Five Lessons from the 2026 Midterms

1. It looks like Democrats may have won the largest share of the national popular vote for the House since the post-Watergate election of 1974. This doesn’t necessarily mean that 2026 is the broadest national victory over that time; 2008 produced a bigger Senate majority while also giving Democrats control of the White House. But 2026 is definitely the greatest “overperformance,” far exceeding what were already favorable consensus expectations. The only comparable example might be 1980, when what most experts thought would be a tight race turned into a 44-state landslide victory for Ronald Reagan and a 12-seat gain for Republicans in the Senate. Expectations matter because they affect how electoral outcomes are received by political actors, and the results from last night have landed like a thunderbolt. Trump and his subordinates will no longer be treated by the political community as if they enjoy the trust of the typical American citizen, and the dilemma faced by other Republicans caught between loyalty to the president and desire to build a broader appeal will become a central storyline in our politics for at leas the next two years.


2. I’m just about the last person who would question the basic validity of thinking about American geography in terms of “red states” and “blue states.” But applying these labels too rigidly can be a mistake, especially in an unusual political environment in which normal patterns are put under rare strain. Yes, South Carolina is a red state, but if there’s a historically poor national climate for Republicans combined with an unappealing Republican candidate and an attractive Democratic opponent, the minority party has a real shot at winning. Much of the Washington political community tends to over-anchor its worldview around the results of the most recent election, when history shows that both short-term developments and longer trends act as constant sources of change.


3. There’s no shame in losing in a national landslide provoked by forces beyond your control. But a lot of Republican candidates this year didn’t even seem to realize how much trouble they might be in under very late—if they had, they would have invested more effort in broadening their appeal beyond the bounds of their party. Perhaps overconsumption of conservative media sources relentlessly promoting rosy scenarios left them unaware of their vulnerability? Watching Fox News Channel hosts struggle last night to understand how James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa could have possibly won in Texas—which anybody who has a professional job informing citizens about politics should have been previously aware was a strong possibility—suggests as much, even though “the president’s party takes a hit in the midterms” is about as reliable a rule as any in American electoral politics.


4. There’s a backlash to Big Tech happening all over the country. Candidates from coast to coast pledged this year to protect citizens from the evils of “data centers,” but that’s only one manifestation of a broader discomfort with economic disruption, threats to employment from AI, and the daily-life ubiquity of overfamiliar tech giants ruled by quirky, self-satisfied billionaires. The actual policy consequences of this trend are still unclear, but members of both parties have gotten the message that it’s good politics to give tech a hard time.


5. Many Americans hold a romantic view of grassroots organizing combined with a cynical belief that money can easily buy elections. This week’s results represent a challenge to both ideas. Democrats won a historic victory despite billions of dollars spent by Republican-aligned Super PACs on television advertising and the lack of a conscious national “movement” dedicated to aid Democratic candidates . Money and local organizing can both be important in politics, but neither is quite as important as people think.

Five Things to Watch in the Election Next Week (That Aren’t About Polling Bias)

1. How high will turnout get? Trump-era elections have consistently produced unusually strong voter engagement. The national turnout rate in both 2020 and 2024 exceeded 64 percent of eligible voters, the highest participation rate since 1908. The 2018 election hit 50 percent of eligible voters nationwide—a level not reached in a midterm since 1914—and 2022 was only a bit lower at 46 percent (other than 2018, the highest midterm mark since 1970). Republican leaders are worried this year about signs of lagging turnout in early voting across deep red rural counties in Texas and Georgia, and potentially lower participation rates among younger independents and casual Republican voters who mobilized in large numbers for Trump in 2024 but have soured on him since. But early voting numbers are not always a reliable guide to what happens on Election Day. If overall turnout drops a bit from 2022 because Republicans are less mobilized than before while Democrats remain energized, such an asymmetry would compound Republicans’ problems this year.


