You Don't Follow Politics. Politics Follows You: The 2026 Midterms Explained for Filipino Americans
You Don't Follow Politics. Politics Follows You: The 2026 Midterms Explained for Filipino Americans
The 2026 midterm in plain English, for the kababayan who tune out: what is on the ballot, what Congress controls, and how to make a better choice next time.
A kababayan wrote online this week that he doesn't follow politics and doesn't care about the midterms. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added that he had already mailed in his ballot a month ago.
My first reaction was sadness. My second was frustration. Both faded, because here is what I actually think: he did the hard part. He returned the ballot. What worries me is everything that happened before the envelope was sealed, the stretch where a decision about who writes the laws, sets the taxes and decides who gets to stay was made without an hour of homework. This piece is for him and for every kababayan who has ever said the same thing. No scolding, no side. Just the plain version of how this works, and how to do it better next time.
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Election. It grows from the root halal, which means elected or a vote, so the word itself says the election is the people choosing.
What a midterm actually is
Every four years the country elects a president. Halfway through that term comes the midterm, and the president is not on the ballot. Almost everything else is: all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 of the 100 Senate seats including two special elections to fill vacancies, governors in many states, state legislatures, and whatever your own county and city have put in front of you. Entering Election Day, Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress. By Monday, 57 million ballots were already in.
Midterms often work as a report card on whoever sits in the White House. The president's party lost ground in the House in 20 of the 22 midterms from 1938 to 2022, so every analyst is asking whether this year follows the pattern. That is a question about history, not a forecast, and nobody can answer it before the count.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Election Day | Tuesday, November 3, 2026 |
| House seats up | All 435 |
| Senate seats up | 35 of 100 |
| Overall turnout, 2022 midterm | 52.2% of eligible voters |
| Asian American turnout, 2022 midterm | 40.2% |
| Philippine midterm turnout, 2025 | 82.2% |
What Congress controls, in kitchen-table terms
The Constitution lists what Congress can do, and the list reads like a household budget. Congress has the power to lay and collect taxes, to regulate trade with other nations, and to set the uniform rule of naturalization, which is the rulebook for becoming a citizen. Bills for raising revenue have to start in the House. Taxes, trade, immigration: three arguments that already happen at every Filipino family table.
Taxes decide what comes out of the paycheck of the nurse, the caregiver, the warehouse worker and the small-business owner. Trade rules shape what goods cost, down to what it takes to fill a balikbayan box. Immigration law decides who can come, who can stay and who can become a citizen, which is why immigration policy lands so hard on families like ours. We have already covered how fear-driven immigration policy lands on families here on PinoyBuilt.
A midterm also decides who holds the oversight power. A new House majority could begin impeachment proceedings against a president of either party, though removal takes a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Whichever way you lean on any of this, the point is the same: Congress writes the rules, and the people who fill it are chosen by whoever returns a ballot.
Why this lands differently for us
I was born in Makati in 1966 and raised in Marikina. I was six when Marcos Sr. signed Proclamation 1081 in September 1972 and placed the whole country under martial law. Congress was closed by decree. I left for Chicago in August 1976, still under martial law, which means that for nearly four of my last years in the Philippines, the legislature back home was a shut door. Martial law was not formally lifted until January 1981.
Now look at the numbers. In May 2025, the Philippines held its own midterms and the Commission on Elections counted turnout at about 82 percent, a record for a midterm there. In the 2022 U.S. midterms, 52.2 percent of eligible voters took part, and among Asian American eligible voters the figure was 40.2 percent. The denominators differ, registered voters in one case and eligible citizens in the other, so read this as a contrast in mood, not a scoreboard. Still, the contrast is hard to ignore. I grew up knowing what it looks like when the ballot is taken away. That memory is part of what the diaspora inherited, and I wonder how often it stays at the airport.
Holding it accountable starts with showing up informed. Our numbers are not small. There are about 16 million eligible Asian American and Pacific Islander voters in 2026, including 1.6 million who became eligible since 2022, and in 2024 several congressional races were decided by fewer votes than the AAPI community's turnout. As Filipino Americans, we are part of that count. If you want to see how big the community is where you live, start with our map of where Filipinos live in California.
How to choose better next time
I am not going to tell you how to vote. Nobody should hand you a ballot already filled out, and that includes me. But a decision made without information is really someone else's decision, so here is the homework, in the order I would do it.
1. Find your actual ballot. Go to vote.gov, which links to every state's official election site, and look up the sample ballot for your address. It lists every office and measure you will be asked about, including the local ones that get the least attention and sit closest to your daily life.
2. Read what they did, not what the ad says. For anyone who has held federal office, congress.gov shows their votes and the bills they sponsored. A record is harder to spin than a slogan.
3. Ask three questions of every candidate and every measure. Who benefits? Who pays? Who is not in the room? These are the same questions I ask of any story on PinoyBuilt, and they work on a ballot pamphlet as well as they work on history.
4. Read two sources that disagree. Separate the reporting from the opinion, and notice which facts both sides accept. That overlap is usually where the truth sits.
5. Ask your own people. The tita who reads everything, the nurse on your unit, the cousin who actually follows this. Kapwa works at the polls too. Ask what they know, then check it against step two.
6. Start early. A mail ballot gives you weeks. Use them. Fill it in at the kitchen table with the sample ballot beside you, not on the last night with the envelope already addressed.
After the polls close
What you see on election night is a count in progress. States finish counting and report final turnout in the weeks after Election Day, so be as skeptical of a screenshot as you would be of an attack ad. Then go back to the Congress you just chose and keep watching it, because the vote is the beginning of the accountability, not the end.
To the kababayan who posted: you already voted, and that counts. Next time, give it the same hour you would give a big purchase. And to everyone reading, if pieces like this help, please subscribe to the PinoyBuilt YouTube channel and watch its videos. Every subscriber helps PinoyBuilt get approved for YouTube ads, which keeps this archive free for the next generation of Filipino Americans.
- Business Standard: US midterms 2026, what is at stake
- BusinessToday: Why the November 3 vote matters (midterm history, impeachment and Senate conviction)
- Khaleej Times: US midterm elections 2026 explainer
- Reuters via The Jerusalem Post: What you need to know about the 2026 midterms (57 million ballots cast as of Monday)
- Democracy Docket: 2022 midterm turnout, Census Bureau data
- The Columbian: 2022 turnout by race and age, Census Bureau data
- CT by the Numbers: Census Bureau 2022 early and mail voting by race
- AAPI Data: 2026 AAPI voters data and narrative toolkit
- Philippine Daily Inquirer: Comelec logs highest voter turnout for midterm polls (2025)
- Philippine Daily Inquirer: Remembering Martial Law under the Marcos regime
- Library of Congress Country Study: Philippines, Proclamation 1081
- Congressional Record, June 3, 2019: U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8 (taxes, naturalization)
- Congressional Record, January 26, 2011: U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 7 (revenue bills)
- Tagalog.com Dictionary: halalan
- Vote.gov: official state election websites
- Congress.gov: members' votes and sponsored bills
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Founder & Editor
J.F.R. Perseveranda
J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
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