Two years ago, Donald Trump’s return to office felt like a diagnosis, a confirmation of some terrible disease. Now, after the spectacular reversal in the midterms, the body politic looks rather different. My sense is that America may be in remission, even if we are a long way from a cure. Trump, after all, is still president. Here are five signals from the Democrats’ extraordinary string of victories that, taken together, could push the country toward recovery.
Reality Has Its Revenge
In 2012 a young artist named Cat Frazier posted an intentionally janky GIF she had designed. “lol nothing matters,” it read, in spinning blue-green letters. It became her first viral GIF, capturing the irony-soaked ennui of the post-financial-crisis 2010s. When Trump first ran for president, the GIF became a go-to response to the madness of his candidacy. His mendacity, his crudeness, his total disregard for any of the norms of presidential behavior — it seemed he could get away with anything. To those in his thrall, it was all a big lol, and nothing mattered.
Fast-forward to 2026, and suddenly a lot of things matter, and no one is laughing. For much of his political career, Trump has relied on an almost supernatural ability to defy the hard facts of material reality: His lies about trivial things, like the size of the crowd at his first inauguration, or quite serious things, like Mexico paying for the border wall, never seemed to catch up with him — no matter how much they were fact-checked. Now, reality has reasserted itself.
Trump’s insistence that other countries would pay for his ruinous tariffs was disproved by the sharply rising prices of imported goods and the falling prices of some key American exports that faced retaliatory tariffs. His administration’s insistence that DOGE could cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget by eliminating countless programs ran straight into the reality of Americans’ reliance on those programs — and actually increased rather than decreased the federal budget and deficit.
The fantasy of a quick, spectacular military strike to topple the government of Iran gave way to a world of pain for American consumers. No spin can change the fact that filling your gas tank costs, on average, about 40 percent more today than it did when the war began. Democratic victories in deep-red heartland states like Kansas and Iowa make a lot more sense when you know that the prices of diesel and fertilizer, so crucial to farmers, have gone up by about 70 percent and 20 percent respectively in the past year — and that tariffs have sapped export demand and increased the costs of farm machinery.
Americans know their own wallets. They see the high mortgage rates and the frozen housing market. They know that, Trump’s dismissal notwithstanding, the affordability crisis is no hoax. They can see and feel how a very small number of people at the summit of the economy have grown unfathomably rich as workers’ share of the pie has shrunk ever smaller. No amount of anti-woke point scoring can distract from the stark arithmetic of daily life. The Trumpian reality distortion field is long gone.
Neither Demography nor Geography Is Destiny
Democrats long assumed that as the country grew less white, their base would grow. The 2024 election was painful proof of that assumption’s flimsiness: Latino and Asian voters swung hard toward Trump and the Republican Party, cementing his narrow victory. Then Republicans made the mistake of assuming these voters were now a permanent part of their coalition. The 2026 midterms demonstrated the folly of that assumption, too, as those voters, like many other Americans, boomeranged left.
This was hardly a surprise. Trump’s cruel and indiscriminate immigration crackdowns squandered any opportunity to solidify his party’s gains among these groups. What’s more, these voters were as much if not more affected by the economic carnage wreaked by Trump’s tariffs and the heedless war in Iran. A snapback of support was more or less assured.
Somewhat less examined is the role of internal migration in reshaping the political map. Republican leaders in Texas and Florida love to boast that their low taxes and plentiful housing draw millions of blue state transplants frustrated by the high cost of living in places like California and New York. But those new arrivals don’t suddenly become conservative Republicans.
Consider Texas. It added 2.47 million residents from 2020 to 2025, with Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston accounting for some two-thirds of the increase. The state’s four biggest metropolitan areas absorbed about 85 percent of that growth. Many of these new arrivals were people who came from blue states and brought with them expectations about tax-supported government services, even if they were frustrated by high taxes in the places they left. They doubtless played a vital role in the victories of Democrats across the state.
Indeed, the influx across the Sun Belt has helped turn deep red states into purple ones — from Southern states like Georgia and the Carolinas to Western states like Arizona and Nevada. Similar internal migration trends are playing out in the Mountain West, too, as blue staters move inland from the Pacific to Montana, Idaho and Utah. In some blue states and cities, meanwhile, voters have grown frustrated with Democrats’ governance, eroding the huge margins they once enjoyed. It is notable that deep-blue Oregon’s governor won re-election by a similar margin as Gina Hinojosa, the shocking Democratic victor in the Texas governor’s race.
As people move around the country, seeking new opportunities and lower costs, they inevitably transform the states they move to — just as the states they leave behind are reshaped by their departures. All of this movement may point to a political landscape that is less polarized along ethnic, racial and geographic lines. For American democracy, that can only be salutary.
The Republicans Won the Culture War, but It Cost Them
Who can forget the tagline of the mega-viral advertisement Trump’s campaign dropped in the closing stretch of the 2024 campaign? “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.” True or not, it cemented the Republicans’ message that Democrats were obsessed with obscure identity politics. Kamala Harris, they argued, was more worried about making sure incarcerated transgender people received gender-affirming surgeries at taxpayer expense than about helping ordinary Americans pay their bills. As a line of attack, it worked.
The Trump administration, with the help of a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, has delivered on its promise to make life hellish for transgender people in many parts of the country, enacting draconian policies such as requiring transgender people to put their sex at birth on their passports. Republicans have all but eliminated access to gender-affirming care for young people in most red states and the administration sharply curtailed it in blue states, too, by threatening large hospitals with funding cuts and investigations.
It is not just trans people. Affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion have been banned or eliminated through coercive pressure on the major institutions of public life. Universities across the country have gutted humanities programs that carry even a whiff of anything deemed woke. Pete Hegseth has been purging the top ranks of the U.S. military of women and people of color. Billionaire tech oligarchs jettisoned their diversity programs, reveling in a new macho energy unleashed by Trump’s second term.
