Dear America: Your Midterms Are Our Problem Too

An election-day appeal from across the Atlantic. Please sort yourselves out. We don’t get a ballot, but we do get the bill, and we can’t afford it any more

Photo by Joshua Tsu on Unsplash

As it stands, I have approximately 958 people in the United States subscribed to this weird little rambling publication of mine. That’s 958 people across America voluntarily subjecting themselves to the mostly unhinged political rants of a British bloke who spends a frankly unhealthy amount of time getting annoyed about things.

Of those, 40 are in North Carolina, 12 in Kansas, four in Maine, 36 in Ohio, 61 in Texas, 36 in Iowa, one in Alaska, 20 in Georgia and 29 in Michigan. A grand total of 239 people across those nine states.

Fear not, I’m not about to embark on a numerically induced existential crisis, those are reserved for Sunday evenings and my annual tax return. I’m merely setting the scene.

Because today, Tuesday 3 November 2026, is election day in the United States.

Well, I say today, but it’s 5:28 in the morning as I’m writing this in the United Kingdom, meaning much of America is still fast asleep, blissfully unaware that a slightly sweary homosexual immigrant on the other side of the Atlantic is already getting himself worked up about its democratic responsibilities, because, I would argue that these could be among the most consequential American midterm elections of our lifetimes.

And I realise that’s a bit of a dramatic thing to say about midterms. From a British perspective, it feels somewhat like suggesting that our local council elections could alter the course of world history, a truly hilarious thought when you’ve watched any of our actual election coverage, especially the part where the results are read in a leisure centre in Slough with candidates joined on stage by dolphins and men dressed up as bins.

As regular readers will know, I don’t write about American politics nearly as much as I write about the endless collection of political clusterfucks on our own doorstep. This is partly because Westminster produces enough material to keep a satirist employed until the heat death of the universe, but even more importantly because I find the American political system gloriously complicated.

That doesn’t mean I don’t pay attention though, because American politics does not stop at America’s borders, and unfortunately for the rest of us, neither do the consequences - and this has never been more clear than since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January last year.

Since that time, there have been decisions made that have directly and seriously affected our lives in the UK, with among these, Trumpian Tariffs.

In April 2025, following the introduction of tariffs, British goods exports to the United States fell by £1.5 billion, or 24.7%, in a single month, according to our own Office for National Statistics.

Not every penny of that can be blamed on tariffs, but the damage to UK exporters, particularly our car industry, has been substantial.

The other victim of Trump’s intransigence has been the NHS. As part of the pharmaceutical agreement negotiated with the United States, the British government committed to increasing the net prices paid by the NHS for certain new medicines by 25% from April 2026.

Twenty-five fucking per cent. That is a 25% increase on a budget line for a health service that’s already running on fumes.

And then, of course, there’s Iran. Fucking. Iran.

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s October 2026 forecast, fossil fuel prices rose by an absolutely insane 83% in the year to September, and British inflation is expected to peak at close to 4% in early 2027.

For ordinary people here in the UK, that means more expensive fuel, more expensive electricity, higher prices and yet another vice-like squeeze on household finances at a time when many people simply cannot afford another one.

It would, of course, be disingenuous to say that America is solely responsible for our economic hardships - our own governments have managed plenty without Washington’s help, but it would be equally absurd to claim that the decisions of the world’s most powerful country have no bearing on the rest of us.

They do, and we’re paying very dearly for some of them.

This is all before we even get to Ukraine, a country fighting not only for its own independence but for the security of Europe more broadly.

Throughout Trump’s second presidency, American support has become increasingly uncertain, and we have now seen a clear pivot of American diplomacy directly siding with Vladimir Putin, not only in rhetoric, but in action.

I am, of course, talking about Trump and his emotional support billionaire hobbling Ukrainian defences by limiting Starlink connectivity, directly leading to Russia being able to more accurately target Ukrainian infrastructure and, even more importantly, civilians.

American influence on the rest of the world is not a new concept, we’ve lived through American wars destabilising entire regions and technology companies acquiring levels of influence that would have made nineteenth-century industrial monopolists positively moist with excitement.

