‘People are pissed off’: anger at the elite and the establishment is fueling this year’s midterms

Coming midterm elections are starting to be framed not as right versus left but instead the ‘well-fed versus the fed-up’ Brian Leeland, a 79-year-old Democratic voter in Detroit, had enough. Frustrated by the way the US media covers this febrile political era, from Donald Trump’s Washington to political campaigns across the country, he contacted the Guardian. “Your decision to frame the race here as a simple progressive versus establishment choice is overly simplistic verging on lazy,” he wrote to this reporter, after our coverage of progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in the Democratic US Senate primary in Michigan. “As an electorate, we are not binary for the convenience of the media.” Continue reading...

Rachel Leingang · Sun, Sep 20, 2026, 3:00 AM
US news | The Guardian

‘People are pissed off’: anger at the elite and the establishment is fueling this year’s midterms

Coming midterm elections are starting to be framed not as right versus left but instead the ‘well-fed versus the fed-up’

Brian Leeland, a 79-year-old Democratic voter in Detroit, had enough. Frustrated by the way the US media covers this febrile political era, from Donald Trump’s Washington to political campaigns across the country, he contacted the Guardian.

“Your decision to frame the race here as a simple progressive versus establishment choice is overly simplistic verging on lazy,” he wrote to this reporter, after our coverage of progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in the Democratic US Senate primary in Michigan. “As an electorate, we are not binary for the convenience of the media.”

This page shows an excerpt; reporting belongs to the original publisher. Some images or embeds may be omitted compared with the live article.