2. Some analysts have suggested that emerging signs of strong black turnout in several Deep South states represent a backlash to the Supreme Court’s recent decision narrowing the scope of the Voting Rights Act. This is a fascinating theory that will be worth investigating further once the final results are in. Even if black turnout is unusually high, it could also reflect more general partisan dynamics (most black voters are Democrats, and Democratic engagement is on the rise) or the candidacies of black Democratic nominees for U.S. senator in Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana; for governor in South Carolina, Georgia, and Arkansas; and for state supreme court justice in North Carolina.


3. Democratic candidates (including nominal independents unofficially supported by the party) without previous political experience but with attractive professional backgrounds like doctor or pastor have demonstrated the ability to compete effectively with Republican incumbents in traditionally red states like Kansas, Nebraska, and South Carolina. If any of these candidates wins, or even comes within a point or two of winning, Democratic Party leaders are likely to take a lesson from this result for the future. Normally, Democrats have been more likely than Republicans to prefer congressional nominees who have previously served in elective office, but they may conclude that there is a benefit to the “accomplished outsider” persona—especially in constituencies where their nominees need significant appeal beyond the party base to win.


4. The prospect of Democrats gaining control of the House of Representatives has been treated as such a foregone conclusion that attention shifted mostly to the Senate months ago. But the size of the incoming House majority will be very important for the 2027–28 session of Congress, and is well worth monitoring as the results come in. As we’ve seen over the last four years, a single-digit margin greatly complicates the Speaker’s freedom of movement to manage the floor—and may even complicate the speakership election itself—by empowering small blocs of disaffected members. Hakeem Jeffries has strong personal as well as partisan reasons to root for the largest possible blue wave next week.


5. Congressional and gubernatorial races are always the headliners, but the thousands of other contests to be decided on Tuesday are also revealing and consequential. Elections for state constitutional offices and legislative chambers can often be an especially valuable indicator of partisan trends and alignments. This year, it’ll be fascinating to see how far Democratic success in Georgia, Arizona, Texas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina extends down the ballot, and the possibility of unified Democratic state government for the first time in decades in Pennsylvania, Arizona, or Wisconsin carries significant policy implications. Do Americans continue to become more and more likely to vote the same way in state and federal contests, or are there important cases of ticket-splitting that reflect the enduring importance of electoral considerations besides the party label?

The Youth Are Swinging Against the GOP, But It’s the “Almost Young” Who May Decide the Election

This week, Harvard University’s Institute of Politics released the latest edition of its Harvard Youth Poll, surveying a national sample of Americans aged 18-29. The results revealed deep dissatisfaction with current economic conditions and the performance of the second Trump administration, and suggested that enthusiasm for electoral participation is notably lower this year among young Republicans than it was in the 2018 and 2022 midterms. Among likely voters under the age of 30, the Harvard poll found that Democrats led Republicans in the generic congressional ballot by 63 percent to 26 percent.

Such results are eye-catching, both for the lopsided margin and for the partisan shift that has occurred since 2024. Two years ago, the 18-29 age cohort favored Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by somewhere between 11 and 19 points, depending on whether national exit polls or a Pew Research Center post-election analysis produced the most accurate estimate. Either way, this was the best performnce by Republicans among young voters in a national election since 2014, and in a presidential election since 2004. If the Harvard findings of a 37-point gap hold—and this week’s national New York Times survey gives the Democrats an even wider lead of 44 points among voters under 30—Democrats will have fully reversed the pro-GOP swing of two years ago.

It’s nice to be the favorite party of the young, but such a distinction only goes so far. Citizens under 30 dependably have the lowest turnout rates of any age range, and they are especially likely to sit out non-presidential elections. In 2022, only 26 percent of eligible citizens aged 18-29 showed up to vote, compared to 64 percent of those over the age of 60. Even a dramatic surge in support among this sector of the electorate can only deliver a limited number of new votes.

A less examined but more strategically important age group is those in their 30s and 40s. Many Americans first become engaged in politics during this life stage, and some are still developing firm views and preferences. As a result, they represent a significantly larger slice of the overall electorate—the Timespoll estimates that voters between the ages of 30 and 44 will outnumber those between 18 and 29 by a 2-to-1 ratio this November—but can also exhibit significant partisan shifts from one election to the next. According to Pew surveys, voters aged 30–49 preferred the Democrats by a 21-point margin in 2018, by 12 points in 2020, by 7 points in 2022, and by just 2 points in 2024. The Times poll found a Democratic generic ballot advantage of 22 points among voters between 30 and 44—roughly matching the party’s advantage in 2018, the last national “blue wave” election. (The two survey outfits use slightly different age range cutoffs, so comparisons can’t be exact.)

