WaPo has published a truly bizarre op-ed by Ruy Teixeira under the headline “How a ‘blue wave’ ultimately could cripple the Democratic Party.” After a brief setup about what appears to be good news for the party in Tuesday’s midterms, he explains,
The bad news for the party is that this very success may cripple it just as it faces the all-important 2028 election and beyond, when unfavorable population trends will start to bite. The Democrats’ job as a national party will soon become much more difficult.
How so?
The populations of red states are growing faster than those of blue states, which will give Republicans an electoral college advantage after the 2030 Census. By the 2032 presidential election, many of the swing-state combinations that currently deliver Democrats an electoral college victory will go the other way. Now, winning Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania (while losing Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Arizona) would put Democrats ahead by one electoral vote. But in six years, it would put Republicans up by eight.
Okay . . . .
But what if—hear me out—states aren’t inherently red or blue? What if the reason some states’ populations grow while others decline has to with internal migration patterns that ultimately change the demographic makeup of the states? What if, when people move from, say, Minnesota to, say, Georgia they remain fundamentally the same?
For example, when I moved to the DC suburbs of Northern Virginia in 2002, my politics were the same as when I lived in Alabama. I made an already “red” state ever so slightly redder. Unfortunately for the Commonwealth’s GOP, lots of others were also moving to NoVa during the DotCom boom, and they were disproportionately Democrats. The population grew from 6.2 million in 1990 to 7.1 million in 2000, 8 million in 2010, and 8.6 million in 2020. A state that voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election (save the 1964 fiasco) between 1952 and 2004 swung blue in 2008 and has now voted for five straight Democrats.
Democrats don’t have an easy road ahead. But, paradoxically, the better they do in 2026, the more likely they are to ignore their party’s weaknesses with working-class and rural voters. Those weaknesses led to Trump winning the 2024 election, but they are likely to fade from the party’s memory as Democrats, buoyed by the fool’s gold of midterms success, attempt to placate an energized left.
Celebration is easy; confronting underlying problems is hard. Thus, when Republicans get shellacked on Nov. 3, expect Democrats to see the result as an enthusiastic endorsement of the party rather than a repudiation of the GOP — a far more plausible explanation.
I don’t even know what this means. Which Democrats are going to do this? The voters? The newly-elected Democratic Members of Congress? The 2028 primary electorate?
Voters have intensely negative feelings about Trump, his administration and his stewardship of the economy, sentiments that have (finally) pushed Americans to prefer Democrats’ handling of the economy. According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, this is the first time Democrats have held an advantage on the economy in 12 years. Otherwise, the Democrats would not be nearly as successful as they are likely to be.
Well . . . yes? As long as I’ve been paying attention to these things—and that’s a long time—midterms have been referenda on the President’s policies rather than an embrace of the opposition party’s agenda.
The Democratic “brand” also continues to be stubbornly negative. A New York Times–Siena poll in September surveyed five red-state Senate battlegrounds — Alaska, Ohio, Texas, Kansas and Iowa — where Democratic campaigns are doing well. In each state, despite the strength of these candidates, the party’s image continues to be very poor. Voters were more likely to say the Democratic Party is too far left than to say the Republican Party is too far right, which is remarkable after two years of the second Trump administration. Moreover, the contrast between the two parties is especially strong among working-class (non-college-educated) voters. In Ohio, 54 percent of these voters said Democrats are too extreme compared with 39 percent who said the same about Republicans.
Let me get this straight: Republican-leaning states are more likely to align ideologically with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party? That is an important insight if true.
More broadly, national polls continue to show that Democrats are just not well liked as a party. In an NBC News poll from September, voters’ view of the Democratic Party was actually worse than that of the Republican Party (and even U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). The Democrats’ rating is roughly on par with that of the MAGA movement and significantly better than only those of socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America — both of which are becoming more closely associated with Democrats.
But isn’t that mostly a function of Democrats frustrated with the inability of their party’s leadership to stop President Trump from enacting policies they despise?
None of this prevents Democrats from making big gains this November, including shifts in their favor among working-class and Hispanic voters. But the data indicate that most of these voters will be “just visiting” rather than locking in their support.
So, the voters who have shifted between Trump and his Democratic opponents in recent elections are unlikely to suddenly become committed Democrats? Again, big if true.
