Is China the real winner of the 2026 midterms? Follow the four horses and decide for yourself.
Let’s start with what is not in dispute. Tuesday was a rout. Democrats took both chambers of Congress, with at least 54 Senate seats and a projected House majority somewhere between 251 and 268 seats, according to CBS News. President Trump’s approval stood at 38%, and 89% of voters said cost of living was a major or crucial factor in their vote (CBS News). As of Wednesday, Republicans had not flipped a single seat, while Democrats flipped seven Senate seats and as many as 12 state legislative chambers (CNBC).
Here in Texas, Gina Hinojosa unseated Gov. Greg Abbott, James Talarico beat Ken Paxton for the Senate, and Democrat Nathan Johnson won the attorney general’s office, the first Democrat to hold it since the 1990s (Texas Tribune).
Call it what it was: a repudiation of the President and the party in power, driven above all by the price of groceries, rent and electricity. Voters have every right to deliver that verdict. But elections have consequences beyond the people who win them. In The Four Horsemen of the American Apocalypse, I describe four forces riding against this country. The question I want to ask is simple: which of them gained ground on Tuesday?
The Red Horse: Got A Gift in the AI Race
The sleeper issue of 2026 was data centers. Voters faced 41 data center measures across 10 states, and the industry won exactly one of them (Scientific American). Candidates who promised moratoriums won in Texas, Georgia and Ohio (Euronews). In South Carolina, Annie Andrews beat the incumbent by branding her “Data Center Darline” and calling for a two-year pause (TIME). Texas, which by Axios’s count accounts for 41% of the coming U.S. build-out, now has a governor who campaigned on a pause (Axios).
The anger is real, and it is not purely partisan. Even President Trump said the tech companies building data centers must “pay their own way” so Americans don’t foot higher electric bills (USA Today). Electric bills are up, and nobody wants a power plant’s worth of demand dropped next door without a say. But consider who benefits from American paralysis. The U.S. still has roughly ten times as many AI data centers as China. China, meanwhile, added power capacity between 2022 and 2025 equal to the industrial power base of the entire United States (CNN). Beijing does not hold referendums on its grid. Gordon Chang has alleged that China-linked networks have helped fuel protests against U.S. projects (Fox News). Whether or not that is proven, the CCP did not need to lift a finger. We slowed ourselves down.
Then add the energy agenda. Chuck Schumer has vowed to restore clean energy tax credits (Axios). China controls over 80% of the global solar supply chain (PV Tech). Slow the data centers that America leads in, subsidize the panels China makes. That is a good week in Beijing.
Ideologically, the Red Horse (from my book, not the Republicans) had a good night too. Six candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America won House seats, a record (NPR). DSA claims more than 50 wins nationwide and says “2028 is ours for the taking” (Washington Times). Washington, D.C. elected a democratic socialist mayor (NBC News). One New York winner campaigned on abolishing ICE and universal rent control (Daily Signal). These members are not CCP agents. But central planning, price controls and open borders are the economics of the Red Horse, and they now have a bloc that can swing votes in a narrow caucus.
To be fair, some analysts expect a Democratic Congress to push a more hawkish line on Taiwan and economic security (CNBC). I hope they do. Hearings are cheap. Megawatts are not.
The Green Horse: The Texas Wall Comes Down
A Muslim American winning office is not, by itself, evidence of the Green Horse. The Green Horse is authoritative historical Islam bent on conquest. An ideology, not a faith. But that distinction cuts both ways, and Abdul El-Sayed, now the first Muslim U.S. senator, has a record that deserves scrutiny, not a pass.
In November 2012, days after Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi granted himself sweeping new powers, 46 Egyptian-Americans signed an open letter hailing his moves as “revolutionary” and urging him to purge the media and the police. Signature No. 33 was “Dr. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed” of New York, then a Columbia medical student (Daily Wire). His campaign declined to discuss the letter with the New York Times, and several fellow signers have since donated to his campaigns (Washington Free Beacon). A year earlier, he had written a column downplaying concerns about the Brotherhood taking power (Bridge Michigan).
In fairness, El-Sayed said in October that he would “absolutely” disavow the Brotherhood (PolitiFact), and Michigan fact-checkers found no evidence that he ever pledged support to the organization. But disavowing a group is not the same as explaining why you once urged its president to purge a free press. He has never given that explanation. Now that he holds a Senate vote, he should.
An even bigger Green Horse story lands in Texas. Last year Gov. Abbott designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations under state law, barring them from acquiring land in Texas (Office of the Governor). The state also fought the East Plano Islamic Center’s planned 402-acre development near Josephine, formerly “EPIC City,” now rebranded “The Meadow,” through AG lawsuits, TCEQ orders and HB 4211 (NBC DFW; NBC DFW).
Who led that fight? Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton. Both lost Tuesday. CAIR wasted no time, congratulating the governor-elect, senator-elect and attorney general-elect and citing Abbott and Paxton’s efforts against EPIC as part of the “politics of hate” voters rejected (CAIR). HB 4211 is still law, and a federal HUD investigation remains open (Denton Record-Chronicle). But laws are only as strong as the officials willing to enforce them. My expectation is that state pressure on The Meadow largely ends in January.
