A significant milestone went unnoticed on a week that was extraordinarily eventful even by today’s standards of U.S. politics. What with the anniversary of Donald Trump’s victory, the Democratic electoral triumph, and the record-breaking government shutdown, it was difficult to remember that Monday marked the start of the one-year countdown to the next midterm elections. These vote will renew all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate. But above all, they will determine the viability of the second half of Trump’s term.

Aware of how much is at stake in these midterms, the U.S. president has already launched an assault on several fronts to — if all goes well, with the help of the Supreme Court — alter the rules of the game before the vote (by manipulating the congressional map through redistricting), during the vote (by making it more difficult for minorities to vote), or afterwards (by denying the results if they are adverse). The goal? To prevent Republicans from losing the House of Representatives and to prevent Democrats from curbing the president’s agenda, and who knows, perhaps even to initiate impeachment proceedings like the two he faced during his first term in the White House.

The rigged election hypothesis doesn’t sound so alarmist or exaggerated when one considers that in 2020, after months of spreading suspicions in advance about the electoral system, Trump clung to power after losing the election by alleging a non-existent fraud, pressured the Georgia attorney general to find him the votes he needed, challenged vote counts across the country, and, when he saw that none of this was working, incited a mob of his followers to storm the Capitol.

Although perhaps we don’t need to go back that far: in the summer of 2024, at a rally in Florida during the campaign that returned him to the White House, the candidate addressed American Christians, saying: “Get out and vote! Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.”

The part of the plan related to the “before” began in the summer, when the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, announced that he would redraw his state’s congressional districts to take five seats away from his rivals. He did so using the tactic of gerrymandering, a sport as American as it is undemocratic. Practiced by politicians of all stripes, it consists of creating demographically artificial and geographically impossible voting districts (as impossible as a salamander, the animal from which the second part of the neologism originates) that benefit whoever is in power. The Constitution mandates this redistricting, by state, every 10 years, when, after the release of new census data, electoral maps are redrawn to reflect population changes.

What Abbott did is known as midterm gerrymandering, because it’s practiced before the midterm elections that split the presidency in two and are usually unfavorable for the incumbent. The fact that the map of Texas, a territory far more diverse than the stereotype suggests, was already heavily manipulated is demonstrated by the fact that Republicans won 67% of the seats in Washington in 2024 despite only obtaining 52% of the vote in the Senate by direct vote. With this new manipulation, they aspire to 80% of the pie.

Response in California

California Governor Gavin Newsom reacted to Texas’s announcement by proposing a new congressional map in his own state that guarantees Democrats five seats. Since California is one of the few states where districts are drawn by an independent commission, he had to submit his plan to a referendum, which passed with 64% of yes votes last Tuesday, a result that strengthened Newsom’s credentials as a potential 2028 presidential candidate.

“Paradoxically, Newsom had to bypass that commission, which is the ideal system,” acknowledges Ricardo Ramírez, a Los Angeles political consultant and expert on voting rights, over the phone. “At first, I thought it was problematic, but there was no other option: playing by the rules in this case would have been like trying to put out a forest fire with a glass of water.”

Tuesday was also the day of resounding Democratic victories in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. These wins have restored the party’s faith in its ability to win after a year of identity and leadership crisis, and increase its chances of regaining the House of Representatives in the midterms (with the Senate, it will be more difficult). Trump reacted to the defeat by pressuring Congress on Truth Social to pass electoral reforms focused on his fixation with mail-in voting and proof of citizenship at the polls. (The idea that undocumented immigrants, paid by Democrats, vote en masse is one of the Republicans’ favorite conspiracy theories.)

In March, Trump issued an executive order that, in the name of election security, included those two measures and others, such as the one requiring that only mail-in ballots received before Election Day be counted, regardless of state rules. Two federal judges blocked him because, as one of them reminded him, “the Constitution does not grant the president any specific power over elections.”

Texas and California have been followed on the Republican side by Missouri (where they are guaranteed an additional representative after the redistricting), North Carolina (another), and Ohio (two more). In all cases, Trump’s party used its control of state legislatures to push through allocations in which minority representation, with its potentially Democratic vote, is concentrated in fewer districts, which they already consider lost, or diluted across other conservative-leaning districts.

North Carolina Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger said in a statement released this by his office that gerrymandering in his state was necessary. “We are doing everything we can to protect President Trump’s agenda, which means safeguarding Republican control of Congress,” and “to ensure Gavin Newsom doesn’t decide the congressional majority.”

