Having won big congressional majorities in a blue tsunami midterm election, Democrats now must decide what to do with them.
The party posted historic gains on Tuesday night, easily winning both houses of Congress and tearing through red-state Senate races in a major rebuke of President Donald Trump and Republicans.
But the breadth of the Democrats’ win means they have the opportunity to break that partisan stalemate that has gripped the country since 2000.
Such opportunities have been allowed to slip away in the past. After mounting one of the greatest political comebacks in American history, Trump largely squandered the GOP trifecta, a Washington buzzword for unified control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, by failing to deliver on the voters’ economic priorities.
WINNERS AND LOSERS OF THE 2026 ELECTIONS
If anything, Trump policies such as the tariffs and the fuel price-spiking war in Iran ran counter to those priorities by adding to his predecessor’s inflation and exacerbating the affordability crisis that has plagued incumbent parties across the world.
Inflation exploding to a 41-year high under former President Joe Biden cost Democrats the White House and Congress. Piling higher gas and diesel prices on top of those cumulative increases, even if at a somewhat lower rate, has now left Trump’s party without a majority in either house of Congress.
Trump and the GOP aren’t the first to blow a chance the voters have given them, however. Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 alongside Democratic supermajorities in both houses of Congress, including a short-lived filibuster-proof margin in the Senate. Democrats needed to win two straight wave elections, also driven by public dissatisfaction with the economy, an unpopular war, and corruption, to achieve such gains.
But that meant the Democratic majority was unsustainably large, tasked with enacting a progressive agenda that voters in many states and districts they now represented rejected. Just two years later, Republicans gained 63 House seats and took the speaker’s gavel away from Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Democrats could easily find themselves tempted to follow Trump in talking about affordability on the campaign trail but focusing on other things once in office. They might also have a problem similar to the Obama-era Democratic majorities, now that they are about to hold Senate seats in South Carolina, Kansas, Texas, and Ohio.
This is a new crop of red-state Senate Democrats that looked nearly extinct before Tuesday night. Will they vote any differently than their blue-state colleagues? Former Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona were practically hounded out of the party for doing so, and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) appears to be next.
HERE’S WHAT DEMOCRATS WILL DO WITH THEIR NEW MAJORITIES
A number of socialist and DSA-adjacent candidates also won Tuesday night, including three of their four Senate nominees, and they will surely try to push the party further to the left. But Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) won by 18 points and Sen.-elect Roy Cooper (D-NC) by nearly 20. Michigan’s Abdul el Sayed, Maine’s Troy Jackson, and Minnesota’s Peggy Flanagan all won by smaller margins despite running in much bluer states.
In addition to not letting socialists lead their party, Democrats could attempt to strike legislative deals with Trump, who would prefer to go down in history in his final term as a master deal-maker rather than the most conservative president.
The Democratic House elected in the 2018 blue wave found that untenable. Its leaders were mostly focused on beating the Republican administration in the next election. But that blue wave and its resulting majority were largely built on districts Hillary Clinton had won in 2016 or that Trump had carried by less than 7.6 points. Next year’s Democrats will be representing places where they haven’t won in decades, including states Trump won by double digits in 2024.
All the short-term partisan incentives line up with spending the next two years locked in battle with Trump, with investigations, impeachments, and passing messaging bills that are meant to be vetoed. Democrats have their own divisions, which will become more relevant once they have real power.
As huge as the swing in the Democrats’ favor was on Tuesday night, our politics have been extraordinarily volatile for the past 26 years: two close presidential elections to start the century with a Republican Congress defying midterm elections history sandwiched in between, the 2006-08 blue waves, the 2010 red wave, Obama’s reelection, a smaller red wave in 2014, Trump’s election, the 2018 blue wave, Biden’s election as Democrats lost House seats, the 2022 red ripple, Trump’s return, and now this gigantic blue shift.
THE ARRIVAL OF DIVIDED GOVERNMENT
All of these seemed enormously consequential at the time. Most came with partisan speculation about emerging permanent majorities. But they were all over in the blink of an eye.
Will the Democrats’ new majorities be any different? That is, at least partially, up to them.