The triumphalist claptrap from MAGA-land treating the 2024 outcome as vastly determinative is bad enough. It’s really annoying when the New York Times joins the parade with overheated rhetoric and limited data, as I argued at New York:

As you probably know, Democrats lost a rather consequential election in 2024. They (and the country) have been suffering mightily from the many excesses of Donald Trump’s second term as president. So Democrats have been spending a lot of time analyzing their mistakes and weighing their options for recovering in the next election cycle.

Republicans, led by their perpetually self-aggrandizing leader, have spent a lot of time inflating their 2024 win into a landslide of world-historical proportions. They’ve been unwittingly assisted in this effort by some mainstream-media journalists who seem determined to find data showing calamities without end for the Democratic Party.

Now the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher has penned an article parlaying short-term voter-registration trends into a desperate crisis for Democrats. His language is remarkably lurid. Democrats are “hemorrhaging” voters, who are in a “stampede away from” the party. And “Democrats are divided and flummoxed over what to do.” The sources he cites seem equally sure they’ve seen the future in a few years of limited data:

“’I don’t want to say, “The death cycle of the Democratic Party,” but there seems to be no end to this,’ said Michael Pruser, who tracks voter registration closely as the director of data science for Decision Desk HQ, an election-analysis site. ‘There is no silver lining or cavalry coming across the hill. This is month after month, year after year.'”

What these Cassandras are discussing is major-party voter-registration trends from 2020 to 2024 in the 30 states that allow registration by party. So right off the bat, the data exclude 20 states. Goldmacher’s analysis also mostly ignores the largest group of new registered voters, those who choose not to register as members of either party. Also missing is any reflection on the specific state laws and practices that influence registration decisions, particularly the ability of independents to vote in party primaries. Given the catastrophic conclusions reached, it would have been a good idea to take at least a brief look at data points that don’t have these limitations, such as surveys of party self-identification. Here’s what Gallup had to say about that just a few weeks ago:

“In the second quarter of 2025, an average of 46% of U.S. adults identified as Democrats or said they are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party, while 43% identified as Republicans or said they lean Republican.

“That three-percentage-point Democratic advantage compares with a tie between the two parties in the first quarter of 2025, after a four-point Republican lead in the fourth quarter of 2024. Until now, the Republican Party had led or tied in most quarters since 2023.”

To be clear, there is no fixed relationship between party registration and voting by party. Democrats had a regular registration and self-identification advantage for many decades thanks to relatively large numbers of conservative Democrats. As the two parties have sorted themselves out ideologically, they’ve come much closer to parity. Focusing obsessively on 2020-through-’24 trends can be very misleading, particularly given the exclusion of data from the 20 states without party registration. But let’s say they are as indicative of the strength or weakness of the major-party “brands” as Goldmacher thinks they are: Of course Democrats lost ground during these four years. America experienced a pandemic that killed over a million people and closed down much of the economy; the first major inflationary price spike since the 1970s; and (like much of the developed world) an equally dramatic spike in immigration. It would be shocking if Republicans didn’t make voter-registration gains over this period. And Trump’s 2024 victory after Democrats executed a mid-campaign candidate change was hardly surprising.

The 2020-through-’24 GOP surge could very well end in 2026, particularly since Trump’s job-approval ratings are cratering precisely in those voter categories where he made such impressive gains in 2024.

One point Goldmacher makes that really is relevant is that Democratic voter-registration strategies may not be working:

“For years, the left has relied on a sprawling network of nonprofits — which solicit donations from people whose identities they need not disclose — to register Black, Latino and younger voters. Though the groups are technically nonpartisan, the underlying assumption has been that most new voters registering would vote Democratic.

“Mr. Trump upended that calculation with the inroads he made with working-class nonwhite voters.”

Again, these “inroads” may not last even two years. But without question, past Democratic registration and voter-mobilization strategies have been lazy and could use a lot of fine-tuning and better targeting.

More generally, party politics in this country has gone through multiple dizzying turns in the 21st century within an overall framework of intense competition. Democrats have been declared dead in 2002, 2004, 2010, 2014, and now 2024, and Republicans have been written off in 2006, 2008, 2018, and 2020. The recent spate of obituaries for a doomed Democratic Party are no more reliable than any of these confident predictions based on short-term trends. Let them rest in peace.

 

Occasionally you see a single poll that really casts light on important political topics. I wrote about an especially good one from Pew at New York:

For months now, Donald Trump’s job-approval numbers have been underwater, albeit relatively stable thanks to steady support from his base, which hasn’t been affected much by perceptions that he’s on an authoritarian bender. But a new and very deep dive from Pew Research Center shows that beneath the surface, the 47th president is losing a lot of ground among the voter groups that fed his 2024 win by trending in his direction.