Why does that matter? Because separate enclaves work against assimilation. Research published in Papers in Regional Science found that immigrants who live and work among high concentrations of their countrymen are less likely to become proficient in English (Beckhusen et al., IZA). America has always been strongest as a melting pot, not a mosaic of walled-off communities with their own schools, their own institutions and their own rules.
And enclaves vote. Look at Dearborn, the heart of Arab America. In 2024, angry over Gaza, the city swung to Donald Trump with 42%, while 18% went to Jill Stein (WDET). Two years later, Dearborn gave El-Sayed 82% of its vote (Spectrum News). That is not a swing. That is a bloc, moving together on a foreign-policy grievance and delivering its votes to whichever party serves it. Bloc voting is perfectly legal. But it is the opposite of assimilation, where citizens weigh candidates as Americans first.
Immigration? Great! Immigration without assimilation? Not so much.
This is the sixth trial in my book: INVASION. It does not always arrive by force. Sometimes it arrives by zoning, and then it arrives at the ballot box.
The Blue Horse: A Seat Back at the Table
The Blue Horse, globalist despotism, wasted even less time. A day after the election, a 19-member congressional delegation was announced for the UN climate summit, COP31, even though the U.S. has left the Paris Agreement (Euronews). House appropriators say they will use the power of the purse to force the administration to spend withheld climate money (Grist). And here is the irony: in Pennsylvania, newly empowered Democrats say they want to stop local governments from banning renewables (Grist). Local control for the data centers America builds. Preemption for the solar farms China supplies.
The Yellow Horse: Riding Hard to Nowhere
The Yellow Horse is the one we ride ourselves: the traitors, cowards and fools on our own side of the border. On Tuesday it rode hard.
I understand the pain at the pump and the checkout line. It is real. But when 89% of voters say cost of living drove their vote, too many of them treated a generational choice like a gas-price referendum. Low-information voters ignored the facts about what the candidates they elected actually stand for. They voted on what a gallon costs this month instead of what kind of country their children will inherit.
The sad part is that there is no reward for that ride. Take rent control, one of the promises that carried the socialist bloc. When San Francisco expanded it, landlords cut rental supply by 15%, and citywide rents went up 5.1% (Diamond, McQuade and Qian, NBER). Blocking data centers will not bring back cheap power; it hands the build-out to Beijing. More spending on top of more than $40 trillion in federal debt will not cure inflation; it feeds it. The voters who rode hardest for relief are the ones who will feel the difficulty first.
And the Yellow Horse has Republican riders, too. A party that holds power and cannot make life affordable has failed its stewardship. Money was no substitute. Elon Musk poured some $474 million into Republican efforts (Euronews), more than $150 million of it to boost Ken Paxton, who lost anyway (CBS News). Clever mapmaking didn’t save them either. CBS is now asking whether the GOP’s mid-decade redistricting push turned into a “dummymander” that spread Republican voters too thin to survive a wave. Strategists outsmarting themselves is a Yellow Horse specialty. That failure goes back five decades, to August 15, 1971, when we abandoned sound money. Inflation is a policy choice. On Tuesday, voters punished the people holding the bill and handed it to people who will make it bigger.
Where the Wave Breaks: Honest Money
There is one more potential casualty to watch, and it is personal for me. In 2025, Texas made gold and silver legal tender with HB 1056 (Texas Legislature), a cornerstone of the transactional gold movement my team helped launch (TransactionalGold.com). Come January, Democrats will hold the governor’s mansion, the attorney general’s office and the Texas House, and a Democratic lieutenant governor will preside over the Senate (MultiState). The new leadership has not said what it thinks of honest money. Texans who care about it need to ask. We hope that if affordability is the issue, honest money will be encouraged.
Now look east. In Florida, the wave broke. Byron Donalds won the governorship (MultiState), and Florida’s law recognizing gold and silver as legal tender took effect on July 1, 2026 (Fox 35). This year the Legislature went further, passing a bill to write the state’s gold and silver coin standards into law, 31-1 in the Senate and unanimously in the House, and Gov. DeSantis signed it (Miami Today). It was not a clean sweep. DSA candidate Angie Nixon came close to unseating Sen. Ashley Moody despite being vastly outspent (Democracy Now). But the largest remaining red state to make gold and silver legal tender can show the country how transactional gold works.
That matters for 2028. Voters just told us the cost of living is what moves them. The left’s answer is rent control and price caps, a plan for economic disaster. Ours is honest money that holds its value and that families can actually spend. Florida is where we prove it. We have now until 2028.
So Which Horseman Won in the Midterms?
If I had to pick one, sadly it is the Red Horse. China got a slower American AI build-out, a renewed push for Chinese-dominated solar, and an emboldened socialist bloc, all without firing a shot. The Green Horse came in a close second, defeating its strongest opponents in Texas; and in Michigan sending a senator to Washington with an unexplained letter in his past. The Blue Horse got its seat back at the table. And the Yellow Horse carried them all in, unaware of the price that will be paid.
None of this is fate. As I wrote, this is a diagnosis, not a prophecy. The answer is not despair. It is honest Constitutional state-based legal tender, allowing families to build real wealth, with citizens who show up long before the next election. The horsemen are riding. The house is still standing. What happens next is up to us.
—Kevin D. Freeman, D.Sc. (h.c.), CFA
