The Fool’s Gold of Midterm Success

Will the Democrats fall for it again?

The Democrats are probably on course to have a pretty good 2026 election. They are the out-party, Trump isn’t particularly popular, Democratic partisans are highly motivated, and there is a lot of general voter discontent, particularly about the economy. That means Democrats will likely take back the House, where they only need a net gain of three seats, perhaps pick up a seat or two in the Senate and make some gains in governorships and state legislatures. Sure, Republicans will try their best to stop this by redistricting and other shenanigans but they will likely fail because the terrain is too favorable to their opponents.

That’s the good news for Democrats. The bad news is that this very success will likely cripple them going forward as they stare into the abyss of the 2028 election and the ongoing realignment of US politics. As they grasp onto the fool’s gold of midterm success, their opportunities to fix their party’s weaknesses will slip away—indeed, are already slipping away. This dynamic is succinctly explained by pollster Patrick Ruffini. He notes that Democrats went through a brief period of introspection after their 2024 presidential loss forced them to confront their weaknesses and the need for change. This was predictable. And also predictably brief.

But a few months later, this newfound openness to doing things differently has faded in the face of all-out opposition to Trump 2.0. In the U.S., midterm elections are a unique mechanism that squash[es] heterodoxy and lock[s] parties into sticking with their existing positions. The parties are thrown immediately back into campaign mode a few months after the election. That means the out-party quickly needs to maximize fundraising and enthusiasm from their base, which is usually at its angriest in the first few months of the opposing Administration’s term.

By favoring the out-party, midterm elections preempt the gnarly questions raised by the party’s last election defeat. And this false optimism carries through to the next presidential cycle.

If Democrats have a good election next November, you can count on their problems with Hispanic voters or young men to be memory-holed. Fans of the party’s existing strategy will argue that the current path works just fine. Just recall what happened after 2022: following a decent midterm, Democrats told themselves that Joe Biden was actually a viable candidate for re-election, that he was the only one who had beat Trump before and that he could do it again…

Or consider 2018, a smashing success for Democrats. The takeaway there was that all the party would need to do was take that Resistance mojo and double down on it for 2020. The party was on the upswing, and Democrats told themselves this meant a broad mandate for social change, not just a narrow repudiation of Trump. And so you got a race to the left to appease the groups, with hands raised on debate stages for decriminalizing border crossings and positions taken in favor of taxpayer funding for gender transition surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison.

We now know this created all sorts of downstream problems with traditional Democratic constituencies, problems invisible in the post-2018 euphoria but very apparent following the 2020 and 2024 elections…

Midterm success is all well and good, but a mere cyclical reaction to the party in power doesn’t solve the deep-seated problems exposed in the presidential year when the broadest set of voters participates…

Running a base mobilization strategy can work in midterms but in presidential years, usually gets canceled out quickly by an influx of low-information and more persuadable voters motivated by an entirely different issue set…

While many Democrats sincerely want to change how their party is perceived by low-propensity voters, all the incentives going into and following the midterms are lined up against them. The better Democrats do in the midterms, the more that arguing for a change in direction makes you the skunk at the garden party.

This all seems exactly right to me. In fact, I don’t see how any attentive Democrat could look at how the party discourse has evolved since November 2024 and not see this dynamic unfolding in real time. The fool’s gold of midterm success is once again poised to distract Democrats from what really needs to be done to secure their long-term success against a formidable populist opponent.

Before this happens and, as Ruffini puts it, they “memory-hole” their profound problems with key voter groups, it’s worth underscoring how much work Democrats have to do to re-establish support levels that might stand up in a presidential election context, when low-propensity voters flood into the electorate.

1. The Democratic Party recently hit a record low in favorability (34 percent) in Gallup polling going back to 1992. As recently as when Biden entered office in 2021, favorability toward Democrats was 48 percent, exactly balancing the 48 percent who viewed the party unfavorably.

2. This decline in Democratic favorability has been skewed toward nonwhites. Since 2021, there has been an astonishing 53 point swing away from the Democrats in net favorability among nonwhites. In 2021, Democrats’ nonwhite favorability was a very strong 39 points above water—66 percent favorable to 27 percent unfavorable. Today, the Democratic Party is 14 points underwater among nonwhites—just 37 percent favorable to 51 percent unfavorable.

3. Party identification—even more consequential for voting behavior—has also shifted dramatically since those halcyon days when Joe Biden first occupied the White House. At that time, Democrats had a 10-point advantage in party identification over the GOP according to Pew. Now Republicans have a one point advantage.

4. Here again the decline in Democratic party identification has not been uniform but skewed toward nonwhites. The Democratic party-ID advantage has declined by 17 points since 2021 among Asians (from 35 to 18 points), by 16 points among Hispanics (from 35 to 19 points), and by 16 points among blacks (from 68 to 52 points).

5. Declining Democratic party identification has also been skewed toward the young. Those under 30 favored Democrats by 32 points in 2021; now the Democratic advantage in just 6 points. Looked at in terms of decadal cohorts (Pew does not use generational divisions), those born in the 1980’s favored Democrats by 20 points in 2021, an advantage that has now essentially vanished. And those born in the 1990s gave Democrats a 22 point advantage in 2021, now down to just 3 points.

6. Most astonishing, back in 2023—two short years ago—Democrats had a very healthy party identification advantage of 26 points among men under 30 (62 percent Democratic to 36 percent Republican). Now this group has radically shifted against the Democrats and gives Republicans an 18-point advantage (52 percent GOP to 34 percent Democratic). That’s a 44-point shift in net party ID over two years.

If calling attention to these facts makes me “the skunk at the garden party” so be it. Maybe the Democrats need a few more skunks and a few less cheerleaders and others dazzled by that midterm fool’s gold.