This rapid and breathtaking victory, however, has come at a cost. In the midterms, Republicans spent millions of dollars on scaremongering advertisements about boys playing in girls’ sports, to little effect. In the aftermath, no less a culture warrior than Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida declared the battle over. “Four years ago, we were in the peak woke era,” he said on Wednesday. He added, “Now the issues are different.” These culture war victories left Republicans with few boogeymen with which to whip up their base.
Scaremongering about immigrant invasions falls flat when the border is practically sealed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are hunting down people in the streets and shipping them off to prisons in El Salvador and war-torn Central African nations. Parents in Texas, a state with some of the harshest laws restricting trans care for minors, have little reason to fear that their children will receive transgender surgeries at school, no matter how much money Elon Musk and his ilk spent to convince them otherwise.
Not long ago, liberal concerns about the basic rights of trans people to dignity and racial equality were mocked as luxury beliefs. In these hard times, it seems that the Republicans’ obsessions with nonexistent cultural threats are the real luxuries.
Americans’ Appetite for Cruelty Is Diminishing
Under these conditions, it has become clear that Americans relish smashmouth politics and abject cruelty much less than Trump and his administration anticipated. Nothing illustrated this more clearly than the immediate and almost universal horror that followed when Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, aired a vile ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent Amy Acton, calling her a liar and casting doubt on Acton’s well-documented experience of sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather.
Ohio’s Republican governor harshly criticized the ad, as did many other members of his party. Trump and Vice President JD Vance, on the other hand, praised Ramaswamy for having the courage to smear a victim of child sexual abuse. Ramaswamy, ever the opportunist, doubled down on the ad, paying to broadcast it statewide, only to pull it in the final days of the campaign when it became clear that voters found it repulsive. Ramaswamy, who ran for president in 2024 and was banking on a win this year to boost his chances in a future presidential run, lost by eight percentage points. The revulsion was a tell: Even if Trump could get away with that kind of nastiness, no one else could.
But there were signs of revulsion much earlier. I saw it in Springfield, Ohio, where a community in a county Trump won by more than 20 points in 2020 rallied around its Haitian residents after Vance absurdly accused them of eating pets. I saw it in Minneapolis this January, when the Trump administration unleashed a ruthless operation to round up undocumented immigrants. When federal agents gunned down Renee Good and Alex Pretti, millions of people recoiled at the blood of their fellow citizens running in the frozen streets of an American city.
It has been heartening to see some of the crudest Republican candidates go down to defeat, even in districts they had been heavily favored to win. Brandon Herrera, a vile gun influencer who trafficked in Nazi imagery and disgusting misogyny, was running for an open House seat in Texas. The previous incumbent, a Republican, won by nearly 25 points in 2024. Herrera lost by eight — and to a woman, to boot.
I’m not naïve. A country whose people brought children and picnic baskets to watch the lynching of Black men clearly has a long and deep history of not just tolerating but celebrating brutality. Yet it has slowly become clear that under today’s economic and political conditions, displays of wanton cruelty fail to motivate anyone but the hardest core of Trump’s base. The rest of us live in the real world, fretting about gas prices, the relentless march of artificial intelligence, war in the Middle East and more.
Mamdani Leads the Way, Even Though He Wasn’t on the Ballot
When Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York last year, Republicans were thrilled. A democratic socialist, he looked like the perfect cudgel for Republicans eager to hammer home the message that Democrats were too far to the left, both economically and culturally. His strident criticism of Israel, unabashed embrace of democratic socialism and immigrant and Muslim identity made him the perfect foil for Trumpian reaction: He was a foreign and dangerous radical, an insurgent who had invaded and occupied America’s glittering metropolis.
So Republicans were aghast when Trump, who had condemned Mamdani in racist and Islamophobic terms during the mayoral campaign, suddenly seemed utterly charmed by the handsome and affable young mayor. The boogeyman became a bestie. This unlikely and one-sided bromance derailed a key part of the Republican midterm strategy, as demonization by association would take in the president, too.
What happened with Democrats was quieter but even more interesting. Mamdani became something of a model for many successful Democrats across the ideological spectrum. Many adopted his sunny affect and his snappy social-video-driven messaging. They also put the central issue of his mayoral campaign — affordability — at the heart of their campaigns. Speaking after the Democratic blowout victory, he was clearly thrilled. But he sounded a warning to his fellow lawmakers in waiting.
“It is not enough to simply win power,” Mamdani said. “We must use it. And the American people will know the difference between hollow words and hard work. For years, we’ve had the debate. Now, it’s time for us and the Democratic Party to deliver.”
One of the reasons that Mamdani is so popular is that he does the basic things New Yorkers want. But he also aims high in trying to improve their lives in new ways, from expanding preschool to giving away opera tickets, from freezing rents to holding scavenger hunts. He is always doing something to try to make life in New York better and always making sure everyone knows about it. His immediate predecessor, like Trump, was entertaining, corrupt and a bit of a clown. For all his smiles, Mamdani is deadly serious about delivering.
There is a lesson here for the incoming Democratic majority in Congress and all these new Democratic governors. The Trump circus stopped entertaining Americans once the bill for his disastrous decisions came due. Democrats will need to use their power to improve people’s lives, quickly and visibly. That won’t be easy, of course. But Trump loves winners and hates losers. Improbable as his promotion of the hard-liner Stephen Miller to the White House chief of staff makes it seem, the Trumpiest move imaginable now would be for him to step away from the smoldering wreck of the G.O.P., opening the door to legacy-burnishing deals with ascendant Democrats.
That would really be a shot in the arm.
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