The statistic that jumps right off the page is that Trump’s job-approval rating among Hispanics has dropped to 27 percent positive and 70 percent negative, with 51 percent expressing very strong disapproval. This rapidly increasing voter category probably had more to do with Trump returning to the White House than any other. According to Pew’s own earlier study of validated 2024 voters, Trump won 48 percent of Hispanic voters as compared to the 36 percent he won in 2020. That over half of Hispanics now very strongly disapprove of how Trump is doing his job is not a good sign for Republicans. Trump is also nearly as unpopular now with Asian Americans, registering a 31 percent approval and 66 percent disapproval ratio (with 49 percent very strongly disapproving). He won 40 percent of Asian Americans in 2024, per Pew, compared to the 30 percent he won in 2020.

Trump’s drop-off in support isn’t quite as dramatic among one other group that got a lot of attention after November 2024, young voters, in part because Pew’s analysis on 2024 voters didn’t show Trump doing quite so well as some others did (per Pew, he won 39 percent of under-30 voters, and now his approval rating in that category is at 33 percent). But a separate metric on 2024 Trump voters separated by age shows his job-approval rating ranges from a high of 92 percent among those over 65 to a low of 69 percent among those age 18 to 34. Of these younger Trump voters, 92 percent gave him a positive job rating as recently as February of this year.

All in all, the Trump coalition appears to be melting back toward the hard-core GOP base of grumpy old white folks. The disillusionment of significant numbers of 2024 Trump voters has several apparent sources. The best known involve the priorities he has set in his second term as president. Like most other pollsters, Pew finds Trump’s approval underwater on a long list of issues. They discern at least some confidence in Trump’s leadership on a few issues (e.g., negotiating favorable trade agreements and using military force wisely) and little at all in others (e.g., making good decisions on health-care policy and “bringing the country together”). Assessments of his One Big Beautiful Bill Act remain a bit in flux (23 percent of Americans, and the same percentage of Republicans, are “not sure” how they feel about it), but the percentage strongly disapproving of the megabill (33 percent) is a lot bigger than the percentage strongly approving (11 percent). Another Trump “accomplishment” Pew looked at closely was his tariff program, which remains very unpopular, with 61 percent of Americans and 32 percent of Republicans disapproving.

Most interesting, however, is Pew’s assessment of changing attitudes toward some of Trump’s personal qualities. The percentage of Americans who believe Trump is “mentally sharp” has dropped from 58 percent in July of 2024 to 48 percent a year later. The percentage saying he “keeps his promises” has dropped from 51 percent to 43 percent. Perhaps Teflon Don is not quite as impervious to perceptions that he is incoherent and erratic as we have been led to assume. And if he’s losing steam personally, it’s unclear why his party (or his potential successors) can be expected to do better in 2026 and 2028.

After reading the umpteenth finger-pointing diagnosis of factional Democratic perfidy I was inspired to call for a midterm truce at New York:

You don’t need to be a political scientist or even a Democrat to know that the Democratic Party has some factional divisions. They are different in nature from the factional divisions among Republicans, which used to be over ideological orientations and policy arguments, but are now over relative degrees of loyalty to the chaotic views and corrupt interests of Donald Trump.

While it’s possible to slice and dice Democrats into multiple tribes, they mostly fall into the rough categories of progressives and centrists (or moderates, or “pragmatic progressives,” or whatever they choose to call themselves). These groups often differ, sometimes vociferously, over economic policy, cultural perspectives, America’s role in the world, and effective political strategies. Tensions between them have understandably been heightened by a painful and extremely consequential defeat in 2024. Ancient grudges between center and left have been revived in the guise of explaining that defeat, though it may have had little or nothing to do with which faction was driving the campaign bus. It’s time, however, for all Democrats to pivot toward the 2026 midterms, in which party unity is both possible and essential.

I cannot count the number of times when self-styled Democratic centrists (the tribe with which I have identified during much of my own career) have blamed Kamala Harris’s defeat on her unwillingness to stand up to The Left, defined as “woke” identity groups bullying politicians to follow their narrow but unpopular agendas (from transgender rights to loosened immigration laws), socialists pursuing big-government panaceas, and critics of America who never understood basic voter patriotism. And you see the mirror image of this blame game in a fairly typical offering at the New Republic this week from progressive organizer Aaron Regunberg:

“[Kamala] Harris started off her campaign with talk of cracking down on price gouging, and other policies to rein in corporate corruption. By late summer, some journalists were asking questions such as, ‘The Populist Mantle Is Harris’s for the Taking: But Does She Want It?’