“The gerrymandering wars are not over yet,” warns Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading nonpartisan organization focused on election law, in a telephone interview. Having missed the opportunity to end election manipulation in 2022 with the Free Voting Act — which failed to pass despite Democrats controlling both houses of Congress — Li lists other states that could further expand the battleground (from Republican Florida to Democratic Illinois) and clarifies that there is still time for new manipulations until shortly before the primaries. In some places, they begin as early as March and extend until the end of summer.

And in the midst of that process, the Supreme Court will rule in June on Louisiana v. Callais, one of the most important cases of the judicial year. Its nine justices, six of whom are conservatives and have handed victory after victory to Trump since his return to the White House, already looked at it last year, but decided in June to re-examine it to seize the opportunity to amend Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This is a landmark law of U.S. democracy because it outlawed discriminatory practices to guarantee voters of ethnic or linguistic minorities equal access to the polls.

That second section states that local and state authorities cannot redraw districts if such manipulation results in the denial or restriction of any citizen’s right to vote on the basis of race. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which in 2023 struck down affirmative action policies in universities, heard oral arguments in the case on October 15 and appeared willing to weaken that part of the law.

“In practice, Republicans could gain almost 20 seats in the House of Representatives,” explains University of Massachusetts professor Paul Collins, author of several books on the politicization of the Supreme Court. All of them are in the South. Furthermore, it would create a vicious cycle: by being excluded, minorities have no incentive to become politically involved because they don’t see themselves reflected in their representatives, so they stop voting. It has also been proven that it would encourage extremism: without competition, the need to find common ground in the center to build consensus also disappears.

“This goes far beyond a weakening maneuver,” says Lydia Ozuna, who founded an organization called Texans Against Gerrymandering in 2017. “The Voting Rights Act is on life support. The Supreme Court ruling would be like taking away its oxygen.” Ozuna speaks to EL PAÍS by phone from the greater Houston metropolitan area, which population shifts in recent years have transformed into a veritable demographic experiment divided almost equally into four groups: white, Black, Asian and Latino. Governor Abbott’s new electoral maps convert one of its districts, currently Democratic, into a Republican one.

Lines to vote

“The success of that electoral manipulation will also depend on voter turnout,” argues the activist, who suggests not losing sight of the plans Trump may put in place for next year’s elections: “Basically, obstacles to going to the polls, such as reducing the number of polling places, which could lead to longer lines.”

Those lines are never a problem in rural, predominantly Republican areas. There’s also Trump’s insistence on limiting voting to election day, contrary to the current system — often difficult to understand from a European perspective — in which polling stations can remain open for weeks. Changing this would hinder millions of citizens from voting. Unlike some other countries such as Spain that hold votes on a Sunday, elections in the U.S. always fall on a Tuesday, which is never a public holiday, so that many would-be voters have to take a day off in a country that is notoriously stingy with them.

The sum of these obstacles seeks to establish a playing field where “competition is real, but unfair.” This is what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way first defined in a 2002 scientific article as “competitive authoritarianism” to describe a system that gives a virtually predetermined outcome the appearance of a democratic choice. Levitsky is also the co-author of the influential essay How Democracies Die, which convincingly argued that contemporary autocrats love elections, as long as they can manipulate them.

Levitsky and Way’s theory is mentioned in a recent article in The Atlantic titled “Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Election Is Already Underway,” whose author, David A. Graham, begins by asking the reader to imagine what happens next. He proposes a journey into the future, to the night of November 3, 2026, at the end of the midterm elections. The scenario is as follows: Republicans have won the Senate, but control of the House “seems like it will come down to two districts in Maricopa County, Arizona.”

“ICE agents and National Guardsmen have been deployed there since that summer, ostensibly in response to criminal immigrants, though crime has been dropping for several years,” Graham writes, imagining Trump prematurely declaring victory and attacking his opponents in Truth; his loyal allies pressuring Arizona election officials; and the far-right media spreading fake news about Democrats committing fraud. Despite the presence of Marines in the streets, small but intense protests erupt in Phoenix and elsewhere, Graham adds. In this scenario, Trump uses them as a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and declares martial law in cities governed by Democrats.

And again, it might sound overly alarmist, if it didn’t seem like an improved and expanded sequel to the 2020 election movie. Even the setting is familiar: Maricopa was five years ago ground zero for Trump’s Big Lie.

