This week’s midterms confirmed that the political ghost of 2006 still haunts a despairing electorate. Americans’ concerns, both domestic and foreign, remain unresolved. Under Donald Trump’s second presidency, these have been not merely neglected but actively dismissed.

Almost exactly 20 years ago, Republicans were punished at the midterms for their ill-advised foreign adventurism. But unlike in 2006, when centrist Democrats made gains in Congress, today’s Democratic Party is advancing a distinctly Left-wing message of economic populism.

Trump broke the pact he made in both 2016 and 2024 with voters, disillusioned former Democrats who found hope in the former Apprentice host’s promises to avoid foreign wars and deliver better days at home. They had placed their faith in him, if not necessarily in the Republican Party.

Voters’ concerns in 2006 were not so different from those animating Americans today. In the key swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, voters elected Democratic senators Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey amid anxieties over globalisation, the impact of free-trade agreements on wages, and opposition to George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. On Tuesday, Brown reclaimed the Ohio seat he lost in 2024. In Casey’s former political heartland — the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre-Hazleton corridor in Pennsylvania — Democrats made dramatic gains, including flipping a congressional seat, in a region that had become a stronghold of vintage MAGA. The issues driving this latest shift, however, were different. Opposition to proposed data centres, coupled with cost-of-living pressures exacerbated by the Iran war and Trump’s tariff policies, helped propel Democrats to victory.

In the year Google bought YouTube and Twitter launched, Americans began feeling unease about the nation’s technological direction — especially as their sense of privacy was eroded by Bush-era surveillance policies. At that time, there was a bipartisan congressional push for comprehensive immigration reform while protesters flooded the streets to oppose local enforcement of immigration laws. Abroad, the war in Iraq had reached disastrous proportions, with American soldiers dying in a conflict that US citizens increasingly viewed as not serving the national interest.

At the same time, Americans were alarmed by Bush’s support for selling US ports to a state-owned Dubai company. China’s economy, buoyed by the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization a few years earlier, was rapidly rising. Across working-class and suburban America, voters felt increasingly adrift, yearning for economic security, social cohesion and an end to war. Frustrated by the GOP’s indifference to these concerns, and further alienated by a series of Republican corruption scandals, voters handed Democrats control of Congress for Bush’s final two years in office.

Two decades later, under Trump’s second presidency, one of this week’s casualties was Ken Paxton, the Texas Republican who partied in Dubai with fugitives ahead of his Senate race. Meanwhile, corruption scandals involving Trump and his allies proliferated, even as Americans grew increasingly anxious about the threat AI posed to their jobs — including those in Amazon warehouses — rather than the outsourcing of work to South Asian call centres. Trump, for his part, dismissed — if not openly mocked — opposition to data centres in communities already hollowed out by globalisation.

Anxious about AI-driven job losses, voters across blue-collar and middle-class communities once again felt adrift, struggling with household bills that continued to climb after Trump’s decision to strike Iran. Though many had backed his immigration message and promises to curb inflation, they were outraged by the inhumane manner in which enforcement unfolded, even as their own financial security became increasingly precarious. The GOP, already weakened by Democrats’ off-year electoral gains, could not withstand the latest wave of voter anger.

Voters may be signalling their desire to move beyond the Trump era, but their frustrations echo those of two decades ago. In 2006, they punished a Republican Party that had lost touch with their concerns. This week, they delivered a similar rebuke to the party Trump once revived, only for him to repeat the very mistakes that brought it down before.