I’ve been thinking about how Democrats counter Trump’s manic drive to enact the SAVE America Act other than by filibustering it, and came up with an idea that I explained at New York:

Donald Trump’s incessant crusade for the immediate enactment of the SAVE America Act is very likely to fail — thanks to a Senate Democratic filibuster that a crucial number of Senate Republicans refuse to kill. The bill’s proponents keep dishonestly insisting that the legislation just requires voter ID. In fact, its explicit aim is to require extensive proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, not just identification at the polls or accompanying mail ballots. But the SAVE impasse will likely strengthen the grip of Trump-fed conspiracy theories about Democrats needing illegal votes to win, at least among Republicans and perhaps even some swing voters. Concerns about vote integrity probably aren’t going to go away, whether they’re justified or not.

The SAVE America Act’s less explicit aim is to disrupt the 2026 midterms, since implementing a whole new national voter-registration system and then purging voter rolls to comply with it would take years to accomplish in any sort of reasonable and orderly manner. And its rarely acknowledged by-product would be a federal takeover of state-election administration, something Republicans fiercely resisted when Democrats sought to enact federal voting-rights legislation when they last controlled Congress and the White House. On top of everything else, what Trump calls the “full version” of the SAVE America Act includes drastic restrictions on voting by mail, along with non-germane prohibitions on transgender sports participation and gender-affirming treatments for minors.

Democrats are fully justified in saying not just “no” but “hell no” to Trump’s demands. But their own political interests might be better served by finding a way to support or even counterpropose the simple voter ID requirements that Americans (including big majorities of Democrats) overwhelmingly support.

Americans also support voting-law reforms that Democrats typically favor. A major Pew survey in 2025 showed 80 percent favor the universal availability of two weeks of early in-person voting; 74 percent favor making Election Day a national holiday; 66 favor restoring voting rights for ex-felons; 59 percent favor automatic voter registration of all eligible voters; 58 percent favor a universal right to vote by mail; and 58 percent favor allowing people to register to vote on Election Day.

There’s also an obvious grand bargain on voting reforms that should be on the table instead of the wildly partisan SAVE America Act, as Bloomberg’s Ron Brownstein recently noted:

“The [best] option is one Congress hardly considers anymore: Pursue a durable, bipartisan agreement that marries the priorities of both parties. …

“[R]equiring photo identification to vote has preponderant public support, and, with a reasonable list of acceptable documents, is unlikely to be a deal-breaker for Democrats. In return, Democrats probably couldn’t ask Republicans to require no-excuse mail balloting in every state (given how Trump’s obsessive hostility to it has permeated the party). But with voter ID as the sweetener, there might be some Republicans willing to accept other widely popular 2021 ideas such as nationwide automatic and same-day registration, guaranteed early voting and rights restoration for the formerly incarcerated.”

Best of all, a deal that includes a modest voter ID requirement without onerous proof of citizenship could outflank Republicans on their most popular election-reform idea and rebut the presumption that Democrats want loosey-goosey voter rolls just like Trump claims.

To deal with residual fears of largely imaginary noncitizen voting (and the recent disclosure by New Jersey’s Democratic governor of a software error that allowed over 6,000 noncitizens to register to vote showed they aren’t totally imaginary), enhanced criminal penalties for anyone involved in deliberate voter fraud should be folded into every Democratic voting-rights proposal.

To be clear, a detailed “grand bargain” proposal will be difficult to develop, if only because Democrats will differ on what to demand in exchange for voter ID, and Republicans will differ on how far to retreat from the extremist position Trump has turned into MAGA gospel. But it could be very useful for the Democratic Party to move from “no” and “hell no” on election reform to “no, but” or, better yet, “yes, if.”

Either non-Trump or post-Trump Republicans will consider bargaining over this, or they will confirm long-standing suspicions that the GOP wants to use voting rules to turn a minority of the electorate into a majority by brute force. It’s a fight Democrats should be willing to wage.

 

It’s subject to a final vote by the DNC, but looks like the order of 2028 primaries could be set, as I explained at New York:

South Carolina’s Republicans have been in the political news this week as they struggle to figure out how to replace the late Senator Lindsey Graham. But now Democrats in that state are enjoying their hour in the sun. In a decision whose direction and timing was up in the air until the last minute, the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic National Committee agreed upon a calendar for early presidential primaries in 2028. Six states ultimately made it inside the charmed circle allowed to hold primaries before the gold rush of Super Tuesday (March 7), and South Carolina edged out Nevada for the kickoff event on January 22. Here’s the list: South Carolina (January 22), Nevada (February 1), New Hampshire (February 8), New Mexico (February 15), Michigan (February 22) and Virginia (February 29).

The full DNC will have to ratify this calendar next month. But the committee in charge of making recommendations chose to brush aside talk of waiting until after the midterms to resolve the issue, and while tweaks often occur, the order of states and the basic framework are likely set.

