As polling results in pivotal races continue to favor Democratic candidates in this year’s elections by increasing margins, the 2026 midterms are starting to feel distinctly reminiscent of 2018—when Democrats gained 41 seats in the House of Representatives and won 7 new state governorships by exploiting popular backlash to the first Trump administration. Many familiar signs of a national Democratic victory have begun to emerge, from public gestures of independence by formerly Trump-loyal Republican candidates to privately-expressed pessimism by GOP operatives that they will be able to defend key congressional seats. Even if the Senate electoral map and partisan gerrymandering of the House limits the magnitude of potential Democratic gains, the newfound battleground status of places like Texas, Iowa, and Alaska testifies to a substantial shift in partisan fortunes over the past two years.
But there’s one big difference between 2026 and 2018. Eight years ago, a great deal of popular attention fell on the “Resistance,” a network of anti-Trump citizens who were busily organizing and coordinating support for Democratic candidates. The Resistance inspired innumerable media stories, several books, and studies by academic scholars, and received widespread credit for contributing to the Democrats’ electoral success. It was frequently portrayed as a distinctively women-led movement, growing out of the protest marches held in response to Trump’s inauguration and reflecting an especially pronounced antipathy provoked by his record of treating women.
Trump is less popular today than he was in 2018, or than Barack Obama was in the Tea Party year of 2010, but 2026 lacks similar proclamations that a national grassroots movement opposing the president has emerged or been reactivated. It’s a dog that doesn’t seem to be barking this time. There have been sporadic organized public protests on the left, such as the “No Kings Days” that have periodically occurred since Trump’s return to office (another one is scheduled for October 17), but less evidence than before of an ongoing conscious national network of activists focused on candidate recruitment, fundraising, and electioneering. Is this a problem—or at least a missed opportunity—for Democrats?
Local citizen activism and protest is often sentimentalized as the purest form of democracy in action. But there isn’t much evidence that it makes a big difference in general elections. Campaigns, interest groups, and engaged citizens often invest significant energy in phone-banking, door-knocking, and other intensive forms of “mobilization” or “visibility,” but academic experts seeking to measure the impact of such activities on electoral results have struggled to find significant effects. The Democrats almost certainly did not need the Resistance to take control of the House eight years ago, nor was the Tea Party a necessary element of the Republican sweep eight years before that. Voters who are strongly dissatisfied with the performance of the president don’t require much encouragement to express their feelings at the ballot box, and those who are fairly indifferent to the march of political events will nearly always remain so even after receiving a visit from a passionate and insistent fellow citizen.
It’s even possible that opposition parties benefit more from keeping the focus on the unpopular actions of the incumbent than by gaining attention for their own side via high-profile protests and media coverage. This year, Democratic candidates running in traditionally red states like James Talarico and Mary Peltola would almost certainly prefer their constituents to view them as individual, independent public servants based in their local communities than as representatives of a rising national liberal movement.
This doesn’t mean that protest and activism don’t matter. The Resistance enduringly changed the composition of the Democratic Party by encouraging record numbers of Democratic women to seek elective office in 2018 and 2020, just as the Tea Party left a long residue on internal Republican politics that is still visible 16 years later. But electoral competition between the parties is less responsive to short-term investments of citizen energy than Americans often wish to believe. It isn’t necessary to build a movement to build a wave.