“Alas, to our daily horror, she didn’t want that mantle. Her campaign pivoted away from economic populism and embraced the corporate-friendly centrism of Harris’s closest advisers. This shift was clear in her policy moves, like watering down her price-gouging crackdown and walking back proposals to tax the rich following pressure from her biggest donors, as well as in her rhetoric, as she curtailed earlier messaging on taking on corporate elites and went all in on a bipartisan theme of defending democracy.”

Regunberg, of course, accuses the circle around Harris of being elitists who betrayed the economic interests of the working class, much as the centrist group Third Way in its diagnosis of 2024 accused progressives of never understanding the working class in the first place, being elitists who are “hostile to success” and “indifferent to people’s desire to attain wealth,” presenting economic policies “framed through the lens of identity politics” and “favoring excessive regulations, inefficient spending, and programs that don’t directly benefit” workers.

With rare exceptions, factional interpretations of the 2024 debacle turn into prophecies of future disaster if the party doesn’t turn one way or the other. Venerable political observer Larry Sabato is quoted by centrist New York congresswoman Laura Gillen as being full of foreboding about what might happen to Democrats if the left has its way:

“Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, warned that Democrats may already be nearing the limits of how far left they can lean without alienating the broader electorate. ‘They reached it during Biden,’ Sabato says. ‘And they certainly reach it if they try and parallel what Bernie or AOC are doing—or now Mamdani. That doesn’t fit most districts. It doesn’t fit most states.’”

Progressive Regunberg counters with a warning about midterm “purges” of progressives being threatened by “establishment Democrats”:

“The antipathy toward populism has been most apparent lately in the New York City mayoral race, where Zohran Mamdani remains unendorsed by leading Democrats despite winning the party’s nomination and facing off against two Democrats (who turned independent for the general election) who are now collaborating with Trump. But it’s in relation to the party’s top campaign apparatuses—the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—that this refusal to learn the lessons of 2024 could be most catastrophic to the party’s prospects in next year’s midterm elections.

“Because again and again, in must-win House and Senate races, rather than embracing candidates that are proving their capacity to spark grassroots Democratic enthusiasm and tap into the populist ferment of the American public, establishment leaders are working to tilt the scales in favor of exactly the kind of uninspiring corporatists that dug the party’s current hole.”

As it happens, my personal impression is that the DSCC and DCCC would endorse a reincarnated Karl Marx if they thought he could win a swing Senate or House race. The planted axiom here is that “grassroots Democratic enthusiasm” depends on “the populist ferment of the American public.” In a presidential or even a gubernatorial election, that could be true. But in midterm congressional elections, Democrats are pre-enthused regardless of the identity of candidates, as poll after poll has shown:

As is almost always the case in midterm elections, most voters will perceive 2026 as a referendum on Donald Trump, who is, after all, the most galvanizing politician in recent American history. And most voters will show up or not show up and cast their ballots based on factors that have little or nothing to do with Democratic messaging or the poor favorability ratings of the party, attributable mostly to discouragement over a defeat that may soon be avenged. As G. Elliott Morris recently showed with his own polling, Democratic U.S. House candidates in 2024 did not do significantly better when identified as “moderates” or by other labels. This is very unlikely to change in 2026.

In 2028, of course, when the Trump era finally ends and there is an open Democratic presidential-nomination contest, intraparty factions may very well wage total war over the party’s positioning and image in what will be a comparative election rather than a Trump referendum. But they’d be wise to declare a truce for the 2026 midterms and put any struggle for the soul of the party off until it matters to general-election voters.

 

Trump is getting a lot of attention, as he should, for trying to steal House seats with mid-decade gerrymanders. But Democrats need to understand he has other dirty tricks up his sleeve, as I explained at New York:

It’s now evident that while Trump has indeed broken all norms in rushing his policies through Congress and asserting executive powers in 2025, he is determined to keep the GOP trifecta until the end of his term. The question is how far he’ll go to tilt the high odds against him. There are already signs that Trump is looking to bend or even break the rules to ensure that the Republican Party maintains control of the House and Senate through the end of his presidency.

The stakes for Trump

Hanging onto the Senate is a big deal for Trump since that chamber has the power to confirm or reject his executive and judicial appointees. Luckily for him, the 2026 Senate landscape is very positive for the GOP; the party would have to lose four net seats for Democrats to flip control.

