Welcome to the Morning Jolt. This is Noah Rothman with you today. Jim Geraghty returns tomorrow.
On the menu today: The Democratic Party’s sizable victories have papered over the simmering internecine conflicts that roiled from within during the primaries. For now, the mood in the party is jubilant, turning down the volume on the party’s discontents. But the Democrats’ restless revolutionaries won’t stay sidelined forever.
United, for Now
The first test of the enlarged Democratic majorities’ cohesion will arrive at the outset of the new Congress.
When the majority party elects its leaders in January, many expect that both Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries will hold onto their respective roles. But that is not guaranteed. According to Decision Desk’s count, Schumer can count on the affirmative support of just three members of his caucus. Many more have withheld their endorsement or have made vague statements about the need for more pugilism from Senate leadership. Many Democrats, including most of the incoming freshman senators swept into office in this year’s wave election, outright oppose Schumer’s leadership.
But who would challenge Schumer? Well, last week, Michigan’s presumptuous Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed tried to draft Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen into a bid for majority leader, and Hollen now says that he’s in “listening mode.”
Schumer is in a tougher spot than Jeffries, but the long knives are out for the would-be speaker of the House, too.
“The American people don’t want us to get even,” Jeffries said in an imminently sensible post-election interview with MS NOW. “We ran on affordability, we won on affordability, and now it’s our job to govern on affordability.”
Those remarks have “understandably enraged a lot of voters,” The Nation’s Elizabeth Spiers revealed. In her tendentious interpretation, Jeffries had “insultingly implied that the electorate’s desire for accountability is about petty revenge.” In the profanity-laced tirade that followed, Spiers advocated vengeance as a form of “accountability.” Any other approach isn’t “meeting the moment.”
Coincidentally, USA Today’s Sara Pequeño also believes that neither Schumer nor Jeffries can “meet the moment.” To her, the victories won by candidates that establishmentarian Democrats opposed — Brad Lander in the House and Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate — are tantamount to a no-confidence vote in Democratic leadership.
Those candidates and their voters want to isolate Israel on the world stage. But, Pequeño notes, leadership does not. In addition, she claims, the voters who fueled the blue wave have a fever, and the only prescription is impeaching the president. Leadership disagrees. The Democratic base is willing to outsource their judgment and policy preferences to NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, but the party’s congressional leadership has other ideas. “If you can’t get behind one of the most popular politicians on the left, I’m not sure you can lead the country,” Pequeño mused.
Media Benjamin, the Chinese Communist Party-adjacent head of the “anti-war” outfit Code Pink, is equally keen on throttling Jeffries’ speakership in the crib. In her telling, Jeffries is an apostate. He withdrew his sponsorship of a Medicare for All bill earlier this year, she wrote. He will not support kneecapping the Pentagon, remains an “enthusiastic defender of the aggressive alliance NATO,” and has given moderate Democrats like Representative Jared Moskowitz influential positions on foreign affairs committees. Worst of all, he is beholden to Jewish money and refuses to endorse the myth that Israel is a genocidaire.
Unlike Schumer, Jeffries isn’t taking the barbs from his socialist detractors lying down.
CNN’s reporters noted with academic disinterest the strikingly racialist attacks on Jeffries from his left. The radio host Charlamagne tha God called him “AIPAC Shakur.” The anti-Israel reporter Rula Jebreal went further still, accusing the Democratic leader of being an “AIPAC monkey” and Israel’s “errand boy.” Jeffries gave as good as he got. “It was very interesting to me, as observed by others,” he told CNN, “that there was almost zero diversity in that crowd.”
That was a subtle jab at the socialist left’s monochromatic cheering section — maybe too subtle. What’s more, the attack may fall flat now that the monochromatic base of socialist voters is represented in Congress by an ethnically diverse cross-section of American society.
A look at the results of this election confirms your likely suspicion that these and similar screeds amount to only so much jockeying for position. But the center-left Democrats who oppose their party’s socialist makeover are engaged in the same game when they argue that the real winners of this election were the party’s “moderates.”
“The big story of this year’s elections was the middle-of-the-road Democrats winning in red states that Trump won in 2024,” a three-byline report published this week in the Financial Times read, “politicians with much more moderate policy prescriptions than their firebrand compadres.” That contrasts with “the relative underperformance of progressives” in blue states and districts.