Then, credulous supporters of the still-president, many of them armed, arrived in Phoenix to challenge the results, initiating a sequence of events that culminated two months later in the storming of the Capitol. Some 1,600 insurgents were sentenced to prison for their actions on that January 6.

On his first day back in power, Trump pardoned them all. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that many of them will be willing, if the opportunity arises, to return the favor in the next election.

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In 1937, the renowned 40-year-old American journalist Paul Gallico made the bold decision to stop writing sports news to reinvent himself and dedicate his life to what he loved: fiction. He had just divorced his second wife, and that year he began this uncertain new personal and professional chapter by indulging in the luxury of traveling first class on the RMS Queen Mary, the newly launched British ocean liner that, over the course of about four days, covered the route between New York and Southampton (in southern England) and vied for the title of the world’s fastest ship with the French SS Normandie. One morning, at breakfast, his destiny and that of the ship became permanently intertwined, far beyond the European port they were heading for.

“To the musical sound of plates, knives, forks, and glasses clattering against the wooden stands at the edge of the tables was added the faint tinkling of ornaments as the large Christmas tree, planted in a tub filled with sand and firmly bolted to the dining room floor, began to lean dangerously. Listing much more than it had ever been before, the ship seemed suspended and gave the impression that it would never right itself.” Gallico didn’t write that paragraph in a memoir, but in one of the most celebrated novels of the disaster subgenre, The Poseidon Adventure (1969), made more popular by its 1972 film adaptation starring Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine; partly filmed, in fact, on the Queen Mary.

The writer completed the voyage unharmed, but the powerful impression left on him by the heeling of the colossal ship — 310 meters long and weighing over 81,000 tons — as it was struck by a massive wave planted the seed of what would become the greatest success of his career. The discovery that, in 1942, while transporting Allied troops, a 28-meter wave tilted the ocean liner at a 52-degree angle (just three degrees from capsizing) further fueled his nightmares.

The story of the Queen Mary is astonishing enough without needing fanciful embellishments: this incredibly expensive jewel in the crown, born from the merger of the two rival British shipping companies, Cunard and White Star Line (the one that built the Titanic), with a generous government loan, boasted 12 decks, swimming pools, paddle tennis courts, nurseries, libraries, a monumental lounge, and capacity for over 2,000 passengers, along with another 1,000 crew members.

In 1941, its austere Art Deco ornamentation had to be removed and urgently replaced with bunks to transport between 10,000 and 15,000 soldiers per voyage during World War II. Along with its sister ship, the RMS Queen Elizabeth, Prime Minister Winston Churchill said that the two vessels had helped hasten the end of the war by at least a year. Adolf Hitler had offered $250,000 and the Iron Cross to whoever sank the Queen Mary, a symbol of hope and an exceptional asset to his enemies.

Operational until 1967, when it was decommissioned following a drop in revenue after the golden age of ocean liners had ended, the legacy of the Queen Mary was far from over. “The ship today and its continued appeal owe a great deal to film and television. If it had ended up anywhere other than Southern California, it’s unlikely its star status would shine as brightly as it does now,” Jonathan Quayle, a maritime enthusiast specializing in the ship’s history, tells EL PAÍS.

Quayle gives talks about the Queen Mary and the Cunard fleet, collects ship artifacts and previously unseen photographs, and is a leading authority in his field. The U.S. city of Long Beach has been home to the ocean liner for almost 60 years, now without most of its machinery and adapted to house a restaurant, tourist attractions, and even a hotel. And, of course, film shoots.

“Being located just outside Hollywood, it was the natural choice when a crew needed a location for an episode of Murder, She Wrote [1984], Charlie’s Angels [1976], The X-Files [1993]… The list of productions filmed on board is enormous. The ship is unique; there’s nothing else like it in terms of size, both inside and out, making it an incredibly rare resource for the film industry. There’s nowhere else where you can rent a huge, three-story English ballroom, built in the 1930s and decorated with the finest woods,” Quayle explains.

In the case of The Poseidon Adventure, only some parts were used, although the lounge where passengers and crew celebrated the fateful New Year’s Eve in the famous capsizing scene was a replica of the dining room of the Queen Mary, an exponent of the romanticism of glorious ships that the film sought to capture. Due to the complexity of the impressive special effects, the lounge was reconstructed in sections so that it could be rotated.

The ship has featured in many other on-screen moments. In Pearl Harbor (2001), the characters played by Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale culminated their first date with a kiss while hanging from a platform on the Queen Mary, even though, in the year in which the film is set — 1941, the year of the Japanese bombing of the U.S. base in Hawaii — the ship was neither there nor did it look that way: it had been painted gray to camouflage it, which led to it becoming popularly known as “the gray ghost.”