Going into the RBC meeting, it was already established that all four regions would have at least one state in the “early primary” window, with South Carolina, Nevada and New Hampshire contending for the opening event. The vote to go first was: South Carolina 26, Nevada 19, New Hampshire 4. Despite its historic claims of primary, New Hampshire was doomed by its lack of diversity, and it didn’t help that the state chose to hold an unsanctioned primary in 2024. Labor and Latino advocacy groups strongly backed Nevada, and Black advocacy groups pushed South Carolina. It’s likely that Democratic angst over what’s happening to southern Black representation in Congress and state legislatures due to the wave of gerrymanders the U.S. Supreme Court greenlit in Callais v. Louisiana made the difference in the close vote.

One familiar state name was missing from the early calendar. Iowa suffers from lack of diversity and a disfavored caucus tradition, but more importantly, it largely disqualified itself with a disastrous counting meltdown in 2020. The RBC overwhelmingly chose Michigan over Iowa to represent the midwest region in the early state window. It also added New Mexico from the west and Virginia from the east to round out the schedule.

One data point that made this decision a bit easier was the sense that “going first” might not be as decisive a factor in the primaries as it used to be. In 2020, Joe Biden performed very poorly in the first two contests (finishing fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire) before rebounding partially to place second in Nevada and then achieving his breakthrough win in South Carolina. Still, the decision to place the Palmetto State first in 2028 will be perceived as creating a nice launching pad for Black presidential candidates, particularly Kamala Harris, who had already dropped out when the state voted in 2020. More to the point, knowing the order of primaries will help 2028 candidates and proto-candidates develop a strategy to win the nomination and plan their early appearances.

The new calendar order of Democratic primaries in 2028 will also increase the differences between the two parties in who votes when. Republicans, who aren’t troubled by non-diverse states having a disproportionate impact on the nominating contest, and don’t have a problem with caucuses, could very well go with the traditional order of Iowa first, then New Hampshire, then Nevada and then South Carolina. But with respect to both parties, it’s important to remember that there’s really no such thing as a national presidential nominating “system;” the primaries are governed by state legislative and state party decisions with the national parties always struggling to control them with sticks and carrots. So don’t be shocked if the exact timing or even the order of contests changes. But it’s a good guess that South Carolina Democrats–and Iowa Republicans–will defend their first-in-the-nation status to the last ditch.

Democrats already anxious about making the four-seat net gain necessary to flip the Senate have another thing to worry about, and I went through the logic and arithmetic of it all at New York:

A net gain of four U.S. Senate seats by Democrats in November would deny Donald Trump an easy path to confirmation of his executive branch and judicial nominees during the last two years of his presidency. It would also eliminate the governing trifecta that has allowed Republicans to repeatedly deploy the budget-reconciliation process, skirting the Senate filibuster that otherwise would protect minority-party influence over legislation. So it’s a really big deal.

But a Democratic Senate flip might come with an asterisk: It’s a big, bald-headed, hoodie-wearing asterisk named John Fetterman. To call the freshman senator from Pennsylvania “erratic” is a major understatement. But he’s becoming increasingly predictable as an ally of the Trump administration, especially on hot-button questions of war and peace.

The long and controversial saga of his recovery from the 2022 stroke that nearly derailed his Senate campaign is one thing; as New York’s Ben Terris reported earlier this year, there are widely varying accounts of how he’s doing from family, friends, and staff. But his transition from being a recognizable (if quirky) Bernie-bro progressive to his present status as every Republican’s favorite Democrat has been fast and furious. He made a point of defecting from his party colleagues on a number of early, high-profile Trump Cabinet confirmation votes (supporting half of them, including, uniquely, Pam Bondi for attorney general). He voted with Trump administration initiatives more than any other Senate Democrat in 2025 (albeit just over one-fourth of the time).

But perhaps just as important, he began to regularly criticize his party using GOP-style rhetoric about alleged Democratic extremism, intolerance, and irrational hostility to Trump. His alignment with conservatives actually seemed to accelerate in 2026, when he has appeared on Fox News a remarkable 56 times. And on one very high-profile issue, the U.S. relationship with Israel, Fetterman has been bitterly estranged from much of his party, refusing to countenance any criticism of that country’s conduct or leadership and extending this intense attachment to support for the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

Unsurprisingly, Fetterman’s repositioning has polarized his constituents by party, as this recent Quinnipiac poll of Pennsylvanians indicated:

“Republicans (77 – 12 percent) approve of the way Fetterman is handling his job, while Democrats (69 – 19 percent) disapprove. Among independents, 48 percent disapprove of the way Fetterman is handling his job and 44 percent approve.”

Even more pointedly, 55 percent of Pennsylvania Republicans, and 57 percent of Pennsylvania Democrats, say they want Fetterman to leave the Democratic Party. And the GOP has sure put out a welcome mat: Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he and several other Republican colleagues have discussed a prospective party switch with the former progressive. And while Fetterman for many months consistently rejected that idea (at least publicly), just last week he said he might abandon his party if it became an “anti-Israeli party.” Since that characterization would be very much in the eye of the beholder, this would appear to open the door to a possible party switch.

