This piece was written by Archipelago’s Co-Founder Lucy Mortimer the day after the US midterm elections on 4 November 2026.

For the last few years, working in climate tech and impact has felt... hard. Everyone is talking about defence tech and AI. Funds are pivoting towards both to match the mood of the investor community, where hope and ambition were once directed at global transformation.

A friend who has been fundraising for a climate company was told by a large asset manager that they would invest — if the company rebranded as an AI company. Allbirds may have thought this a plan, but for the rest of us? Not so much.

For those of us who have spent our careers working on adaptation and transformation, this environment has felt hostile and foreign. I’ve often felt like an outlier, and I know I’m not the only one. There have been moments when I’ve quietly wondered whether I was wrong all along — whether I’d spent my career working towards something nobody actually wants.

Then last night, something changed.

What happened

Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate. They flipped seven Senate seats — Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas — and Texas elected its first Democratic senator since 1988. It’s only the fifth time since the Second World War that a party has flipped both chambers in a midterm.

For me, this isn’t about Republicans versus Democrats, any more than British politics is about Labour versus Conservatives. There are good people on both sides of the table, with different views but shared goals.

What I read in last night’s result is a rejection of extremism: of a politics of control, dressed up as conservatism with a small c. A rejection of the individual benefiting at the expense of the many. And a rejection of control over communities — through the dismantling of USAID, and a Supreme Court, shaped by Trump’s first-term appointments, that overturned Roe v. Wade.

The collective mattered again.

Women showed up

The exit polls are still settling, but the picture is already clear:

• Women backed Democrats by 16 points. The BBC’s election-day voter poll has women voting 57% Democrat to 41% Republican for the House, while men split roughly down the middle.
• The gap widened. CNN’s voter poll shows women, who backed Democrats by around 8 points in 2022, returned in greater force this year.
• Young women led. Tufts University’s CIRCLE found 77% of women aged 18–29 voted Democrat for the House — and 96% of young Black women.
• And women won. Amy Klobuchar becomes Minnesota’s first woman governor. Keisha Lance Bottoms, in Georgia, becomes the first Black woman ever elected governor in the US.

As a woman, and as a woman in an industry where there still aren’t many of us at the table, that matters to me more than I can easily put into words.

What two years did to climate

It’s worth remembering how much ground has been lost:

July 2025: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act dismantled much of the Inflation Reduction Act — cutting short tax credits for wind, solar, EVs and home efficiency.

The grants: the EPA halted $7 billion in Solar for All funding for lower-income communities, alongside hundreds of other cancelled IRA grants.

February 2026: the EPA repealed the 2009 Endangerment Finding — the legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gases in the US — and with it vehicle emissions standards.

September 2026: emissions standards for fossil-fuel power plants went the same way.

Bloomberg’s analysis estimates the rollbacks have set back US emissions cuts by around a decade.

What this means for climate tech

Markets didn’t wait for the final count. This morning Ørsted rose 7.3% and Vestas 5.2%, and Korean battery makers jumped — Samsung SDI by more than 11% — on expectations of friendlier climate policy.

Let’s be realistic though. The President still holds his veto for two more years, and nothing that’s been repealed comes back overnight. A Democratic Congress can block, scrutinise and investigate, and can’t rewrite the last two years on its own.

But for climate investors, policy uncertainty has been the single biggest worry. What changed last night is the direction of travel.

Perhaps it’s the start of a swing back towards looking at the bigger picture. Towards investors no longer being afraid to say climate, ESG, impact or positive out loud. As an investor, and as a woman, I’m hopeful in a way I haven’t been for two years.

Let’s get to work

In his statement overnight, Obama wrote that Americans want “a politics that brings people together rather than divides them.” He also reminded his party that the work starts now, with two years of this administration still to run — it’s time to roll up our sleeves.

That’s true for us too. Climate didn’t stop mattering because the money got nervous. The problems we’re working on are still there, and so are the founders solving them.

We have a long way to go. Let’s get to work.