The House, on the other hand, is on a knife’s edge: All 435 seats are up for grabs, and Republicans can lose only two net seats there if they are to maintain control. So even the smallest midterm breeze toward Democrats could take away Mike Johnson’s gavel.

A Democratic House would be a problem for Trump for multiple reasons. First, it would deny his party the power to enact major legislation on a simple party-line basis, as it did with the massive One Big Beautiful Bill Act and is continuing to do with clawbacks of existing spending. Second, a Democratic House could and would spend a lot of time investigating the extraordinary levels of corruption, cronyism, and illegal actions that are the real legacy of Trump 2.0. And it might even make him the first thrice-impeached president.

So in sharp contrast to his conduct going into the 2018 election, Trump is very focused on holding the House next year. He’s already working to raise tons of money, avoid destructive GOP primaries, and generally serve as party field marshal. That’s all pretty normal and entirely legal. But unfortunately, Trump being Trump, he’s also setting other schemes in motion.

Redrawing the map

This summer, Trump hijacked a special legislative session in Texas that was supposed to focus on flood relief to command a rare and unnecessary redrawing of U.S. House districts, which could give Republicans as many as five new seats. Texas’s Democratic legislators have thrown some sand in the gears of this power grab by fleeing the state to deny Republicans a quorum, but sooner or later the GOP will get its way.

The bigger question is what the national balance of power will be if an escalating war ensues between Democratic- and Republican-controlled states to change congressional maps prior to the midterms. Generally speaking, the GOP will be favored in any gerrymandering arms race, since the states it controls are less likely to have adopted nonpartisan redistricting reforms. Missouri, Indiana, and Florida have been the major sources of speculation over additional pre-midterm gerrymanders for Republicans.

Suppressing votes

While it hasn’t been quite as overt as his map-rigging attempt, Trump has not lost interest in a variety of old-school methods for reducing the number of “undesirable” people allowed to cast votes. Indeed, he has persuaded MAGA-land to subscribe en masse to conspiracy theories about Democrats opening the borders to tens of millions of vicious criminals who will instantly be herded to the polls to seize power for their “radical left” benefactors. The absence of any evidence whatsoever for significant levels of voting by noncitizens has not kept Trump and his supporters from proposing and enacting a variety of barriers to election participation by people too old or poor to show up on Election Day with a wallet full of identification documents. Most of these were incorporated into a Trump executive order issued in March, in which the president sought to usurp a variety of congressional and state powers over election administration in the guise (ironically) of vindicating voting rights.

One big theme is to enforce a “National Election Day” by restricting early voting systems, particularly those in states that allow for receipt and counting of mail ballots after Election Day if they’re postmarked earlier. But as the Brennan Center documents in a report on this order and its implications, three additional Trump ideas are to impose unnecessary identification requirements, to create federal supervision over state-financed and locally administered voting machines, and to give the Trump administration access to private data contained in voter files.

The potential for havoc in giving this particular administration greater control over the rules, machinery, and data involved in voting should be obvious from previous Trump/GOP efforts to discredit election results they don’t like. Another likely result of presidential interference in voting systems is an acceleration in the exodus of local election workers fearful of intimidation or attacks based on spurious fraud claims.

Lying about results

Perhaps the most predictable feature of any postelection period during the Trump era has been unsubstantiated claims of votes being illegally cast for Democrats or illegally taken away from Republicans. Trump claimed illegal voting robbed him of a popular-vote plurality in 2016, though he won the election. Congressional Republicans claimed fraudulent mail ballots in California cost them the House in 2018. And most famously, virtually the entire GOP has now bought into the Trump fable of the stolen 2020 presidential election.

If control of the House in 2026 comes down to a relative handful of close contests, and particularly if most of them are in states where Democrats control the election machinery (which is almost guaranteed to be the case, considering the importance of marginal seats in California, New York, and Pennsylvania), Trump will certainly claim Democrats have stolen or are in the process of stealing the election. Anyone who remembers late autumn 2020 can easily imagine the wave of White House-generated protests, lawsuits, investigations, “audits” and conspiracymongering in store for us in late autumn 2026.

Changing the results

In December 2020 and January 2021, Team Trump sought to prevent the naming of electors and their confirmation by Congress. In a midterm election, the key pressure points would be state certification of congressional results and then the seating of new House members. In the case of contested House races, Team Trump might discourage the certification of Democratic winners in Republican-controlled states and then fight it all out in the courts as judges seek to adjudicate the results.