The two obvious questions are whether that makes sense for Fetterman and how it might transpire if that’s what he wants. It is at this point hard to envision a scenario where this perceived turncoat could win renomination to the Senate as a Democrat in 2028. Just look at the above polls of Democrats. The numbers are not ambiguous at all. When Fetterman’s campaign committee announced it was conducting a joint fundraising initiative with the campaign of Pennsylvania’s Republican senator Dave McCormick, it barely raised an eyebrow. On the other hand, as Fetterman himself has pointed out, rank-and-file Republicans won’t be thrilled to embrace a Democrat whose heterodoxy has not extended to such hot-button issues as abortion or LGBTQ+ rights. He may also be aware of the Joe Lieberman precedent: In 2008, the Connecticut senator had just won reelection as an independent and then warmly endorsed the presidential candidacy of his close friend John McCain. But when McCain made it known he wanted to put Lieberman on the ticket with him, there was a huge conservative revolt over abortion and LBGTQ+ rights that ended the talk instantly. Pennsylvania Republicans may like Fetterman the Fox News Democrat, but they may like a true conservative better.

On the other hand, Fetterman could theoretically win another term in the Senate by doing what Lieberman did in Connecticut: running as an independent (which happened after Lieberman lost the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont) and counting on his GOP friends to take a dive by nominating a weak candidate and signaling that crossover votes were okay.

In any event, if only to keep his options open, the smart move for Fetterman could be to stay put until after the election but let it be known his party-caucus affiliation afterward is negotiable. If Democrats flip the Senate without Fetterman’s vote, he can stay right where he is. If Republicans maintain a majority without his vote, he can also stay or switch, depending on his future plans. But what would really put him in the catbird seat is a 51-47 Democratic Senate majority that he could either confirm by caucusing with his old party or overturn by caucusing with Republicans even if he maintains an independent identification. Given the huge stakes involved, an intense bidding war over his support would almost certainly ensue.

Fetterman’s potential leverage, of course, would depend on everyone else in the Senate staying where they are. And if the above scenario emerges and Fetterman’s peddling himself to both parties, Democrats could make a serious effort to outflank him by flipping Republican Lisa Murkowski. Like Fetterman, Murkowski often dismisses the idea of a party switch. But thanks to Alaska’s nonpartisan top-four primary-election system, she’s already functionally an independent. She has a terrible relationship with Trump, who (along with the state GOP) backed a Republican rival in 2022 and is sure to oppose her in 2028 if she runs. And as the senior senator from a state that is unusually dependent on friendly federal policies and spending, Murkowski would almost certainly entertain a Democratic offer if it was generous enough and if she could maintain her seniority.

In any event, don’t get too invested in the Senate results on election night. If party control is up for grabs, watch Fetterman and Murkowksi and see how high the bidding goes.

As Democrats react to the continuing atrocities associated with the mass deportation campaign, it’s important for them to understand that what they find most objectionable is a feature, not a bug, for Trump’s base, as I explained at New York.

If you get your information from mainstream media or progressive political outlets, the recent debate over ICE tactics and mass-deportation policies during the second Trump administration is one-sided. Whipped on by quotas and undermined by haste and poor training, immigration enforcement agencies are constantly overreaching and providing horrifying social-media content to their many critics, it seems. More generally, the administration’s mass-deportation efforts appear to be going far beyond its claimed focus on “the worst of the worst.” There’s plenty of evidence that law-abiding immigrants who have been here for years are being targeted and treated abominably.

It’s understandable, then, that ICE’s overseers periodically give the impression that they’re working to rein in the masked agents. And even Republican politicians urge better deportation targeting as though the current politics just need some fine-tuning.

But it all looks different from MAGA-land, as evidenced by the backlash to the recent suspension of ICE vehicle stops after two fatal shootings. This infuriated many pro-Trump social-media influencers, reported the Daily Beast:

“MAGA faithful are revolting against Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, accusing him of surrendering to Democrats on a recent ICE reform … after he ordered ICE to suspend traffic stops in the wake of two fatal shootings of men by federal agents this week.

“Fox News host Tomi Lahren fumed on X, ‘We are being betrayed in real time. If you want Trump voters to stay home in November, keep this up, Markwayne and co. …’

“MAGA influencer and self-styled citizen journalist Nick Sortor blasted the change in ICE policy as a ‘TOTAL CAPITULATION to the left’ and ‘WEAK’ in an X post.

“Laura Loomer, the Islamophobic far-right influencer and President Donald Trump’s ‘loyalty enforcer,’ simply wrote, ‘Deport Markwayne Muslim!'”

In Trump’s world, keeping his base energized is always Job One. So unsurprisingly, he un-suspended the vehicle stops and restated the MAGA catechism about the need for mass deportation at Truth Social:

“The men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done. CRIME IS WAY DOWN IN AMERICA, in many cases with numbers that haven’t been seen in decades. The Open Border Policy of Sleepy Joe Biden allowed 25,000,000 people to pour into our Country, unchecked and unvetted. Many were Criminals, and we have to get them out. In order to do this, we must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch. I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job. Keep those Crime Stat Records coming! Remember, you are loved and respected in America. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

This backlash against the apparently woke idea of reducing cruelty in ICE tactics stems from broader MAGA suspicions that opponents of mass deportation are lurking somewhere in the administration. It erupted even before Trump’s second term began in an intense battle over H-1B visas, beloved of the tech community (Elon Musk in particular). It continued in mid-2025 when there was talk of going easy on the immigrant farm workers who are so critical to U.S. agriculture. And when the general public began turning on ICE after high-profile shootings in Minneapolis, leading to bipartisan calls for reform, the hammer came down in the shape of GOP party-line legislation in Congress (signed by Trump last month) that pre-funds immigration enforcement for years with zero “guardrails” to prevent agent misconduct.

