Anti-Monopolists Soared in the Midterms

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Yesterday, the results came in for one of the most significant elections in our lifetimes, one which may mark the end of an era. I want to offer an analysis of what happened, not from a standard partisan or political perspective, but with the goal of explaining how this election is going to change corporate behavior, and, more importantly, how you might be able get involved.

Why is it so important to be involved in governing? To understand that, let’s examine what happened yesterday, its consequences in corporate America, and how governing intersects with politics.

It’s hard to overstate what happened. The actual victory for Democrats, or loss for Republicans depending on how you see it, was so crushing it was on the scale of 1974, the electoral reaction to Watergate. It’s so big that the concept of “red” and “blue” states, which comes out of the 2000 election, might be over. The Democrats not only won the U.S. Senate, taking seats in places like Kansas, Iowa, and perhaps even Alaska and Mississippi, they flipped every statewide seat and both legislative chambers in Texas. They literally do not have enough staffers for the seats they now occupy.

It’s like 1974 in another way too. Unlike earlier wave elections, like 1982, 2006, and 2018, this one seems ideological. That is, the new crop of Democrats have fundamentally different beliefs about the world than the incumbents. As Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa argued, the core question is no longer progressive cultural politics, it’s economic power. To pick another race, you could look at the Texas Attorney General candidate, Nathan Johnson, who won his election on an explicit consumer protection and antimonopoly platform.

David Sirota@davidsirota

This contentious interchange between the NY Times and @GinaHinojosaTX was truly amazing. Hinojosa offered one of the best explanations of populism I've ever seen. Her comments were a total rejection of Corporate Dems' neoliberal formula. Her Texas victory is a game changer.

8:10 AM · Nov 4, 2026 · 177K Views

92 Replies · 697 Reposts · 4.26K Likes

In that sense, it’s more akin to the Watergate Babies on the left who ditched Wright Patman, or the Gingrich revolution on the right who got rid of the moderate Republicans in 1994.

This vote was clearly driven by anger at Donald Trump. The Iran War is deeply unpopular, and 73% of all voters link the conflict to persistently high gas and fuel prices. Heading into the final month of the midterm elections, some 75% of Americans were concerned about the rising cost of food and groceries. While Trump has tried to wrangle the economy with tariffs, voters overwhelmingly link tariffs to higher prices.

But there are other issues as well. Favorability toward the United States’ ongoing support for Israel has also plummeted among Democrats and Independents, and is declining among Republicans. On Election Day, Trump announced the government would be ending its $4 billion per year in military support for Israel by the end of 2026.

In essence, corporate power and the national security posture of the U.S. were both on the ballot. That is unusual and speaks to a broader mandate than just an angry anti-Trump vote.

If you are interested in governing in this new environment, please submit your resume to the resume bank that my organization, the American Economic Liberties Project, set up. There are going to be thousands of open slots for policymaking, communications, legal and investigative positions, across the country, and we are trying to find people who care about monopoly power to staff the newly elected political leaders and help them enact their agenda. So if you’re interested, please upload your details here.

Already, we’re seeing the stock market manifest changes in capital flows. The stock market is surprisingly up; oil prices have crashed as traders expect Trump to wind down the conflict, and much of the market is up on the notion that “gridlock” will mean higher corporate profits and lower tariffs. Companies that offer Medicaid services increased in value, companies that offer privatized Medicare are lower, the data center build-out world is taking a hit as financing and permitting costs are set to increase, but those who already have data centers, namely the big tech hyperscalers, have done quite well.

Companies involved in the data center buildout are reflecting the midterm mandate.

The new political environment has already had one significant consequence in the corporate world: the biggest break-up of the century so far. The $400 billion corporation CVS, which owns insurer giant Aetna and PBM Caremark, just announced it is preemptively splitting itself apart, in part due to the campaign to break up big medicine that BIG and all of you helped launch.

Here’s how it happened. Since 2016, pharmacy benefit managers have gotten more and more unpopular, especially since they are owned by insurers and pharmacy giants who use them to dispense medication in ways that prioritize profits over care. BIG covered CVS over the years, starting in 2020 with our piece “How CVS Became a Health Care Tyrant.”

Over the past few years, several states, including Arkansas and Tennessee, passed laws mandating the split up of pharmacies and PBMs. On a Federal level, Senators Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren introduced a similar package of laws, and newly elected Senators Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Annie Andrews of South Carolina - both doctors - were on board. The writing was on the wall, and now CVS is trying to get ahead of the politics by announcing it will be selling off most of its pharmacy operations. CEO David Joyner explained this morning that the anticipated regulatory scrutiny is one reason why:

American Economic Liberties Project@econliberties

The CEO of CVS says @SenWarren and @HawleyMO's Break Up Big Medicine bill is one of the reasons the company is breaking up! 👏

3:30 PM · Nov 4, 2026 · 4.81K Views

18 Reposts · 73 Likes

The actual split isn’t enough. The conglomerate is trying to keep their specialty pharmacy that sells the profitable drugs, while splitting off the less profitable physical pharmacies. But it’s a big deal that they are taking apart their empire. Big medicine is in real trouble.

