Tuesday’s elections showed that President Trump’s excesses could fuel a Democratic takeover of the House next year.
There were two losers in last night’s elections. The first and most obvious one was President Donald Trump. The second was Kamala Harris.
With the gubernatorial victories of Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, a new generation of Democratic women is coming to the fore who will likely seek the presidency. Harris, who has been making noises about running in 2028, should think again. The Democrats’ strong performances in yesterday’s off-year elections underscore the weakness of hers against Trump in 2024.
The other difficulty that Harris would face is California Governor Gavin Newsom’s successful passage of Proposition 50, which endorses redistricting for congressional seats. Newsom is now the presumptive frontrunner for the Democrats in 2028. He has taken the battle directly to Trump rather than engage in the kind of mealy-mouthed retrospection that Harris has indulged in as she promotes her wan memoir, 107 Days. Newsom knows something. Harris does not.
What about Trump? In the face of defeat, he has returned to his customary fusillade of invective, claiming that the elections were rigged because they did not turn out as he hoped or that his absence was decisive. He pronounced on social media, “TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT.”
Actually, Trump was on the ballot, at least unofficially. As Sherrill marveled, her opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, refused to distance himself from Trump even when it was in his own political interest to do so. Instead, he clung to Trump and lost big. As Vivek Ramaswamy put it, “We got our asses handed to us.” Even in Mississippi, the Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in the state Senate by flipping two seats.
The real Republican fear is that the 2026 midterm elections will be a replay of what occurred in 2018—a Democratic landslide that recaptured the House of Representatives. Trump, as has been widely noted, is a good campaigner for himself and an abysmal one for the GOP. It’s starting to look as though there is no MAGA movement. It is Trump, and Trump alone, who has been able to win the presidency in 2016 and 2024. Otherwise, he has not delivered for the GOP. Quite the contrary.
As Jamelle Bouie notes, “New Jersey and New York City both had high turnout for off-year elections (Virginia had a slight increase). In other words, it really is the case that Trump specifically, in his capacity as president, inspires ferocious energy and opposition against him among a large part of the voting public.” Whether his push for redistricting in Texas and elsewhere ends up backfiring on Republican candidates is also an open question. If the current results are anything to go by, the Hispanic vote may not lean Republican in 2026.
The bottom line is that Trump remains the Democratic Party’s greatest electoral asset. Had he refrained from embarking upon draconian ICE raids against illegal immigrants and imposing sweeping tariffs, the economy would be humming. Right now, almost half of the products imported into America have steep tariffs, and inflation has not subsided. Add in a Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago at the very moment SNAP benefits are expiring and the government shutdown is hitting an all-time record in length, and you have a recipe for real trouble. If he keeps it up, Trump might make the Jimmy Carter presidency look like a success story.
About the Author: Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He is the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, which The New York Times included on its 100 notable books of the year in 2008, and America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel.
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