“US midterms election results herald new political era,” the headline told readers who, depending on their party preference, were either ecstatic or enraged. It was 2010, and the Republican Party was breaking out the champagne after its sweeping victory. Merely two years earlier, when Barack Obama won in a landslide, becoming the first Black president and taking conservative states like Iowa and Indiana, the press had declared the Republican Party was on life support, with some pundits predicting that conservatives would need a generation to rebound on the national level. A 2009 New Republic cover story even pronounced, “Conservatism is Dead.”
By the end of Obama’s two terms, Republicans had won control of an unprecedented number of state and local offices, building a scaffold for Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 victory. Despite Trump’s popular vote loss, the same commentators who predicted Republican doom claimed that the U.S. had entered an era of right-wing populism. Nothing could stop the so-called “Trump train.” That is, until the 2018 “blue wave” came crashing into the depot. Joe Biden’s presidential victory of 2020, along with the Democrats taking control of the Senate, had everyone in the mainstream media certain that MAGA was fit for a funeral, and that was before January 6. Trump would likely serve time in prison, and the Democratic Party, leading the most diverse and progressive House of Representatives in U.S. history, would triumph, according to demographic shifts that enhanced the electoral influence of their political base. The coalition of the ascendent had ascended.
Then, Donald Trump won every swing state in 2024, and The Nation asked, “What happened to the Democratic Party?” The same legacy outlet of leftist journalism asserted that the Democrats were “squalid,” “fangless,” and “far from the picture of health.”
Two years later, after the latest midterms, the same magazine reported on the “Democratic earthquake,” gloating that the “American people kicked Donald Trump’s ass.”
One cannot argue with the latest assessment. Nor can anyone who cares about liberal democracy, shared prosperity, and social justice fail to feel joy and relief when considering the MAGA comeuppance. Democrats took Congress with ease. Inspiring candidates, such as Iowa’s Senator-elect, Paralympic gold medalist Josh Turek, scored unlikely victories, and the American electorate posted results that, as recently as the 1990s, would have read like scenes out of a fantasy novel. Keisha Lance Bottoms will become the first Black governor in the former Confederate stronghold of Georgia, New Mexico’s Deb Haaland will become the country’s first Native American governor, and JD Ford will become the first gay congressman from Indiana. By defeating Greg Abbott, the monstrous enabler of ICE, Gina Hinojosa will become Texas’s first Latina governor.
One should always resist the temptation to confuse cause for political ebullience with revolution. The same “American people” who created fodder for celebratory Nation headlines remain fickle and, as recent election results indicate, can just as easily cause consternation and disappointment. Since 1990, party control of the House has flipped five times, while control of the Senate, a governing body with an institutional bias toward Republican rule, has flipped three times. The 10 presidential elections since 1984 have split evenly, with Democrats taking five and Republicans winning five. Neither party has cemented an enduring coalition. Maybe Democrats have laid the groundwork for one with this tremendous victory, but it’s hardly preordained.
And yet … No predictable oscillation stops pundits from treating every election as the apocalypse. This trend turns reporters into announcers for a professional wrestling broadcast, emphatically repeating phrases that bear a striking resemblance to “the greatest match of all time” and “the biggest main event in history.”
It remains taboo to question Americans’ sagacity. But all evidence suggests that swing voters, who often determine elections, are, charitably put, ahistorical. As they make enough 180-degree turns to make any observer dizzy, they render any sustained vision of governance impossible to execute. These same voters then protest that “nothing ever gets done” in Washington.
Gore Vidal christened our country, “the United States of Amnesia,” while the late Studs Terkel differed only in believing that “USA” stood for the “United States of Alzheimer’s.” Election results and the media reactions that they provoke demonstrate the accuracy of Vidal and Terkel’s diagnosis.
One of the painful lessons that many Americans tend to forget is that Republicans are incompetent and cruel when occupying roles in public administration. A massive blue wave in 2006 gave Democrats control of the House and Senate, as well as many governorships, when the voters had become exhausted with President George W. Bush, who had invaded Iraq under pretenses, bungled the war’s prosecution, and then left New Orleans to fend for itself after Hurricane Katrina. That heckuva job was forgotten in 2010, when many of the same voters handed Congress back to the Republicans. Republicans have proven resilient even when out of power. Ask not only Obama, but Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Kamala Harris.
A crucial percentage of American voters appear to realize the extent of Republican inadequacies and iniquities only when Republicans hold office. When Democrats have power, these voters are forever persuadable that next time will be different.
Persuasion, or, to put it even more ambitiously, inspiration, is an act of leadership the left often fails to achieve, particularly after a successful election. The need remains as urgent as ever. Last week’s outcome largely stemmed from dissatisfaction among key constituencies Republicans can win back.