House Republicans are currently considering a tangible product of the MAGA backlash on immigration: legislation to “codify” the administration’s border and mass-deportation policies in order to make it somewhat more difficult for a future Democratic (or RINO) administration to change course. It’s called the Permanent Trump Secure Border Act, and the House Freedom Caucus is insisting it be passed before it will consider anything else (it’s dead on arrival in the Senate, of course, but this is about posturing for the base, not changing laws).

More and more, it’s looking like rational Republicans focused on swing-voter sentiments going into the midterms are being outgunned by those for whom base-voter mobilization is the exclusive and eternal formula for winning elections. That means making sure every single voter is aware that outrage over ICE agents dragging people from their cars and shooting them in the head is just a speed bump on the road to ridding America of as many immigrants as possible.

Like a lot of Democrats, I’ve been anxiously watching the topsy-turvy situation in Maine, but made it clear at New York that it’s not absolutely the be-all end-all race.

Now that Graham Platner has withdrawn his Senate candidacy, his supporters in Maine seem equally furious at their former nominee and at national Democratic operatives both left and center. The former seized on Platner as a bundle of male proletarian stereotypes without bothering to vet him thoroughly for precisely the sort of background and character issues that brought him down. The latter cleared the field of viable alternatives to the hapless Janet Mills, even as they worked behind the scenes to undermine Platner and then exulted in his humiliation. The national narrative, as my Maine-residing colleague Rebecca Traister put it, promoted a “cartoonish proxy war … pitting the oysterman Platner, working-class cosplayer and dirtbaggy avatar of the male left, against a hidebound Establishment.” So it’s understandable that the locals would just as soon be left alone to work out their own representation in the U.S. Senate.

But it’s also understandable that Democrats nationwide tend to believe that “as Maine goes, so goes the Senate,” to adapt the ancient slogan about that state’s bellwether status. Susan Collins is the only GOP incumbent up for reelection this year whose state Kamala Harris carried in 2024. In fact, Maine hasn’t gone Republican in a presidential election since 1988, when George H.W. Bush (whose family maintained a summer retreat in Kennebunkport for many decades) won the presidency. Collins got lucky with a weak opponent in 2020 and has been given considerable leeway to distance herself from Donald Trump. But still, she is a Trump enabler and represents low-hanging fruit for 2026 … or at least she did until Platner’s campaign imploded.

As Maine Democrats try to get their act together, it’s a good time to ask the question: Could Democrats possibly flip control of the Senate without taking down Collins? A fresh look at the math is in order.

With Vice-President J.D. Vance holding a tiebreaking Senate vote, Democrats need a net gain of four seats to gain control of the chamber. According to the authoritative Cook Political Report ratings of 2026 Senate races, there are five GOP-held seats other than Collins’s that are in a competitive range. North Carolina, where Republican Thom Tillis is retiring, is rated “lean Democratic,” with former governor Roy Cooper running very strong. Races to defenestrate Dan Sullivan in Alaska (with former statewide congresswoman Mary Peltola as the Democratic nominee) and topple appointed senator Jon Husted in Ohio (former three-term senator Sherrod Brown is running there) are rated toss-ups. Winning all the toss-ups against the White House party in a midterm election is not a big reach, particularly when the president is as unpopular as Trump. Then there are two more races rated as “lean Republican”: the Republican-held seats in Iowa (where Democrat Josh Turek is running even with Republican Ashley Hinson) and Texas (where Democrat James Talarico is running even with MAGA wild man Ken Paxton). And while it’s rated “likely republican,” GOP Senator Pete Ricketts’s Nebraska seat is in everyone’s peripheral vision, given the potential strength of independent (but Democrat-supported) Dan Osborn.

So even if Susan Collins wins, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas offer a path to a Democratic majority with Nebraska being a possible wild card. And of course, that assumes Democrats win their own competitive races in “lean Democratic” Georgia (where incumbent Jon Ossoff has a solid lead over Republican Mike Collins) and New Hampshire (Democrat Chris Pappas has a slim but steady lead over former senator John E. Sununu), plus the toss-up race in Michigan (an open Democratic-controlled seat where Republican Mike Rogers awaits the winner of a high-profile Democratic primary between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens).

Is it improbable that Democrats will win seven of nine competitive Senate races in November (not counting Maine)? Not necessarily. That’s how wave elections tend to work. Democrats netted six Senate seats in 2006 and eight in 2008, while Republicans netted nine in 2014. Yes, Trump carried Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, Georgia, and Michigan in 2024 — all but the last two by double digits — making them officially “red states” for the moment. But Democrats have unusually strong candidates in Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, and Georgia and an unusually weak opponent in Texas. If there’s any GOP ace in the hole, it could be a stash of national PAC money (the value of which was enhanced by a recent U.S. Supreme Court campaign-finance ruling) it can deploy strategically. But that’s hardly a guarantee of victory.