Subgroup estimates can be noisy, and other surveys might find somewhat narrower margins. But even if the movement back to the Democrats among voters in their 30s or 40s this year isn’t quite as large in percentage terms as that among those in their teens or 20s, the Democrats will still gain many more raw votes from the older group because there are many more of them in the active electorate. Especially in places with populations that are collectively older than the national average, such as Maine or Iowa, any significant shift among a millennial generation now heading toward middle age will be much more consequential than a comparable swing among the much smaller minority of Gen Z-ers who will cast ballots in 2026.

It’s often assumed that young people are naturally liberal and become more conservative as they grow older, even though there isn’t a lot of clear evidence that this is a reliable pattern. But it is indisputable that the aging process converts many previous non-voters into voters. There’s no guarantee that those who join the ranks of the politically active for the first time later in life will closely resemble their generational peers who have been voting since they turned 18, and so a generation can evolve politically from one election to the next simply by absorbing freshly mobilized members. In 2024, the national climate was reflected in the collectively pro-Republican tilt of newly registered voters. In 2026, with Trump’s ratings in decline and the Democrats on the political offensive, this trend has reversed along with the prevailing political winds. We’re less than two weeks away from finding out whether resurgent popularity among the “almost young” (to borrow a phrase from Leonard Cohen) is strong enough to carry Democratic candidates to victory despite an unfavorable electoral map.

When Voters Prioritize Economics Over Culture, the Electoral Battleground Expands

Even when the results of an election can be fairly described as a “national wave” in favor of one party, the magnitude of the partisan shift is never uniform from coast to coast. And evidence suggests that this year will follow the same pattern. Recent polls indicate a Democratic lead of about 8 points on average in the overall popular vote for Congress, representing a roughly 10-point swing in the party’s favor compared to 2024. But state-level surveys suggest that the pro-Democratic surge may be even larger in a number of southern and rural midwestern states, including Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, and South Carolina. At the same time, some normally blue-leaning territory farther north and west (including New York, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oregon, and California) appears to be producing much more modest movement toward Democratic candidates.

The result of this geographic variation is an expansion of the electoral battleground. Democrats have managed to compete in an unusally large number of traditionally Republican states and districts this year. Reports have begun to pile up of multiple Republican incumbents in seats that Trump carried by double digits in 2024 who are unexpectedly finding themselves in electoral peril. At the same time, Democratic candidates have also been unable to take some other races off the board in normally friendlier places for the party that should seemingly give them easy victories in a favorable national climate.

This pattern might plausibly illustrate a general sense of political alienation that is simultaneously penalizing sitting Republican officeholders in red states and ruling Democrats in blue states. But there isn’t much historical evidence that American voters punish incumbents on both sides when they are unhappy with the direction of the country. Again and again, the president’s partisan allies have, rightly or wrongly, consistently taken the brunt of popular dissatisfaction—even when the opposition party is not itself held in high esteem.

A more likely explanation reflects the issue terrain that is being contested in this election. My own research has demonstrated that voters’ opinions on economic policies vary less by geographic location than their views on cultural matters. As American politics became increasingly defined by the culture war from the 1990s onward, culturally liberal regions of the nation became more reliably Democratic while conservative areas became more securely Republican—producing the familiar “red versus blue” arrangement of geographic party support while shrinking the scope of the remaining competitive battleground to a small minority of swing states and districts.

