Does It Matter That There’s No “Resistance II”?

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.

A Defense of the Midterm Convention “Trumpapalooza”

Aside from the predictable cheerleading of reliably pro-Republican outlets, media treatment of this week’s midterm convention in Dallas has been critical or mocking from the moment that it was first announced in June to last night’s concluding balloon drop. The logic behind this response is understandable and even defensible. But in this case, it’s not entirely convincing.

The argument that the midterm convention was a bad idea is straightforward, even self-evident. Donald Trump is currently an unpopular president with unpopular policies. Any effort to raise Trump’s profile as the leader of the Republican Party, give him a public platform to remind voters of their dissatisfaction with his substantive record or personal manner, and associate him with Republican candidates running in close races this fall seems thoroughly counterproductive. Committing avoidable strategic blunders is one of the worst imaginable sins in the eyes of campaign consultants and their like-minded friends in the political media world. Moreover, the irony of Trump’s need for personal attention and praise holding privately unenthusiastic GOP leaders captive to a multi-day celebration of self holds undeniable dramatic appeal to the professional authors of campaign storylines.

What’s missing from this otherwise sensible analysis is a full reckoning with how bad things look for Republicans right now. Of course, polls can be biased and there are still two months until the election. But the best evidence we have today shows Republican candidates in poor and deteriorating shape across a range of pivotal seats in both congressional chambers. Most aggregation models now indicate that Democrats are overwhelmingly favored to flip the House and have an even shot of gaining a majority in the Senate even though it would require winning at least two seats in states that Trump carried by double-digit margins in 2024.

If the spectrum of realistic outcomes for the GOP this November indeed ranges from “tough night” to “total nightmare,” calculations about Trump’s role begin to change. That Trump is a serious net liability for his party is both undebatable and, at this point, impossible to remedy. But if the true worst-case scenario this fall would result from a combination of energized Democrats, angry swing voters, and disengaged Republicans, maybe Trump can at least try to do something useful about the latter group. Trump himself told the convention crowd to “pretend that I am on the ballot,” suggesting that he has been appraised of the need to bolster enthusiasm among citizens who gladly vote for him but might not bother turning out for the likes of Ken Paxton or Jon Husted.

It may seem counterintuitive that Trump becomes more valuable as Republican fortunes decline. But we’re long past the point at which the closest races in 2026 are likely to be concentrated in normally competitive “purple” constituencies. The red states are poised to decide this election, and if Trump can make sufficiently effective appeals based on personal or party loyalty to a population of voters who supported him three times for president, a Republican wipeout will be averted and the loss of just one house of Congress will seem like a relief, if not a victory. Trump will certainly take credit.

The Dubious Theory That Working-Class Voters Want Candidates Who "Look Like Them"

Like many other center-left parties across the Western world, the Democratic Party has experienced a significant decline in support among working-class voters over the past two decades or so—whether class is measured by household income, occupational status, or educational attainment. This trend has confronted Democrats with a particularly acute electoral challenge in parts of the country where blue-collar white citizens constitute a majority of the voting population, including much of the Midwest and interior West as well as small towns and rural areas across most of the nation.

This partisan realignment is primarily driven by the rising salience of cultural conflicts, Compared to citizens with socioeconomic advantage, working-class voters are more patriotic, nationalistic, traditionalist, and skeptical of social change; they also consistently hold more conservative preferences on subjects like abortion, LGBT rights, gun control, environmentalism, and immigration. As the public image of the Democratic Party has become more associated with cultural liberalism, it has lost its formerly durable popular reputation as primarily concerned with representing the political interests of the working class.

If winning a greater share of the working-class vote in the future requires the party to become more moderate on cultural issues, liberal Democrats would be forced into an unappetizing choice between ideological purity and electoral success. But if another path exists to reverse the party’s growing unpopularity among this key voting bloc, such a dilemma might be happily avoided. Thus an alternative hypothesis has attracted considerable acceptance among progressive activists and primary voters in recent years: Democrats can appeal to blue-collar Americans by nominating performatively “working-class” candidates who nonetheless champion progressive issue platforms.

This idea has a long history, but its most prominent recent manifestation was the Senate campaign of Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Fetterman in 2022. Fetterman became nationally famous for dressing casually and speaking plainly, with his tattoos, hooded sweatshirts, and running shorts featuring prominently in press coverage of his candidacy as supposed authentication of his Everyman identity. To some observers, especially supporters on the left, Fetterman’s victory served as proof of concept for the claim that liberalism in a Carhartt wardrobe was a formula for success in a critical battleground state.

Unfortunately. it’s very difficult to analytically isolate Fetterman’s presentation of self from the other factors that might have contributed to his election in 2022; he faced a weak carpetbagging opponent, and Democrats nationwide performed better than the president’s party usually does in a midterm election (probably due to the Supreme Court’s unpopular Dobbs ruling issued that summer). But another test of the theory arrived two years later with Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate. Democratic supporters and sympathetic media figures celebrated Walz as a “regular midwestern dad” who wore flannel shirts, went pheasant hunting, and had coached high school football, and was therefore an ideal ambassador to blue-collar and rural voters.