White voters without a college degree, white residents of rural counties, and young men who supported Trump in large numbers in 2024 either voted Democratic or stayed home as a protest against the increasingly punitive cost of living, the incoherent war against Iran, and the president’s bizarre behavior, which includes insistence that the affordability crisis is a “hoax,” supercharging inflation with tariffs that agitate historical allies, and evaluating the posteriors of Republican politicos. Overseeing a draconian immigration enforcement regime that abused detainees, terrorized neighborhoods, and killed American citizens didn’t help, not even with voters who, as recently as 2024, expressed the desire for more stringent border security. The most salient question is how Democrats can retain their voters when Trump takes his long-overdue exit from the political stage, especially if it coincides with inflation’s waning.
The “progressive vs. moderate” debate, which plays out in an endless loop, tries to answer the question of persuasion. Still, it typically fails to recognize that voter behavior is not agentic AI that needs only the right issue-oriented command prompt, whether it is a cost-of-living pitch or “Medicare for All.” Pundits and politicians heavily invested in the ongoing progressive and moderate kerfuffle also tend toward insular analysis. Listen to the recent discussion between Mehdi Hasan and Sarah Longwell for an example of two political commentators behaving as if election outcomes depend on what Democrats do and say, rather than large cultural trends and the highly-funded, efficiently managed Republican commitment to persuasion that encompasses everything from traditional and social media to local campaigns against libraries.
The Republican persuasion machine is often an exercise in bigotry, so ignorant that calling it “anti-intellectual” is a compliment. Still, it does present a cohesive vision of freedom, albeit a destructive one, while communicating principles that can organize life in a society, albeit an unhealthy one.
Does the left have an alternative? Can the left present a competing conception of the right’s individualistic, antisocial notion of freedom? Such an alternative could revive the meaning of communal life, detach public safety from the proliferation of firearms that cast a pall of danger over every public gathering, reconnect humanity to the natural world, and reclaim the idea of pleasure and liberty from reactionaries who have appropriated it to signify nothing more than shock jock vulgarity.
Ellen Willis, a feminist activist in the 1960s who became one of America’s great essayists, wrote that a “left with no sense of the stakes in cultural political issues can never compete with the right’s ability to exploit them.” Inspired by her formative political experiences, she advocated a “democratic politics that affirms freedom and pleasure” as conditions of “human survival.” The reason that there is undying nostalgia for the movements of the 1960s, including those in which Willis participated, is because, for all its flaws, the counterculture projected a way of life that could prove emancipatory from the shackles of repression and anomie. The Civil Rights Movement remains the moral center of U.S. history because it offered a nonviolent and ethically brilliant engagement with politics that inspired people beyond its leaders’ immediate demands. It remains instructive, especially in an age when the right has repurposed bigotry as a voter recruitment tool, and many progressives treat antisemitism as a tolerable eccentricity engendered by Israel, which had the temerity to fight back when its civilians were raped and murdered, rather than hatred’s most perennial and fateful form.
The fate of Democrats, and even democracy, will turn on elected officials’ ability to show public policy’s capacity to intervene in the daily crises of American life. As the Washington Monthly has suggested, a Democratic agenda should “champion the self-employed,” a swelling section of workers that cannot relate to reactionary “trickle down economics” or leftist nostalgia for labor unions. “Medicare for All” is a good slogan, and perhaps, an admirable long-term goal, but as Merrill Goozner recently wrote, Americans “need help now.” A Democratic Congress, with a popular mandate, must work within the bounds of reality to lower costs and improve care quality.
As Willis would recognize, effectively navigating important issues also requires a cohesive moral and cultural vision that elevates people beyond their material concerns.
Senator Raphael Warnock, the elected official most closely connected to the Civil Rights Movement, understands transcendent politics. The pastor of Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Church in Georgia infuses his rhetoric with the dramatic promise of a societal orientation that, in his words, transforms justice into “what love looks like in public.” Calling for a “larger moral vision” of American life in which the “acid test of faith” is “commitment to the most marginalized members of the human family,” Warnock also makes it clear that “going back to normal” is as delusional as it is destructive. “We don’t just need a return. We need a reimagining. We need a reorientation,” he has said, “If back where we were was so good, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
If the contemporary left cannot seize the opportunity of the right’s falling fortune to turn the crises of extreme inequality and precarity, the assault on liberal democracy, and the threat that climate change presents to livable ecology into opportunities of rhetoric, organization, and leadership, it will find that the politics of “affordability” is cheap.
Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist, recently predicted that Western democracies will swing from the populist right to the populist left, accomplishing nothing in the transition of power other than an ongoing protest against the decadent status quo.
If, because of a lack of courage and imagination on the left, politics remains petty, small, and short-term-driven, we’ll wake up on a cold November morning not too far in the future to read about the “red wave.”
The post Midterms: Don’t Get Cocky. Political Victories Are Fleeting appeared first on Washington Monthly.