But in 2026, cultural issues have become less salient to an electorate that appears primarily concerned about economic prosperity and fairness. Persistently high inflation, decaying perceptions of a border security crisis, and the fading of “Woke 1” discourse on the American left have helped to return popular focus to the foundational economic dimension of party conflict. Between open alliances with tech-lord billionaires, legislated cuts to health care subsidies and Medicaid benefits, and recurrent preoccupations with gold leaf and ballrooms, the second Trump presidency has also taken on more of a traditionally Republican moneyed-class tinge than the first one did. Recent polling by the New York Times suggests that Democratic Senate candidates are more likely than their Republican opponents to be seen as “doing what’s best for ordinary people,” and a national survey by the Associated Press found that 53 percent of respondents agreed that the Democrats were “focused on helping people like me,” compared to only 40 percent who said the same of Republicans.

Putting red states in play isn’t the same thing as winning them. The structurally unfavorable Senate map and gerrymandered House districts in Texas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and elsewhere mean that a disproportionate popular swing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for major Democratic electoral gains in the South and Midwest. But the fact that Democratic candidates across the country are emphasizing economic appeals while red-state Republicans are attempting to convince voters to focus instead on immigration and LGBT-related controversies reveals how much the parties themselves see Democratic inroads into Republican territory as requiring Americans to shift their attention from cultural battles to their own bank accounts.

Will There Be a “Canada Effect” Along the Northern Border in the 2026 Midterms?

National elections are mostly fought and viewed through a national lens, and 2026 is no different. From one state to the next, candidates and parties are mostly fighting over the same few issues, while the state of the national economy and performance of the sitting president shape the larger electoral climate in which these individual contests are taking place. But the U.S. remains a large and diverse country, with different groups and interests distributed unevenly across the map. Topics of specific local concern can still arise here and there, with potentially decisive effects if the race is tight.

On Wednesday, Michigan’s Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, Mike Rogers, released a new television ad in which he breaks with President Trump’s trade policy by saying that “here in Michigan, we know that Canada is not our enemy. We need to end this tariff war now.” Rogers’s ad raises the question of whether the Trump-instigated trade war with Canada is especially unpopular or politically salient in parts of the U.S. that abut the northern border. Residents of those places might be especially affected by the tariffs because of close economic ties and cross-border commerce, but also retain familiarity and positive associations with Canada that counteract Trump’s attempts at demonizing the country.

The Canadian tariffs have also become an issue in Alaska, where incumbent Republican senator Dan Sullivan has tried to navigate between his support for Trump’s trade policy and the resultant economic effects that have even damaged his brother’s manufacturing business. In Maine, where the fraying U.S.-Canadian relationship has not only increased consumer prices but also weakened the state’s tourism industry, five-term senator Susan Collins has been openly critical of the trade war with Canada. In a debate this week, Collins took credit for convincing the Trump administration to omit concrete, wood pulp, and road salt from the list of goods subject to the tariffs, prompting her Democratic challenger Troy Jackson to retort, “What about everything else? We can’t eat road salt.”

Covering the northern region of the state, Maine’s mostly rural 2nd congressional district supported Trump over Kamala Harris by a 10-point margin in 2024. When moderate incumbent Democrat Jared Golden, who won re-election by less than 3,000 votes, announced his retirement, most election observers assumed that the seat would easily flip to the Republicans in 2026. But polls are finding a surprisingly close race to succeed Golden. Republican nominee Paul LePage, a former governor of Maine, also broke with Trump’s policy towards Canada during a debate this week, claiming that he didn’t support the president’s tariffs “as currently structured” while arguing that “we need to de-escalate the rhetoric” and resume negotiations toward a trade deal.

In New York’s 21st district, covering the rural Adirondack region, Democratic nominee Blake Gendebien leads Republican opponent Anthony Constantino by 3 percentage points according to a new poll from Siena College—another abnormally strong North Country overperformance for a Democratic candidate. (Trump carried the 21st district by 20 points in 2024, while outgoing Republican incumbent Elise Stefanik won re-election by 24.) There are other developments making this race unusually competitive, but it seems very possible that tensions with Canada are a much greater concern to voters there than elsewhere in the nation. We may not be able to determine with confidence how heavily the tariffs will affect local dynamics in 2026, but it’s one more factor to consider in what’s become a fascinating campaign.

Why Is Kansas So Close?

