For Democrats, the good news just keeps on coming.
Did I just write that? I’m in shock that I had legitimate cause to. That it’s true. The party ended 2024 in such profound devastation and stumbled through so much of 2025 in a daze that I’d begun to wonder if it were operating under a cosmic hex, never again to feel a flicker of hope, a tickle of joy.
But here we are. Virginia voters just passed a redistricting plan that could net the party an additional four House seats in November. It answers, tit for tat, Republican gerrymanders elsewhere. Even before that hopeful, joyful turn, political analysts were abuzz with how increasingly friendly to Democrats the midterm political environment was shaping up to be. My Times colleagues Emily Cochrane and Reid J. Epstein reported last week that the Democratic Party was expanding its midterm ambitions to red House districts that it discounted before. In an article the following day, my Times colleague Nate Cohn explained why the Democrats’ designs on a Senate majority, once wishful, were now realistic.
President Trump may not be Jesus, but he’s performing a resurrection — of the Democratic Party. It’s enough to give an agnostic like me religion.
But there’s always doubt, and mine arises from the dangers of overconfidence. With the president at peak derangement, with former compatriots such as Tucker Carlson swearing him off, with tacky monuments rising, with prices refusing to fall and with the country lurching ever closer to the edge, how could Democrats not start to think that the midterms are in the bag? They have a surfeit of reasons for optimism, which means I have grounds galore for dread. The party could face a premature elation problem.
To ward that off and make sure that they don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Democrats should keep these warnings in mind:
Voters still dislike them. A lot. By some measures, voters remain more sour on Democrats than they are on Republicans or on Trump. According to the Real Clear Politics polling average as of midday Friday, just 34.3 percent of voters had a favorable view of the Democratic Party while 57.0 had an unfavorable one. The comparable numbers for the Republican Party were 37.7 and 56.1. Meantime, despite all of Trump’s troubles, 40.3 percent of voters approved of the job he’s doing while 57.8 disapproved, according to Real Clear Politics.
“Every time people tell me, ‘Well, Trump is getting less and less popular, and his approval ratings are so low,’ I say, ‘Yeah, and national Democrats are even lower,’” Senator Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, told Politico’s Playbook earlier this month. “So when there’s a binary choice, we still don’t come out winning on those comparisons.” That means the party cannot follow the script it did in 2024, cannot assume that an anti-Trump posture and message are enough and must attend to its cultural disconnect from many voters. Its fortunes have risen without its reputation being restored — and that leaves it vulnerable.
Not all elections over the past six or so months — and not all data — point to a swelling blue wave. Yes, Democrats romped in November in the elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia. In December, voters in Miami elected a Democratic mayor for the first time in nearly 30 years, and she beat a Trump-endorsed Republican by about 19 points. And in January, voters in a Texas district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024 elected a Democrat to the State Senate; that candidate won by about 14 points.
But Democrats’ margin of victory in the Virginia redistricting vote last week was only about three percentage points. Recent polls that ask voters which party they generally support or would prefer to have control of Congress show Democrats with a lead of only about five percentage points. That’s a smaller advantage than the one they held before the congressional elections in 2018, midway through Trump’s first term in the presidency, and it’s underwhelming in the context of usual midterm pendulum swings and all the misdeeds, messes and melodramas of Trump’s current term. Democrats still have plenty of persuasion to do.
The map isn’t kind to Democrats. Gerrymandering and the country’s polarization in general mean that there aren’t that many competitive states or districts, and the Democratic path to a Senate majority allows for few if any mistakes. The party needs to flip four seats while losing none that it currently holds, two of which are in states — Georgia and Michigan — that Trump won in 2024. There are only two states obviously ripe for flipping: North Carolina and Maine. If Democrats go four-for-four in Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Maine, they still need to score two upsets. They’re looking at Ohio, Alaska, Texas and Iowa. The terrain is tough and its real promise unknowable.
