Since it became clear that the Democrats were going to take both houses of Congress, people have been asking me how to make sense of Tuesday’s midterm elections: the so-called blue wave where traditionally red states flipped blue for the first time in decades.
The Democrats performed very well on Tuesday, from congressional races to governors’ mansions to many remarkable gains in local offices in states that have been reliably Republican for years. We saw a real rebuke to Republican leadership and more voters backing left-of-center candidates. But my reaction as a political scientist is probably less exciting than most people expect.
In short, we have seen before what happened on Tuesday. The results of this year’s midterm elections tell us very little about where American politics is going.
Of course, many on social media disagree and have already declared Tuesday’s outcome a mandate, and are celebrating a new direction in America. Pundits and social media outlets will have plenty to say about realignments, historic victories, and a new Democratic coalition emerging. Look at Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina, they’ll say.
Yes — they are big victories, and Republicans should take them seriously. But an impressive set of returns on election night is not the same thing as a realignment or a real change to our political order. Pundits and politicos have announced those new political eras before and with great certainty, only to watch the country change its mind again two years later.
Many political scientists have come to call our moment in political time the era of unstable majorities. I have written about our political instability for years, and I think a better way to understand Tuesday is to recognize that for over three decades neither party has managed to build a coalition that holds together for very long.
In this era of instability, we keep seeing elections where one party wins, interprets the result as approval for far more than voters actually agreed to, and begins governing accordingly and moves too far to one extreme. Then comes the predictable backlash in which the opposing party takes over and often does the same thing.
A brief look at some recent political history makes this pattern clear. Barack Obama arrived in Washington in 2009 with large Democratic majorities built on promises of hope and change. Republicans then took the House in 2010. Donald Trump won in 2016. Democrats took the House in 2018. Similarly, Joe Biden won the White House in 2020, and the Republicans reclaimed the House in 2022. Trump came back in 2024 with his party controlling Congress, and now Democrats have taken both chambers. These elections have different explanations and particularities, of course, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. But there is a pattern here, and it long predates Trump.
Neither party has managed to turn a victory into a stable majority.
Much of Tuesday’s seemingly explosive result is unremarkable in one respect. It looks like classic economic retrospective voting was ruling the day. Economic voting is essentially a theory from political science that argues that voters evaluate the people in charge by how things are going, especially economically. This theory has held up for decades of elections, and it is useful to remember that while the average voter may not know what caused inflation or directly hold securities in the stock market, people are hurt as their grocery and housing costs surge.
When this happens, people vote accordingly and effectively punish the party in power. What we should not forget is that voters don’t need a deep understanding of monetary policy to decide they’re unhappy with a party’s choices and actions on economic concerns. Inflation helped Trump into office in 2024. Continued frustration with the cost of living hurt Republicans in 2026, alongside anger over the Iran war and other decisions by the administration that have made daily life more expensive.
In fact, there is nothing especially mysterious about someone voting for Trump in 2024 and a Democrat in 2026.
That voter may not have changed a single view about taxes, abortion, immigration, or the proper role of government. He may simply be dissatisfied with whoever is in office, and economic voting helps explain the immediate result. Unstable majorities help explain why these reversals keep taking place, and why the winners have such trouble keeping their voters and establishing any sense of continuity.
The parties have now become far more ideologically sorted and extreme than the rest of the country. More people identify as politically independent than as either Republicans or Democrats. Significant numbers of people do not hold every position they’re supposed to hold if they’re a Republican or a Democrat, and there are still people who want tougher immigration enforcement and support abortion rights, or want more government help with healthcare while opposing higher taxes.
The voters who make the difference in elections often have little interest in signing on to a party’s entire agenda. But the practical reality is that leaders listen to their activists and supporters once they are in power, and they declare mandates and behave as if everyone who voted for them wanted the same things.
Overreach can hasten the backlash, although it isn’t the only reason parties lose. Sometimes the economy is enough. What matters is that both parties seem incapable of recognizing how conditional their support has become. Republicans treated 2024 as an endorsement of Trump and his agenda. Democrats will be tempted to treat this week’s results as an endorsement of theirs. Some Democrats won in places that haven’t elected their party’s Senate candidates in decades. Those wins are significant and changed the balance of power in the Senate. But let’s see whether Democrats can keep those voters and govern reasonably and not radically before proclaiming the dawn of some new political era.
I suspect that with the Democrats in Congress, we will see attempts to roll back GOP initiatives and, regardless of the merits, more political instability. Title IX — which prohibits sex discrimination in any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance — is a straightforward example of what that instability looks like for universities. The rules changed under Trump, changed again under Biden, and then the Biden changes were struck down in court. Universities spend a considerable amount of time, money, and effort adjusting to policies that may not last, and the repeated changes have been extremely polarizing and damaging. Businesses and state governments face much the same problem. Elections ought to have consequences, of course. But we now have reached a point where making long-term plans around federal policy feels increasingly foolish and unstable.
People may not have extensive knowledge about congressional bills and policy details, but they absolutely feel and understand the current moment of instability. They know that policies and the legality of choices can radically swing every few years, and this may help explain something else that political commentary too often treats as a separate problem. In October, Gallup found that government and poor leadership were the single most frequently named problem facing the country, cited by 26% of people, although 38% named an economic concern of one kind or another.
While Gallup doesn’t unpack the poor leadership response, it is not unreasonable to think that when the government keeps changing direction without settling much of anything, people get fed up with it. We elect new leaders who promise to fix what their predecessors did, only to see much of their work undone after the next election. If everything is temporary, up for reevaluation, and subject to easy revocation, what exactly are voters supposed to believe they accomplished?
TAKEAWAYS FROM THE 2026 MIDTERM ELECTIONS
Now Democrats will control Congress next term while Trump remains in the White House. It’s highly likely that there will be hearings, investigations, threats of vetoes, and far too much fighting. Perhaps there will be some room to address the economic concerns that brought so many voters to the polls, but I wouldn’t count on a newfound appetite for compromise. At least the new divided government makes the limits of both parties’ power harder to ignore.
Tuesday was a serious defeat for Republicans, and the results will certainly change the rest of Trump’s presidency. But it is a mistake to declare this blue wave a turning point for the nation. The election is just another data point in our era of unstable majorities. What the Democrats must now understand, and what the Republicans sadly missed in 2024, is that winning the next election is not the same as building a coalition and creating legislation with positive outcomes that can survive the one after it. Until that happens, this political chaos will keep wearing the public down and further hurt our great nation.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
