What Next, Democrats? 

The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack.

This week’s midterms look all the more remarkable when you turn back the clock. In November 2024, Donald Trump’s 49.8% showing against Kamala Harris in a cost-of-living election was proof positive that the country had lurched irredeemably to the right. America, asserted triumphant Republicans, was a conservative nation after all, and the vaunted MAGA realignment had finally arrived. Evidently eager to concede the point, misanthropic centrists seemed to agree. The Republican right had decisively won the argument and, clearly, the Democratic Party was still just too damned liberal.

How laughably silly that all looks now. In incredibly sweeping fashion, Democrats won elections up and down the country and — though some results remain outstanding at time of writing — 2026 was a decisive rebuke of Trumpism and a blue landslide in every sense. Buoyed by victories in the Midwest and Sunbelt, Democrats will now control both the House and the Senate. No fewer than seven Senate seats have flipped and, despite the best efforts of the world’s richest man, Texas has finally been turned blue. Kansas will soon have its first Democratic U.S. senator since 1932, and the Democrats may yet pick up another seat in Mississippi. At least five governors’ mansions have changed hands too, and Florida of all places came within just a few points of electing both a Democratic senator and governor. At the state level, they’ve also secured trifectas in at least five legislatures (Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and made plenty of further gains elsewhere.

By every standard, these results are historic. A blue wave. A blue tsunami. A “volcanic eruption of blue Crayola” (in the grandiloquent phrasing of CNN’s Van Jones) — these kinds of hyperboles are mostly accurate for a change. Compared to several other wave elections, in fact, 2026 looks to be even larger in scale.

In both 2006 and 2018, for example, Democrats won the House popular vote by a margin of between 8 and 9 percentage points. On current projections, this year’s figure could be as high as 17.

Beyond the numbers, conservative forces — both within the GOP and outside of it — have suffered a major body blow. Across 10 states, voters comprehensively rebuffed Big Tech’s nationwide push for new data centers through various ballot initiatives, and even Sam Altman is now doing his best to sound conciliatory. Elon Musk injected some $450 million into the campaign and, for all it got him, he might as well have just lit it on fire. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed successfully overcame an incredibly well-financed (and unapologetically racist) smear campaign backed by a bipartisan coalition of pro-Israel liberals and MAGA Republicans. Billionaire spending in California looks to have defeated a proposed wealth tax. But with this regrettable exception aside, Bernie Sanders-style economic populism had a very good night across America.

Surveying the results, there are ample reasons to be optimistic. For all its initial bravado and menace, Trumpism 2.0 has been rendered a dud, and in post-election interviews Wednesday, Trump himself sounded uncharacteristically chastened. The shape and extent of recriminations within the GOP are presently unclear. But Trump’s now decadelong stranglehold of the American body politic seems, finally, to be approaching its terminus. For 10 years he has been the loudest and most consequential force in global politics, and it genuinely feels like the fever is breaking.

There is also ample room for a more sober and bracing assessment. The electoral routing of MAGA will mean considerably less in the long term if the underlying dynamic of American politics is not transformed. Triumphant though it is, the Democratic Party remains a profoundly contradictory and politically incoherent formation, and its trajectory after previous blue waves has tended to reject any kind of transformation. In 2006, Democrats rode an antiwar wave to victory and used their newfound clout to continue funding the Bush administration’s occupation of Iraq. In 2008, Barack Obama was swept into office with a mandate for change and promptly ceded populist anger toward America’s broken political and financial system to the right. As David Sirota notes, Democratic voters were largely content to let their leaders off the hook:

Recall that after the 2006 and 2008 — the last voter uprisings in a Republican president’s second term — there was a collective sense that the work was completed and everyone could go back to brunch…There was little independent media or voter appetite to hold newly elected Democratic leaders to their promises, and those leaders often ignored — or flipped off — what little pressure came from the party’s base. Hopes for Medicare for All, a halt to mass foreclosures, and a new New Deal quickly gave way to abandoning a public health insurance option, bankruptcy reform, and tough banking regulations. Despite the Obama administration’s curtailed aspirations and accomplishments, by 2016, a Pew Research Center poll showed just 13 percent of Democratic voters were frustrated with their party — even as their party was on its way to losing to Trump.

There is something buried deep within the psyche of some Democrats that craves order, stability, equilibrium — or at least the appearance of them — above all else. This was true after Obama’s victory in 2008 and Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 and it remains the case today. There are, however, some crucial differences.

As Sirota further points out, recent polling from Pew suggests there is a strong sense of dissatisfaction among rank-and-file Democrats toward their own side (67% of Democratic and Democratic leaning voters, he notes, are “frustrated with their party” with 3 out of 10 Democratic voters saying it makes them feel “downright angry”). Thanks to organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, moreover, the left now has a presence — in Congress and in statehouses throughout the country — greater than any it has had this century. Its main task, or at least one of them, will be to ensure that inchoate populist energy is preserved rather than dampened. A posture of stubborn insurgency, I think, will be necessary to save liberals from themselves.

Indeed, no one should underestimate the rank ineptitude of the Democratic Party’s leadership class or its virtuoso ability to fuck things up. Reacting to the results on election night — “This is not a partisan moment. This is a patriotic moment. This is not a blue moment or a red moment. It’s a red, white and blue moment because American has won tonight” — presumptive House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries sounded predictably out of touch, as did Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader.

Regardless, the congressional left can and should flex its muscles at every opportunity. As my friend Nick French suggests, the formation of a new caucus is very much in order. Progressives and socialists alike should push for the defunding of Trump’s illegal war with Iran at the earliest opportunity and smash the filibuster for good. As Eric Blanc writes, there remains much to do:

Democrats should polarize the country around popular legislation that would materially improve people’s lives. They should fight to repeal the roughly $900 billion in looming Medicaid cuts, protect ACA affordability, and save threatened rural hospitals. They should redirect money from ICE and endless war toward jobs, health care, and public investment. And they need to start fighting now to end the filibuster — part of a wider fight against minoritarian veto points that will eventually have to tackle SCOTUS, statehood for Puerto Rico and DC, and other long-needed democratic reforms. We can’t allow appeals to bipartisanship or institutional norms to become another excuse for suicidal inaction. It’s good to investigate and prosecute Trump, his goons, and his corrupt billionaire buddies, but the centerpiece of this Congress should be an ambitious economic agenda that makes the stakes of 2028 clear.

Ultimately, however, breaking from the tiresome dialectic that has defined American politics since the beginning of the 21st century will require nothing short of unprecedented democratic mobilization. Despite the relentless upheavals and crises of the past two decades, American politics have remained astonishingly immune to meaningful change in any form. And despite a climate of profound and deepening popular dissatisfaction, American institutions have seem fixed in a rigid stasis. “Permanently mobilized and unable to move,” as Corey Robin puts it, the electorate longs for a transformational break but is repeatedly left disappointed.

Trumpism’s historic drubbing is certainly cause for celebration. With sufficient courage, discipline and vision it can be cause for a richer and more lasting kind of change as well.