Will Democrats Squander Their Midterms Mandate?

Politics The difficulty of divided government will make a return to Trump-hunting and lawfare tempting. I hope the Democrats understand what the results of the midterms really mean. They didn’t just win Congress in a landslide. They landed a two-year job interview with the American people, with the presidency in 2028 as the real prize if they do well, a chance to prove in hard policy terms they should be handed the White House. Or they could squander it beating up on the lame-duck President Donald Trump. Democrats have clearly been facing restiveness from their base over failing to stand up to Trump. They are unlikely to cooperate with the administration. If a faction of Republican lawmakers turn on Trump, they may even be able to override a presidential veto and will possibly have the votes available to impeach and convict him, something they lacked in Trump’s first term. But probably not. So, how will they use the power they’ve just been handed by the American people? Americans face higher prices after being promised economic relief. They want cheap gas as their birthright. Their healthcare bills aren’t getting any cheaper. They were promised an end to American wars of choice in the Middle East only to watch Trump launch the conflict in Iran. It appears voters either did really pretend Trump was on the ballot—and voted against him—or that they in a small way began to hold Congressional Republicans’ feet to the fire for letting so many bad things happen on their watch. There is no doubt the people spoke, the center held, the system worked, and all the pre-election noise about the end of democracy was just guff. But Trump will be president for about another two years. He acts unilaterally and somewhere between boldly and erratically, so for better or worse, he can still pursue a blizzard of executive policy actions. The winning Dems won’t take office until January, and even 2027 for them will be bifurcated by the start of serious campaigning ahead of the 2028 presidential election. They don’t have much time. But to pass the test the American people have set before them—do something about the economy—it is unclear what they can accomplish. Trump-appointed Republicans still control Treasury and Commerce, and the Fed will still do its business more or less free of political interference. People seem unclear about the actual status of tariffs after so much Trumpian fidgeting, never mind what the actual impact has been. ICE and its sister organization, Customs and Border Protection, are largely untouchable in the short run, as they are already funded for the balance of Trump’s term. There are no obvious Supreme Court vacancies coming. If you can’t control interest rates and thus inflation, and if you can’t slam the brakes on Trump in Iran and thereby lower gas prices, what can you do? What was the point of electing Democrats again? If the practical side of the Democratic Party is stymied, it opens the door for the vengeful and radical left wing. Internal Democratic struggles, not legislation, will then probably dominate. Promoting narratives about Epstein, Elon Musk, the Arch and other Trumpian construction projects, and corruption will overrun getting real things done if progressives like AOC and El-Sayed rush into the gap while centrist Dems find themselves frustrated on the sidelines. It is hard not to see voter dissatisfaction with the Democrats grow even though they did so well in the midterms. The people showed up and voted, but they won’t get much of what they wanted. None of this is helped by the apparent inability of the Democratic Party to boost viable presidential candidates. Polling shows the leading Democratic candidate at present is Kamala Harris with 34 percent support; she badly lost both past primaries and the general election. AOC, who has little support outside coastie progressives, is at 11 percent. New-blood governors like Andy Beshear and Josh Shapiro did not show enough support to even make the chart. Dems appear to have no strong successor with a national following, which only reinforces the impression of a party that can organize opposition but struggles to articulate a governing alternative. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox Instead, the people will likely get more of what Democrats have specialized in throughout the Trump era: lawfare. Following that fateful night in 2016 when the world said goodbye to Hillary Clinton, the Democrats sought to first overthrow Trump in a deep state-assisted coup centered around Russiagate, then to destroy him politically via two impeachments, then during the Biden administration to bankrupt and/or jail him with New York prosecutions, civil suits, MeToo, and debanking, and more recently, by connecting Trump with supposed personal misconduct, hidden inside the Epstein Files, that is so vile even his base will walk away. Expect more of all that—food-fight impeachments and investigations over the controversy du jour—but the details don't really matter. Revenge, and dragging Trump through the mud hoping to have some of it rub off on Vance in the process, does. The problem for the Democrats, of course, is that this strategy hasn’t worked to bring down Trump. Arguably, surviving them made Trump only stronger and Democrats weaker for having failed. Even as he was found guilty of multiple felonies for falsifying business records (this remains the only criminal conviction against Trump), he wound up getting no prison time, no probation, not even a fine, and no apparent political punishment from the voters. A civil case of sexual assault resulted in millions awarded to the victim, but even this case seemingly hasn’t much hampered the president politically. Much of the country yawned seeing how one city, New York, wedded to its liberal values and home to biased juries, could stir up a lot of smoke and fail to start a fire. The Biden administration and the pro-Biden FBI had the full Epstein files for years and evidently found inside them nothing to wield against Trump. It seems likely that instead of following through on their promises to fix the country’s real problems, the Democrats will squander the opportunity and end up looking petty and overly focused on hurting Trump rather than helping Americans.