Democratic performance in off-year elections demonstrates Trump and MAGA's weakness
A key challenge for Democrats in the coming year will be to sharpen public defiance into a force powerful enough to foil Trump's authoritarian responses to his growing unpopularity
Last week’s elections across multiple states were the first true measure of Republicans’ and Democrats’ relative political fortunes one year into the dismal era of Trump II. Against the expectations of many pundits, and likely against the hopes and fears of many of the candidates themselves, Democrats over-performed in contests throughout the country. From marquee gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey to school board contests in Pennsylvania and Colorado, Democratic candidates notched unexpected victories and more-than-respectable margins. The Washington Post gave a good sense of the momentousness:
In Georgia, Democrats ousted two Republicans on the Public Service Commission, the party’s first capture of a nonfederal statewide office in Georgia since 2006. In Connecticut, Democrats took control of 28 towns from the GOP. In New Jersey, Democrats won their biggest majority in the General Assembly since the Watergate era.
[. . .]
In the [Pennsylvania] race for Bucks County district attorney, Democrat Joe Khan ousted incumbent Republican Jennifer Schorn by 54 percent to 46 percent, becoming the first Democrat since the 19th century to win the office.
And according to polling expert G. Elliott Morris, there “was a directional shift toward Democrats in 99.8% of counties that held partisan elections” — a simply astounding move in the party’s favor following a 2024 election that showed widespread and dispiriting moves towards Trump even in Democratic strongholds.
The most important immediate consequence of these widespread Democratic wins is that they’ve re-calibrated the perspective of many political observers and millions of ordinary citizens regarding the popularity, influence, and power of the Trump administration. For the past year, Donald Trump has ruled in an increasingly lawless fashion, with he and his advisors barely hiding their intention to transform the president into a dictatorial and dominant figure not only over U.S. politics, but over the U.S. economy and society. The defeat of GOP candidates across the country represented a massively dour public judgment of the second Trump presidency to date. Never in our lifetimes has a party been so identified in the public imagination with its leader; never in our lifetimes has a president so thoroughly re-made an entire party in his own image. It strains credulity that many voters were not thinking of the president and his domination of the GOP, even when they voted in purely local elections.
Moreover, the election results jive with polling that had shown the president’s approval rating slipping to levels not seen since the January 6 insurrection; for instance, a recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll showed only 41% approval and a whopping 59% disapproval of Trump’s performance. And as Republicans would be quick to point out and Democrats hard-pressed to deny, this sweep is hardly due to a sudden resurgence of public faith in the Democratic Party, whose approval ratings are even lower than the president’s.
These results should dispatch the false notion that anything like a majority of Americans is on board with Trump’s lawlessness and corruption, or supports his handling of the economy. And they provide further validation that the 2024 election was no mass public endorsement of authoritarian politics, far-right conservatism, and white supremacy, but was what it seemed far likelier to be: a narrow victory propelled by a die-hard MAGA base, and augmented by voters enraged by inflation and disillusioned with a Democratic president who failed to bring economic stability to their lives (and who broke faith with them by concealing vital information about his physical and intellectual deterioration). In 2024, millions of Americans wanted life to return to a mythical pre-pandemic idyll, and ultimately enough of them did not believe Joe Biden’s own vice president could credibly deliver this.
But now, those who were overly credulous of a permanent new right-wing coalition that supposedly included substantial numbers of former Democratic voters, and who advised self-defeating policy changes for the party, have been left with egg on their faces. In state after state, demographics that had seen significant shifts in Trump’s direction in 2024 saw rapid shifts in the opposite direction: in particular, Latino voters and non-college minorities all demonstrated not long-term fealty to MAGA, but at least a willingness to change votes in response to their appraisals and feelings regarding political and economic reality. This is not to say that the Democrats can or should take these voters for granted — quite the opposite — but that there is a path forward for earning and retaining their loyalty in future elections.
The worst possible Democratic response to these off-year elections would be to conclude that passively letting Trump make mistakes and defeat himself has somehow been vindicated as the optimal policy, to double-down on talking only about kitchen table issues, and to de-emphasize Trump’s lawlessness. As Greg Sargent writes at New Republic, the economic mismanagement and authoritarianism simply can’t be separated from each other:
Trump’s tariffs, his killing of the tunnel project [between New Jersey and New York], his potentially illegal federal-worker firings, his DOGE bloodbath, and more show that the economic carnage he’s unleashed is inseparable from his consolidation of autocratic power. Democrats can say these things are bad because they’re both authoritarian abuses of power and have terrible economic consequences, while vowing to stand up to that lawlessness—and do well with the working class.
Crucially, politicos did not simply leave it to voters to intuit this connection on their own; as Sargent details, gubernatorial candidates Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey also made this case in advertisements and on the stump.
It also seems quite credible, on the level of basic common sense, that it wasn’t just economic issues that led Latino voters in particular to turn away from Trump and MAGA in last week’s elections. Donald Trump’s election-year vows to implement mass deportation programs have proven all too real — and their excesses have shown that the administration has little care for whether ICE agents violate the civil rights of Latino citizens in their sinister zeal to racially purify the nation. Before his election, voters could credibly believe that Trump would focus on high-priority undocumented immigrants like those with criminal records; the past year should have disabused them of this lie.