Is this election an endorsement of a Democratic agenda?

Well, not really, or it’s at least yet to be seen. Since 2000, 11 of 13 elections have been “change” elections, meaning there’s a change in party control over the Presidency or at least one of the chambers of Congress. Voters are angry, and no one in power is doing much to assuage that anger, so frustrations are wielded against whatever party is in power. Democrats will soon have power, but they do not necessarily have the enduring trust of the public.

As I’ve mentioned in recent columns, that cynicism created a wedge in the discourse among Democrats, with Senator Schatz and Representative Casar squaring off recently over the extent to which Democrats should wield their power. Their sweeping success in the midterms certainly militates in favor of a mandate for bold action.

Now that Dems have won that power — taking back both the Senate and the House, and many state offices — Republicans are due for their own intra-party reckoning. If there is one certain outcome of the midterms, it’s that MAGA is dead.

Was this election an endorsement of the fight against oligarchy?

I think, yes. This was among the most expensive election cycles in American history, with $12 billion spent. Just 50 individuals were responsible for over $2.8 billion of that spending. In a country of about 343 million citizens, 0.00001458% — about 15 millionths of a percent — were responsible for over 23% of all election spending. And yet, the side with more money did not win.

One of the most notable political figures this cycle is the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who cleared every previous record by spending $445.5 million in a single election cycle. In 2020, Musk moved his residence from California to Texas amid a clash with state officials. Over the next five years, he moved Tesla, SpaceX, and X/Twitter with him. He also became highly political, endorsing Trump, running DOGE, and then spent $190 million to elect Texas Republicans in the 2026 midterms.

Yet, Texas is the bluest it’s been in 40 years. By the end of the election cycle, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico was running against Texas AG Ken Paxton on paper, but had focused his rhetorical ire on the richest man in the world.

Team Talarico@TeamTalaricoHQ

.@jamestalarico: In this race, we went up against our own Goliaths. The richest man in the world, the most powerful man in the world, and the entire Washington D.C. establishment.

David wasn't as big or as strong as Goliath. He didn't have as many weapons. But he had hope. He …

5:44 AM · Nov 4, 2026 · 29.4K Views

45 Replies · 268 Reposts · 1.72K Likes

Anyone can point to any number of reasons why Democrats in redder areas prevailed the way they did in these midterms. But to listen to, say, the Texas Democrats themselves, it was not about alienating voters with partisan posturing on culture issues, but with the rhetoric of economic populism, and a unifying “love thy neighbor” reorientation of politics in the state. It was a plea for moral clarity against power.

Did Anti-Monopoly Messaging Factor into the Election?

Yes. Heading into the elections, I put together a spreadsheet with every candidate I could find that explicitly ran on an anti-monopoly platform and came up with 71 legitimate Federal and some state candidates. The lion’s share were Democrat candidates, but there were a couple Republicans, too. And that was while I was trying to be conservative in my assessments. I’m not alone, it was fairly common for electoral analysts to notice the populist tone of the campaigns. One advocacy group found that Democrats spent $29 million on 154 ads that mentioned “Big Tech.”

As a campaign messaging example, Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown won his race narrowly, pitching to voters, “I do not work for data centers. I do not work for Wall Street. I work for you.”

Elsewhere, I was tracking 41 local ballot measures across the country, in California, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, North Dakota, Ohio and Wisconsin, regarding whether to allow new construction of data centers. As of this writing, it would appear that every single one failed. When data centers are put before voters, the outcomes aren’t even close, with most opposition ending up in the 75-83 percent range.

And these losses weren’t due to a bunch of wealthy NIMBYs voting to preserve property values. In fact, the most damning rebuke came from Downe Township, New Jersey, an unincorporated community of about 1,400 residents in the state’s poorest county, which voted down a data center measure with 87% of the vote.

Yes. I’m not going to go over every candidate I tracked, but here are a few that you probably didn’t see:

Josh Turek won his race for Senate in Iowa, flipping a red seat blue, while campaigning against vertical integration of healthcare, food price gouging, and private equity ownership of homes and farmland.

Ron Sand will lead from the Governor’s desk in Iowa, two years after leading the effort as State Auditor to block the Koch Industries’ acquisition of a fertilizer plant in Lee County.

Sam Forstag will be the first Democrat to win a Montana House seat in 30 years. He campaigned against meatpacker consolidation and private equity ownership of mobile home parks.

Roy Cooper won his “Make Stuff Cost Less” campaign for Senate in North Carolina pledging to block anti-competitive grocery and food processing mergers and to ban surveillance pricing and price fixing.

Antitrust attorney and former Colorado AG Phil Weiser handily won his bid to become the governor of the state.

Melat Kiros won her Congressional seat in Colorado and campaigned specifically on the Warren-Hawley Break Up Big Medi