Besides, Susan Collins is by no means out of the woods; indeed, her best hope of survival might have been to run against a damaged-but-not-defeated Platner. If Maine Democrats can unite behind a viable and scandal-free substitute, there’s plenty of time to challenge this vulnerable incumbent. And if they know what’s good for them, national Democrats should try to keep a relatively low profile down east.

So a new possibility about the raging debate on the direction of the Democratic Party is emerging, and I gave it a stab at New York:

The big debate among Democrats this year is whether the renewed energy being exhibited by the progressive wing of the party reflects an ideological development or something else. Unsurprisingly, there are many voices suggesting a long-awaited “pivot to the left” by Democrats is finally underway, as Ben Davis, a Democratic Socialist who worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, wrote in The Guardian:

“After the last month, Democratic leadership should be seriously taking stock of their position. The energy is on their left. The people are on their left. Democrats want fighters, and they want a politics rooted in the collective struggles of the masses, not decided in smoke-filled rooms. We still need moderate Democrats to win those pesky median voters, for now. But the party’s leadership is deeply out of touch with its base. A leftist wave is cresting across the country.”

For many left-bent progressives, this trend, if it’s real, is long overdue. The recent history of the Democratic Party, in their minds, has been a long and terrible saga of centrist disappointment and even betrayal of the rank and file and their interests. From Carter to Clinton to Obama to another Clinton to the doddering Biden and the hapless Harris, centrists promoted a duopoly beholden to oligarchical elites and complacent with militarism and mass incarceration. The center-left gave us Donald Trump and then let him return to power, they reason, so why should centrists be trusted to turn the country around? Isn’t it the left’s turn to be in charge?

At the same time, Trump and his mouthpieces are promoting the same “Democrats pivot to the left” idea in luridly cartoonish Red Scare colors. Trump now routinely refers to progressives of any hue as “the communists.” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is singing the same song:

“It’s insane to see how far left the Democrat Party has moved to where now literally it’s a Bolshevik Revolution. I mean, the Communists have taken over. This is not your father’s Democrat Party, and it’s really the candidates that they’re nominating that are the far-left extremist lunatics.”

But there could be something else going on that has little to do with ideology, much less “socialism” or “communism.” That’s what G. Elliott Morris concludes in a deep dive on the polling data underlying the “progressive surge” in Democratic primaries:

“I think the data conclusively shows Democratic primary voters aren’t being drawn primarily to the leftism of these DSA candidate, but rather their anti-party orientation. …

“Among self-described moderates — just a fourth of the party — Schumer polls at just bare even and Jeffries lands at 61/100, effectively tied with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg.

“On a comparative basis, it’s worth emphasizing the finding that Bernie Sanders is viewed as the most favorable Democratic figure even among self-described moderate Democrats. In absolute terms, every left-wing ‘insurgent’ figure … lands above 50 with moderates: Mamdani, the highest profile Democratic Socialist in America, lands at 57 — seven points above Schumer.”

So even Democrats who self-identify as nonprogressive prefer progressive politicians to “moderates” like themselves. Why is that? Morris believes it’s clear Democrats of every hue are furious with “the Establishment,” and not just because “the Establishment” isn’t fighting Trump hard enough or successfully enough:

“In public statements Schumer, Jeffries, and Hickenlooper each put roughly two-thirds to four-fifths of their substantive rhetoric into attacking Trump or the GOP. For the left, their conflict is with the establishment. Looking at the language of these groups, it’s like candidates are living in different worlds.”

In other words, “the left” is winning support from voters who are indifferent toward or perhaps even opposed to its ideological agenda but who are now gravitating toward politicians who are demanding change. It’s the same impulse that fed the once-shocking rise of Donald Trump among Republicans. Voters are, if possible, less enchanted about the status quo than they were in 2016, but for obvious reasons Trump and his party can no longer fully harness that angry energy.

So if this analysis is correct, what should Establishment Democrats — or, for that matter, “moderates” — do about it? Yelling more loudly about “fighting Trump” has its limits; as we’ve learned over the last year and a half, promising to “fight” a party with trifecta control of the federal government can guarantee a disappointing result. But what Democratic voters seem to crave is a commitment to change that goes a lot deeper than getting rid of Trump and returning to the status-quo ante. Does that mean they need to all become “socialists”? No, not necessarily: There are “radical centrist” types of pro-change politics available too, like demanding more accountable government that gets things done. With the right tone, an “abundance” centrist enraged by bureaucratic and interest-group resistance to housing construction and infrastructure projects might strike some of the same anti-Establishment chords as a Democratic Socialist. What does seem clear is that today’s breed of Democratic voters are not longing for a return to “normalcy,” as Joe Biden famously offered in 2020. More important than moving left or moving right is just moving.