It didn’t work. The Harris-Walz team was the worst performing presidential ticket in rural America in modern history, receiving just 32 percent of the total vote in non-metropolitan counties nationwide. Vice presidential nominees usually don’t matter much to electoral outcomes, and this was likely true in 2024. But it’s fair to say that Walz did not electrify the campaign trail or dominate in his debate against J. D. Vance.

This year, Graham Platner is the leading test case for the dress-down-and-win hypothesis. Platner’s profile as a bearded and tattooed military veteran turned oyster farmer with a sharp-edged speaking style and strongly progressive political views attracted early support from Bernie Sanders and several labor unions. While his actual “blue-collar” credentials are somewhat arguable (he attended two private prep schools and has received regular financial assistance from his attorney father), Platner’s candidacy caught fire among Maine Democrats. He succeeded in driving Maine’s sitting governor Janet Mills from the primary race and now stands as the presumptive opponent to five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins. But the relative political novice has had some skeletons emerge from his closet since he declared his candidacy; even the tattoos turn out to be a bit of a problem.

While we wait to find out whether Platner’s flaws render him unacceptable to the Maine general electorate, it’s worth considering how much of the strategic argument for candidates like him is founded on assumptions that working-class voters respond very powerfully to superficial signals of “blue collar” identity (like personal appearance or language style), and that nominating candidates with these attributes is a more effective path than ideological repositioning on substantive policy matters to winning elections in competitive constituencies. After all, the most popular politician in our lifetimes among small-town Americans is a super-wealthy business tycoon from New York City who only takes off his neckties when he’s playing golf on the courses that he owns.

A common touch is surely an asset in politics; this is one reason why Elizabeth Warren underperforms other Democratic candidates in Massachusetts elections. But it’s not the only thing that’s important to voters, even those of modest social status. We should be suspicious of the implication that working-class citizens care more about vibes than policy, especially when such suggestions come from well-educated white-collar activists who themselves hold very strong ideological commitments. Whether or not it’s offensive condescension in the guise of sympathy, there’s just not much evidence that it’s true.

One person who has come to agree is John Fetterman himself. Fetterman has continued to insist on maintaining his casual fashion style while serving in the Senate, but he responded to Donald Trump’s 2024 victory in Pennsylvania by starting to break with other Democrats on multiple issues. His constituents have noticed, now perceiving him as significantly more moderate than the rest of his party. This reinvention may doom Fetterman in the 2028 primaries—if he indeed runs for a second term as a Democrat—but it’s a tried-and-true method for winning general elections in a competitive state. Just ask Susan Collins.

Young People Are Fascinating—Just Don't Expect Them to Decide the 2026 Election

“Young Voters Vehemently Oppose Trump, ICE” reported the Yale Youth Poll this week, drawing on a national survey conducted in March that revealed substantial erosion of the president’s job approval since last year among respondents under the age of 30. Two years ago, the Trump-led Republican ticket had performed surprisingly well among this age group—especially men—compared to 2020 and 2016. But the Yale analysis, in concert with other recent polling, suggests that the 2024 results reflected a temporary shift in the preferences of young adults rather than a more enduring realignment. Looking ahead to the 2026 midterms, Democrats once again far outpace Republicans in the voting intentions of 18-to-29-year-olds.

The political views of the young dependably receive special attention among media analysts, for understandable reasons. Older people tend to find young people fascinating, and young people find themselves fascinating. Generation gaps and conflicts are familiar dramatic tropes upon which to hang stories, whether the young are portrayed sympathetically as idealists longing to transcend the hypocrisies of their elders or critically as naive narcissists who haven’t yet experienced the hard knocks of life. And, in a political world that places great value on the power of prediction, the youth politics of the moment can seem (sometimes misleadingly) to provide a vision of the nation’s future.

But anyone interested in the factors likely to foreshadow or affect the outcome of the midterm elections in November shouldn’t spend too much time obsessing over the preferences and priorities of the youngest cohort of citizens. Voter turnout is strongly and reliably correlated with age, and young adults are always much less likely than older generations to participate in elections—especially non-presidential contests. According to data compiled by the political scientist Michael McDonald, the turnout rate among eligible citizens between the ages of 18 and 29 was 49 percent in the 2024 election, compared to 76 percent among citizens aged 60 and over—a gap of 27 percentage points. In 2022, the gap in turnout between the 18–29 age cohort (26 percent) and the 60+ cohort (64 percent) was even larger, reaching 38 percentage points.

In the last midterm election four years ago, citizens under the age of 30 constituted just 12 percent of the national electorate, according to the Current Population Survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. That equalled the share of the electorate aged 75 and above. More voters had passed their 65th birthday (30 percent) than had yet to reach their 42nd (29 percent). The median age in the 2022 midterms was 54.

In a very close election, of course, shifts in a single slice of the voting public might be important. But many of the key races this year are being held in constituencies that are even older than the nation as a whole. Among the potentially competitive Senate seats up for election in 2026, only three (Georgia, Alaska, and Texas) are being held in states where the median age is below the national figure, while six (Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, and Iowa) are located in states with disproportionately elderly populations.

