Though a handful of national races have yet to be called, the past week has only solidified overwhelming initial evidence of a midterms Judgment Day wrought upon the GOP by the American people. I suspect that for many, the election presented as an inverted, redemptive version of Election Day 2016, when so many of our beliefs about the nature of the U.S. were first challenged and overturned by Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory. This time, though, the surprise was all upside, as Democrats not just greatly outperformed polls, but shattered mass perceptions of a deadlocked political map and their party’s lack of viability in numerous states.
The towering majority that Democrats have seized in the House — 255 seats as of this writing — has analysts looking back to the post-Watergate surge of Democrats into Congress for comparable margins of victory in the popular vote. And while the Democrats did not reach their Senate highs of the last two decades (with their count likely to reach 56, assuming the outstanding race in Alaska goes their way), they managed to gain several seats in states that went for Donald Trump by double digits a mere two years ago — and even won in places that had seemed like borderline outlandish pickup possibilities, such as Kansas, South Carolina, and Mississippi.
Apart from the Democrats’ capture of Congress, the collapse of the Republicans in multiple states signaled the depth of the party’s win. The breaking of the GOP’s stranglehold on Texas may have been the single most consequential political development of the night, as seemingly in a flash the Democrats’ slow grind towards power in the state turned into a GOP rout. It would have been one thing for the highly-talented James Talarico to have beaten the uniquely unappealing Ken Paxton; it was another thing altogether for him to do so in the face of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of attack ads and a hate campaign aimed at replaying GOP anti-trans tropes from 2024. And it was still another thing entirely not only for Gina Hinojosa to dispatch the seemingly undispatchable Greg Abbott (who was seeking his fourth term as Texas governor, and who few prognosticators saw as vulnerable until late in the election cycle), but for Democrats to capture every contested statewide position of power while also taking the Texas house (though the senate remains in GOP hands). As a key redoubt of MAGA and the GOP (including, importantly, constituting the lynchpin of the Christian right’s quest for power), the success of Democrats in cracking the hard Lone Star nuez would alone have carried a resonant message about the vulnerability of MAGA and Republicanism, even without so many other wins across the country.
Somewhat ironically, the scale of the Democratic victories provides evidence for many explanations for how it happened, so that in these early days, competing and even contradictory theories can seem like the silver bullet that explains everything. But perhaps above all else, such an extreme verdict against the GOP points directly to public anger and exhaustion towards President Trump, and more broadly towards a Republican Party that the public rightly sees as complicit in his misrule. In this sense, it doesn’t especially matter whether a particular voter’s topmost complaint was the president’s mishandling of the economy, his launching of a disastrous war against Iran, his insane and self-defeating tariffs, his cruel and appalling reign of terror against immigrants, his theft of taxpayer dollars and other corruption, or his attempts to vassalize blue states and turn the federal government into a vehicle of retribution. All these policy disasters, self-dealings, and moral failings are integral to Trump and MAGA politics and identity, and to the president’s fundamentally authoritarian project of wrecking U.S. democracy in favor of a system where Trump rules primarily to personally benefit himself and his allies.
Still, there’s a subtle but notable distinction worth making between the specific reasons voters cast their votes they way they did, and the election’s historical significance. Whether voters were consciously doing so or not, the practical outcome has been a repudiation of MAGA’s authoritarian politics and a blow in defense of democracy. Many of those who were complicit in the project to subdue American freedoms and equality were cast out of office, which in turn has disempowered Trump and, perhaps just as importantly, sent an unambiguous message that a strong American majority is done with the country’s experiment with authoritarianism.
In the last year and a half, Donald Trump has illegally wrecked entire departments and agencies of the U.S. government; dispatched ICE and CBP to terrorize blue cities, resulting in multiple murders of citizens and immigrants; bullied companies, universities, and law firms into paying his administration de facto tribute money; sicced the Justice Department on his political opponents; and sought to subvert the midterms by an unceasing barrage of pseudo-legal tricks and outright threats. The slap-down of the GOP at the state and national levels sends a clear message: this is not what America wants. As Adam Gurri put it at Liberal Currents, “The best way to defeat an attempted authoritarian consolidation is to send as strong a rebuke at the ballot box as you possibly can.” On this front, Americans got the job done.