Support among Democrats for a single-payer health care system never went away. But it’s definitely front-and-center again, as I explained at New York:

With the recent upsurge of outspoken progressivism in Democratic primaries, Medicare for All has returned as a chief policy demand. M4A (as it’s often abbreviated) is the favored poll-tested moniker for a single-payer health-care system that would provide universal public insurance regardless of age or means. It has been associated strongly with Bernie Sanders, who first offered single-payer legislation in the House way back in 1993 and introduced what is now the gold-standard proposal in the Senate in 2017, right after his first presidential campaign. But more than that, support for M4A has been the policy proposal that instantly separates progressive sheep from centrist goats in the Democratic ranks.

In the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, support for M4A as opposed to incremental health reforms building on Medicaid or Obamacare was a topic all the candidates had to address. For at least one, future vice-president and 2024 presidential nominee Kamala Harris, waffling on M4A helped derail a once-promising candidacy.

While support for Medicare for All did not go away after 2020, it did take a back seat to the Biden legislative agenda that virtually all Democrats supported, which focused on non-health-care priorities, aside from efforts to shore up existing programs that had been scaled back during Trump’s first term. And after Trump’s return to the White House in 2024, Democrats were in the minority in Congress and very much on the defensive as the GOP hammered Medicaid in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and threatened to gut Obamacare this year.

But now that Democrats can envision themselves controlling Congress next year and reconquering the White House in 2028, they’re being forced to articulate policy goals more elaborate than resisting Trump and defending the status-quo ante. And as always, Medicare for All is attractive to Democrats as a relatively simple health-care policy panacea, and as a signal to left-bent activists and voters alike that the candidate embracing it is a true progressive unafraid of offending either centrist donors or private insurance companies and their investors. M4A is particularly catnip to insurgent Democratic candidates who want to show their anti-Establishment bona fides and their hostility to timid Democratic incrementalism. At a time when health-care costs are a critical component of an affordability crisis that remains the top voter concern for Americans across the political spectrum, expanding the wildly popular Medicare program to cover everyone seems less radical than ever.

Strong support for Medicare for All has become a must-have credential for candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and like-minded activists and influencers. And so, as Axios reports, it’s an old idea whose time has come round again:

Democratic socialist and progressives’ success in this year’s primaries is evidence of new enthusiasm for Medicare for All plans that many centrists have long dismissed as costly pipe dreams.

The health affordability crisis and widespread frustration with the medical system are fueling a new appetite for big-government solutions to address drug prices, insurance premiums and long-term care costs.

“This does feel like a moment where the Democratic base is looking for bigger ideas that go beyond incremental policies,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president of policy at KFF.

Non-incumbent Democratic Senate candidates like Juliana Hatton of Illinois (who won a highly competitive primary in March) and Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan (the current front-runner in that key race) have used support for M4A to differentiate themselves from ho-hum Democratic Party foes. And several House insurgents sponsored by DSA (Pennsylvania’s Chris Rabb, New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, and Colorado’s Melat Kiros) or Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution outfit (California’s Aisha Wahab, Mai Vang, and Randy Villegos) have made strong Medicare for All advocacy a key differentiator from other Democrats. It seems certain that if Democrats do flip either congressional chamber in Congress, there will instantly be a demand for proactive health-care reform legislation, and M4A is likely to have more support than ever.

The cost of Medicare for All remains its biggest problem — perhaps even a bigger problem than ever given the recent explosion in health-care costs. It’s not just the cost of expanding Medicare eligibility to non-seniors that’s a huge cost center; most proposals like Sanders’s also expand the medical services covered, and most crucially, eliminate copayments and premiums. In that respect, it’s not Medicare for All we’re talking about, but Medicare for Free for All, which is another proposition entirely.

Still, as the clearest and most coherent health-care reform idea on the table, and no more “socialistic” than the health systems already in place in most of the world (and less than many), M4A remains the progressive default position on a topic that grows more urgent every year. It’s Democratic centrists who need a reboot of their mostly reactive thinking on health-care policy going into the post-Trump era. Perhaps some hybrid of subsidized private health insurance with a robust “public option” — what Texas Senate candidate James Talarico cleverly calls “Medicare for Y’all” — will become the lower-cost alternative to Medicare for All, but not just because it’s less ambitious and closer to the status quo. That’s not a good message for Democrats right now.

I’ve been doing a little history search about wave elections, which led me to this commentary at New York on the Senate landscape for 2026:

It says a lot about the evolving conventional wisdom on the 2026 midterm elections that professional contrarian Harry Enten of CNN felt the need to explain that Democrats don’t exactly have a lock on flipping control of the U.S. Senate in November:

“Right now, Dems have a math problem in taking back the Senate. They need a net pickup of 4 seats & lead in 1 GOP held seat (NC). Rest are ties or GOP ahead. Problem is the fundamentals…. Median of key 6 states: GOP with +6 on generic ballot. 53% say Dem party too far left.”

I might quibble a bit with his specific analysis. The generic ballot is hardly a reliable guide to Senate races. It mostly just confirms what we already know: Democrats need to flip some red-state Senate seats to gain control thanks to an adverse landscape. So it means winning in places where swing voters lean Republican. It’s doable only with the right overall environment (a midterm election with an unpopular Republican in the White House) and a state-by-state advantage in candidate quality.

