Few things are as predictable in politics as the party that wins the White House suffering losses in the subsequent midterm elections, especially when the president is unpopular.
With about a week to go before Election Day, Republicans clearly aren’t escaping this familiar dynamic. Barring a miracle, the GOP is going to lose control of the House, while its Senate majority rests on a knife’s edge. But the margins and Senate control obviously matter — to the rest of President Trump’s term and to the gigantic political and ideological clash coming in 2028.
Rather than moderating after their humbling loss to Trump in 2024, Democrats are more inflamed and radical than ever before. They haven’t given an inch on trans issues or identity politics and show little sign of having truly learned from Joe Biden’s immigration debacle (although there are murmurs of regret here and there). Medicare for All is back in fashion, and the DSA is increasingly influential in Democratic ranks, making support for Israel radioactive in the party.
If Democrats take the House, they will subpoena everyone in sight (unfortunately, President Trump and his circle have given them plenty to investigate) and put further upward pressure on federal spending, while trying to defund the Iran war and interior immigration enforcement. If they also get a Senate majority, confirmations of Trump executive-branch appointees and judges will slow and perhaps grind to a halt. If there’s a Supreme Court vacancy, Democrats will try to force Trump into making a poor choice or hold the seat open in the hopes of winning the presidency in 2028 and putting a progressive jurist on the Court.
Unified control of Washington is the ultimate goal. Should Democrats get it in two years, they will attempt to eliminate the filibuster and unlock the path in the Senate for radical, self-serving changes to the system. Even establishment Democrats are talking of adding Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states, and it has become nearly party orthodoxy that the Supreme Court should be “reformed,” either with age limits to jettison conservative justices or by expanding the number of justices.
This is an agenda to overturn the constitutional order for partisan and ideological advantage. The legitimacy of the Senate, with four more arbitrarily added Democratic seats, and the Supreme Court would never be the same. Many Democrats also want to trash the Electoral College, and who knows what else they’d come up with should they take over Washington.
In short, they want to make changes that would be hard to reverse, would entrench them in power, and would poison our politics for years to come.
The number of seats that they gain this year will help determine their strength to try to effect these changes if they win the presidency in 2028.
Over the last two years, the GOP Congress has cut taxes and deregulated, while many Republican governors have pursued worthy reforms, from eliminating state income taxes to easing up on rules around the construction of new housing, to advancing school choice. All that is to the good, but much of this has been blotted out for voters by President Trump’s protectionism, the higher fuel prices owing to the Iran war, and his sundry idiosyncratic priorities and initiatives of dubious legality.
The best political argument that Republicans have had this election cycle is that, whatever the public’s discontents, the Democrats are much worse, a line that, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, has the added advantage of being true.