The national partisan shift back toward the Democrats since 2024 has put electoral territory that had recently slipped away from the party back within its grasp. Democratic candidates are waging highly competitive campaigns for senator in Ohio and Iowa, both former perennial battlegrounds that tilted Republican after 2016. The party has apparently restored its former strength among Hispanic voters in Texas, with implications for several House seats in the Rio Grande Valley as well as the state’s barnburner Senate race. Other places that once elected Democrats with some regularity before the Trump era—southwestern Wisconsin, western North Carolina, tidewater Virginia, western Montana—are home to tossup races this year for congressional seats currently occupied by Republican incumbents.

But there’s an exception to the current electoral map’s throwback quality: the Democrats have a legitimate shot at a victory in Kansas, where they haven’t won a Senate race since 1932—the longest streak of futility in the nation for either party. The specific seat up for election this year has been held by Republicans for 108 consecutive years. What’s changed to put Kansas in play?

Kansas may seem like the ultimate conservative state—by reputation, it’s heavily white, rural, and traditionalist—but its actual composition is less inherently favorable to contemporary Republicanism than stereotypes suggest. The state population is 72% non-Hispanic white according to the 2020 census, which is much higher than the national population (58%) but also equal to or lower than other midwestern states where Democrats regularly win elections (Wisconsin is 79% white, Minnesota 76%, and Michigan 72%). The state is also less rural than repeated childhood viewings of The Wizard of Oz might have led one to believe; 72% of its population resides in urban areas—placing it on par with Georgia, Michigan, and Minnesota and ahead of Wisconsin, North Carolina, Iowa, and New Hampshire. Finally, it’s relatively well-educated for a consistently Republican-leaning state. Aside from the unique case of heavily Mormon Utah, in fact, Kansas has the highest proportion of college graduates of any state carried by Trump in the 2024 election.

When conbined with an especially promising political climate, favorable demography can open up chances for a normally disadvantaged party to take a legitimate shot at victory. But capitalizing on such opportunities usually requires an especially appealing candidate. Democrats seem to have chosen a strong nominee this year in Adam Hamilton. A Methodist minister who has never previously held elective office, Hamilton benefits from the combination of a respected professional background, polished communication skills and experience, and the lack of a political record to attack. He is challenging incumbent Roger Marshall, who has served in Congress since 2016 but is not known as an especially charismatic figure.

It’s a real race, with several recent independent polls even finding Hamilton ahead by a point or two. National Republicans have admitted their concern by recently increasing their financial investment in Marshall’s defense. A modest Republican victory in Kansas is still the most probable outcome, but is in legitimate doubt for the first time in decades. For all the consistency of our contemporary “red vs. blue” geographic alignment, there’s still the chance for an occasional surprise if the conditions are right.

Why Campaign Spending Is Less Important Than Everybody Thinks

As Democrats continue to lead in the polls heading into the midterm elections, the Republican case for optimism increasingly hinges on the party’s apparent advantages in independent spending resources—a subject of extensive mediaattention over the past few weeks. One recent article even boiled the midterms down to a fight between two contrasting financial indicators—high gas prices on one side versus bulging Republican campaign war chests on the other.

That’s a clever frame, but it’s a bit misleading. Spiking fuel costs and other consumer expenses will matter a lot more to the outcome in November than differential party spending. Survey evidence already makes it clear that affordability concerns are the main reason why voters are dissatisfied with the job performance of President Trump and his Republican allies, and now express a preference for Democratic control of Congress despite substantial reservations about the Democratic Party and its leadership. Democrats are not guaranteed a sweeping victory—but if they fall short of the analysts’ current bullish projections, the explanation will almost certainly involve a combination of biased polling, an unfavorable electoral map (especially in the Senate), and a late change in the national climate rather than a decisive knockout at the hands of Republican super PACs.

Money surely matters in politics, but it’s subject to diminishing returns. Once candidates have enough resources to introduce themselves to voters and make their case for why they deserve election over their opponent, the marginal impact of each additional dollar spent begins to decline. And in virtually all pivotal races these days, both parties are well-funded to the point of saturating the airwaves, muting the power of any numerical advantage. If a persuadable voter sees 2 ads for Candidate A and only 1 for Candidate B, that might work to Candidate A’s benefit. But if he or she sees 40 ads for Candidate A—or the same ad 40 times—and 20 for Candidate B, it’s pretty hard to imagine the disparity being decisive.