But it is doable, as recent history has shown. And you don’t have to go back to those times in the 20th century when widespread ticket splitting meant tons of senators could hold seats in enemy territory, thus becoming vulnerable to the occasional intense partisan wave or realignment.

Even this century, “wave” elections have made the “fundamentals” Enten cites largely irrelevant, or at least limited. In 2006, an election year when a second-term Republican president had become very unpopular (sound familiar?), Democrats executed a net gain of six Senate seats and flipped the chamber. More remarkable is that, two years later, when the Bush presidency ended and the country sank into a financial crisis, Democrats won another eight net seats. For a brief moment, Democrats held a Senate supermajority (hard even to imagine today) until Republican Scott Brown won a special election in Massachusetts in early 2010. If that seems like a million years ago to you, consider that the 2006 Ohio winner, Sherrod Brown, is back this year as the Democratic nominee seeking to flip the seat of appointed senator Jon Husted, while Scott Brown is running for the open Senate seat of Democrat Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire.

Then in 2014, Republicans returned the favor by flipping nine Senate seats and regaining the Senate control they lost in 2006.

What all these Senate-wave years have in common is that the winning party didn’t lose any seats at all. Similarly, the key to Democratic prospects in 2026 may depend as much on whether they successfully defend potentially vulnerable seats in Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire as on their ability to win tough races in Alaska, Maine, Ohio, and Texas. Failure to hold their own turf explains why Democrats actually lost ground in the Senate races of 2018 even as they gained 41 House seats and flipped the chamber. Conversely, in 2022 as Democrats lost control of the House, they managed to hang on to Senate control by successfully defending three vulnerable seats and flipping a GOP seat in Pennsylvania.

It all reinforces the fact that Senate races occupy their own political universe in which the broader dynamics — particularly, which 33 or 34 seats happen to be on the ballot in any given election — matter a lot but individual contests do as well. The landscape still favors the GOP in November, but a wave on the level of 2006 (again, an eerily similar moment when you compare the job-approval levels of Republican presidents then and now) wouldn’t be that surprising and could restore Democratic control of the upper chamber.

I’m always alert to historical analogies, and the cult of Nixon isn’t a new one for MAGA folk, but it’s telling J.D. Vance is embracing it, as I noted at New York:

One of the odder quirks of MAGA movement devotees is a decided soft spot for Richard Nixon. That’s right: the disgraced 37th president of the United States, forced to resign to avoid almost certain impeachment and removal from office, is a not-so-secret heartthrob for devotees of the 45th and 47th president.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Vivek Ramaswamy raised some eyebrows by insisting that Nixon (you know, the president who opened diplomatic relations with Red China, promoted détente with the Soviet Union, and perpetuated a forever war in Vietnam) had forged the original America First foreign policy. He was far from alone in his nostalgia for The Tricky One. Highly influential culture warrior Christopher Rufo has treated Nixon as Trump’s progenitor on a broad range of issues, from law-and-order appeals to the demonization of academia and the liberal media, with special emphasis on Nixon’s battles with the federal bureaucracy he inherited from the New Deal and Great Society initiatives:

“The question that troubled Nixon during his presidency was the basic one of politics: Who rules? He saw that the deepest conflict in the United States was not along lines of class, race, or identity but between the bureaucracy and the people.”

Rufo is one of multiple right-wing theoreticians to view the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down as a “coup” by leftist elites rather than the product of Nixon’s own arrogance, hubris, and paranoia. The parallels to the alleged persecution of poor, brave Donald Trump are as obvious as they are ludicrous to people outside the MAGA cult.

So it’s not too surprising that a politician who wants to be viewed as the living embodiment of the post-Trump MAGA movement, J.D. Vance, is going out of his way to identify with Nixon. As part of his tour promoting his latest memoir (that’s now two for the 41-year-old veep), Vance stopped off at the Nixon Presidential Library in California and offered some pithy thoughts on Nixon, Trump, and himself, as the Associated Press reported:

“Vice President JD Vance on Thursday said the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon would have been a blip in today’s news cycle, and he drew parallels between Nixon and President Donald Trump — arguing that both were targeted by ‘deep state’ forces. …

“’If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,’ Vance said.”

That’s the “coup” hypothesis in a nutshell. It suggests that today’s environment, in which the president says things every hour that would have destroyed the reputation of his predecessors, is what’s normal.

But Vance did something interesting that went beyond comparing Trump to Nixon. He compared himself to Nixon:

“’Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media,’ he said. ‘It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.’”

There are indeed some superficial similarities. Both were 39 years old and less than two years into a Senate term when they were tapped for vice presidential nominations by presidential candidates who wanted some youth on the ticket to balance their own advancing years. Both were thought to represent the most conservative wing of their conservative party. But beyond that, the Nixon-Vance identification is a reach. Nixon didn’t write any “bestselling books” until after he lost the 1960 presidential election and was reinventing himself for another bid in 1968. Vance wasn’t always “hated by the media;” indeed, he was a media darling when Hillbilly Elegy was first published. Nixon developed a reputation for foreign policy chops as vice president. So far Vance’s big foreign policy accomplishments are lecturing Europeans to be nicer to the fascists in their midst, and serving as errand boy in negotiations with Iran that may yet come a cropper.

