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As US voters headed to the polls on Tuesday to deliver what turned out to be their damning verdict on the Trump administration’s record, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage took to his GB News show to suggest that the pundits had got it all wrong.
Predicting a “big surprise” for the world, Farage told his viewers that “I don’t go with the consensus that Trump’s going to get absolutely smashed [in these midterms]”.
Insisting that the President’s big money backers would ultimately save the day for him, Farage added that “Elon Musk hasn’t chucked in $450 million of his own money just for fun.”
In the end it turned out that he had. Despite Musk and other big tech billionaires pouring record-breaking funds into Republican coffers, the Democrats won a series of stunning victories across the country, taking seats which in some cases they hadn’t held for almost a century.
Even in the previously staunchly Republican Texas, where Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters two years ago, the Democrats took control.
The results, which now look set to be a truly historic victory for Trump’s opponents, have major implications, not just for US politics, but for politics on our side of the Atlantic too.
Over the past year Nigel Farage’s party has netted a series of record-breaking donations from two Reform-backing crypto billionaires.
Yet while these donations have deeply unnerved Farage’s opponents, they have also coincided with a steady collapse in support for his party.
In the past twelve months support for Reform UK has fallen by an average of 10 points, with most recent polls now putting Farage’s party in third place behind the Conservatives.
Reform’s performance in actual elections has declined over the same period as well.
At the start of this year Reform looked on course for a series of major gains and indeed the party did perform very well in May’s local elections, at a point when Keir Starmer’s premiership was on the verge of collapse.
Yet the months that have followed have brought with them a series of huge by-election defeats, many of which were in areas that the party had previously been confidently predicted to win.
As Reform’s coffers have filled, their public support has evaporated, to the point where bookies now give the party a mere 25% chance of winning the most seats at the next general election.
Even that may be inflating their chances, however.
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With the right-wing press now increasingly putting their support behind Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives, and a series of police and parliamentary investigations still underway into Reform’s finances, Farage has become an increasingly rattled figure.
At a series of recent lavishly-funded media events in central London, a visibly irritated Reform leader lashed out at the press for backing the “establishment” parties, whilst attacking the “incompetence” of his own staff for failing to get business leaders to turn out to see him speak.
Because for all the millions pouring into Reform’s coffers and the billions pouring into the Republicans, what both parties are now discovering is that such funds only get you so far.
In the run up to the midterms Elon Musk bankrolled Republican candidates to the tune of almost half a billion dollars, yet his party now looks on course for one of the worst set of results in its history.
If politics was solely a business, then the Republican’s shareholders would be right now be pushing to sack the entire board.
Because in reality, for all that big money can distort our democracy, particularly in the US, it cannot yet destroy it altogether.
Faced with a deeply unpopular war, soaring gas prices, and growing dissatisfaction with Trump’s authoritarian ICE immigration regime, voters put their own money where their mouth was and told the party of Big Money and Big Tech exactly what they thought of them.
And if this is true in a country whose electoral system is as dominated by large political donations as the US is, then it is doubly true in a country like the United Kingdom where the financial stakes are so much lower.
To put the two countries into perspective, total spending in the US midterms this year reached a record £12 billion. At the last UK general election in 2024, the total spending across all parties reached just £94.5 million, with Andy Burnham currently under pressure to restrict these figures even further.
Of course being a big fish in a small pond still has its advantages and Reform’s crypto billionaire funding should help the party do better at the next general election than they otherwise would have done.
Yet what the midterms have shown is that whilst money might buy you a lot more digital adverts and billboards than your opponents, it doesn’t necessarily buy you respect.
This can be seen in the polling. According to the most recent survey, Trump’s net favourability ratings are now down to just minus 24.
For a sitting US president that’s pretty bad, but it’s positively glowing compared to the minus 42 ratings currently enjoyed by Nigel Farage in the UK.
Of course Farage’s opponents shouldn’t get complacent. There are good reasons why democracy campaigners in the UK are pushing for tougher caps on both political donations and spending in our elections.
The fact that Farage was able to push out his midterm predictions on his own national TV show is another sign of how big money still has the power to distort our politics.
But whilst Reform’s opponents shouldn’t be complacent, they shouldn’t be despondent either.
As the US midterms have shown, whilst money may talk, bullshit still walks, and once you’ve truly lost the public’s trust, no amount of hard cash is ever going to turn that around.