Martin Scorsese used it in The Aviator (2004). In Assault on a Queen (1966), Frank Sinatra led a gang of thieves who, taking advantage of the discovery of a sunken Nazi submarine, tried to sneak onto the ship (which, at the time, still had a year of service remaining) at sea to steal the contents of its safe. The British master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, also took the opportunity to pay homage to an emblem of his country, opening Dial M for Murder (1954) with the arrival of the conspiring husband aboard the ocean liner.

Not forgetting, of course, the episode of The X-Files referenced by Quayle, where Agent Mulder boards a ship lost in the Bermuda Triangle, which is none other than the Queen Mary — renamed Queen Anne — and travels back in time to the day the United Kingdom declared war on Germany.

For Quayle, the key lies in the “iconic status” that the Queen Mary has held since its troubled and protracted birth, marked by the ravages of the Great Depression, as it represents “what Great Britain could offer,” as well as a light at the end of the tunnel for the population after years of hardship. And, on the other hand, there are those “imposing and beautiful interiors” that The Poseidon Adventure revealed to later audiences, about which Quayle is preparing a book. “The ship’s interiors were pioneers of British design in the 1930s, but their place in that history has been largely forgotten,” he laments, “with specifically commissioned artworks, fixtures and decorative elements.”

Furnished primarily by the Bromsgrove Guild, the Queen Mary featured exclusive pieces by artists such as Edward Wadsworth and the landscape painter Algernon Newton. Woods from various colonies of the then-British Empire were used, while the first-class dining room was dominated by a gigantic map depicting its transatlantic voyage, complete with a small motorized model of the ship to mark its position along the route.

The mystery ship

The map of the grand dining room plays a significant role in La maldición del Queen Mary (in English, The Curse of the Queen Mary), a horror film released this year in Spain via Amazon Prime Video. A change in the model indicates that, as in the episode of The X-Files, a time jump has occurred, leading a married couple of audiovisual creatives in crisis to become entangled with a gruesome parricide committed aboard the ship (with no known basis).

The film, with a touch of self-aware humor, satirizes the carnival sideshow status the ship has acquired in recent decades, particularly for horror fans. Filmed on board, it’s not the only B-movie production to become associated with the once-luxurious vessel. Two terrible exploitation films by the shameless production company The Asylum, Titanic 2 (2010) and Titanic 666 (2022), have also been released using the sets of the Queen Mary.

It seems to have become what it is in popular culture: a haunted mansion on the water. The culmination of years of legends and ghost stories that have surrounded the ship since it ran aground in Long Beach, to the point of making it a place of pilgrimage for followers of the supernatural, which, in the eyes of its owners, is a serious commercial goldmine.

Quayle admits to having a complicated relationship with it. “While I have no problem with these events, or with the revenue they generate when it is reinvested in the ship’s upkeep, I don’t like that half of the facilities are inaccessible due to shows that could be located anywhere on the property, nor that historic spaces that could otherwise be restored, opened up, and enjoyed are kept untouched,” he says, referring to horror tours, mazes, and other attractions whose appeal lies in the fact that they take place in normally unusable areas of the ship, which are deliberately kept in their original state to give the impression that the visitor is walking through eerie ruins.

Quayle recalls that this transformation of the Queen Mary into a supposedly haunted enclave took place under Disney, when the company briefly owned it in the 1980s. With an eye toward developing a future DisneySea theme park (which it would eventually build in Tokyo in 2001), Disney created a Ghosts & Legends tour.

“Before, nothing related to ghosts or demons was mentioned in the promotion,” says Quayle. “Disney, with its magic wand, took elements of history and exploited them to create macabre tales that had no connection to events, purely for entertainment. It was in poor taste, as the ship had decades of incredible stories to share, and Disney didn’t need to invent things or embellish the truth. For better or worse, it was a resounding success.”

Rumors have been circulating ever since: accounts of German or Italian prisoners who died there, of the souls of the HMS Curacoa (which the Queen Mary sank in an accident) wandering the corridors, of children’s voices heard in the old nurseries… The official website offers up to three different paranormal activities, as well as a form for tourists to submit their video or audio recordings of unexplained experiences recorded on board.

