Midterms: 52 million votes already in, and Trump campaigns by phone

According to Le Monde, more than 52 million Americans have already voted early in the 2026 midterm elections. In its live coverage of 1 November, the daily reports that Donald Trump, due at rallies in Iowa and Kansas on Sunday, took part on Saturday in "telephone rallies" held remotely. That is what we know. The rest, the makeup of those 52 million voters, their leanings, the reasons for this remote format, the wire report does not say. We will not make it up.

What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact.

A figure like that will delight the fans of "democratic festivity". We would be glad to join them. That tens of millions of people are turning out or slipping a ballot into an envelope well before polling day is real energy, and it says something about a country that wants a say in its own affairs. Rosa Luxemburg reminded us that democracy is indispensable to the working class because it is by exercising its rights, and fighting for them, that it becomes aware of its interests and its historic task (our translation, Reform or Revolution?). The right to vote is not a gadget. Those who scorn it on the left are fighting the wrong battle.

But look at the whole scene. On one side, millions of people voting. On the other, a president campaigning through a loudspeaker, a disembodied voice in living rooms where people listen more than they take part. The contrast is almost too neat: mass participation on one side, politics as a broadcast on the other. Luxemburg already described this participation of all classes in political life, but in the form of bourgeois parliamentarism, where class antagonisms do not disappear but are laid bare for all to see. We vote, yes. And then what?

That is the uncomfortable question. Voting early, voting in large numbers, says nothing in itself about the real power of those who vote. A ballot can mobilise or, on the contrary, channel and soothe: popular energy is spent in the polling booth, then goes home. The yardstick we like to apply to reforms holds for elections too: do they strengthen the confidence and organisation of those at the bottom, or do they demobilise them? Neither queues nor statistics answer that. Only neighbourhood committees, unions, strikes and assemblies do, everything that is built between one election and the next.

Gramsci noted that the liberal experience is not in vain: one does not get beyond parliament without passing through it, and it is by rubbing up against it that the masses became something. Fair enough. But going through a door does not oblige you to camp in it. The 52 million voters have crossed the threshold. The question is whether they intend to stay on the doorstep waiting for the results, or to go inside the house.

The president speaks into a handset; the people, for their part, have a ballot and, above all, hands. Everything will depend on what they do with them the morning after the count.