On Data and Democracy’s Adam Bonica splits the difference:
The House Republican caucus will shift rightward as more moderate members in swing districts lost or retired; the House Democratic caucus will shift to the center as more moderates won in swing districts; this is the normal pattern
https://t.co/oJgeadEvjb https://t.co/F7D893FiAC— Matt Grossmann (@mattgrossmann) November 9, 2026
“Across the ideological spectrum, Democratic candidates outperformed side by side, showing how a national mobilization wave lifts all boats,” he wrote:
Despite consternation among the party establishment that DSA candidates would be a drag on the party, they gained on Harris’s 2024 share by about as much as Blue Dog–endorsed candidates. In this era of highly polarized and nationalized elections, the party swims or sinks as a coalition, not as factions. The lesson for the party from this is that the inter-factional disputes between centrists and progressives are a distraction when it comes to Democrats’ electoral fortunes.
The breadth of Democratic majorities will make it easier for leaders to forge creative legislative coalitions and sideline backbenchers who thought they were heading to Congress with a mandate to make life miserable for the hated “establishment.” And Democratic partisans will let leadership get away with it if the Democratic Party’s majorities appear to be getting results. And yet, among Democrats, there are many varying and probably mutually exclusive definitions of what success looks like.
Depending on whom you ask within the Democratic Party, you’ll hear a variety of outlooks from different factions, each claiming to represent majority opinion within the party. The “moderates” want to handcuff the president and constrain him from prosecuting the war with Iran, root out corrupt practices within his administration, and pare back cuts to Medicaid. The far-left wants to see impeachments — preferably of the president, but his subordinates will do — and they want to cripple not just this president’s capacity to project U.S. power abroad but any president’s. And they will not be satisfied with restoring Medicare to the status quo ante. They want a radical new status quo in which Medicare consumes the private health insurance industry whole.
Each of these factions knows that the voting public just wants to see consumer costs reined in, but that’s easier said than done. The fact that you haven’t heard Democrats talk about tinkering with Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, for example — one of the national security provisions that allowed Trump to impose tariffs on America’s trading partners after the Supreme Court circumscribed the president’s trade authorities earlier this year — suggests the party is already losing sight of voters’ prime directive: affordability.
ADDENDUM: As I told Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham last night, you have to hand it to the president. He knows how to read a poll.
🚨 Keep the pressure on Iran — without giving Tehran a free hand.
Noah Rothman: “Maintaining the blockade strategy seems to be the ideal.”
“If you give Iran a free hand in the Strait of Hormuz… it’ll only increase energy prices.”
“Allowing Democrats to confront their own policies, the fallout from their own, seems like a pretty effective strategy.”
https://t.co/JK6WRGHLqV— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) November 10, 2026
In the president’s sit-down interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat, Trump’s analysis of his own polls was dead-on. Throughout 2026, the pollsters who separated “border security” from “immigration” found that the president continued to get high marks from voters on the former even as his ratings on the latter steadily declined. Trump is also right that the “crackdown,” as Douthat put it, contributed to the souring of the public’s mood and helped transform one of the GOP’s biggest issue advantages into a net negative for the party.
The reporting indicates that elements within Kristi Noem’s DHS and elsewhere thought the administration would benefit politically from street confrontations over ICE’s activities. The harassment to which ICE and CBP agents were subjected was nauseating, and it might have enlivened base Republicans. But when Atlas Intel — one of the best-rated pollsters of the 2024 cycle — surveyed Hispanics, they found that “immigration policy, deportations, and ICE” was their top issue, and probably not because they appreciated the Trump administration’s approach. Latinos voted Democratic this year by 30 points.
The real mystery is what Trump thinks he can accomplish with Democratic majorities on immigration policy. He floated the idea that those who have established themselves in the U.S. could stay under some new form of legal status, but that will not satisfy this Democratic caucus. Flush with a sense of ascendancy, the Democratic majorities will push for something much more comprehensive and permanent.
Trump is clever, however, to open the door to negotiations with Democrats by offering them half a loaf. When Democrats reject compromise, as they almost surely will, the president can accurately contend that his opponents are being unreasonable. And if Trump himself isn’t the best messenger for that line of attack by 2028, that message is transferable to almost anyone who might run on the Republican line.
Voters do not want to go back to the Biden years in which millions of migrants overran the nation’s borders, overstressed municipal services, and contributed to dire humanitarian conditions in America’s shelters and detention facilities. But voters have also forgotten what the Democratic agenda looks like.
Posturing chastened and deferential to the voters’ will, as Trump did in this interview, is a good place to start winning back the public’s confidence. Giving voters a good long look at what Democrats will do with the power they seek is another.