America’s two political parties, the oldest and third-oldest in the world, face new challenges as a result of the Democrats’ “more than a thumping” of President Donald Trump’s Republicans last week.
The Democrats, of course, have the happier task of deciding what to do with their unexpectedly wide majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives.
Their capture of at least seven Senate seats — nine if their current leads hold up in Mississippi and Alaska — in states that Trump carried by double-digit margins just two years ago gives them a majority that looks likely to last at least four and quite possibly six years. That’s because most of the party’s seats that are up in 2028 are in states that have been safely Democratic for years.
The party’s majority in the House looks formidable but not impervious, overturnable as it is by seat gains of the size achieved three times in recent years, by Republicans in 2010 and Democrats in 2018 and again this year.
But the great opportunity, and the great risk, for Democrats is the fact that they seem to be the one party with a plausible chance to win a trifecta — the White House and both houses of Congress — in 2028. That’s a big contrast from recent history, in which one party or the other has won trifectas in seven of the last nine elections.
Their win this year pretty clearly owes little to their policies or political leadership. An exit poll showed an electorate with a 49% to 43% party identification edge for Democrats but with 52% expressing unfavorable feelings toward the Democratic Party.
Most voters were clearly eager for the opposition party to curb the power and capriciousness of the incumbent president. It doesn’t necessarily follow that the larger electorate in the presidential year will be ready to give Democrats control of both the executive and legislative branches.
That’s especially true if Democrats follow through on their threats to abolish the Senate filibuster. The impulse for checks and balances that worked for Democrats this year could work against them two years from now.
Precedent for that exists in the era of polarized partisan parity that has prevailed since the early 1990s. Many Democratic politicians retain a sentimental attachment to the idea that they represent a downtrodden working class, even as affluent college graduates have become one of their bedrock constituencies.
After they won trifectas in 1992, 2008, and 2020, they pushed policies of economic redistribution — health insurance changes in 1993–1994 and 2009–2010, and countercyclical spending in 2021. Each time, they have been rebuked by the voters, massively in the 1994 and 2010 off-years, and more narrowly but decisively in 2022 and 2024.
Democrats with long memories, like Rahm Emanuel, may recommend only modest economic changes. But others with shorter perspectives may give in to redistributionist impulses that prove unnerving in a country where most people, for all their complaints, live comfortably.
Another danger for Democrats, decisive in 2024 but (perhaps temporarily) irrelevant in 2026, was what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) laughingly dubbed last August as “Woke 1.” This showed considerable adroitness from Ocasio-Cortez, whose 2018 defeat of a House Democratic leader put her in the spotlight with colleagues calling for defunding the police and for sex change surgery for transgender prisoners.
My guess is that Democratic congressional leaders and presidential candidates will similarly be inclined to leave “Woke 1” behind but may not be able to muffle the highly visible socialists who want to abolish capitalism and close down prisons. And Democrats may not be able to resist the temptation to overreach in their investigations of, and impeachment attempts against, Trump appointees and Trump himself. On this week’s roll call, every House Democrat voted to proceed on the impeachment of War Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Republicans face the task of adjusting to the voters’ rejection of the president who has battered their party to subservience. Astonishingly, the first to take up cudgels was Vice President JD Vance, who in an X post the afternoon after Election Day blamed the result entirely on the Iran “war.”
All would be well, he argued, if Trump would end the war, address inflation, put America first, and “change our relationship to Israel.” No, replied many conservatives, it was tariffs and inflation, not the war — which, veteran Democrats Andrew Stein and Mark Penn argue, Trump needs to explain better.
A better analysis, in my view, comes from RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende. “It wasn’t just the war, and it wasn’t just tariffs,” Trende wrote. “I don’t know that it was even ‘mostly’ those two issues combined. It was Trump’s entire second term.”
Voters want in their leaders something like the opposite of chaos and caprice. Consider Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, with their constantly adjusted rates, his threats to annex Canada and Greenland, violent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, the White House ballroom, and, on election eve, the disquisition on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. As Walter Mead writes in the Wall Street Journal, “Voters might accept the occasional plot twist and policy mishap, but they get restless when the chaos feels out of control.”
The possibilities for further chaos, and certainly for confrontation, between Trump and congressional Democrats are obviously legion. But Republicans will have to choose a new nominee, and that nominee, given Trump’s policy on Iran, which he reiterated after the election in his 60 Minutes interview with Ross Douthat, will not be a clone of the 45th and 47th president.
We may be seeing the fracture of the Republican Party and of MAGA as well. Vance’s opposition to Trump’s Iran policy lines him up with the likes of commentator Tucker Carlson, whose preoccupation with Israel led him to oppose some Republicans this fall.
In contrast, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been careful not to oppose the president openly, even while delivering in Munich and Athens, eloquent speeches describing the common historic origins and philosophic links of European and American traditions. It has been assumed, and Rubio has stated, that he would not run for president again, as he did in 2016, if Vance were a candidate.
Nevertheless, a poll conducted by highly rated AtlasIntel the weekend before the election showed Rubio leading Vance by a 46% to 33% margin. Atlas showed splintered results on the Democratic side — 18% each for Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), who just won his second Senate term by a 59% to 41% margin, and 16% for former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Has anyone war-gamed out a 2028 race between the elder statesman Rubio (born 1971) and Ossoff (1987), Ocasio-Cortez (1989), and Buttigieg (1982)? It might just take the spotlight, finally, Trump (1946).
One other factor looms large over 2028. The president elected that year will be in office “in the last quarter of 2032, [when] the Social Security trust fund dedicated to retirees is scheduled to run out of money,” writes Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle. “At this point, by law, benefits are supposed to be cut to match outflows to inflows, which would mean an across-the-board cut of over 20 percent.”
MORE THAN A THUMPING, POSSIBLY A REALIGNMENT
To prevent that, the president and Congress would have to agree to impose FICA taxes on incomes over the current $184,500 limit, cut benefits for affluent seniors, or raise the retirement age. The first change would hurt affluent college graduates, the Democrats’ lead constituency these days. The second would hurt affluent retirees, always a high-turnout voting group. The third would hurt young nonwhite voters without college degrees, among whom Trump made gains in 2024, and Republicans suffered losses in 2026.
Back in 2005, President George W. Bush proposed adding private investment accounts to Social Security, but Democrats, despite some early interest, spurned his offer. Had it passed, the trust fund would probably not run out of money in 2032. Bush’s repute has not prospered in the Trump years. But sometime in the next presidential term, both parties may regret that he didn’t succeed on Social Security.