Vance, 'habibi', do you see me now?

“JD, habibi [dear, in Arabic],” Abdul El-Sayed told US Vice President JD Vance after winning his historic seat for Michigan. He did it with an irony that only those who win allow themselves, questioning the man who had called him “evil” at a rally, to remind him that he will have to take the oath of office in January. There is something extraordinary in that scene because it reveals a deep sense of democracy. Vance will have to publicly recognize the victory of the person he had tried to delegitimize as a political adversary. And democracy does not require that rivals at the polls appreciate each other on a personal level, but it does require that they recognize their right to exist politically. That may be the most important victory of the night.

All in all, prudence requires us not to read the result as a triumph of democracy over the Trump method, although we cannot help but see that almost half of the voters have seen these elections as an opportunity to reprimand him. And there is a State like Georgia in which institutional health has been among the first concerns. But the reason behind these results may or may not be more prosaic, depending on how you look at it: that of a diesel depot in Kansas, the State that had not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. It was there, precisely, where Republican Roger Marshall defended nothing less than the solidity of an economy before voters who pay for the war with Iran with every refueling. Trump has managed for years to impose his version of reality, but there are things that cannot be disguised, things that affect the materiality of life, like what people pay every time they fill the tank.

Does this mean that we should look down on those who vote for what they pay? That this motive is not as noble as saving democracy? At all. Punishing those who govern when the pocketbook is tight is the most basic way of calling for accountability, and precisely that, what it costs to live, has become an anger that we are also seeing running through the streets of Europe this fall. The historic victories in Kansas and Texas may have been due to having heard that anger. There, not two Democrats have won, but two politicians who made prices the center of their campaign, who understood that the cost of living goes beyond what we pay for things; It also has to do with what we stop being able to plan or with the fear of losing what we have. While Republican Marshall defended tariffs, Democrat Adam Hamilton demonstrated that concreteness can unite voters with different ideologies.

The night has thus left a photograph unthinkable not so long ago, with the first Muslim senator, the first openly gay man elected to the Senate, the first black female governor and the first Native American female governor of the country, and it would be easy to read it only as a triumph of diversity. But what brings many of these candidates closer to a Kansas pastor who was a Republican is not his biography, but rather having known how to talk about what is happening to his voters, just what Marshall did not do when he assured them that the economy was going well.