What is new, and what concerns me most, is that under the Trump 2.0 administration, that power, both domestically and abroad, has largely been unchecked and unchallenged.

The United States was designed around a system of checks and balances. A president. A Congress. A judiciary. Three institutions that are explicitly intended to prevent too much power accumulating in any one pair of hands.

Yet over the past two years, congressional scrutiny has repeatedly proved hilariously insufficient to change the administration’s course. Case in point, the still ongoing war in Iran.

On 23 July this year, the House of Representatives voted 214 to 208 in favour of a resolution directing Trump to end military action against Iran unless Congress authorised it, with four Republicans joining the Democrats. Later that very same day, the Senate blocked a separate attempt to restrict the president’s war powers, and so, the war continued.

You can argue about the merits of the conflict, but surely we can all agree that decisions involving war deserve meaningful scrutiny from the representatives of the people expected to pay for it and, potentially, die in it, no?

And I don’t think those questions should stop at foreign policy.

Take Pete Hegseth, for example, a man who gives the impression that he is auditioning for a particularly enthusiastic supporting role in Apocalypse Now. Watching him run the most powerful military in the world feels like watching the loudest lad at the stag do being handed the nuclear codes, then managing them with exactly the judgement you’d expect and about as much understanding of the consequences.

Beyond the theatrics and idiocy, his decisions, especially on how the Iran war has been conducted, deserve serious, rigorous and relentless scrutiny.

Or consider Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As someone who works in healthcare, I find developments in American vaccination policy deeply concerning.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 4,852 confirmed measles cases in 2026 as of 29 October. Four thousand, eight hundred and fifty-two. In a country with access to one of the most effective and extensively studied childhood vaccination programmes developed in history.

It would be inaccurate to attribute every case to one politician. Measles outbreaks have multiple causes, and declining vaccination coverage predates Trump’s return, however, when the person overseeing American health policy has a long history of questioning established vaccine science, scrutiny of his role in decisions made concerning vaccines is pretty fucking important.

And I’m not saying any of this because oversight is a Democratic or Republican activity, but because accountability is supposed to be a democratic activity.

I'm under no illusion that today's elections will remove the Tangerine Tyrant from office, and I very much doubt additional scrutiny will suddenly inspire him to abandon the vainglorious declarations and social media tirades that define his presidency.

But today will determine who controls the House of Representatives and the Senate, and those institutions have powers that matter.

The Republicans currently hold a 53/47 advantage in the Senate, so Democrats need a net gain of four seats, with the vice-president’s casting vote preserving Republican control in a 50/50 split. Meanwhile, all 435 House seats are being contested.

A different congressional majority would not instantly resolve the war in Iran, bring peace to Ukraine or reverse America’s tariffs, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise.

But investigations, spending decisions and presidential nominees could all face different scrutiny, and possibly most importantly, the people exercising extraordinary power could face a different degree of accountability.

One of the strangest things about watching from outside the United States is that we have absolutely no democratic voice in it.

We watch your elections. We follow your congressional hearings. We listen to your presidents, and far more frequently than I would like, we stare at the news wondering what the actual fuck is going on.

Not because we believe British politics is some shining beacon of good governance. Good lord, no. We’ve had Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and an entire political generation who appear determined to turn national self-sabotage into a competitive sport.

But we do understand that what happens in America matters beyond America.

We understand that the consequences of American politics do not require an American passport.

Democracy isn’t always just about choosing a leader every four years and handing them the keys to the kingdom. It isn’t a blank cheque, nor was it ever meant to be. The whole bloody point of representative government is that power remains answerable to the people. Not just on election day, but on every day that follows.

And the moment accountability becomes something we demand only of the other side, it stops being accountability and becomes little more than political convenience.

I don’t expect American voters to put the interests of the United Kingdom ahead of their own, nor should they - but I do hope that the consequences of American political decisions beyond its borders are at least part of the conversation.

Because the rest of us don’t get a ballot, we simply get the bill for the decisions that America makes.