The stats and polling all suggest one thing: the Republicans are set for a hammering in the midterms. Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating of any US president going into a midterm election since Harry Truman. And it’s still dropping. The Democrats are projected to win by a margin of 11 percentage points, the largest swing by any party in almost 20 years. It is possible that the Democrats flip the Senate and secure a large majority in Congress. Those majorities would make a material difference, perhaps finally establishing oversight of the policies Trump has brought in during his second term: immigration enforcement, trade disputes, gutting the federal workforce, the Iran war, to say nothing of his own family’s corruption. The tide seems to be turning, and one question is on everyone’s mind: is the Trump era really ending?

“Nobody wants to jinx it,” wrote David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times, but: “All the signs we have suggest that, historic or not, these midterms are likely to mark the end of a political era.”What that gives way to is a much more complicated picture in which the US will be delivered from Trump himself, but remains a country riven and undermined by what he has unleashed. By the time he is gone, Trump will have been president for eight years, and a toxic force for more than 12.

That is a long time even for a normal politician. Under one who shatters norms and forces himself into the centre of everything, Trump’s effect is as if he were president for decades.

He has already enacted policy that is nearly irreversible, things that can only be overturned with a huge amount of work and legislative wrangling and improbable bipartisan consensus. USAID is gone. Probably also gone are government departments effectively eliminated or incapacitated by Doge, the “department of government efficiency”. There are entire global tariff regimes and the executive and budgetary empowerments of ICE to deal with. And most difficult to unspool is a war with Iran that, despite its promised, imminent end, is looking to be an open-ended conflict. Even if the midterms augur a win for the Democrats in 2026, the country they will inherit will have been permanently shaped by Trump.

And that is still a big if. Trump is a singular figure who cohered an otherwise inchoate and disparate coalition, from white evangelical Christians to working-class Latinos to Silicon Valley billionaires. Maga is a movement that is bound up with Trump, and feels increasingly weakened by his incumbency. Like Brexit and other insurgent movements, the galvanising anti-establishment power is lost when you are the establishment and have been for quite a long time.

Looking for new people to blame, new grievances to exploit, becomes less an exercise in rebellion, more in whining and negativity. But whoever comes after Trump as a candidate, even if it is the black hole of charisma that is JD Vance, may still find some success using the same general pitch. That combination of combativeness and fractiousness might still read as authentic and subversive to the base. It may even seem comparatively sharp and legible against the opaque generic blah-ness of the Democratic establishment.

And that Democratic establishment itself is reason to worry. It is a ways to go yet, but the Democrats themselves seem unable to go either back or forward decisively. The party’s old guard is spent, either gerontocratic or gerontocracy-adjacent. In the latter camp is Kamala Harris, whose last campaign summons not the hope of a fresh candidate in 2026, but an apparatchik who offers only continuity without gravitas. In the former, there is a cohort who now only project entitlement and the out-of-touch, glassy-eyed bloat of so many years of capital acquisition - Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton.

Only Barack Obama still enjoys some sprightly relevance, and has used it to back Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate who is making that break with the past in a journey that Obama has cast as a passing of the baton. “He’ll finish the job we started,” Obama has said.

But even as El-Sayed is on the verge of making history as the first Muslim senator in a state that is pivotal to the presidential race, he is either drawing lukewarm, reluctant endorsements from other senior Democrats or he is openly attacked, primarily on his position towards Israel, which he believes has committed genocide in Gaza and should be defunded. Only a few days out from the election, Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens, who El-Sayed narrowly beat last August to clinch the candidacy, has been taking big swipes at El-Sayed and his comments on Israel, and demanding he disavow election ads not even run by him, but by a leftwing group that backed him.

The result is an unseemly scuffle that resulted first in El-Sayed saying he did not want Stevens appearing with him at a party unity event held on Sunday, and culminated later that day with an extraordinarily disgraceful development: Stevens endorsed El Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers.

Divesting from Israel has become a flashpoint that appears to be less about political and ideological positions than the emergence of a new orientation in the party that breaks from an old guard overtaken by rapid changes of attitude. This was encapsulated by a quote from David Kramer, a Democrat who chaired Stevens’s primary campaign: “There’s a lot of talk about it being a big tent party, but sometimes we worry the tent is maybe devolving into a circus and we’re going to be pushed out.”

Kramer is also voting for Rogers for the Senate. And there you have it. Some Democrats would rather lose than win on the left’s terms and be pushed out.

All of this suggests a future in which Trump is no longer on the scene, but there is still enough residual momentum among Trump’s acolytes, and disarray within the Democratic party, to render a midterm surge a temporary setback for Trumpism, not the restoration of the old order or the beginnings of a new one.

We have been here before. In fact, it’s worse than that, we have been here before in vastly better circumstances for the Democrats. Trump’s loss in 2020 happened in a context where there was a strong and familiar Democratic candidate in Joe Biden, a pandemic that research found hit Trump’s support, and no big live crisis in the Middle East roiling domestic politics. The midterms may spell the end of a certain Trump era, but what follows may probably be a case of long-Trump: a Republican party still unable to plot a path without him, and a Democratic party still unable to locate what it stands for outside of opposing him. Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist