Everybody Moves Leftward

Daniel Schlozman, professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, is happily familiar to n+1 readers. A frequent contributor to the magazine, Schlozman is also the author of When Movements Anchor Parties and, with Sam Rosenfeld, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics. Hollow Parties has quickly become a poli-sci classic since its publication in 2024, frequently invoked in op-eds and columns and in general political conversation. To my mind, its best invocation was in a tweet by the writer Rachael Bedard the night of this year’s primary elections in New York. I can’t find the tweet now, because Twitter’s search has been destroyed forever, but Bedard wrote something like “NYC DSA is the least hollow party in America.”

Among its many virtues, Hollow Parties provides an elegant framework for making sense of the strange-seeming and asymmetrical habits of the Democrats and the Republicans—but especially the Democrats, a topic of natural obsession to those of us who can’t fully liberate themselves from the two-party system. (Schlozman and Rosenfeld tackled the Dems in a piece for n+1 last year, in which they wrote, among other things, that the “Biden-era Democrats attempted programmatic post-neoliberalism inside a party that neoliberalism had hollowed out.” Ouch!)

Over the past few years, I’ve often called Schlozman to help me understand the slower transformations (and lack thereof) undergirding the headline-grabbing shifts in the American political scene. I’m prone to despair, and while these phone calls haven’t ever really made me feel better, they’ve always helped me understand what’s going on beyond the social media chatter and, for that matter, my own despair. So it was especially nice to speak with him on Wednesday, this time over Zoom, less than 24 hours after the blue tsunami—or as the great Kleber Mendonça Filho called it, the lapada.

My conversation with Schlozman has been edited, but even so, there’s a lot we didn’t cover. As he says, “the scale of this victory is extremely impressive.” The triumph of DSA candidates across the country is an extraordinary result. So is the election of Scott Colom in Mississippi, and Angie Nixon’s close call in Florida. Abdul El-Sayed’s comprehensive defeat of the AIPAC machine on his own terms is a milestone at a moment of sickening Islamophobia. If the interview that follows seems more focused on process, procedure, and next steps rather than the high highs, it’s only because I felt that I needed to mitigate some of the “truth nuke” memes I’ve been inhaling for the past few days.

For all the pleasure of the lapada, there is a lot of hardship and struggle to come. On Friday afternoon, Donald Trump announced that he’d appointed Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles. This is a less dangerous prospect than it was a few days ago, but it’s horrifying all the same: the fascist sociopath at the heart of this nation’s deportation and concentration-camp regime is now that much closer to the center of power, an informal proximity formalized. In a statement, incoming Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries called Miller “a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands. His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor.” Time to make it happen. —Mark Krotov

Mark Krotov: What can a Democratic majority like this accomplish in Congress?

Daniel Schlozman: This majority is big enough that it’s not dependent on the most conservative members of the caucus to pass things—but it doesn’t have anything like a veto-proof majority. Divided government can be very productive, and can also be a lot of nothing. That’s a choice. What does Donald Trump want to get done in the last two years of his administration, besides his monuments? And what do the people under him want to countenance?

The political scientist David Mayhew’s book Divided We Govern said that in the postwar years, divided government was pretty effective—but that’s not as true as it used to be. We’re a more partisan country. Still, there’s plenty of stuff around which the partisan lines are less strict, and where divided government can accomplish plenty: trade, energy policy, agriculture, the permitting reform bill that may go through in the lame duck. The other thing is that at times divided government can just keep the lights on, which means pushing through battles over the debt ceiling and the appropriations bills to keep the government open. We really don’t know which scenario is going to play out because Donald Trump, who’s an atypical president in lots of ways, has never faced this kind of lame-duck period. How will he respond?

The other thing that happens is that Congress investigates, and they’ve got lots of grounds to do that. Congress will begin to reassert its role in the public sphere. They’ve been extremely supine over the past two years, passing basically nothing except the One Big Beautiful Bill. They let Trump do all sorts of things, including violating the power of the purse, inventing fiscal justifications for spending on his ballrooms and whatnot—things that were absolutely at the core of congressional prerogatives. How much will Congress try to reassert its own traditional prerogatives, investigate, and then set the agenda for whatever’s happening in 2028? Will Congress send veto bait to the president? There’s only so much veto bait they can send. One strategy says that you send him things he’ll veto, which will draw useful contrasts. That hasn’t worked terribly well. If you actually get a bill that can pass through Congress under the filibuster pivot with a coalition this big, the president tends to like it. But we’ll see.

MK: We’re so used to this notion of Congress as a place where nothing happens. There are so many words to describe the process—churn, logjam, inertia, obstructionism. Is there any reason to think that those dynamics won’t pertain, given the size of the majority?

DS: There’s a world in which Trump is eager to make deals because he’s a deal guy, and congressional Republicans are afraid that he’s giving away the store. There are lots of futures, and that’s one of them. Big majority caucuses are ideologically diverse, and a lot of the Democrats who won yesterday are relatively moderate. At the same time, the Republican caucus in Congress is even more right-wing than it was because it’s the moderates who lost, and the remaining right-wingers are very determined to stop anything. They can probably tell Trump that they don’t want to work with him. Job one for them is to elect a new leader. Jim Jordan of the Freedom Caucus says he’s running, and he’s an extreme obstructionist.

MK: Speaking of leadership, are Schumer and Jeffries going to be challenged?

DS: Highly unlikely. You need 218 votes on the floor to get a speaker, and Jeffries has just presided over enormous success. Why would you challenge him? You might not like Schumer and Jeffries, but they’ve got records: look what we’ve done. And if you’re Chuck Schumer, sticking around until 2028 and beyond is probably appealing. You’ve now got these senators in the bank for six years, which means that you may still be majority leader after 2028. (And if Schumer wants to stick around beyond 2028, then AOC has some other options.) If Democrats have their 260 votes or whatever in the House, that means that the most extreme members of the chamber, either on the hard left or the hard center of the caucus, can’t disrupt much of anything because the speaker has so many votes in reserve on any given vote. That makes life much easier for Jeffries.

MK: Have either of these guys been around for something of this scale, in leadership positions or otherwise?

DS: They’ve both been around for Democratic control. But a majority like this will be bigger than the biggest majority that Nancy Pelosi ever had, which was after 2008. Jeffries was not around for that—he arrived in 2012. In order to have been in a Democratic majority this big, you need to have been around. Rosa DeLauro, Maxine Waters, Richie Neal, were there before 1994—maybe some others. That was the point at which everything changed. There have been comparisons in 1974, which was the last time that you had a massive repudiation of a president six years into an administration, one that that hit both chambers, with issues of executive power at the forefront. Democrats couldn’t do much in the last two years of the Ford Administration or the first years of the Carter Administration—their big, swollen majorities weren’t disciplined in any way, between the junior Watergate babies and the Southern conservatives. This is a much less heterogeneous party than it was. But that we’re going back this far in terms of comparisons suggests that this is not this kind of midterm Democrats have seen in the political lifetimes of people who are around now.

Other comparisons have been tossed around, but their utility is limited. Democrats did especially well in places like the Rio Grande Valley, among Hispanic voters who moved right in 2024, but what we saw overall was closer to what in the jargon would be called a uniform swing. Everybody moves leftward. It wasn’t a shift that was concentrated in specific subgroups. That was the 2016 story, which was centered on a particular set of white working-class voters. There’s a feeling of tectonic plates shifting you didn’t feel in 2006. The 2024 national Republican majority was thin, but because we’re dealing with Trumpism, and the collapse in core Democratic demographics, there was the feeling that we weren’t just dealing with Republican control, but something darker. And then it goes poof in an even bigger way. It’s a qualitatively different feeling.

MK: Without getting into Chuck Schumer’s loathsome politics, his doddering inarticulacy, and his imaginary constituents Joe and Eileen Bailey from Massapequa, it seems like he did a pretty good job recruiting candidates this cycle.

