Election 2026

‘People are pissed off’: anger at the elite and the establishment is fueling this year’s midterms​

Coming midterm elections are starting to be framed not as right versus left but instead the ‘well-fed versus the fed-up’

Brian Leeland, a 79-year-old Democratic voter in Detroit, had enough. Frustrated by the way the US media covers this febrile political era, from Donald Trump’s Washington to political campaigns across the country, he contacted the Guardian.

“Your decision to frame the race here as a simple progressive versus establishment choice is overly simplistic verging on lazy,” he wrote to this reporter, after our coverage of progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in the Democratic US Senate primary in Michigan. “As an electorate, we are not binary for the convenience of the media.”

His was a complaint I heard often as I traveled across the midwest to cover a host of contested Democratic primaries. So I called him up.

Leeland’s list of frustrations is long: grifters, liars, the two-party system, money influencing elections, the US’s standing in the world, the growing national debt and a fixation on cultural issues, not just the larger problems that plague the country.

He is one of many angry voters whose rage is reshaping American politics. It could decide the .....

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