Despite the Democrat’s big win and the hyperbolic claims every election cycle that this is the most important in history, not much will change over the next two years if recent history is any indication.
Whether you call it a “thumping” like President George W. Bush in 2006 or a “shellacking” like Barack Obama in 2010, there’s no way to avoid the reality that Republicans had a horrible, no good, very bad night yesterday when both houses of Congress were overwhelmed by a nationwide blue wave. As NBC News described it this morning, “Democrats flipped seven Republican-held seats in Michigan, Maine, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. Some of those states Democrats had long dreamed of turning blue, and others were barely even on their radar a year ago as possibilities…Democrats’ sweeping victory looked inconceivable when the midterm campaign season kicked off. The party prevailed despite an unfavorable map in which the major battlegrounds ran through red states that Trump won in all three of his presidential bids. Not since 2006 has the minority party flipped control of both chambers on a single night.” From the Republican perspective, the news was bad wherever you looked. Texas, the second largest state in the union and usually a Republican stalwart, sent a Democrat to both the Senate and the statehouse as governor. Deep red Kansas, and reasonably red South Carolina, Iowa, and Ohio also sent Democrats to the Senate, while Iowa also elected a Democrat governor. As of this writing, the Democrats also flipped some 38 House seats, leading to their largest majority in at least two decades. While the GOP managed to secure a few holds, it doesn’t look like they picked up a single seat or governorship. As a result, Democrats are rightly celebrating what can only be described as triumph while Republicans are busy fighting over who’s more to blame, President Donald Trump or Congress (hint, there’s plenty to go around, look for more than in the weeks to come).
Pundits, perhaps needless to say, have been busy as beavers trying to figure out what this means for the future. Now that Congress is no longer in Republican hands and Democrats and Republicans will at least in principle, be forced to work together, what does that look like in practice? What will newly empowered Democrats do once they take office on January 3? At this point, the only thing anyone can agree on is that there will be a lot of investigations and potentially an impeachment. While future Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer mentioned prices, his statement made it clear what the real intention is. “What we’re going to do is lower costs, end all this rampant corruption and end the chaos. Plain and simple,” he said even before election day. The expected future Speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries said much the same, “The cost of living is way too high, and Donald Trump — along with his Republican sycophantic members of Congress — have actually decided not to do anything about it because so many of them are so focused on enriching themselves, their family members, their friends and their donors. There is a cost to corruption,” he told reporters, also before the election while oddly not mentioning the billions in fraud being uncovered across the country, which certainly has a cost. “These are all things that are going to need to be thoroughly investigated as part of our pledge to hold the crooks accountable, beginning on day one,” he added. Representative Robert Garcia of California was even more plain, claiming he will focus on “Trump family corruption,” and according to NBC News at least, that means a wide net, “how Trump’s fortune has grown by billions of dollars since his 2024 campaign, as well as Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and Trump’s immigration crackdown.” Democrats on the Judiciary Committee claim to have a long list as well, including pardons for “wealthy criminals and MAGA loyalists” and foreign governments’ “buying influence.” To be sure, perhaps no one was blunter than Senator Ed Markey, who posted on X, “They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing.”
While we might attribute at least some of this impulse to what the opposition party normally does when they are in power, more on that in a moment, there’s also the reality that Democrats managed to achieve this victory without running on any policy whatsoever to achieve any of the things they claimed. Contrary to their insistence they’d bring down prices, there is no bill ready to go, no policy idea however half-baked ready to become a bill, or even the slightest notion of how to fulfill any of their promises. Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that traditional Democrat policies, higher taxes, more regulation, and less reliance on fossil fuels, tend to increase prices rather than reduce them, making it no surprise that next to none of these things were mentioned during the campaign. Regardless of their plans and intentions, Democrats will simply not have the votes when anything they might pass runs up against the 60 vote filibuster threshold in the Senate followed by President Trump’s veto. Even if they were to eliminate the filibuster — something I find highly unlikely when the President remains a Republican – the veto power still stands, giving them the option of trying to work together or create endless gridlock. Though I certainly cannot predict the future, the focus on investigations immediately after securing what’s being described as a historic victory rather than anything they campaigned on, certainly seems to suggest we’re looking at massive gridlock rather than any actual results. If I had to guess, the Democrats are about to learn the hard truth that governing is much harder than campaigning, that being in power makes you responsible for how that power is used, and that investigations conducted via huge, public committee hearings simply do not produce results anymore.
