end of the first two years of his second administration, the feeling in the street is that a broad sector of the population is dissatisfied with Trump's performance on these issues. The citizenry is less ideologized than the politicians: it wants effective solutions to its everyday problems. According to polls, the Republican Party is very likely to lose its majority in the lower chamber, and there is also a lower but not negligible probability that the same will happen in the upper chamber. While the party in power usually retreats in midterm elections, polls indicate that this retreat would be greater than the average for this type of election. These trends relate not only to the perception of the president's performance but to a general dynamic of paradigm shift among Republicans and Democrats. On the one hand, President Trump and his MAGA movement went from being relatively peripheral within the Republican Party before 2016 to becoming its center of gravity in less than a decade. In fact, the president's influence has been strongly felt in the selection of many Republican candidates in these elections. On the other hand, the Democratic Party went from the axis of the culture war in the 2024 elections to a duality between socialist and centrist alternatives in the 2026 elections. Abdul El-Sayed and James Talarico, the Senate candidates in Michigan and Texas, respectively, represent this duality between socialism and centrism. The case of Texas is particularly instructive regarding the paradigm shifts in both parties. The Republican candidate, Ken Paxton, who has President Trump's endorsement, won the primary against his rival, veteran Senator John Cornyn. The Democratic candidate, Talarico, prevailed over Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who was co-chair of Kamala Harris's campaign committee in the 2024 presidential election, a featured speaker at that year's party convention, and received Harris's support in the primary a few months ago. The Democrats have not won a Senate seat in Texas since 1988. If Talarico were to defeat Paxton, it would be a highly impactful victory not only in the state but nationally, and it would give a strong boost to the centrist alternative ahead of the 2028 elections. The midterm elections will be, on the one hand, the expression of the paradigm shift, and on the other, the results are expected to intensify the shift. This, in turn, would affect the 2028 presidential elections. Will there be a MAGA candidate or an alternative of a different kind within the Republican Party? What will be the role of President Trump, who is unlikely to behave like a lame duck, in the process? Will a centrist or socialist option prevail within the Democratic Party? On Tuesday the citizenry will express its will at the ballot box, with its mind on its pocketbook and its eyes on the border. And the next day, in the leading power of the West, the long road toward the presidential transition will begin.