First, congratulations, Democrats. You won convincingly, and your victory can reasonably be described as a blue wave. However, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, there is a quote by Winston Churchill that seems apropos in this moment: “In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill.”
Second, I sometimes think the Republicans resemble the Washington Generals, taking the court only to tee up the ball for the Harlem Globetrotters’ slam dunks and comedic mayhem. Who am I not to succumb to a knee-jerk reaction and a slight twitching of the eye? But even Cicero was a hypocrite.
The Nov. 3, 2026, midterm elections offer both political parties a lesson that goes considerably deeper than President Donald Trump’s personality, his public vacillations, or the policies of his administration. The most consequential political vulnerabilities may be those that neither party can readily observe — because the methods by which political organizations measure their own strength may systematically exclude people who have already withdrawn their support.
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There is an interesting connection between Abraham Wald’s work on survivorship bias and the Democratic gains in these midterm elections. During World War II, Allied military analysts examined aircraft returning from combat, hoping to determine where additional armor might improve their chances of survival. The returning planes displayed concentrations of bullet holes in certain locations. The obvious conclusion was to reinforce those areas. Abraham Wald, a mathematician working with the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University, recognized something the others had overlooked: the aircraft being examined had survived.
The aircraft that had not returned were absent from the evidence. They could not physically be examined. Consequently, the areas displaying the greatest concentrations of damage were not necessarily those requiring additional protection. They might instead be the places where an aircraft could sustain damage and still make it home. Wald’s insight was that the missing aircraft contained information as important as the aircraft available for examination. The lesson is simple: what we can observe may be systematically different from what we cannot. The process by which we collect information may conceal the evidence most essential to understanding our circumstances.
Now consider the Republican Party. There are plenty of observable explanations for the GOP’s electoral difficulties. Trump’s changing public pronouncements and tendency to stand firm on controversial positions provide obvious subjects for examination. Historically, the president’s party has also tended to lose congressional seats in midterm elections. Beyond that familiar pattern, Vice President JD Vance attributed the Republican defeat to the war with Iran, while Trump emphasized his own absence from the ballot, although he too acknowledged the war’s political consequences. Meanwhile, Republican candidates had sharply reduced references to Trump in their general-election advertising.
These visible factors — the war, economic concerns, candidate positioning, and the familiar disadvantages of a midterm election — are available for examination. Political commentators will undoubtedly spend considerable time debating their relative importance. But what about the aircraft that never returned?
What about Republican voters who quietly withdrew their support without announcing their departure? What about independents who had previously voted Republican but no longer found the party appealing? What about those who remained nominally loyal while privately harboring serious reservations? And perhaps more importantly, what about the people closest to political power?
A powerful leader may surround himself with individuals who consistently affirm his decisions. Some may genuinely agree. Others may recognize that disagreement carries consequences for their careers, influence, or continued access. Still others may simply learn that silence is preferable to confrontation. In politics, the resulting chorus of internal agreement may sound like overwhelming support. But is it really?
This is where Wald’s insight becomes particularly interesting. Those who remain within an organization are not necessarily representative of those who have departed. Nor do their public expressions of loyalty necessarily reveal their private convictions. Indeed, an organization may become increasingly confident in its own strength precisely because its dissenters have disappeared.
There is a related phenomenon known as preference falsification, in which individuals publicly express positions that differ from their private beliefs because of perceived social or institutional pressures. Combined with survivorship bias, it creates the possibility of a political organization whose internal consensus grows stronger even as its broader public support deteriorates.
This dynamic explains why traditional polling often detects direction while missing magnitude. While Democratic pollsters correctly anticipated a victory, standard methodologies struggle to gauge the true scale of a wave election. Much like the WWII analysts examining only returning bombers, surveys capture the active voters who agree to respond, but systematically undercount the quiet dropouts and silent mind-changers whose cumulative numbers transform a modest win into a blowout.
This oversight isn’t unique to politics; it happens whenever an institution assumes visible metrics tell the whole story. On Jan. 5, 1971, Louis “Red” Klotz — the player-coach for the Washington Generals — hit a last-second shot that unexpectedly defeated the Harlem Globetrotters, ending a 2,495-game losing streak. The crowd reacted with stunned silence, with Klotz recalling that spectators stared at his team “like we killed Santa Claus.” Expecting a scripted narrative, everyone in the arena had grown blind to the possibility that the underlying dynamics of the game had shifted. Political parties face the exact same trap when they mistake visible survey data for the full extent of public sentiment.
But Democrats should resist the temptation to believe that this problem belongs exclusively to Republicans. Consider the victory speech of Michigan Democratic Sen.-elect, Abdul el Sayed. Addressing his defeated Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, el Sayed declared, “You chose hate, and Michigan chose hope.”
El Sayed also spoke of open-mindedness and serving the people of Michigan. Yet conciliatory language does not erase the implications of moral accusation. When a political contest is framed as a choice between hope and hate, where does that leave the millions of citizens who voted for the losing candidate? Does their opposition necessarily reflect hatred, prejudice, or some other moral deficiency? I believe their motivations are more complicated than that. Perhaps el Sayed intended his criticism to apply only to his opponent’s conduct. But political rhetoric reaches beyond its immediate target, and its broader implications deserve scrutiny.
Churchill’s admonition concerning magnanimity in victory is not simply an appeal to good manners. It invites the victor to distinguish political disagreement from moral condemnation — and to recognize that winning an election does not confer moral infallibility. The moment a political organization begins to interpret disagreement primarily as a moral failing may also be the moment it becomes less capable of understanding those who disagree. This is the very worry that many conservatives have regarding the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America.
And this returns us to Wald. A voter who openly criticizes a political party is still providing that party with information. A voter who quietly withdraws may provide none. More troubling still, an organization that has already decided its opponents are motivated by ignorance, prejudice, or hatred may see little reason to investigate their actual concerns. Its explanations become substitutes for inquiry.
Republicans who interpreted their 2024 victories as evidence of enduring political allegiance may have mistaken a temporary coalition for a permanent one. Democrats would be equally mistaken to assume that their 2026 gains necessarily represent a lasting realignment. The difference between a vote of affirmation and a vote of rejection may be invisible in the final tally, but it can be decisive in understanding what comes next.
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Wald understood that the returning aircraft told only part of the story. The missing aircraft might tell the more important part. Republicans would do well to examine what their apparent strengths may have concealed. Democrats would do equally well to examine what their victory may now conceal from them. The more successful an organization becomes at eliminating internal disagreement, the less capable it may become of recognizing external disagreement.
Churchill’s magnanimity in victory may therefore be more than a virtue. It may be an intellectual necessity. For the greatest danger to a political party may not be what it fails to understand about its opponents, but what its own certainty prevents it from seeing.
Andrew Moore is a small-business owner and author of the Primus Aeternus series.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