DS: The scale of this victory is extremely impressive. It’s the truest of all political cliches that victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. Everybody is saying, “look, we did it!” Every faction. So whatever your internal politics are, you can feel very happy about your people having won.

MK: What about Angie Nixon?

DS: Why is Florida the one that got away? Don’t ask me. I’ve spent more nights in my life in Sumatra (four) than in Florida (three). One reason may be internal migration. There’s a paper I was looking at last night about internal migration patterns that shows that since 2019, Republicans have moved to Florida in a big way. In any case, it’s just not a state that seemed primed to elect Democrats in 2026. Angie Nixon is an extremely talented politician, and it would have been really great to see her in the Senate. But David Jolly’s loss in the gubernatorial race wasn’t that different from Nixon’s, so the idea that we left Nixon on the table and there was a world in which we didn’t do that and she could have won—I don’t see it. Given how many close Senate races Democrats won, just as a matter of resource allocation, throwing everything into the second biggest state with a competitive race is tricky, and pulls energy away from small, cheap states like Iowa, Kansas, Alaska, Mississippi. It’s also worth saying that if Vindman had been the nominee, it would have been hard to come up with a story in which he wins.

MK: If this was a conversation about Vindman it’d be appearing in the Atlantic.

DS: Exactly.

MK: Speaking of the ongoing conversation around progressives versus Atlantic-pilled moderates, there’s some discussion online happening about underperformance. Can you explain it to me?

DS: I have thoughts, but you need to ask me a question.

MK: Could you just give me your thoughts?

DS: No.

MK: Hm, OK. I mean, I don’t think this is world-historically important discourse that we need to spend a lot of time on, but I’ve seen commentators, by which I mean Matt Yglesias, lay out this shifting story about how Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan wasn’t actually that impressive because the margins were worse than, say, Jon Ossoff’s in Georgia or Roy Cooper’s in North Carolina. That line of thought has a thin, tautological quality I find sort of puzzling.

DS: In February 2020, E. J. Dionne published a book that mostly went unnoticed—because it was February 2020—called Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country. The thesis was that progressives and moderates are not only stuck together in the Democratic Party, inside a two-party system that isn’t going anywhere, but also that each bloc has qualities the other doesn’t and can’t have. Moderates have a special sauce when it comes to winning races in places that are hard to win. Progressives have a special sauce in that they have a long-term vision of where they want to take the country, and in identifying and instantiating core values—real core values, not the fake, TED Talk kind.

Code Red was sort of an instabook, but for all that there’s wisdom to this observation. In social science terms, there’s an internal validity question about underperformance: what is it, and then an external validity question, which is what does it explain? Which is related to questions about the benefits of moderation, however we’re defining moderation. Underperformance in comparison to what? What do you control for in your model? If you can raise more money, is that internal to the model? If your opponents are attacking you really, really loudly, is that internal to the model? There are some modest benefits to electoral moderation, I think that’s correct, but what then do you make of those benefits? That’s the external validity question. Once you’ve run your statistical model—and some of the statistics around underperformance seem to me more and less dodgy—what does that mean? Eventually the meaning of cross-sectional over- and underperformance on a given ballot looks much less clear than the people touting it would claim.

But if a candidate overperforms, how to think about what a center-left party should do at this historical juncture, where fascism seems like it may be on the ebb but has in no way retreated? That is a hard question to which the progressives have given a lot more sustained, deep attention than moderates, even as the overperformers genuinely do have things to say cross-sectionally.

Why am I talking about cross-sections and change over time? What does a victory in a given election say about the big picture? How do you go from an individual overperforming candidate to a party brand, and how do you go from the campaign trail to the big priorities in office, including executive office where you’re managing the economy and maybe waging war? It’s not clear that looking at overperformers answers fundamentally hard questions about how a center-left party should position itself for the long run. There was an interesting paper that came across my desk the other day, by some European political scientists. It dealt with forced experiments, so it’s hard to say how all this lines up in the real world, but the paper basically said that voters didn’t like it when they felt that parties were doing things that were popular because it was expedient—but they liked when parties changed their positions for reasons that were principled. So then you’re in this paradox, where if you’re trying to do everything that’s popular, voters will dislike you because they think it’s too expedient. If we’re trying to position for the long run, it’s a lot less obvious how to do that than to simply look at the people who are overperformers and hit the copy button a lot of times.

MK: Seems complicated!

DS: It’s complicated. I would hope that the complicatedness was an invitation not just to thrash out the methodological questions of overperformance and underperformance, but the implications of overperformance and underperformance in the public dialogue to come. But the debate is rather arid and stale because to me it’s not about the real question, which is: if overperformance, then what? That’s a live question.

Part of this is that there are very fragmented debates about who deserves credit for this success. Who won? And as we move into a 2028 presidential cycle, how much of this is relevant? Presidential politics have very different dynamics, and the singular quality of presidential leadership looms large. How much do the lessons of legislative politics apply, with all these candidates running in their individual districts? That’s a lot of what’s being asked in these debates, in a somewhat subterranean way. What kind of presidential candidate do we want? Rather than just: what kind of candidates do we want in other legislative primaries? If there’s a place where the questions about where the party should go are really thrashed out, it’s in the presidential nomination process. And so, my external validity questions are also let’s-think-about-presidential-nomination questions.

MK: Speaking of 2028 (to my horror!), the primary calendar is going to be different this time around, right?

DS: Yeah, the Democratic National Committee has rejiggered the primary calendar, but we’ll have to see exactly what means. New Hampshire’s got a state law that it has to go first—will the DNC, which has put New Hampshire third, actually strip the state of its delegates, meaning that they won’t be seated at the convention? Or is this just kayfabe? In general, the primary calendar, which is of great interest to obsessives like me, is probably less determinative of winners than consolidation. And consolidation begins now. The people who are running for president are running even if they haven’t declared, and some of them had a good day yesterday.

MK: I’d like to ask about money. It seems like it didn’t have the effect I and many others feared it would even a few months ago.

DS: In 2010, when Citizens United was decided, Democrats were appalled, and initially they tried to figure out how to take money out of politics. Then it turned out that because of class dealignment and rich people’s dislike of the short-fingered vulgarian, Democrats had a financial advantage through the 2010s, and they started to whisper that maybe campaign finance reform wasn’t such a good idea. After 2024, with the embrace of Donald Trump by the tech right and especially the world’s richest person, the money advantage disappeared.

This election is basically illustrative of the political science chestnut that money matters less than lots of people out there might imagine. Once candidates have enough money that they can—I sort of sound more like I’m talking to a roomful of undergraduates than n+1 readers . . .

MK: No, n+1 readers can handle it. Not enough of us were poli-sci majors.

DS: Probably true! Once candidates have enough money to get their message across, the marginal dollar is not that useful. You need to be able to say who you are, what you’re about, what your special thing is—but by the millionth ad, or the millionth-and-first ad, you’re not actually persuading people. One of the things that happened this week is that a lot of Democratic candidates won who were vastly underfunded. If you’re the House Majority Project, you want to get a majority, so you’re a lot less interested in seats 258, 259, 260—and so you’re not spending in those districts. But then some people in a lot of pretty red places won anyway. In some cases, there’s a governor or senator whose advertising is bringing them along, but in some cases, not.

Formal estimates about the dollars spent on politics are imperfect because of all the dark money hidden inside shell corporations inside shell corporations inside shell corporations. But the general story is that above all, you need money to get out there. So money is important in lower-profile contests, including primaries, and it matters less in general elections, where voters have a sense of what’s going on. That’s a consistent story, and it explains why in Michigan, all that hidden AIPAC money was more effective in the primaries than in the general.

MK: It’s interesting that two of the great Democratic crash-outs in recent years, John Fetterman and Haley Stevens, were ultimately about Israel. But in Stevens’s case I also detect some frustration about the fact that all that money just wasn’t enough!

DS: Right. In primaries, left-wing candidates have to worry about the power of organized money more than they do in general elections, when there are tidal waves that can get lots and lots of candidates over the line.

MK: Can you talk about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact?

DS: Yeah, the idea is that if states representing 270 electoral votes agree to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote, you could effectively get rid of the electoral college without a constitutional amendment. And now that Democrats have unified control of enough states, this is possible. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t speak to the legal issues, but this is one of the interesting developments that comes out of this week. We’ll see if we get there.

MK: OK, great. Lawyers should feel free to write in. What about the gerrymandering story? So much discussion in the first few months of this year seemed rightly focused on the Republicans’ audacious (I guess that’s a nice word for it) midcycle redistricting efforts. What happened with that? Is the story just that you don’t do that kind of thing in an election cycle where you’re incredibly unpopular, or is there more to it than that?

DS: There’s more to it than that. Two things happened. The first is that in its Callais decision, the Supreme Court overturned longstanding Section Five rules that gave a green light to districts that would have long been deemed illegal. Republicans walked through the open door and did this redistricting, and so that was the one-two punch.

So then what happened this year? Southern Black voters turned out in a higher share relative to 2024 than northern Black voters, and that probably gets us a Senate seat in Mississippi. In part that’s blowback from Callais—it’s countermobilization. But overall it looks like only in North Carolina did Republicans create a true dummymander, where they actually lost seats. There are lots of states where the redistricting worked pretty well. In Florida, and in Texas, they were mostly able to protect themselves. With nationwide fair districts, Democrats would have gotten something more like 275 seats. Now, 275 doesn’t get you a veto-proof majority in the House, so what those seats would have actually done in practice is unclear. But just because you win big doesn’t mean that these were fair districts.

MK: Speaking of things like fair districts, what are the prospects for Democratic reform in this Congress?

DS: Very modest. But if Democrats have a majority in 2029, they goddamn better go further on democracy reform than the Democrats did in the Biden years. That will mean being aggressive about election subversion, and a national ban on gerrymandering with teeth.

It’s worth addressing a few bad arguments about some of this stuff. The first is that the only way Democrats can win is by reforming the system, since they can’t win on their own. Obviously false! There’s a conservative-coded version of that argument, along the lines of: we need to become way, way, way more moderate than the most moderate Democrat because that’s the only way we can possibly win. And then there’s a lib-coded version, which is that we must have radical system reform because the public is unpersuadable otherwise. Both incorrect. Democrats were able to take advantage of a good cycle and win, but the argument for procedural reform is every bit as strong because these systems are every bit as unfair. Just because Democrats were able to win very impressive victories in very red states does not mean that the malapportioned Senate is any less malapportioned. The Senate is still the most malapportioned democratic body in the world! The Supreme Court still has lifetime tenure. All of these anti-democratic features of the American system are still there.

MK: But so you can’t have democratic reform without the president.

DS: You need the president. Either you get two thirds of Congress and you override the president, or you get the president to sign the bill. You get it through both chambers of Congress and you sign it. If you get it through both chambers of Congress, then you need sixty votes, or you need to break the filibuster. What’s nice is that Democrats now have senators in the bank. A Democratic president is now in much likelier shape to have a majority, and you get that person to sign whatever democracy reform you want into law.

MK: This is maybe a niche concern, but I’ve been spooked about Republicans messing with the 2030 census and all the implications downstream from that. How much do we have to worry about things like that now?

DS: I’m less worried than I was. The 2030 census will be funded through the appropriations process, and the appropriations process demands Congress. This is an instance where I think that Democratic majorities will be able to exert some control. But still, this is a worry I share—I wouldn’t say it’s not worth worrying about.

MK: Part of why I worry about it is that it seems so key to the Russell Vought piece of the Trump agenda.

DS: Yeah, the census is used for a lot of different purposes in determining federal grants, determining representation—how non-citizens are counted, how college students are counted, and on and on. You don’t want to muck it up.

MK: Since we’re talking about dastardly Republican misdeeds, why wasn’t there more voter suppression?

DS: If it’s not close, they can’t cheat—that’s the old cliché. It’s easier to manipulate returns in close elections than in landslides. But also the relatively demobilized GOP base isn’t braying because of the scale of the victory. It’s very good that we’re not seeing attempts to monkey with returns, which is really, really, really dangerous—dangerous in ways that a lot of the money in politics isn’t. Election manipulation, rather than money, is at the absolute core of the shift from democracy to authoritarianism.

MK: I guess I don’t understand why the same government that put the National Guard on the streets of Memphis didn’t send the National Guard to polling stations.

DS: Well, Trump sent Department of Justice monitors to a bunch of Democratic cities, so they were trying to do that. But then we’re getting into the question of how much the authoritarian moves of the past two years are going into retreat.

This gets into another big question: what are the Republicans going to do? Thinking that through requires taking a step back. We’ve been living in broadly fifty-fifty politics for a long time now. There have been times when the fifty-fiftyness seemed ready to break—when Trump won in 2016, it might have seemed like we’d entered a new political era. But it hasn’t really been broken decisively. For ten years, Trump and anti-Trumpism dominated national politics, and now everything is much more open. And so both the longer period of fifty-fifty politics, which Trump didn’t actually disrupt, and the period of Trump’s absolute dominance of the national political discourse and the Republican Party—all of it feels much more wide open.

The Trump agenda had nothing to do with Americans’ actual material concerns, and then everything got worse because of the war in Iran. That is really Trump’s war—he got inside the heads of the neocons who’d wanted this for a while, and also indulged in his late-stage delusions. So you have this extraordinary post by JD Vance in which he says: we lost because of the war. Well, yes, of course.

But so what then? What does a Republican Party that’s not that look like? Vance’s post isn’t really an answer, and nor is Don Jr.’s post saying: Yes! Look at JD, he’s right! Marjorie Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America says that the Republicans didn’t run hard enough on an anti-abortion message, which for years they were pretty quiet about because they knew it was unpopular. In other words, there’s not a lot of regrouping thus far. What does an economic policy for the post-Trump period look like when the economic populism of tariffs is a political loser? What does immigration politics look like when draconian interior enforcement obviously hurts Trump? Squeezing the welfare state via the One Big Beautiful Bill is likewise a negative for them. So what’s the agenda?

George H. W. Bush ran successfully as the inheritor of the Reagan Administration’s legacy. If JD Vance can’t do that, what does he do? Marco Rubio, who’s a more formidable figure in a lot of ways, is waiting in the wings and not commenting much. But what does a Rubio agenda—one that fuses traditional conservatism and Trumpism—actually look like? Does Tucker Carlson swoop in and say that he’s the truest MAGA, with no fingerprints on Iran whatsoever?

I’m repeating myself, but defeat is an orphan. A more wide-open politics for Republicans is one in which their alternatives aren’t immediately clear. It’s true that they had some terrible candidates, like Ken Paxton and Roger Marshall and Darline Graham, but it’s not like there’s a profile of a paradigmatic Republican who survived yesterday, whom the party can model themselves after.

MK: The Vance post was so weird. If he weren’t a complete and total coward he would have just resigned in February when the war started, but now he seems to be trying to do so retroactively.

DS: It’s also funny because the vice president is the one person the president can’t fire. So the only way Vance can leave is of his own volition.

MK: Since we’re talking about foreign policy, I’m obviously curious about what foreign policy might look like over the next couple of years and beyond. (We have an event at the office next week that’s at least partly focused on this question. Come!) El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan is obviously a major defeat for AIPAC. I’ve also been seeing a lot of blob talk bubbling up, and the timing of that doesn’t seem totally random.

DS: Most successful presidential candidates don’t win factionally, the way Donald Trump did. You need to win proportionally. The candidates that do well tend to take a bit from column A, a bit from column B, and they don’t usually refight the last round’s battles. They reframe things for the future, whatever that might mean. This is, I think, an important thing to emphasize now. The Biden Administration ended in failure, and Trumpism has been repudiated. Democrats need to consider which pieces of the Biden legacy they want to adopt and tweak, and which they want to abandon entirely. Since one of Biden’s foreign-policy legacies is genocide, that’s something you could just abandon entirely. Which isn’t to say it’ll happen!

We know that AIPAC is damaged goods, but foreign policy largely gets made in the presidency. We’re going to see a lot of interesting questions surfaced. I suspect we won’t end up with the full, dovish skepticism of American power that readers of Aziz Rana in n+1 will have assimilated. Maybe we’ll get more skepticism of existing American policy toward Israel, but closer to an assertive multilateralism that’s more comfortable at the Munich Security Conference. But there are lots of ways to get broad support.

MK: How much does it matter that a lot of the people in Congress are going to be new?

DS: It matters a lot. The Democratic caucus will have something like eighty new members. That’s huge. We don’t have a committee seniority system, like in the middle of the 20th century, when the Watergate babies didn’t like being made to sit around forever. It’s very easy for Hakeem Jeffries to have a big majority, but on the other hand, all these new members are going to want stuff, and they’re not going to want to be lectured by their elders. Jeffries will need to give them stuff to do. One nice thing about task forces and oversight is that they make members feel busy—it’s a nice break from fundraising all day. In the Senate the norms of seniority are still stronger, and Schumer and leadership will need to find some activities for all these people, too.

There are a lot of new members of the caucus from right-to-work states, from places where tariffs were especially unpopular. Obviously lots of ancestrally Democratic constituencies came home on Tuesday—union members whose support for Trump two years ago made that election feel so foreboding. But now you also have Democratic senators from Mississippi, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina—these aren’t hotbeds of American labor. And so that raises its own set of questions in the caucus in terms of the balance of power.

MK: Right.

DS: There was a lot of talk this cycle about whether to run candidates who talk about saving democracy or not. On the one hand, you do see that the Republican regime’s undemocratic overreach blows back. You see it blow back on immigration, with Latinos returning to the Democratic Party. You see it post-Callais, with southern Black voters. In the main, however, this is an election that was more about the old-fashioned—and in some ways depressingly ordinary—politics of high prices making people unhappy, rather than about renouncing fascism and finding it evil. There’s no question that it’s an election that shows that it’s possible to beat the forces of Trumpism. But a lot of the guts underneath it is just voters unhappy with high prices. It’s very satisfying to see that democratic politics works. On the other hand, it’s not the ideological repudiation of the project that one might have hoped for.

MK: But does that distinction actually matter?

DS: Practically it may not matter, no, insofar as Trump and the Republicans don’t have the juice anymore. We’re entering a lame-duck period. We’re clearly past the high-water mark. The tech folks bought in at the top. Good!

MK: Preparing for our conversation, I reread your great review of Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics, which ran in the New Republic about three million years ago, in February 2026. Along those lines, is there a world in which we start expecting larger swings like this? Is this the new normal?

DS: One of the funny things about hyperpolitics in America is that we had all these events that felt so climactic: Trump’s victory in 2016, the pandemic—and the actual number of seats that moved in Congress was often relatively modest. Here we’ve seen a bigger swing. But the thesis of Hyperpolitics it that it’s often hard to institutionalize your victories. Is there something more durable that Democrats can put together? Certainly it’s possible after their very good day.

There were some particular dynamics to Trump as the center of the political universe that favored the right over the left. That moment may pass. But the deeper dynamics, in which it’s easier to break things down and have a good day when voters are unhappy than it is to institutionalize your alternative—especially if that alternative is moving leftwards? A good midterm election doesn’t answer that. It just opens up the possibility for Democrats to begin a project that would vitiate the hyperpolitics thesis.