The real election coup could happen when Democratic and Republican House-election winners present themselves in Washington as members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s the House itself, not the states, that ultimately decides on the qualifications and credentials of its members. If the House and the trifecta hangs in the balance in January 2027, does anyone think Mike Johnson will pull a Mike Pence and resist demands by Trump that Republicans in contested races be seated while Democrats are sent home? No, I don’t either.

Democrats better work like hell to win a House margin in 2026 that cannot plausibly be overturned.

 

After another week of Trump power grabs and authoritarian conduct, it occurred to me that the atmosphere is going to be very different if Democrats reclaim the White House in 2028, and wrote about that at New York:

As you may recall from the distant days of 2020, the all but announced theme of the Joe Biden presidency at its start was a return to normalcy after the chaos and extremism of Donald Trump’s first term, which was punctuated by the attempted insurrection of January 6. While the new Democratic administration and its congressional allies proceeded to put a lot of ambitious plans into place, there was definitely an atmosphere of restoration, of a status quo ante being brought back.

That will not be the case if Democrats regain the White House in 2028.

Trump 2.0 has broken something fundamental in the two-party system, not just because of the policy extremism or the president’s overtly vicious and vindictive personality. Republicans have taken a very narrow election victory and, instead of trying to build an enduring majority coalition, have launched a winner-takes-everything regime that resembles in spirit the Sack of Rome rather than any sort of continuity in government. To an ever-increasing extent, there’s no “normalcy” that can be restored and no appetite for it among Democrats even if it were practicable. We see this change in attitude not just in the repeated pugilistic rhetoric of Democratic elected officials and party activists but in a very self-conscious thirst for destructive retaliation.

In the most recent example, the Democrats have spent years championing redistricting reform as a way to mitigate the arms race between partisan gerrymanders; all that has flown right out the window in the wake of Trump’s Texas power grab, a mandated mid-decade redistricting without a shred of justification other than being a way to rig next year’s midterms. Democrats are instantly plotting retaliation in California and other states they control, even as they imagine the horrors of a continued GOP Congress beyond 2026 despite the unpopularity of Trump’s agenda.

The disappearance of the status quo ante, never to return again, is most evident in a federal government being rapidly and radically reshaped by a combination of Republican executive and legislative coups. As Pete Buttigieg has rightly pointed out, the agencies being abolished, emptied, and turned upside down aren’t going to just spring back to life in a change of administration. And more fundamentally, the civil-service system Team Trump is so aggressively wrecking can’t be built back overnight either, as Protect Democracy recently explained in the wake of the president’s executive order creating a new category of political appointees:

“Schedule G lays bare what we’ve long known: the Trump administration’s strategy is not just to fire civil servants; it’s to fire them and then fill their roles with loyalists. The White House is now working on the other side of this Fire and Fill equation: preparing to fill roles long held by career civil servants with loyalists.

“As Schedule G’s potential to expand hiring shows, the administration’s gutting of the workforce is not about “right-sizing” the federal bureaucracy — it’s about reshaping the civil service into a tool for unchecked control and removing safeguards that protect the public from the politicization of day-to-day government services.”

A future Democratic administration will have to do something with this planned influx of partisan warriors rationalized by the “deep state” conspiracy theory that treats all existing federal employees as radical leftists. And there may need to be a particularly fraught reckoning with the vast new immigration police state Trump and Stephen Miller are frantically putting together. In seeking to reverse such initiatives, moreover, the odds are very high that the next Democratic presidency will avail itself of the new executive powers Trump-friendly federal courts have authorized. Why exercise restraint, particularly knowing another MAGA administration could be right around the bend?

That leads to the final and, in some respects, most important reason Democrats can’t just hope for a return to normalcy: Even if they eschew payback and seek to rebuild a political system open to bipartisanship and evidence-based policymaking, who will be their partners across the aisle? In 2021, it was possible to hope the pre-Trump Republican Party might reemerge — conservative, to be sure, but not full of venomous conviction that Democrats are traitors who are consciously trying to destroy the country, defy the Almighty, and change human nature itself. That GOP committed suicide when it devoted itself to Trump’s vengeful comeback and began to zestfully share the MAGA movement’s cruelty and authoritarian excesses.

Are we then entering a period when America must choose between two parties equally determined to seek total victory for their point of view, perhaps lurching from one to the other metronomically as lofty-minded pundits wonder why we can’t all just get along? That’s possible. But by the time Trump leaves office for the last time in January 2029, the destruction of the political system that existed when he came down that escalator in 2015 could well be complete and all nostalgia over it forgotten. Add in the anger Democrats almost universally feel over the endless trampling of norms by people whose role models are Orbán, Bolsonaro, and Putin, and you can appreciate that sooner or later payback is on the way.