Democrats need to turn their good fortune into a lasting political advantage, but the party’s midterms strategy indicates this could be a challenge. Democratic candidates have adopted the “affordability” slogan, seasoned with a generous helping of economic populism. This has been a successful formula for this cycle. Post-election, it could have diminishing returns.
Because each election cycle is different? And parties and candidates usually try to appeal to the current concerns of voters?
Democratic candidates have put forward a confusing smorgasbord of measures on affordability. Besides undoing Trump’s tariff regime and reversing his health care cuts, there is a grab bag of price controls, subsidies and new regulations that may or may not be successful. Democrats have also suggested an array of ideas for new social welfare programs (from universal child care to Medicare-for-all) and expansions of old ones — expensive and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to implement in today’s fiscal climate. And there are traditional favorites such as taxing the rich and raising the minimum wage.
So individual Democrats running in different states and congressional districts with distinct political cultures aren’t all running on the same playbook? That is truly shocking.
There is nothing particularly new about this program. Indeed, it seems suspiciously similar to the laundry list of progressive economic priorities that defined the Biden administration. Those didn’t work, and proposing a do-over is unlikely to win back many working-class voters.
Presuming a blue wave—the premise of the column—won’t those policy proposals almost by definition have won back many working-class voters? Regardless, 2028 will be a presidential year, no? In which case, won’t there be two presidential nominees who will be the de facto leaders of the two parties? So, until we know who the Democratic nominee is, we have only the vaguest idea of what the predominant Democratic message will be.
Besides, with Trump as president, these ideas have no chance of becoming law. They will, however, provide material for the inevitable tsunami of aggressive messaging bills from progressives charged up by the 2026 results. That certainly won’t do anything to convince voters that Democrats are not still “too far left.”
Democrats should keep a lesson from the second Trump administration firmly in mind: If you promise to fix the economy, make life affordable and get things back to normal, you’d better do it.
Which voters, exactly, are going to hold Congressional Democrats responsible for the economy under a Republican presidency? When in the history of American politics has that ever happened?
Of course, Democrats will argue that voters understand that the party isn’t really in control, given the Republican White House, and will give them a mulligan leading into the 2028 presidential campaign.
It’s not a mulligan. The party really isn’t in control. Voters always—always!—blame presidents for a bad economy.
Then, the thinking will go, their economic ideas will get a fair hearing. But that presupposes the party can unite behind a plausible centrist economic program. The lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, when the primary process was similarly open, does not inspire confidence.
Now, 2020 was a while back and my memory isn’t what it used to be. But didn’t a Democrat win that one? I could have sworn that happened.
It also presupposes that voters won’t mind a post-2026 Congress defined by Democratic grandstanding. There’s reason to doubt this, too.
Why do we expect the Congress to be defined by Democratic grandstanding?
New findings from a Blue Rose Research survey from this month indicate that voters’ patience is wearing thin. By an overwhelming 65 percent to 23 percent margin, voters said it was more important to them that “things in America change” after the election than that their party controls Congress.
Presumably, that’s why some significant number of Republican voters are projected to switch teams this cycle? But it’s simply the case that there’s very little a Democratic majority can do to effect major change with Trump in the White House.
This desire for politics beyond simple partisanship is palpable. Voters agreed (70 percent to 18 percent) that almost all members of Congress vote the party line regardless of what benefits their district. Even more tellingly, by almost 2 to 1 (53 percent to 28 percent), voters said they hope the 2026 elections produce more leaders who are willing to break with their party to make bipartisan progress rather than have their party control Congress and pass a partisan agenda.
Could Democrats speak to this mood? They could. There is a golden opportunity in the current bipartisan permitting bill. This is an excellent piece of legislation, which has the twin virtues of plausibly improving both affordability and the Democrats’ image.
So, what if the things voters tell pollsters they want and the things that actually motivate their voting behavior diverge? What if their vote is mostly influenced by their party identity and their sense of the state of the country, particularly its economy? And what if I were to tell you that, if the economy indeed improves as a result of legislation passed by a Democratic Congress (which is highly doubtful for many reasons) the credit will redound mostly to Trump and the Republican Party because voters always give credit to the party in the White House?
Look, like Teixeira, my preference would be for Democrats to push a relatively moderate agenda over the next two years and nominate a pragmatist rather than a Democratic Socialist in 2028. Not only do I think that’s more likely to lead to electoral success, but it happens to align with my own policy preferences. But there’s no world in which a blue wave in 2026 bodes ill for the party’s 2028 chances.
