One month before the Democratic Party’s midterm triumph, the Pew Research Center asked Americans their views of the two parties. Sixty-one percent viewed the Republicans unfavorably, and 58 percent had the same negative view of Democrats. This dissatisfaction with the two main political parties has been growing in recent decades, and the number of independents has been climbing — reaching 45 percent of U.S. adults in 2025, according to Gallup. So how, amid this growing alienation, did the Democrats pull off a landslide?
The short answer is by becoming an anti-party party. Across the Western world, voters have become increasingly unhappy with mainstream political parties, which have lost supporters, members and vote shares. In Britain’s 1951 election, the Tories and the Labour Party got 97 percent of the vote; in 2024, their combined share was 57 percent. This reflects part of a broader dissatisfaction with established institutions, from government to the church to big business.
The Democratic Party fought this midterm with a motley crew of mavericks. Many openly criticized the Democratic Party itself. Axios did an analysis of campaign ads from Aug. 24 to Sept. 22 in recent election years and found that this year 47 Democratic-aligned ads criticized their own party or both parties, up from just 14 during that span in 2018. Candidates had a variety of political views, from pro-life and pro-oil and gas on the one hand to Medicare-for-all and anti-ICE on the other. It turns out that loosening ideological conformity allowed Democrats to be more authentic and more responsive to their local constituencies.
The great debate in the Democratic Party in recent years has been whether it should move to the left or the center. It should do both. More than a dozen of the winning House candidates were endorsed by the moderate Blue Dog PAC and more than 20 by the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC. Adam Hamilton, a megachurch pastor, was elected to the Senate in Kansas, a state that last elected a Democrat to that body in 1932. Meanwhile, Abdul El-Sayed, an Arab Muslim Rhodes scholar and a passionate advocate of Medicare-for-all, was elected to the Senate from Michigan.
An anti-party party does not need to be incoherent. It should instead be an organization that is stronger at the bottom and looser at the top. Power should flow from the grass roots, not from the bigwigs in Washington issuing diktats.
Of course there must be some core beliefs, but they should be a flexible set of principles, not rigid dogma. The Democratic identity has always been about looking out for the little guy. When speaking the language of economic populism, enforcing competition and providing access to the marginalized, Democrats sound true to that tradition. When they speak the language of cultural leftism — on asylum, trans women in sports or diversity, equity and inclusion — that dynamic is reversed. They are speaking as the elites — often down to the masses, who must be instructed in how to be virtuous.
These days, many seem to think that Democrats or Republicans from different parts of the country must not deviate from their party’s national agenda. This model of European-style ideological purity does not suit the United States, a vast continental nation that is more than 10 times the size of most European ones, with huge regional disparities and mixed cultural heritages.
As the scholars Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld note in their book “The Hollow Parties,” for much of American history, political parties were rooted in their respective regions, providing jobs, services and a sense of identity. They weren’t ideologically conformist. Think of the Democratic Party in its Rooseveltian heyday, with its Southern segregationists and Northern liberals. The authors champion the “accommodationist” tradition in American party politics: comfortable with bargaining and compromise and skeptical of ideological purity. It was on the eve of that era that Will Rogers famously quipped, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
The midterm elections were in large part a referendum on President Donald Trump and his policies, from the Iran war and tariffs to immigration roundups and eye-popping corruption. It was a Democratic wave, not a liberal one. Many of the candidates who won big were moderates. Many of the ballot initiatives that prevailed were conservative. Polling suggests that on many key issues — illegal immigration, crime, major social issues — Americans are still center-right. But it might well have been an election to reward the Democrats’ antiestablishment style: a big tent and a practical organization that reflects the diversity of this country.
The anti-party party might be a way of restoring the political party itself and of repairing politics. In an age when millions of citizens distrust distant institutions, a party rooted in the people and places they actually know could again begin to mean something.
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