Lifelong Republicans punished Donald Trump this week by simply voting for the other side. In Spain, disillusioned voters would rather stay at home than cross the line – and our politicians know it
Opinion · Elsa Ibáñez Ferrer, editor-in-chief of Spain Expat Press
There are election nights that reshape a presidency, and Tuesday was one of them. Democrats took the House of Representatives and, according to NBC News projections, the Senate too, gaining seven seats to reach 54. It is the heaviest defeat of Donald Trump’s political career.
But the numbers matter less than the map. In Kansas, a state that had not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, a Methodist pastor called Adam Hamilton unseated the Republican senator Roger Marshall. Ninety-four years of unbroken Republican victories – the longest single-party streak in Senate elections anywhere in the country – ended in a single evening. In Texas, James Talarico became the state’s first Democratic senator in 33 years.
Even where Republicans held on, the ground shifted beneath them. In Arkansas, Tom Cotton kept his seat, but the race swung almost 19 points towards the Democrats compared with the 2024 presidential vote. In the district around Little Rock, the Republican French Hill leads by barely two points, with the count still unfinished. And Trump, the man who refused to concede in 2020, has said he will accept the results.
What happened in Kansas is simple to describe and almost unthinkable in Spain. People who had voted Republican all their lives looked at what was on offer, did not like it, and voted for the other candidate. They did not stay at home. They did not spoil their ballot to avoid “helping the enemy”. They crossed the line.
Hamilton made it easy for them. He ran as an “independent-minded Democrat”, kept his distance from his party’s leadership, said he would not back Chuck Schumer for another term as leader, and won endorsements from well-known Kansas Republicans. Voters judged the person and the record, not the rosette. That is precisely what a democracy should allow: the powerful must know they can lose, even in their safest strongholds.
In Spain, voting looks less like a judgment and more like supporting a football club. You are a socialist or you are a conservative, often because your parents were. Switching sides feels close to betrayal. Broken promises, corruption scandals, pacts that were ruled out only yesterday – none of it shifts loyalties very far.
The latest polling bears this out. According to the pollster 40dB., the Socialist party (PSOE) keeps about 71% of its 2023 voters, and the conservative Popular party (PP) about 75%. Depending on the survey, only 6% to 10% of former Socialist voters would move to the PP. Much of the discontent goes nowhere at all: a Hamalga poll for the news site Vozpópuli found that 8.6% of 2023 PSOE voters now plan to abstain, and another estimate suggests that four in 10 new abstainers voted Socialist last time.
The logic is familiar to anyone who has spent time in a Spanish bar during an election campaign: I don’t like what my lot have done, but I’d sooner die than vote for the other lot. Repeated millions of times, that instinct is a life insurance policy for every party leadership, of whatever colour. If you know your disappointed supporters will, at worst, stay on the sofa, lying to them costs very little.
Part of the explanation lies in the rules of the game. Americans vote for a named individual who has had to win a primary and answers to a district or a state. A candidate can break with their party, and voters can reward them for it. Spaniards vote for closed, blocked lists drawn up by party headquarters. A member of parliament owes their seat not to voters but to whoever placed them on the list. You do not choose a person; you choose an acronym. And when all you can choose is an acronym, voting becomes an act of belonging rather than of evaluation.
Countries change. People change their minds. Parties change too, sometimes beyond recognition. There is no reason to chain yourself to one side for life. The lesson from Kansas is that a vote is a tool for rewarding and punishing – not a membership card.
None of this means American democracy is a model to be copied wholesale. Partisan gerrymandering still protects seats: the local press in Arkansas credits it for French Hill’s narrow lead. Money weighs heavily, too – the Kansas race was the most expensive in the state’s history. Americans, in practice, have only two choices, while Spaniards can punish their party by moving within their bloc, from the PP to Vox or from Sumar to the PSOE. Nor are Spanish voters as immovable as the stereotype suggests: in 2011 the Socialists collapsed, and in 2015 the rise of Podemos and Ciudadanos broke the two-party system. The Economist’s Democracy Index has for years rated Spain a “full democracy” and the US merely a “flawed” one.
Still, the image of this week is hard to argue with. In Kansas, a lifelong Republican could look at his senator and say: not this time. In Spain, that same voter, more often than not, still prefers the silence of abstention to a vote for the other side.
Elsa Ibáñez Ferrer is editor-in-chief of Spanien Press
