The False Hope of the 2026 Midterms
Post-Electoral Redemption will be excruciatingly difficult.
I’ve been a little sour on the pundit optimism around the 2026 midterms. Maybe it’s because we’ve been through this rodeo before, the Democratic House being pushed to impeach the president the last time they won a midterm in the Trump era, watching that constitutional mechanism rendered useless by the partisanship of a Republican Senate that had, by then, calibrated itself around loyalty over judgment. Now, as we approach another midterm, there is something approaching consensus among the chattering class and poll-obsessed professionals that 2027 will bring a Democratic House and, maybe, a Democratic Senate.
And yet something instinctual keeps me asking: and then what?
The Democratic Party is not a sufficient opposition party at this moment. It refuses to give voice to people horrified by American foreign policy’s underwriting of mass human rights abuses abroad. It is shying away from saying whether it will refuse American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) money. It is constantly punching leftward and downward at its most energized voices, the minorities, women, and economically precarious voters watching wealth transfer upward to the top one percent in real time, feeling themselves existentially imperiled in ways the party’s donor class is structurally incapable of naming.
If anything, the Democratic Party is in a state of corporate capture, and it isn’t very resistant to this ending. John Ganz has spent the past several years, most fully in When the Clock Broke, making the argument that what we are watching today was legible thirty years ago during Pat Buchanan’s 1992 campaign, the Perot insurgency, and in the paleocon-populist energies the political class chose to treat as marginal noise rather than signal. The tragedy of our moment is not that the shape of Trumpism was unknowable but that it was unwanted, by a professional-managerial class whose continued employment depends on the status quo being reparable. So we have a Democratic Party that might take the House and, maybe, a narrow Senate majority. That is a very big maybe.
And even if it materializes, there are reactionary centrist forces inside the party working extremely hard to “ratfuck” progressive candidates and return the party to a status quo that built this authoritarian moment in the first place, rather than imagine something capable of freeing American democracy from the moneyed and absolutist interests that plague it today and have plagued it before.
This is the next step in analyzing what a Democratic win actually does, and it is not articulated often enough in mainstream political commentary. There are exceptions. Jamelle Bouie’s columns at the New York Times are perhaps the most consistent example of a writer willing to sit inside the skepticism and say it plainly. Even in a recent piece granting that Trump’s second term looks like “a presidency in terminal decline,” Bouie adds the line that should haunt anyone reading the midterm polling with too much comfort: we have nearly three more years to live through. It’s an open question whether we survive it intact.
Survive what intact? Not just the Trump presidency, but also the democratic fabric, or the shared sense that citizenship means something and that the possibility of accountability is more than a word.
So Then Why Sell the Hopium?
Hope sells better than dread. Writers of the American condition, especially those tied to a serial schedule of content production, are incentivized to peddle hope and to reach for an idea of America as the fundamental good guy, partly because the market rewards it, partly because they may actually believe it. I am writing from a place of less generous expectation, after nearly a decade of being let down.
It is hard to take seriously any reading of this moment that does not reckon with a new era of democratic backsliding that is not wholly unfamiliar to the Black American experience, one that American political culture keeps asking us to treat as exceptional rather than diagnostic. Bouie himself has spent years drawing the Reconstruction analogy: the argument that the most ambitious American experiment in multiracial democracy ended not because it was formally abolished but because the Northern political class lost interest. The reactionary project was given the time and space to rebuild its machinery. The lesson is not that history repeats itself. It is that the forces of manufactured racialized hierarchy are a natural feature of political life under the specific conditions this country keeps reproducing, and they do not stop simply because an election punishes them once.
The Democrats may win in November.
Whether they are willing to mount the hard-nosed reforms and accountability measures that would signal a real intolerance of the fascistic forces moving through the American zeitgeist remains a large and open question. The inference, after ten years of watching the answer, leans clearly toward no.
When you talk about “the Democrats “. I’m not sure who you mean. Yes, if Chuck Schumer doesn’t recognize that Israel has become a terrorist state, I expect they will find a new leader. The leadership of the Democratic Party is always too concerned about pleasing the donors. The Democratic voters are supporting more progressive, more aggressive candidates. There are more than 1000 grassroots organizations supporting more progressive candidates with money, time and effort. Some, but not enough of those organizations are organizing Black voters. The more people they get to vote, the more attention will be paid later.
I'm not sure the Dems will take either chamber of Congress in November, because they absolutely refuse to even discuss Republican election malfeasance, let alone build in safeguards to protect election infrastructure. Their approach is to get out the vote, so that the election is "too big to rig". But this attitude totally discounts technological interference with regards to voting machines.