In some ways, this is more than a simple guess because we’ve seen this movie before as they say, many, many times over just the last forty or so years. For all the talk of history and potential political realignments, President Ronald Reagan was rebuked in 1982, Bill Clinton in 1994, and Barack Obama in 2010, only to succeed in the very next cycle. President Obama was the most recent and in many ways remains the most instructive in the current political climate. Though he secured the largest electoral margin since George H. W. Bush in 1988, winning 52.9% of the vote and 365 electoral votes, the Republicans flipped an incredible 63 seats in the House and seven in the Senate, though that wasn’t enough of a majority, a mere two years later in what was said to be stinging rebuke of the Affordable Care Act and a slow recovery from the Great Recession. The popular vote margin was 6.8%, a swing against President Obama of 14.1%, slightly less than what we just witnessed. Perhaps needless to say, Republicans were as thrilled as Democrats are now, believing they had set the stage to win the Presidency in 2012 and ultimately end the Obama era after just a single term. Much as the Democrats are planning today, they launched a slew of investigations almost immediately upon taking office, both to get their message out and hold the President accountable. There was Operation Fast and Furious, the Benghazi attack, the Solyndra loan, and more, but none of it really worked – forget even being remembered fifteen or less years later – and President Obama went on to win a relatively easy 2012 election, besting Governor Mitt Romney by almost 4 points, a margin that was only surpassed by President Biden in 2020 and even then, only by a little bit.
By 2014, after he won re-election but finally lost the Senate, President Obama publicly announced that he had a pen and a phone, and therefore no need to wait on Congress to do anything. “We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone. And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating,” he declared. “I’ve got a phone that allows me to convene Americans from every walk of life, nonprofits, businesses, the private sector, universities to try to bring more and more Americans together around what I think is a unifying theme: making sure that this is a country where, if you work hard, you can make it,” he added. In other words, he didn’t need to bother dealing with gridlock in Congress and could instead take matters into his own hands. Not surprisingly, there was little in the way of legislation passed during his final years in office, a few smaller bills and an increase in the debt ceiling, but despite this, President Obama left the White House with an approval rating higher than he had enjoyed throughout most of his second term. Further, had the GOP nominated the usual type of candidate that year, his successor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton likely would’ve won in 2016, unless you believe Jeb Bush would’ve broken what was considered the blue wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin (hint, the chances were close to zero).
In my opinion, there are two lessons to take from this, both as Republicans in defeat and as a country as a whole trying to come to terms with what just happened. First, despite the Democrat’s big win and the hyperbolic claims every election cycle that this is the most important in history, not much will change over the next two years. There will be more investigations, a lot of gridlock, some food fights, and perhaps a couple of compromises over the budget, probably an impeachment, but especially when you consider that the Republican Senate in particular has not passed a major piece of legislation in 18 months, President Trump will continue to lead by executive order, as he and his predecessors have done, and the Democrat Congress will be able to achieve almost none of their priorities. In that sense, this might best be described as the least consequential midterm since 2010, if not longer, but that’s often the case, whatever the pundits claim. Second, while there is no doubt the result was a rebuke of President Trump individually and the Republican party generally, reading any permanency into it and trying to predict the future based on it is a classic fool’s errand. Whatever the pundits may insist, power in the United States, if not everywhere, is fleeting and voters are notoriously fickle. As someone who follows politics closely and is an unabashed partisan, it seems almost impossible to believe the public would vote President Obama into office in 2008, only to figuratively clip his wings in 2010, vote him back in 2012, then clip his wings again in 2014, but that’s exactly what happened, the same as it has with President Trump, who was actually voted out in the interim.
Beyond the occupants of any office, the electoral disposition of states changes just as quickly. I already mentioned the so-called blue wall, but in 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, Ohio was a critical swing state. Starting in 2016, it was considered a reliably red state, until Tuesday when it returned to swing state status. Florida was the same. Even as it managed to remain red on an otherwise grim night, the margins were close enough that what will happen in 2028 is anyone’s guess. The only constant is change. The only thing you can do is go along for the ride, influence the people you can, and vote when the time comes.
