Swing Voters Won’t Be Grateful If Democrats Capitulate

No predictions here, but you can probably take this to the bank: If Democrats win the midterms in six weeks, there will be endless discourse about What It All Means—and I suspect one of the big sub-themes will stem from the fact that the election was a referendum on Donald Trump and his party of loyalists. Democrats did well, but perhaps it was in spite of themselves. Perhaps most of the pivotal voters sought refuge with Democrats, because there are only two major parties, and the one in charge has courted disaster. In our system it isn’t really “any port in a storm,” it’s “the other port in a storm.”

And yet, it’s hard for a party to shrug off a landslide. Will Democrats misread a good result as a vote of confidence in them, grow complacent, and lose the next election? Kind of like they did after the last midterm?

I’m confident this discourse awaits us because it’s already here. You can hear it in quiet chatter among factionalists across the party, all of whom are pre-honing arguments about how the results prove their theory of the case. Democratic leaders will foist this doubt upon themselves, because they ooze insecurity. Activists will embrace it, because if the election suggests Democrats have solved their biggest political problems, what impetus will they have to move left on this issue or to the right on that one? After the election, mainstream reporters and pundits will get in on all the navel-gazing, as well—a little performance to demonstrate how unbiased they are: You don’t have a mandate, Democrats, because the people voted against Trump, they didn’t vote for you.

Annoying as this sounds, there will be a lot of truth to the critique. Democrats aren’t suddenly popular. Republicans won the 1994 midterms in a landslide, then lost the presidency two years later. Republicans won the 2010 midterms in a landslide, then lost the presidency two years later. Etc.

The problem is less that we’ll be subjected to all this second-guessing than that it’ll produce a false consensus about how Democrats can convince these desperate new voters to stick around. I do not expect Democrats to apply real critical reasoning to their victory, so that they take the right lessons from it.

I expect them to tell themselves that they ran on “affordability” and thus must prove that they take the cost of living seriously, by passing a bunch of bills that would lower costs. I expect them to draw lessons from, e.g., the political success of Zohran Mamdani, who talks about affordability all the time, but only because his task is to remain popular in the very expensive and very blue stronghold of New York City.

I expect them to “hold the center” by dodging culture-war fights they believe favor Republicans or, worse, using their new agenda-setting power to side with Republicans on those issues. Whatever openings their new majority provides them, they should avoid overreach.

But basically all of this will be beside the point. Democrats are not poised for a landslide because voters want Congress to pass more messaging bills. The signal they’re sending is pretty clear—it just isn’t one the political establishment wants to hear.

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The signal approximately everyone wants to receive is that they can appease voters without engaging in bruising conflict with Trump. That if they simply gesture at solutions to the problems voters cite in polls and focus groups, they can cling to the center for the next two years, and win the next election, which is the one that really counts.

But this is a naive view of public sentiment, and we can see that quite clearly in the GOP’s most recent contortions...