There’s zero assurance of party unity. The grave stakes of Republican control of Congress during the remainder of Trump’s term have not exactly eliminated Democratic infighting and elevated common purpose above individual ambition. In the Senate race in Michigan, the bitterly fought three-way Democratic primary could result in Abdul El-Sayed — arguably the riskiest of the candidates — prevailing over two rivals who are splitting and thus dispersing moderate Democrats’ votes. The Democratic primary in the Senate race in Texas, where James Talarico beat Jasmine Crockett, turned remarkably ugly. The tension between the party’s progressive and moderate wings is thick. To succeed in November, Democrats in key places are going to have to put aside potential disappointment with a party nominee who’s not a mirror of their preferences. Can they? Will they?
The money picture is mixed. While some Democratic candidates in important races have amassed war chests much bigger than that of their Republican rivals, Republicans have had more fund-raising success than Democrats when it comes to party committees and super PACs, and Trump’s super PAC is its own fund-raising juggernaut. The Democratic yearning for control in Washington doesn’t show up on the midterm election’s balance sheets. The party is in danger on this front.
The redistricting battles aren’t done. While Democrats’ success with new maps in California and Virginia have arguably neutralized Republicans’ success in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri, Florida has yet to speak, and its Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has pledged action this week to improve the party’s midterm prospects there. While it’s unclear that he can do so, his maneuvering, along with pending court decisions, underscores the uncertainty about which party will ultimately come out ahead in the frenzy of gerrymandering.
Trump could have some very, very dirty tricks up his sleeve. Let us not forget that he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He continues to thunder about imposing new restrictions on voting by mail and taking other measures that are obviously intended to suppress the Democratic vote total. And he has shown a willingness to exert executive authority where predecessors didn’t and to explode norms that forebears obeyed. We have no clue and can’t make any assumptions about what he might do to spare himself a Congress under Democratic control. That’s the terrifying truth.
I’m increasingly bullish on Democrats’ standing, despite all of the caveats I just laid out. But to protect themselves from Trump’s potential schemes, Democrats may have to generate enthusiasm and turnout well beyond whatever burden they’d normally confront. These aren’t normal times. Do the old analyses apply?
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What I’m Reading, Saying and Listening To
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Oh how I love the loopy, wickedly observant mock movie reviews by Libby Gelman-Waxner (a pen name for the humorist Paul Rudnick), which initially appeared in Premiere magazine decades ago and later migrated to The New Yorker. And oh how I missed them for the past four and a half years, during which she took a break. But she was back last week with this look at all of those streaming series about beautiful women in beautiful homes that are thick with tension and prone to the occasional corpse. “It’s only possible to cope with a splintering marriage and ungrateful, cross-addicted children if there’s at least one cupola with a winding staircase, overlooking a pea-gravel drive with enough square footage for a fleet of BMWs,” Libby shrewdly observed. “I don’t want to see anyone suffer in a studio apartment or even a colonial. In ‘The Watcher,’ Naomi Watts, as a gifted ceramist, is renovating her estate, which may be haunted, presumably by someone Martha Stewart beheaded because the topiaries were ragged.” Long live Libby.
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I was delighted to join Jack Stripling, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, on its popular College Matters podcast. We discussed not only my recent newsletter about teaching at a university at a moment of such uncertainty and unrest but also some reasons that campuses found themselves in the Trump administration’s cross hairs. You can choose your preferred way to listen to our conversation here.
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On my gym playlists, I often have Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation” and Kathleen Edwards’s “In State” back to back. They seem to me sonic cousins. Both have clever lyrics — the title of “In State” doesn’t mean what you probably think it does. Both are popular rock, no question about it. But both also have inflections from other genres that give them a distinctiveness that much similarly radio-ready fare doesn’t have.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Ringer, Brian Phillips captured the craziness of that A.I. image of Trump as Jesus and of our attempts to process it: “Trump’s deletion of the post did little to quiet the questions it raised — very real, very urgent questions such as: Why do things have to be this way? Why am I always so tired? Does the backlash to this post reveal meaningful cracks in the conservative Christian coalition, or is it just another blip in the discourse? Is God speaking to me through my proctologist?” (Thanks to Adam Ashworth of Houston for nominating this.)