This is where contentions that this election was less a whole-hearted endorsement of the Democratic Party than a repudiation of the GOP should be treated with a grain of salt. It is true that even many Democratic base voters are less than enthusiastic about various aspects of the party — whether due to disagreements on policy or its relative willingness to fully fight Trump and MAGA. It is also true that the party is divided on many policies fronts, lacking the lockstep deferral to the whims of a god-king like the GOP. Yet it must be said that Democratic voters, independents, and Republicans who cast votes for the party at least see the Democrats as a party loyal to American small “d” democracy and as the vehicle for its defense. In a moment such as this, with the Republican Party having substantially turned against principles like majority rule and the rule of law, the midterm results have appointed the Democrats as the nations’s defenders against encroaching autocracy.
But a fuller understanding of the Democrats’ victory should also acknowledge that it didn’t simply emerge from the electoral mulch of mass Trump revulsion, and that while the party is a heterodox grouping when compared to the GOP, its elected representatives do in fact stand for various basic principles, and advocate a range of policies, that have strong popular support. Across the country, state Democrats have pushed for a higher minimum wage, health care, more money for education, and protection of the natural environment. These substantive policies stand in stark contrast to GOP efforts to cut taxes for the rich, eviscerate public health infrastructure and health care funding, and ruin public education. And perhaps above all, we need to acknowledge the slow, steady work by thousands upon thousands of ordinary Americans and state-level politicians that have laid the groundwork for Democratic gains in states like Texas, Wisconsin, and Mississippi; while Trump has sought to ruin the country from on high, countless Americans have been working to shore it up from below. Whether it’s building up political infrastructure or advocating for a raft of practical measures that materially improve Americans’ lives, state-level Democrats have been establishing a framework that is an essential complement to the party’s evolving national vision and aspirations.
That said, with the widespread rejection of MAGA and at least temporary mass support for the Democrats, our politics remains in a state of major flux. What Republicans had claimed to be a political realignment in 2024 — the durable movement of traditional Democratic-leaning constituencies like young voters and Latinos towards Trump and the GOP, alongside the further movement of non-college-educated voters toward the Republicans — turns out to have been (merely and thankfully) a temporary trend. And the rejection of ruinous MAGA politics that have captured and corrupted the GOP provides another layer of hope that the Republican Party is on the path to still greater decomposition. On top of this, Donald Trump has two more years in office to help further gut public perceptions of the GOP, suggesting that the party still has further to fall (though, as we’ll get to below, the Democrats have deep political and moral incentives to protect the country from the damage Trump can still do).
Yet widespread public skepticism of the Democratic Party reminds us that if a true political realignment in the party’s favor is to happen, the party has to work to make it happen. For now, Democrats are finding unity both in their general opposition to Trump and in an emphasis on addressing voter worries about affordability. But any honest assessment of the loosey-goosey term “affordability” quickly shows that it encompasses an enormous range of concerns, from inflation to health care costs, educational access, job security, and protection from the ravages of climate change. In other words, sooner or later, Democrats will need to hash out and find compromises on a range of policy fronts currently subsumed under relatively easy unifying positions like “Donald Trump needs to end the insane Iran war because it’s driving fuel costs through the roof.” I don’t say this as a prediction of impending doom or chaos for the Democrats — after all, reconciling and prioritizing issues is a basic function of a political party. And for all its broadness, “affordability” does capture something fundamental about what has gone wrong with our country — the all-too-widespread sense of economic precarity, the fear that the American Dream has met an untimely demise, the mass frustration that basic goods like housing and health insurance are sucking every last dollar from working Americans. It’s good and healthy that the Democrats will need to dig into the specifics or otherwise face their own electoral reckonings in the coming years.
But although Democrats have an understandable interest in delivering on their “fight to make things more affordable” campaign promises, the primary obstacle to success (at least at the national level) remains: Donald Trump is still president, and has already proudly proclaimed his eagerness to veto legislation that Democrats pass. And although it is within the realm of possibility that the president may at least make an appearance of trying to make deals with Democrats, the possibility of him doing so runs into direct conflict with the other core reality that led voters to deliver the Democrats so much power: Trump’s desire for maximum personal control over the U.S. government and his unquenchable desire for material aggrandizement. Put another way: Donald Trump still wants to be a king, still sees the U.S. Treasury as his personal piggy bank, and still views the presidency as a world historical opportunity to siphon billions of additional dollars to the accounts of his family and their allies.
To believe that in the face of an electoral shellacking, Trump will now somehow back down from either his efforts at lawless, limitless rule or his desire to make bank off the presidency is to betray a basic lack of understanding of this rotten man, and of the illiberal and anti-democratic impulses of his core constituencies. I think we can expect the opposite: shorn of his protective congressional majorities, facing lame duck status under the ordinary laws of democratic politics, and under the threat of major scrutiny and potential consequences for subverting the presidency, he is almost guaranteed to double down on his every malevolent tendency. Add to this a seething hatred of the American people for so clearly rebuking him in the midterms, and we can see that this is a time of extreme danger for the republic and for ordinary people alike.
