This is the last day of PN’s midterms special. If you value our independent coverage of American politics and aren’t already a paid subscriber, please support our work by becoming one.
“How do you now say hey, let’s not look behind us,” Joe Scarborough asked Hakeem Jeffries on MS NOW on Wednesday morning, “but we’re going to focus on bringing costs down for working Americans?”
A leading question, sure — but apparently, leading in just the direction the next speaker of the House wanted.
“The American people don’t want us to get even, they want us to get things done on their behalf,” Jeffries responded. “We ran on affordability, we won on affordability, and now it’s our job to govern on affordability.”
Jeffries’s comment generated a lot of lefty frustration, and perhaps he was just saying what he knows the elite media want to hear. But even though affordability was in fact the top issue in the campaign, if the message Democrats take from the most sweeping midterm victory in half a century is as limited as “voters really want life to be more affordable,” they will be missing the most important lessons of this election.
The truth is that there is very little Democrats can do in the next two years to “get things done” and bring down the price of groceries, healthcare, housing, or much else. They can pass some bills that Trump will veto, and from a political perspective that’s fine. But this is what they most need to learn from the 2026 midterms: They have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Republicans threw everything at them
At the outset of the campaign, Republicans might have had reason to believe they could overcome, or at least mitigate, the natural tendency of voters to lean toward the opposition party in midterm elections. The GOP had what seemed to be extremely powerful weapons at its disposal, and it would use every one of them. But in every case, those weapons proved to be less potent than both Republicans and Democrats imagined — precisely because Democrats met them with strength.
The first and most obvious was money — gobs and gobs of money. While Democrats were better able to amass small-dollar donations, Republicans had industry and billionaires on their side, and those megadonors came through like never before. This was the most expensive election in history, even more than the presidential campaign two years ago. It wasn’t that long ago that a House campaign that spent a couple million dollars was considered well-funded; this year there was a race in North Carolina where over $50 million was spent on advertising.
Yet everywhere you look on the map, conservative money didn’t get the job done. For example, two years ago, the crypto industry spent $41 million to defeat Sen. Sherrod Brown (“thank you to all of y’all for getting rid of Sherrod Brown,” Sen. Tim Scott told a crypto convention last year), and this year they upped their spending to $64 million to keep Brown from returning to the Senate. They lost, just as they did in many other races. They will not be able to inspire the same fear they used to in members of Congress.
In most of the key races, Democrats got outspent. Yet they won almost all of them, either because they raised enough to stay competitive, or because the money just didn’t change people’s minds.
The biggest spender of all, of course, was Elon Musk. He dropped almost half a billion dollars in this election — a pittance to him, perhaps, but more than any individual has ever spent in a single election. A stunning $224 million of it was in Texas, mostly to shore up the campaign of a single candidate, the hapless Ken Paxton. Not only did Paxton lose, it wasn’t even close.
Then there was the gerrymandering Trump demanded last year, which Republicans thought would give them at least a fighting chance to hold the House. The states with the most egregious redrawing of lines were Florida and Texas; in the former, Republicans failed to flip any of the seats they had drawn to be tougher for Democrats, while in Texas, they wound up losing more seats than they gained.
Another key weapon the GOP deployed was the Supreme Court, which gutted the Voting Rights Act in time for them to attempt to write Black southerners out of representation completely. The result was a surge in Black turnout as voters fought back against the effort to disenfranchise them, which helped Democrats make gains in multiple states, most notably Mississippi, where Scott Colom could become the first Black senator since Reconstruction.
Most of all, Republicans deployed their favorite weapon: hate. They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising targeting trans people, especially trans kids, and it didn’t work. Yes, some Democrats tried to hedge their positions, but some of the most successful ones, like Abdul El-Sayed, met the attacks not by cowering but with strength.
Perhaps most notable was Sam Forstag, a Montana House candidate who responded to his far-right opponent’s repugnant attacks by saying that “everybody in Montana deserves to live the life of dignity that is protected in our state constitution.” In a district Trump won by 11 points two years ago, Forstag won.
Speaking of El-Sayed, he was the target of a campaign of anti-Muslim bigotry so vile and explicit it would have been almost unimaginable just a few years ago, from his opponent, the conservative media, and the president and his cabinet. We saw how that turned out.
Finally, the administration tried to use federal power to meddle in the election, attempting to deploy the Postal Service to stop delivering mail ballots, intimidate state election officials to bar people it erroneously identified as non-citizens from voting, and even void the Alaska Senate election. It all failed — because Democrats and state officials fought back.
In all of these cases, the weapons the GOP and the Trump administration deployed were indeed powerful, and most had worked in the past. It was because Democrats were resolute in opposition that those weapons were defused.
For the next two years, Democrats will have to make good on the promise of this election. They will not be able to easily bring down the price of groceries, gas, housing, or healthcare, at least not directly. The most effective ways to do any of those things will run right into President Trump’s veto.
But there is a great deal they can do — investigating his corruption (which was one of the most important issues in this election), stymying his nominees, exposing his failures, using the budget process to make at least some progress on policy, and perhaps even impeaching him. That might or might not be the best choice at any particular moment, but in pursuing all those goals, they should start from the presumption that they deserve to be in power and have the public behind them.
The only thing they have to fear
Fear has been Democrats’ constant companion for decades, a problem that can be traced most directly to the 1994 midterms.
That blowout — which was comparable to what happened in Tuesday’s election — convinced an entire generation or two of Democrats that the American people simply despise them, and the only way to win is through caution. Don’t be too emphatic about liberal policy goals, don’t offend, don’t make too much noise, approach voters with a tone of supplication and timidity. That has been true even when they advocate for the most popular ideas, as though they feel they need to apologize for favoring a higher minimum wage or expanded health coverage.
Every now and again it might work. But over time, that defensiveness created a terrible perception problem for Democrats. As much as Republicans try to characterize them as radical, public opinion data makes clear that the problem the Democratic Party has isn’t that voters think it’s too extreme on policy or too “woke” on social issues. It’s that voters think Democrats are weak. Because too often, they are.
Republicans, on the other hand, brim with confidence whether they’re on the right side of public opinion or not. That sends a message about who they are that voters respond to, even when they’re in the wrong.
So let this election be a lesson: Democrats don’t have to fear tech oligarchs, crypto goons, election meddling, or racist appeals. They have to take all those threats seriously, but rather than cowering in fear, they should fight back with determination and righteousness. That’s how they won this year, and how they can keep winning.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Let's keep walking the talk of winning, as Paul Waldman suggests. Going on offense is strong, not weak. But do so in a way that shows Democrats are listening to regular people and are one of them, not looking down from a superior perch. The overly intellectualized sniff of elitism is being replaced by the scent of fresh air breathed by the successful, younger, newly elected, Finally.
Having Jeffries sounding weak out of the box doesn’t help their reputation for being weak. Oversight isn’t the same as retribution. The Dems need to lift up some rocks and set the Trumpian bugs running. The corruption is absolutely epic, and was one of the main issues mentioned by voters during exit polls. The Dem 2028 campaign can’t just be “we investigated the guy who’s leaving anyway”: there need to be affirmative legislative efforts to help people live as well. But they’re indeed going to have to walk and chew gum at the same time. If Jeffries isn’t up to that, he needs to be replaced.
I don’t think 100% vetoes from Trump are necessarily to be expected: his damaged psyche can be played to useful advantage. (Ask Putin and Netanyahu.). The Dems will already have 60% of the House, too, only 7% short of veto override. Republicans who want something positive to run on in 2028 might be willing to pass well-crafted bipartisan bills. There’s hope here.