And even repeated exposure hardly guarantees that a message has any effect. Most viewers are instinctively skeptical of the claims made by politicians, parties, and political groups. Creating the “killer ad” is far from an exact science, and the constantly shifting political environment means that an effective playbook in one election might fail in the next. Republican attacks on Democratic cultural liberalism appeared to work in 2024, so it makes sense that Republicans are trying them out again this year. Maybe voters will respond similarly—or maybe they’ll decide that they now care more about economic issues on which Republicans currently face a reputational disadvantage.

Political scientists have repeatedly found that campaign spending in general elections normally produces, at best, modest and evanescent effects in voter preferences. But conventional wisdom gives it much greater weight. One reason is the prevalence of cynicism about politics, which makes it easy to believe that elections can easily be bought by wealthy elites or special interests—a view encouraged by left-aligned government reformers happy to claim that more stringent campaign finance regulation will cure the ills of politics. Another factor is the quantifiability of fundraising and spending, which provides an accessible and seemingly objective indicator of candidate and party success in the midst of an otherwise murky pre-election season.

Perhaps most importantly, political practitioners and media members inhabit a world in common, where smart strategies and ruthless tactics appear more decisive to electoral outcomes than they do from the relative remove of academia. In the midst of the fight, the deployment of millions of dollars here or there feels like a central part of the story. But with distance, the fumdamental factors that shape each year’s contests come more into view. Republicans don’t need to despair yet about this November, but whatever hope they have lies in those fundamentals more than whatever magic their ad wizards might cook up.

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.

Five Lessons from the 2025 Election Results

1. “Unless the president is unusually popular, the party holding the White House will suffer significant losses in off-year elections” is a very well-established pattern, so nothing about the Democratic electoral victories in New Jersey, Virginia, and other states yesterday should be treated as shocking or even unusual. But it’s always valuable to confirm that some of the old rules of politics still apply, even as other aspects of our political world have changed. And for all its normal predictability, this thermostatic backlash effect still seems to catch media commentators and other political professionals by surprise. In part, this is because so much attention during the first year of a presidential term is focused on the failure and subsequent internal dissension of the opposition party, making what should in fact be a fully expected rebound of its electoral fortunes seem like a dramatic plot twist.

2. One of the reasons why Trump has been treated as politically stronger, and the Democrats politically weaker, in his second term than in his first has been that we haven’t seen as visible a popular oppositional movement emerge in 2025 as we did in 2017. Yes, there have been anti-Trump protests, marches, and hashtags, but nothing to the scale of what happened eight years ago, and major institutions like universities and corporations have taken a more accommodationist tack to conservative populism than they did in the peak “Resistance” era. But yesterday’s results demonstrate that 2025’s less prominent expressive opposition on the left does not necessarily indicate, or produce, less successful electoral performance for Democratic candidates—or even lower levels of voter participation. This raises the fascinating, and I think quite unresolved, question of how much self-styled “movements” actually affect the outcomes of general elections for top political offices.

3. Based on exit polls and results in particular localities, it’s clear that both Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia performed much better than Kamala Harris in 2024 among Hispanic and Asian-American voters, either matching or exceeding Joe Biden’s performance in 2020. There are three plausible interpretations of this change: (a) minority voters’ growing support for Trump does not—at least yet—apply to other Republican candidates when he isn’t on the ballot; (b) many have become “nature-of-the-times” swing voters who punished Democrats for disappointing stewardship of the national economy in 2024 and are now punishing Republicans for the same thing; (c) Republican gains among socially conservative racial minorities between 2016 and 2024 are now being reversed, perhaps because of the more aggressive immigration enforcement policies and rhetoric of the second Trump term. We’ll need more data and more elections to better understand the causal factors behind this trend (assuming it continues).