Quayle, who insists he is not opposed to this type of entertainment, despite calling it “poisoned candy,” now hopes that, with the ship’s return to the control of the city of Long Beach for the first time in 40 years, the general approach will change. Steps are being taken in that direction, further encouraged by recognitions such as the Queen Mary’s designation as one of America’s Historic Hotels. “Those in charge seem to appreciate that the ship is more than just a handful of stories. Its history of war and peace far surpasses any macabre spectacle.”

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The Democrats’ time in the desert is over. After sweeping every single one of Tuesday’s major elections — from one end of the country to the other and by wide margins — the opposition has finally put its long mourning period following defeat in the presidential election behind it, and is winning back voters in communities that turned their backs on them a year ago. Now preparations begin for the next battle, the midterm elections that will decide control of Congress, with a feeling that has been absent among Democrats since November 2024: enthusiasm.

“Enough with the premature obituaries. The Democratic Party is back,” posted House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries as the vote counts made the scale of victory clear. “Tonight, we sent a message — we sent a message to every corner of the Commonwealth; a message to our neighbors and our fellow Americans across the country; we sent a message to the whole world — that in 2025, Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship,” declared Abigail Spanberger, the winner of the Virginia gubernatorial election, in her victory speech.

The endorsement is undeniable: the electoral victories weren’t limited to states already under Democratic control or those won by former vice president Kamala Harris last year. The same pattern was repeated in swing states that rejected the party in 2024. The same Latino and Asian American communities that stayed home or voted Republican a year ago turned out to vote for the Democrats.

Trump himself, unusually contrite, acknowledged it Wednesday. “I don’t think it was good for Republicans. I’m not sure it was good for anybody, but we had an interesting evening and we learned a lot, and we’re going to talk about that,” he said from the White House, at a breakfast with Republican senators.

Spanberger won her election by a 15-point margin, more than double the six-point margin by which Harris had won the state 12 months earlier. In New Jersey, the other state where the governorship was at stake, her former roommate, Mikie Sherrill, won by 13 percentage points, seven more than the former vice president had achieved in 2014.

Additionally, in California voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 50, which allows for the redrawing of electoral districts in a way that guarantees at least five more seats for the Democrats in the House of Representatives. This counters a similar measure already passed in Texas and opens new opportunities for Democrats to gain control of at least the lower chamber in Congress in next year’s midterm elections.

In Georgia, one of the swing states that decided last year’s election, for the first time in years voters chose Democratic blue on their ballots for two seats on a state commission that has been dominated by Republicans since time immemorial. In Pennsylvania, the quintessential swing state, three judges were re-elected, keeping the state’s Supreme Court under Republican control.

Each election was very different, with candidates ranging from the progressive Zohran Mamdani in New York to the moderates Spanberger and Sherrill. But they all had something in common: “The unpopularity of the president and many of his policies, as well as widespread dissatisfaction with the direction the country is heading,” note analysts from the prestigious political consulting firm Cook Political Report.

Exit polls indicate that 60% of voters in Virginia and New Jersey expressed dissatisfaction or anger with the way things are going in America. Democratic candidates garnered over 75% of the vote among these disaffected voters.

Among the Latino community, which last year had shifted toward the Republicans, the pendulum seems to have swung back again. Drastically. In some of the counties with the highest concentration of this population segment in both states, Spanberger and Sherrill achieved some of their most decisive victories. The Manassas Park district, with the largest Hispanic population in Virginia, flipped 22 percentage points toward the Democrats compared to a year ago. In Hudson County, New Jersey, Sherrill won by 22 percentage points compared to what Harris obtained in November 2024.

“The results of all of Tuesday night’s election contests — combined with Democratic overperformance in special elections earlier this year by an average of 15 points — point to serious danger for the GOP going into the 2026 midterms,” wrote the analysts at Cook Report. “A blue wave is building; the only question now is whether it can be sustained for another twelve months.”

Republican strategists also acknowledge this. Tuesday’s drubbing “shows there is discontent, certainly against the current administration, and demonstrates that candidates and campaigns matter, too,” Mike DuHaine, former political director of the Republican National Committee, told NBC.

But there is still a long time between now and next November. And it remains to be seen what effect, among other things, the Republicans’ efforts to alter the electoral districts in the states they control in their favor will have, something that could give them an additional advantage in maintaining — or expanding — their current dominance in Congress.

House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared defiant at a press conference following the final vote count. “What happened last night was blue states and blue cities voted blue. We all saw that coming, and no one should read too much into last night’s election results. Off-year elections are not indicative of what’s to come. That’s what history teaches us.”

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