Those in the Democratic Party who have urged the party to keep its head down in the face of authoritarianism and to hope that Trump eventually somehow destroys himself, to focus on narrow “kitchen table issues,” or even to shift further towards a supposed “middle” to capture some of the supposed right-wing cultural swing of the electorate, have utterly misjudged our political situation. Americans have not missed the big picture of the Trump administration — the economic mayhem, the in-your-face corruption, the psychotic attempt to send troops into American cities — and when given a chance to make their voice heard, most declared “fuck that shit.”
Tellingly, the Trump White House has sought to deny a link between Donald Trump’s lack of popularity and GOP election losses. The president himself suggested that Republicans didn’t fare well because he wasn’t on the ballot — implicitly endorsing the idea that the GOP on its own just isn’t that popular, while dismissing the reality that in a nationalized political environment where Trump dominates the GOP, this particular president will usually be on the ballot at least in spirit. And when Donald Trump has made post-election comments on Americans’ economic concerns, it has been mostly to dismiss them, such as when he lied about lower energy prices.
Even in the face of such a clear electoral indictment, Donald Trump seems incapable of moderating his ostentatious corruption and indifference to the fortunes of ordinary Americans. His obsessive focus on building (or at least pocketing money to “build”) his Bribery Ballroom, which has led to the demolition of large chunks of the White House, may be the most symbolically resonant instance of this. All those Mary Antoinette “let them eat cake” memes may or may not sway public opinion, but they capture a certain timeless quality to his self-aggrandizement that is instantly clear even to those who don’t follow politics closely.
This full-speed-ahead approach towards giving the finger to the middle and working classes ties closely to President Trump’s most decisive response to the election results — to indicate that his and the GOP’s future lies in rigging elections in 2026 and beyond. This had been the plan even before these damning off-year elections, and it is even more so now that Trump and his close advisors have seen their authoritarian aggression and economic folly register as irrefutably unpopular among American voters. We have every reason to believe that these election results will cause Donald Trump not to seek common ground with the opposition or to pursue economic policies that actually benefit ordinary people, but to accelerate his attempts to ensconce himself and the GOP in power against further adverse electoral outcomes. We should expect to see a renewed commitment to ICE abuses in blue cities, and to accompanying troop deployments; a doubling-down on foreign adventurism in a likely-doomed attempt to gain a “rally around the flag” polling bump; and a push to make voting for Democrats as hard as possible in 2026.
But while Trump may believe in his capacity to bully and bluff the GOP into successfully retaining power, we may in fact be seeing the start of meaningful schisms between him and GOP pols who lack such faith. Many of them understand a key implication of a possible blue wave in 2026 — that it could render GOP gerrymanders urged by Trump to be self-defeating, by spreading Republican voters thin and increasing the number of districts that a pro-Democratic electorate could flip to Democratic control. This concern has been amplified by the rapid shift back to Democrats we saw in the Latino vote in multiple states, and the fact that many extreme gerrymanders would rely on continued higher levels of pro-GOP voting by this diverse demographic. Conflict over gerrymanders seems like a real point of contention between Trump and otherwise-loyal Republicans, as many GOP representatives could go from occupying safe seats to facing decent odds of losing in a blue wave election should gerrymandering not be amplified by voter suppression measures.
Some Republicans have even begun talking of the need for Trump to rein in his anti-immigrant push in order to staunch losses with Latino voters, which only highlights the conundrum for GOP elected officials. With nativism and racial domination central to Trump and MAGA’s identity, the likelihood that he will change course for a kinder, gentler mass deportation seems fantastical. One decisive question is whether or not elected GOP officials — particularly those in Congress — choose to follow Trump off this cliff, or finally begin to see their political futures as irrevocably divergent from a president whose only course for remaining in power is to become, undeniably and for all to see, a dictator who refuses to leave office, who uses force and fraud to seize a third term.
One central question that has haunted U.S. politics in the age of Trump, and particularly during his second term in office, is how “regular” democratic politics can defeat a president who flouts the law, works to subvert free and fair elections, employs the government to distribute propaganda and disinformation — and is increasingly comfortable in resorting to pure force to intimidate and punish his “enemies.”
Last week’s elections show, however, that the country is not so far gone as some (and I include myself among their number) might have feared. The idea that Trump is the avatar of a new conservative majority has been discredited as the fraud that it is; Americans of many different backgrounds were able to perceive Trump and the GOP’s failures despite often-obfuscatory coverage by key media outlets (here’s looking at you, New York Times!) and endless right-wing propaganda; and some Democratic candidates grasped that talking about Trump’s corruption and lawlessness actually amplified their attacks on his economic incompetence. Moreover, as much as he’s working to insulate himself from accountability, Trump’s sour response to the election results betrayed an understanding that even this would-be dictator does not consider himself safe from a sufficiently large and outraged opposition.
Donald Trump will likely respond to his declining popularity by accelerating efforts to immunize himself against accountability, and by attempting to distract and divide Americans via foreign wars and domestic repression. He will also likely escalate his and his allies’s looting of America, out of an intuition (if not an outright belief) that his reign will in fact someday end. Democrats and other opponents must prepare for this escalation, and be ready to escalate in turn: not by engaging in lawless responses of their own, but by insisting on the unacceptability of the president’s de facto insurrection against American democracy, by decrying his disastrous economic mismanagement, and by providing a countervailing vision of American solidarity, democratic triumph, and egalitarian economic dynamism. They cannot be afraid to name the essential criminality of the president and those who abuse and rob their fellow Americans, and to assert with confidence that, sooner rather than later, the law will come for the lawless. And ultimately, they must find a way to sharpen public defiance into a force numerous and powerful enough to foil Trump’s authoritarian responses to his unpopularity.