Over the past week or so, a debate has arisen in a few corners of the political media over whether or not Democratic candidates would be well-served by pursuing opportunities to reach young citizens by engaging social media personalities with youthful followings, such as the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who hold controversial opinions on certain political issues. But a new poll of Democratic voters in Michigan released by the left-of-center group Data for Progress found that 80 percent of all respondents, and 89 percent of those over the age of 45, were either indifferent to Piker or hadn’t even heard of him. It’s common for political analysts to praise candidates and parties for courting teenagers and 20-somethings, or to suggest that they would reap an electoral benefit from doing so. But even successful attempts to bolster support among young social media users are likely to harvest fewer raw votes than more modest shifts in sentiment among older citizens who represent a much larger proportion of the overall electorate.

Because so much of our popular and media culture is dominated by content targeted to, and trends led by, young people, it’s only natural to assume that these generations must also hold the potential to be unusually influential in the realm of politics. But while Taylor Swift may be the biggest pop star in America, even she couldn’t lead Kamala Harris to the White House in 2024. As the full results of the Yale polling indicate, the GOP’s chief problem right now isn’t that young people are souring on the party—it’s that their parents and grandparents are too.

Republican Governing Mistakes Are the Great Partisan Equalizer

The Democratic Party faces a set of serious challenges. It has lost its former popularity among white voters without college degrees, a significant share of the national electorate that has shifted since the 1990s from mostly voting Democratic to supporting Republicans by a 2-to-1 ratio. The results of the 2024 election suggested that this trend could extend to other ethnic groups as well, especially Hispanics, and that younger men of all races might have become alienated from the party. While Democrats have made partially offsetting gains among college-educated voters, this countervailing trend has not been sufficent to maintain the party’s traditional numerical advantage among the American public or to counteract an increasingly pro-Republican structural tilt in Senate elections. Like other center-left parties around the world, Democrats must contend with the growing tension between the demands of their culturally progressive activist population and the more moderate preferences of the casual supporters they need to win national power.

But there is an important factor that has so far prevented the Democratic Party from losing its ability to contest elections on an equal footing: the perennial Republican struggle to govern. In a strict two-party system where electoral competition is a zero-sum game, that’s turned out to be an important asset.

President Trump’s job approval rating now sits at about 40 percent on average, a historically low figure for this point in a presidential administration. Trump is being weighed down by negative evaluations of the national economy, with Americans expressing particular dissatisfaction with high inflation and declining affordability on his watch. Unsurprisingly, given how midterm elections tend to serve as a referendum on the performance of the president, Democrats have moved into a steady lead in congressional polling even as the party itself remains fairly unpopular.

It’s not always fair to blame—or credit—the president for the nation’s economic health. But Trump has implemented well-publicized policy changes that are not only opposed by most citizens, but were also predicted by experts to increase inflation and reduce growth. Just as economists could explain in advance that Trump’s tariffs would be much more likely to produce higher prices than employment benefits, specialists in the politics of the Middle East easily foresaw that attacking Iran would lead to immediately noticeable spikes in fuel prices and indirect effects on other consumer costs. Many voters may not fully understand exactly how the Iran war leads to rising prices on goods other than gasoline—it requires rare knowledge, for example, to be aware that the Hormuz blockade will also make food more expensive by constricting the worldwide supply of crop fertilizer—but since they reliably hold the president responsible for managing the national economy, he is likely to be punished anyway. Trump is also aggressively pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, which could also have the effect of compounding the inflation problem.

When a president’s poll numbers start to slide, much of the Washington commentariat diagnoses a public relations crisis and dispenses the traditional remedy: better messaging. It’s true that Trump probably would be well-advised to express more sympathy for Americans’ concerns about affordability and to develop a potentially persuasive rationale for the conflict with Iran. But the real problem he faces is the consequence of his policy decisions, not a lack of clever spin. Political scientists can sometimes express cynicism about the capacity of voters to keep political leaders properly accountable for their governing choices, yet history is full of policy failures that became political disasters. At least some of the time, it’s in the interests of politicians to get the substance right.

Republicans have realized major electoral benefits over the years from subjecting policy technocrats and other intellectuals to rhetorical attack and budgetary defunding, which have become more frequent as the party has harnessed populist resentments among voters without college degrees. Conservatives characterize the community of credentialed subject-matter specialists as skewed to the ideological left, prone to arrogance and condescension, and not as reliably correct about the world as they claim. These are all valid criticisms.

That doesn’t mean, however, that refusing to develop substantive knowledge about complex issues, or to listen to those who have it, will produce a record of successful governance. Yes, the experts are wrong sometimes, but not as often as those who dismiss everything the experts say. The George W. Bush administration, the Tea Party Congress, and the first Trump term all suffered from political weaknesses that stemmed from policy failures, handing electoral gifts to the Democratic opposition. Recent events suggest that Republican leaders haven’t been studying this history—and thus may be doomed to repeat it this November.