In a letter to the editor of The Times, James Nesci evaluated Trump’s ludicrous claim that the image showed him as a physician, not Jesus. “Everyone knows that when a doctor heals someone, there’s a glowing aura around the patient; that’s in the medical literature,” Nesci wrote. He added: “And that woman who appears to be praying? She must be using hand sanitizer. And the angels and eagles and soldiers and the Statue of Liberty in the background? Probably just hospital staff.” (Frank Magiera, Dudley, Mass.)
In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik mulled the motivations behind Trump’s insistence on his very own Arc de Triomphe: “It is an act of mischief as much as of monument-making. It is a very arch arch.” (Julie Fouhy, Brookline, Mass.)
In The Toronto Star, Rosie DiManno pondered piety and pooches: “Sitting at the right hand of God-Trump is Vice President JD Vance, a converted Catholic all of seven years. That’s 49 in lapdog years.” (Don Hendry, Mississauga, Ontario.)
In The Boston Globe, Yvonne Abraham marveled at Vance’s readiness to lecture the pope on theology: “This is akin to a kindergartner suggesting Einstein should be very, very careful when he talks about matters of physics.” (Jeffrey Savit, Needham, Mass.)
In The Dispatch, Kevin D. Williamson posited that Trump’s abstinence from alcohol and apparent aversion to recreational drugs are irrelevant. “Giving Trump a gram of powdered hubris would very much be a coals-to-Newcastle affair — the man is living proof that you do not need a bag of cocaine to engage in cocaine thinking,” he wrote, later adding that other members of the Trump administration needn’t be under the influence to act with all the idiocy of the intoxicated: “The Trump administration is the hangover without the bender, the delirium tremens without the fun part, the suicidally depressive post-cocaine crash without the high.” (Bob Bemis, Heber City, Utah)
In his newsletter, I Might Be Wrong, Jeff Maurer responded to commentary about overlong movies — including in my newsletter last week — by observing that the huge piles of money spent on key sequences all but guarantee those blockbusters’ bloat. “This isn’t just sunk cost fallacy — this is sunk cost fallacy plus the knowledge that if you go to your boss and say, ‘We wasted $10 million of your money,’ your boss will say, ‘I understand, I respect your honesty, now step into this rocket: I’m going to fill it with scorpions and fire it into a volcano’,” Maurer wrote. (Tina Kent, York, Pa.)
In The Times, Jacob Gallagher noted that the hoodies and other clothes made by Jake Burt, who works mostly out of a single shop in London, “have a thrifted quality, like something you’d find in the nosebleed section of your parent’s closet and think, ‘Wait, when was my dad cool?’” (Barbara Bekken, Missoula, Mont.)
Also in the Times, Gia Kourlas previewed the New York City Ballet’s “All Balanchine III” program, which includes a performance of “Symphony in C.” Its “glittering finale, with lines of dancers performing superhuman feats with nothing more than their brains and bodies, is practically a protest dance against artificial intelligence.” (Sharon Gurwitz, Manhattan)
Emma Goldberg evoked the experience of rooting for New York’s less charmed Major League Baseball team, which requires “keeping faith in the face of games designed to break it. Holding on, against all evidence, to moronically maniacal hope. There’s a reason it’s hard to say the words ‘Mets fan’ without the modifier ‘long-suffering.’” Bonus: A correction attached to the article had prose as amusing as Emma’s, noting that an earlier version “misstated which day the New York Mets suffered their 11th straight loss. It was on Sunday, not Monday. Even the Mets cannot lose on an off day.” (Jeffrey Horn, Dix Hills, N.Y., and Bill Williams, Chapel Hill, N.C.)
And Emily Anthes explained why she doesn’t sweat the question of how intelligent her canine companion is. “Watson is everything we could want in a dog: sweet, gentle, goofy, loving,” she wrote. “I don’t need him to help me with the crossword — I just want him to curl up next to me while I do it.” (Joe Doggett, West Dover, Vt.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
The post The Democrats’ Premature Elation Trap appeared first on New York Times.
