Consider, for a minute, what it would mean for the polls to be right.
Democrats could plausibly win Senate races not just in North Carolina and Georgia but also in Iowa, Ohio, Texas, Kansas and Alaska. If surveys were slightly biased against Democrats, there could be a blue pickup in South Carolina, an independent friendly to liberals in Nebraska and perhaps a close race in South Dakota, too.
Come January, Democrats could control both houses of Congress and command subpoena and investigative power in the wake of a historic run of Republican corruption and naked self-enrichment. They could control 28 of the country’s 50 governorships, including not just Iowa and Alaska but also potentially Texas and Kansas. In the swing state of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro might win re-election by 25 points. Blue districts could command 70 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, perhaps even more. And the country’s three biggest cities would be run not just by Democrats but also by left-wing mayors.
We’ve spent the past decade in what feels unmistakably like the Trump era, with even progressive strategy and Democratic policy shaped by the inescapable gravity of the president and MAGA’s claim on the American future. Not to mention Donald Trump’s singular command of American attention: Across three campaigns, he won almost eight million fewer votes than his Democratic opponents, but when he descended that gold escalator in 2015, he claimed center stage in the country’s political imagination and hasn’t left it since. Joe Biden began his term dreaming of an F.D.R. presidency, but his administration lingers in national memory more like an asterisk noting that Trump was not actually in power for 12 consecutive years.
What would it be like to leave that whole era behind? And what might follow it?
Perhaps those questions sound like a jinx. The path to a Democratic Senate still looks like a tightrope walk, dependent on some structurally unlikely victories in red states. There are reasons to worry that polls have been too optimistic, that rural voters who have refused calls from pollsters may still turn up to vote, and that a tsunami of Republican spending could hit soon — including hundreds of millions of dollars from Elon Musk alone. Perhaps the price of gas could continue to fall. And even if there is a blue wave, it would still leave us with several years of contentious lame-duck conflict in Washington. The Trump era has already produced national wreckage like a new mountain range, and the cleanup may well be a generational project.
Consider all those caveats granted. Eras can still come to a close more quickly than you might expect. As late as the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush’s approval rating was still hovering around 70 percent, and well into his second term the country’s culture seemed suffused with his particular brand of cowboy evangelicalism at least as much as MAGA has ever infiltrated the American bloodstream.
We are still living with the fallout from the war on terror and the surveillance state built in its name, not to mention Medicare Part D and the giant fiscal bill due from the Bush tax cuts. Elections have consequences. But that doesn’t mean that every vote marks a long-lasting shift in the character of the country. During the Bush era, one senior adviser notoriously described members of the administration as “history’s actors” who would be creating new political realities for years to come. But these days George W. Bush is almost a forgotten man in Republican politics, who spends his days composing eerily moving paintings about the strange time in history when he was a world-historical figure and a cultural meme.
What followed Bushism was Obamaism, but who and what will follow Trump? We’ll have to wait and see. Victory in the midterms and the lame-duck period that follows would present the Democratic Party with an opportunity to hash out what it might actually stand for. The time for the party to start laying the groundwork for the post-Trump era is now, not in 2028. I don’t mean this as a matter of political messaging, where broad alignment is easy enough to imagine. I am talking about policy: What does the party want to do beyond rebuking Trump? What would go into an H.R. 1 bill in a Democratic Congress in 2027? What would a Democratic president try to do in the 100 days after Inauguration Day in 2029?
These questions remain remarkably unanswered at the moment. For the past few years, Democrats have more or less followed James Carville’s advice from a 2025 Times guest essay that party members keep their heads down and wait for Trump and MAGA to implode. Overall, Democrats have softened some of the rhetoric that they decided alienated voters in the Biden years — on climate and gender issues in particular — and leaned into messaging about corruption and plutocracy that the Trump administration has served them on a platter. More recently, they’ve added skepticism about artificial intelligence, marking a kind of break with Obama-era tech politics — or at least confirming the breakup that tech leaders made with Democrats in the 2024 election cycle.
But this is all the easy positioning of an out-of-power party. There are few signs of long-term policy planning and prioritization of the kind you need after you’ve won. In general, the policy picture seems considerably cloudier than it did leading up to the 2008 election, when the Democratic Party seemed pointed toward withdrawal from Iraq, health care reform and climate action of some kind or another. Leading into 2020, Democrats had the vision of a Green New Deal and the broader care economy agenda, which became known as Build Back Better.
But heading into 2028? One could imagine an immediate anti-corruption crusade giving way to a broader good governance, anti-DOGE agenda: action on gerrymandering, significant expansion of I.R.S. investigative powers so that tax rates on the rich can actually be enforced, a restoration-plus response to all the science and R. & D. funding cut by Trump. Perhaps that good governance agenda would even extend to Supreme Court reforms and statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico — though it’s more likely that they would be judged as not worth the struggle. There are natural paths forward for permitting reform focused more on clean energy than the version currently being debated in Congress, for national data center policies designed to make developers pay for major upgrades to the grid and drive local electricity prices down, and for an “Abundance”-inflected approach to affordability, especially to the national housing shortage.
The would-be House speaker Hakeem Jeffries has promised fast action on restoring Obamacare subsidies, reversing Medicaid cuts and undoing Trump’s tariff war. Progressives might push for a rollback on Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding or even a ban on internal immigration enforcement against non-felons, and it’s not hard to picture a new defense budget that would cut spending by axing gold-plated weapons systems and investing instead in next-generation, low-cost alternatives. Democrats haven’t begun to talk publicly about how the way that Trump’s government has taken stakes in private companies might enable progressive-minded interventions on particular sectors, or the way that his invocation of an energy emergency creates opportunity for progressive industrial capacity — though if they wanted to, the Roosevelt Institute’s recent Project 2029 compendium of possible policy and governing innovations for progressives might be a good place to start reading. And then there are those old ideas sitting on the shelf, some more popular than others — Medicare for all, a new national minimum wage, free college — but all looking a bit less likely to be implemented in an era of high interest rates.
If this sounds like a grab-bag list, that’s because it is. Maybe it won’t matter politically for this election, or even the next one. The rot of Trumpism may be enough, particularly because the president’s second term has made Republicans look so obviously like a self-dealing and corrupt elite that Democrats no longer look remotely like the party of money. We can already see would-be presidential candidates seizing that opportunity and leaning into common-sense anti-plutocratic positioning, wherever they are on the ideological spectrum. But one hopes the positioning will translate into policy rather than just get repeated as an eternal set of vague talking points. To be sure, one lesson of Trump’s second term is the price of overreach. But when one political era comes to an end with a wave election, there is a risk of underreach, too.
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