Once in a while, elections send an unmistakable message. The election of 1932 expressed the public’s demand for government action on mass unemployment, bank failures and economic insecurity. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory spoke to frustration with inflation and the spectacle of American impotence. Tuesday’s midterm belongs in the company of seismic years like those. The scale of the swing suggests that Americans were passing judgment on more than just the current occupant of the White House. We witnessed a historic realignment.
The shift redrew the political map, making Democrats competitive again in states like Texas, Mississippi and Kansas, and elevated a generation of leaders like James Talarico, 37, Abdul El-Sayed, 42, and Jon Ossoff, 39. The country elected its first Native American female governor, its first Black female governor and its first openly gay male senator, milestones for a party whose diversity increasingly goes without saying.
So what were the voters repudiating? President Trump and the party he’s reduced to a compulsory cheering section were plainly the objects of their displeasure. The election was an intense, visceral reaction against the cruelty and callousness of his administration, attitudes it expresses through brutal ICE raids and the president’s singular obsession with building gilded monuments to himself. There is a line past which corruption ceases to be tolerated, and with its $2.2 billion haul in 22 months, the Trump family has crossed it.
But there is a message of the 2026 midterms that goes beyond disgust with an uncaring president and his team of grifters. What the voters wanted, to judge by the things they told pollsters and the candidates they elected, was a government that can do its fundamental job. The electorate is asking for a government capable of protecting them from problems and dangers they can neither escape nor confront on their own.
In 1854, Abraham Lincoln wrote that the purpose of government was to do for people what they “can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves.” I’m not sure that anyone has ever improved on his formulation. Mario Cuomo updated that idea for an era of antigovernment conservatism when he argued in 1984 that government exists “for people to do for themselves collectively what they can’t do or can’t do as well individually.”
The expression of what people can’t do individually usually comes through in political shorthand. You might define affordability, the political keyword of 2026, as the intersection of inflation and a sense of impotence. Trump’s unilateral tariffs added insult to a preexisting injury. Having promised to bring prices down, he essentially seized a power rightfully belonging to Congress and ended up making the things Americans buy every day more expensive.
A family can decide to eat out less, but it can’t do anything about health insurance premiums made unaffordable by the expiration of Obamacare tax credits. Truck drivers can’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz to lower the cost of diesel. Even if you’ve saved enough for the down payment on a house, you can’t increase the housing supply or bring mortgage rates back down. The right’s great promise to Americans during the past 45 years has been to let individuals make economic decisions for themselves. In practice, most voters feel less empowered, secure and hopeful about the future than their parents did.
An obvious way to tell the story of Tuesday’s election is to begin with Mr. Trump coming down the golden escalator in 2015. He has finally reached the subbasement. But the story extends back well before him, to Ronald Reagan telling the country in his first Inaugural Address that “government is the problem.”
In 1994, another midterm in which an opposition wave stripped a dominant party of control in both houses of Congress, the Republican leader Newt Gingrich turned Reagan’s genial mistrust of Washington into a poisoner’s handbook, employing a vocabulary of crime and perversion to depict his political opponents. Mr. Gingrich showed Republicans how to win power by sabotaging the government and then citing its failures as the reason to elect more Republicans.
It should be said that Democrats have made their own contributions to the middle class’s feelings of abandonment. The 2008 crash taught Americans an unfortunate lesson. When private financial institutions were in danger, the government showed that it could improvise a rescue on a scale commensurate with the emergency. If you were in danger of losing your house, however, the response was slower, stingier and often nothing at all. The disparity between the bailout of the financial system and the lack of help available to homeowners made it reasonable for Americans to wonder whether those in power even cared about them.
The pandemic reinforced that doubt. The government helped produce vaccines and sent money to households and small businesses. It also left nurses scrounging for protective equipment and parents trying to take care of children with no certain plan for returning to school. A country that needed reliable information was instructed by a president who repeated whatever quack medical advice he might have heard from his latest golf partners. Low trust made it harder for the responsible authorities to mount a coherent pandemic response, and confusion gave people reason to trust them less. The lesson many Americans learned is that in a national emergency, they would have to fend for themselves.
The Trump administration’s answer to the failures and inadequacies of government was Elon Musk, a man whose companies depend on government contracts and government decisions. Mr. Musk took a chain saw to the parts of government that served other people. At the outset of the new administration, DOGE attacked public employees, expertise and institutional knowledge with a vandal’s glee. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump was bringing bribery into the crypto age, sparing favor-seekers the inconvenience of using cash. To Republicans, the government’s obligations to ordinary Americans were unaffordable. The opportunities it created for the well-connected were limitless.
If the Iraq war showed how much damage the United States could do when it fundamentally misjudged a threat, the Iran war showed how unwilling the party in power was to learn the lesson. While Americans paid at the gas pump, Mr. Trump oscillated almost daily between expressions of bloodthirst and promises of imminent peace, without ever making a plausible case that his war of choice served the national interest.
Mr. Trump’s invasion of Venezuela similarly established his enthusiasm for expropriation without addressing any of the concerns on voters’ minds. In Gaza, American weapons helped sustain a war many Americans simply wanted their government to stop. Republicans who insisted there was little they could do about health insurance costs did nothing to challenge new military commitments costing billions of dollars.
Now imagine Americans bringing their high level of institutional distrust to the societal transformations driven by artificial intelligence. A data center — another keyword of 2026 — is an odd enemy for a grass-roots movement. The objections began with water and electricity bills, but the breadth and intensity of the opposition suggest larger fears. People are being asked to supply the resources for a technology that may eliminate their jobs, while having no say in how it develops. Many of the people building these systems acknowledge the dangers. They nevertheless expect to make the decisions themselves.
Data centers are factories without workers, sprawling symbols of a post-human future. Seeing one raises the inevitable question of whether whatever job you do will even exist in five years. As such, data centers are natural symbols of the uncertainty and sense of powerlessness that people feel about what may be the greatest of all technological transformations. According to the president, anyone opposed to a data center simply likes being poor and wants to stay that way.
The Democrats offered a more hopeful vision of what Americans could accomplish together, rooted in mutual obligation. Mr. Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas reframed their party’s appeal in what we used to call the red states. A seminarian and a Methodist pastor, they spoke about what people owe their neighbors and their communities. In his victory speech, Mr. Talarico connected the commandment to love one’s neighbors with the need for good schools, a fairer economy and health care. Mr. Hamilton invoked the good Samaritan and called for cooperation across party lines. Both spoke to aspirations that Mr. Trump’s shameless offer of a $5,000 handout could never satisfy.
Now the Democrats need to figure out how to make the government deliver again. They need to do so while also pursuing the urgent task of reining in the Trump administration’s unprecedented corruption and exposing the president’s abuse of power. In all of this work, they face enormous obstacles. They can send the president a bill restoring health insurance subsidies and make him decide whether to veto it. But Tuesday’s resounding victories did not give them anything like the two-thirds majorities needed to override him.
A Democratic president elected in 2028 will face a familiar dilemma: how to address the issues on people’s minds while hampered by Republican deficits, foreign entanglements and a G.O.P. more interested in culture war politics than in solving the country’s actual problems. For two years, Congress has allowed Mr. Trump and a handful of billionaires to decide what the government is for. Voters have supplied their answer. Democrats now have to show that a government devoted to the public’s needs can still meet them.
Jacob Weisberg is the author of “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post America Called. It Wants Its Government Back. appeared first on New York Times.
