Blinken: "I did not see this result" as Democrats take Congress

“I was fairly optimistic coming into it as a Democrat. I sort of parked that for four years as Secretary of State. I tried to stay out of politics,” Blinken said on Saturday at the HT Leadership Summit. “I was fairly optimistic, but I have to acknowledge to all of you, I did not see this result.” Blinken served as US Secretary of State from 2021 to 2025.

The shift went well beyond the usual midterm slap a sitting president's party takes, he said. All 435 House seats and 35 of the 100 Senate seats were up on November 3, along with 36 governorships and a batch of state legislative posts — and Democrats won control of both chambers. They also made gains in state races and in states once written off as unwinnable for them, a swing Blinken said could reshape the Electoral College map Democrats had feared would work against them.

Blinken pinned much of the backlash on broken promises. “President Trump came in, he made some very concrete promises, and he hasn't delivered on them. And people got very frustrated with that. He said he was going to bring prices down. They continue to go up,” he said. He added that tariffs and the war on Iran piled on inflationary pressure, and noted that slowing inflation doesn't mean prices come back down.

Corruption anger was the other big driver, according to Blinken. He said polling put concerns about corruption at the centre of the result and pointed to movements abroad — the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, Ukraine's Maidan protests, Brazil's Car Wash investigation. “Every single time there was a movement of significance of this kind, corruption, the revulsion of corruption was either the or a significant driver,” he said, arguing the US was no exception.

On Israel, Blinken acknowledged a real shift in American public opinion but said it wasn't what moved most voters. “If you look at the polling, that's not what was motivating people. In certain individual places, it might be. But in most places, it wasn't,” he said.

Now the pressure flips to the winners. Blinken said the Democratic Congress taking office in January must show it can tackle affordability: “If a Democratic Congress, which will take office in January, doesn't deliver, that won't be good for Democrats.” With Trump still in the White House, he added, the president will carry much of the blame for the economy over the next two years heading into the 2028 election.