Trump’s selection of Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff, alongside this week’s news that the president is once again nattering on about a stolen election, should be enough to alert Democrats that the president will not be retreating from the worst of his offenses. And this, I think, should be a stark reminder that even though their smashing midterm wins have given them space for initiative and national agenda-setting that they formerly lacked, Democrats have a primary responsibility to confront, expose, and defeat Donald Trump’s attacks on the U.S. government and the rule of law, and on the citizenry and immigrants.
Here, Democrats need to better acknowledge and balance the tension between their role as elected officials who are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, and their role as politicians who have been elected to serve the interests of their constituents. To be blunt, they have an obligation to defend the country and its citizenry against attacks — including presidential lawlessness, plunder of the Treasury, and direct harm to citizens and immigrants — that should weigh heavily in their prioritization of where to place their efforts. I think we have at least seen some version of this tension play out in the days since the election, as leading Democrats have talked about what percentage of time and effort they should expend investigating the Trump administration versus working on issues like health care.
Among current Democratic leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, we can already see a preference for avoiding the path of confrontation that is a necessary part of their constitutional obligations, including by emphasizing to the public that investigations will be allocated less overall emphasis. Equally tellingly, Democratic leadership has strongly indicated that impeaching Trump is to be avoided at all costs, which leads us to a crucial question: if impeaching Donald Trump is off the table, then what is the plan for stopping Trump’s lawlessness if public exposure and the threat of legal repercussions don’t do the trick? And at that point, does it truly make sense to double down on passing legislation that Donald Trump would simply veto, or, less probably but still possibly, negotiating with a lawless president on legislative compromises that he can’t be trusted to faithfully execute?
So the Democratic Party faces a difficult, arguably unprecedented situation in having been elected in great part to rebuke and contain a president who’s an avowed enemy of the constitutional order, who will not play by the rules of democracy or the law, and who has shown a willingness to incite violence to punish his enemies. There is no point in communicating to the public a sanitized version of this deeply dire situation, or in unnecessarily positioning themselves for blame (via lackluster attempts at oversight) when Trump inevitably continues his outrages.
It would be a complete misread of our political situation and public opinion if Democrats fail to press every avenue of attack against our delusional, increasingly delegitimized president1. Even if we grant a certain logic to taking impeachment off the table due to the reasonable odds that enough GOP senators would stick by Trump when it came to actually voting to remove him from office, investigations that dig up incriminating information on the president can accomplish multiple priceless objectives. Further exposure of his corruption and abuse of power will only drive his dwindling popularity further down. While this may do nothing to slow down Trump’s personal lawlessness, pushing the president towards pariah status with a strong majority will certainly affect the willingness of his collaborators to aid him, whether they be administration officials, members of Congress, or corporate leaders who joined the “why not fascism?” bandwagon back when crushing the republic seemed like a good business proposition. And of course, behaving as if the rule of law matters sends an unmistakeable signal to the American people that it does in fact matter, that a vote for the Democrats is a vote against criminality, and that the law will eventually come for those who break it.
I want to end with a final reason in favor of fully investigating and confronting the president — one that, the longer I sit with it, feels quite important. With Donald Trump’s term in office ending in two years, Democrats must get a jump on a political future that will involve contending with a GOP that has radicalized into full anti-democratic animus over the course of the Trump administration, and that will in 2028 either continue its radicalization or proclaim its contrition in the hope of being spared yet another electoral wipeout. In a situation where a lawless president cannot be removed from office due to the extremism of GOP senators, Democrats must play a longer game, and ensure that the GOP as a whole pays the price that their deranged president will not. As punishment for defying the Constitution, they can escalate in the direction of a metaphorical apocalypse not for Trump, but for his entire political party. And so Democrats can work to present any findings of Trumpist corruption as key evidence of the fundamental complicity of the GOP in standing by its man for the past ten wearisome years; even more so if they uncover instances of direct involvement by Republican senators and congressmen in the president’s illegal or abusive schemes. They can encourage public hatred and contempt not only for Donald Trump, but for those who benefitted as he robbed and gutted the republic — and in 2028, they can remind voters that although the president is no longer on the ballot, they can send an undeniable message to his co-conspirators and enablers by voting as if he still is.
For an in-depth analysis of what specific investigative tools are available to congressional Democrats, this piece by Greg Sargent and Brian Beutler is invaluable, as is the case they make for Democrats to move aggressively against Donald Trump on the investigations front and how it can even be said to complement the fight for affordability and other material improvements to voters’ rights.