The just-concluded midterm election in the United States signaled profound tectonic shifts in the balance of power in the country and delivered a sharp rebuke to Donald Trump’s incompetence, self-dealing and politics of unbearable infantilism and bigotry. It also offers teachable moments for Nigeria.
First, exit polls show that the economy was voters’ number one concern. They worried about inflation, high grocery prices and the pain at the pump because of high petrol prices. Trump’s war with Iran compounded their misery. They punished the party they thought was responsible for these indignities.
The lesson is that how real, living, everyday people actually feel, rather than abstract, disembodied statistics about growth, determines how they assess the effectiveness of any government. Like Bola Tinubu, Trump trumpeted figures about GDP growth and the stock market as proof that he was working, while ordinary Americans were preoccupied with the prices of meat, groceries and petrol. They cared about the arithmetic of survival in their kitchens and at petrol stations.
Like Tinubu and his henchmen, Trump and his cheerleaders told ordinary Americans that their current pains were temporary sacrifices for a putative deferred permanent gain. They used almost the same diction. American voters said they had no appetite for temporary pains and would rather temporarily change the people inflicting temporary pains on them.
A Republican senator, Cindy Hyde-Smith, is currently fighting for her political life in Mississippi, a state where Democrats hardly win statewide elections, because she cavalierly dismissed worries about the increase in the price of beef during a television appearance. She said people had “so many proteins to choose from.”
Her opponent, Scott Colom, a Black Democrat who is narrowly leading in the count as of the time of writing this column, turned her insensitive remark into an ad featuring Mississippians who said they would rather change their senator than change their source of protein. The race remains undecided, but the political damage has already been done.
Dissatisfaction with corruption was another major driver of the electoral choices of Americans. More than half of voters in the Associated Press Voter Poll said government corruption was “crucial” to their congressional vote.
Trump’s second presidency has been marked by allegations of shameless self-dealing involving his family’s cryptocurrency businesses and the dealings of his associates. The White House disputes wrongdoing, but voters are clearly not persuaded.
Interestingly, Nigeria’s corruption is now being invoked to measure the depth and scale of corruption in Trump’s America. A Gallup survey published in September found that 89 percent of Americans thought corruption was widespread in their government. The comparable figure for Nigeria in 2024 was 90 percent.
The Economist of November 5 captured this embarrassment in a sentence: “The share of Americans who think corruption is widespread in their government now roughly matches that in Nigeria.” There is something profoundly sobering about Nigeria becoming a yardstick for political rot in America.
It’s always problematic to compare the tolerance and inclusivity of America with that of what one might call primordial countries (that is, countries where people have ancestral connections to the land they live in, unlike the US, a settler society built through successive migrations, colonization, enslavement and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples), but it is still impressive that in spite of conservative efforts to make America exclusivist, it continues to expand the boundaries of who can aspire to political power.
It isn’t a perfect place. No place on earth is. But its recurrent capacity for inclusion remains remarkable.
A wildly diverse cast of people from a multiplicity of backgrounds won major electoral victories. Fourteen Nigerian Americans won state and local offices, according to Nigeria’s diaspora commission.
An unprecedented five Black governors will serve simultaneously, including Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first Black woman elected governor in American history (and the first woman ever elected governor of Georgia), and Republican Byron Donalds, Florida’s first Black governor.
Deb Haaland became the first Native American woman elected governor, Gina Hinojosa became Texas’s first Latina governor and Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan became America’s first Muslim senator. Chris Pappas became the first openly gay man elected to the US Senate, and transgender candidates won groundbreaking state legislative races.
As a Muslim, I was particularly intrigued by how Nigerian Muslims, especially northern Nigerian Muslims, celebrated the epochal electoral victories of American Muslims. It is a legitimate cause for celebration that a predominantly Christian country, where Muslims constitute only about 1.6 percent of the population, has elected its first Muslim senator and at least six Muslims to the House of Representatives.
I was intrigued because several of the people ululating in celebration of these electoral victories are the same kind of religious zealots who cheered the cold-blooded murder of Sheikh Yahaya Ibrahim Masussuka in Katsina on October 26, who hurl “inter-faith” as an insult at Muslims who champion interreligious harmony, who label other Muslims who don’t share their bloodstained doctrines of violence and exclusion as “unbelievers” and who would almost certainly reject these American Muslim politicians as “unbelievers” if they knew what they believed and supported.
There is a related irony: Muslim-majority countries often struggle to reciprocate that level of religious openness (Senegal, which elected the Catholic Léopold Sédar Senghor as its first president in 1960, is a notable exception). That should give the celebrants something to ponder.
When, on January 6, 2007, I wrote about Keith Ellison, the first American Muslim elected to the US House of Representatives, an angry Nigerian reader wrote back to tell me that I had misled my readers. He protested that Ellison, who is also African American, wasn’t a “real Muslim.” What kind of Muslim, he asked, would be endorsed, supported and campaigned for by Jews and homosexuals?
The reader had checked Ellison’s website and discovered that the man he imagined to be a Muslim in the mold of Muslims in Africa, Asia and the Middle East had received endorsements from prominent Jewish and gay-rights organizations, groups he had been brought up to see as “enemies” of Islam.
(For the record, Ellison is a Sunni Muslim who practices the same kind of Islam that Sunni Muslims in other parts of the world practice. He was even asked by conservative television host Glenn Beck in November 2006 to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”)
Finally, several MAGA congressmen who championed the Christian genocide narrative in Nigeria or supported measures urging action over the persecution of Christians have been swept away by the blue tsunami. They include Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, Addison McDowell and Tim Moore of North Carolina.
Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who separately pressed for Nigeria’s designation as a Country of Particular Concern, also lost his seat. Chuck Edwards, another cosponsor of the Nigeria resolution, abandoned his reelection bid before November.
Even Texas, home to former Blanco mayor Mike Arnold, one of the most vociferous American purveyors of the Christian genocide narrative, voted Democratic in its races for governor and US senator. Gina Hinojosa defeated Greg Abbott and James Talarico defeated Ken Paxton. In a state long considered an impregnable Republican fortress, that is a spectacular political reversal.
America has shown the world that it can still summon the democratic spirit that made the world’s first peaceful transfer of power between people who are not members of the same dynastic family. Trump stained that tradition in 2021.
It falters. It wobbles. But its voters have shown once again that it can get back on track. Nigeria can learn from that. After all, the greatest assurance against the arrogance of power is the knowledge that an aggrieved electorate can peacefully send an incumbent government packing. For that to happen, the votes of ordinary people must count.