But the more significant thing at the moment is that Vance wants to be seen as the New Nixon, embracing the mantle of a man who might have done prison time had his successor not pardoned him in an act that probably cost Gerald Ford reelection in 1976. Perhaps this is Vance’s way of assuring MAGA folk that despite his time rubbing elbows with billionaires on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and his charmed political life, he’s still a bad boy and a bad-ass at heart. The current veep has a ways to go in forming a clear persona for his presumed 2028 presidential bid. But he might well settle on depicting himself as a hillbilly who’s done good just like Dick Nixon, the classic middle-class striver who bested his snooty disparagers and obtained supreme power.

While it’s all well and good to analyze Democratic prospects for the 2026 midterms along conventional lines, it’s increasingly clear Donald Trump has unprecedented turbulence in his plans, as I explained at New York:

As the clock ticks down toward the midterm elections, Republicans are desperate for the Trump administration to focus on advancing an affordability agenda that might bring back some of the voters they’ve lost since the 2024 election. Sure, there’s the possibility of a housing bill finally being enacted, not that anyone believes it will have an immediate impact on the cost of shelter. And yes, the president’s Iran peace deal, if it sticks, will relieve upward pressure on energy prices, especially the gasoline prices politicians follow obsessively. But with all the chaos currently afflicting the GOP legislative and messaging machine, it’s likely too late for the party to put together a compelling argument that Trump is keeping the promises he made to bring back pre-pandemic prices and place a steady hand on the national tiller.

So, sooner rather than later, Republican candidates will have to give up their dream for a Trump pivot and accept whatever message the president is offering. And what might that be? Politico has an answer:

“President Donald Trump believes he handed Republicans a winning playbook for the midterms — if only they’d follow it.

“Gerrymander everywhere possible, get rid of the filibuster, fire the Senate parliamentarian and pass the SAVE America Act.”

This strategy reflects an understanding of the midterms as being strictly about which party controls the landscape, rather than what either is saying to persuadable voters. Democrats will try to rig the midterms, Trump believes (or claims to believe), by deploying many millions of illegal votes. So the way to beat them is to counter-rig the election while doing everything possible to suppress Democratic voting, which is to a significant extent “fraudulent.” It’s a straight-out power play, and Trump is furious that his troops care about stupid traditions like the filibuster or the Byrd Rule (the basis of the Senate parliamentarian’s objection to a party-line vote on the SAVE America Act), rather than crushing the opposition with an iron fist.

From Trump’s point of view, the only reason Republicans have any chance to maintain control of the U.S. House is the audacious gerrymandering campaign he initiated last summer. As he would put it, “Nobody’s seen anything like it.” Yes, he needed an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court, whose late-April Callais decision unlocked a whole new avenue for partisan gerrymanders in the South. And no, southern Republicans didn’t max out on their opportunities as Trump preferred (leaving majority-Black congressional districts in place, for now at least, in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina). But the unapologetic exercise of raw partisan power has served the GOP well, and Trump’s prescription is more of the same.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that John Thune surrenders to the constant pressure from the White House, or is overwhelmed by a Trump-inspired revolt from his own conference, and finds some way to pass the president’s “full version” of the SAVE America Act, which includes a ban on no-excuse voting by mail and some nasty transphobic provisions. The House, which in February passed an earlier version limited to proof-of-citizenship voter ID, would have to pass the full bill. If that really happened, and the legislation survived a blitz of legal challenges, its fruits would be the most chaotic run-up to a national election since the 19th century. Voter-registration systems would be turned upside down as the new and very onerous requirements were implemented. Millions upon millions of citizens might have their right to vote challenged as Republicans pursued voter-roll purges to get rid of “unqualified” election participants. The 37 states that currently have no-excuse voting by mail — including 13 of the largest 14 by population — would have to completely overhaul all of their election plans overnight. For the seven states where voting is virtually all done by mail, the switch would be catastrophic.

If the midterms are a game, tossing this toxic legislation into the mix at this late date is the equivalent of flipping the board.

If, alternatively, the SAVE America Act fails or is held up in the courts, Trump has a plan B: Run on it, and on the core MAGA proposition that the fiendish plot by Democrats to import criminals from around the world to vote illegally is a lot more urgent a problem than high living costs.

From the perspective of swing voters, particularly those who might have voted for Trump in 2024 because they were upset about inflation or thought Democrats weren’t governing very effectively under their octogenarian president, this pitch is questionable. It’s basically an effort to convince them that Trump has been right all along and that they should join the MAGA cause and come to rallies and hoot “USA! USA!” and learn to appreciate the golden age this president has given us. It’s a swing-voter message only Donald Trump could settle on, and its abiding advantage is that it will immensely please his confirmed MAGA base, promising no compromise with the hated foe and lots more of what he’s been offering since 2015.

Republican political professionals and candidates running in swing states or districts may not be jazzed about this approach, yet they have no choice but to get with the program. Nearly all of them have made a devil’s bargain to follow this man, and as he often reminds them, his coattails are responsible for the power they now hold. And if it doesn’t work in November, there’s always the kind of postelection overtime effort Trump showed himself willing to undertake in 2020 and 2021.