4. Zohran Mamdani is poised to become a well-known national figure, in part because both supporters and critics will have a strong incentive to provide him with generous publicity. For various reasons, however, the mayoralty of major cities is normally a political ticket to nowhere—even for politicians who aren’t constitutionally ineligible to run for president. Mamdani is the latest in a number of economically and socially progressive candidates to win election in big northern cities, which is an important development in its own right but a long way from indicating what the “future of the Democratic Party” might be. Mamdani has undeniable political talent, but was also blessed with competing against several unusually unappealing opponents—beginning with an incumbent mayor whose four years of flagrant blundering opened the door to his candidacy. The governing choices he makes will be fascinating to watch.

5. Perceptions matter in politics whether or not they match reality, and the perception that yesterday’s results constituted a “blue wave” (in part because expectations were set by polling that underestimated Democrats’ performance) is likely to have important consequences for a range of topics from the resolution of the government shutdown to candidate recruitment in the 2026 midterms. But it’s as easy to overstate the magnitude of Democratic victories this year as the Republican victories of last year, and indulgence in the former is not the ideal response to indulgence in the latter. The best evidence indicates that we remain in an era of polarized and closely matched parties, meaning that the emotional response of attentive partisans on both sides rises and falls much more dramatically than the actual strength of the parties themselves. And no election is ever the final word on anything; in this country, there’s always another one right around the corner.

Honest Graft Podcasting with Chris Hayes and FiveThirtyEight

Along with Matt Grossmann, the co-author of my new book Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, I've recently appeared on two major podcasts devoted to American politics. You can hear our discussion with MSNBC's Chris Hayes on his podcast Why Is This Happening? here, and our talk with Galen Druke of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast here. Both episodes are also widely available on popular podcast apps.

In the 2024 Elections, It's a Man's Man's Man's Republican Party

One of the most important consequences of Donald Trump's political ascendance in 2016 was the effect it had on the political engagement of women. They played a leading role in the "Resistance" movement of anti-Trump activism in the 2018 and 2020 elections, which often portrayed Trump as uniquely threatening to women's interests in both his substantive policies and personal behavior. The number of female candidates in the Democratic Party made a noticeable jump in 2018, the first election after Trump became president, and Democratic primary voters seemed especially motivated to express their aversion to Trump by nominating women for Congress and other major offices. The Democratic House majority elected that year contained a record number of women, and in 2020 a majority of non-incumbent Democratic nominees were female for the first time in American history.

Less predictably, the proportion of women nominated by the Republican Party also increased during Trump's presidency. Women rose from 13 percent to 22 percent of all Republican House nominees between 2018 and 2020, and jumped from 18 percent to 33 percent of all non-incumbent nominees. Media reports revealed that Republican officials and interest groups, worried about stereotypes of a male-dominated party, had invested in efforts to recruit more women to run for office. The representation of women in the GOP still lagged well behind the Democrats, but seemed to be on a similar trajectory.

However, the parties have since diverged. The picture for Democrats is of relative stability. Since 2018, the proportion of Democratic House nominees who are women has remained between 42 and 48 percent, as depicted in the figure below. But Republicans proved unable to sustain the growth of female nominees achieved in the 2020 election. This year, 84 percent of Republican House nominees, and 83 percent of non-incumbent nominees, are men.

In Senate and governors' races, both parties have produced a fairly steady pattern of increased female representation since the 2000s, but the Republicans experienced a decline in female Senate and gubernatorial nominees from 21 percent in 2022 to 16 percent in 2024—the lowest proportion of women nominated by the party since 2016:

The 2024 election has exhibited especially overt "gendered" elements that are hard to ignore. Trump, facing a female opponent for the second time in his political career, made his entrance to the Republican National Convention this summer to the accompaniment of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," while Harris prefers a soundtrack of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift—both of whom have endorsed her campaign. Commentators and analysts discuss the possibility of a record gender gap and the possibly central role of abortion and trans rights in shaping voters' preferences. Even the candidates' media outreach strategies reflect gender differences, with Harris appearing on podcasts hosted by Alex Cooper and Brene Brown that are especially popular with women while Trump targets the mostly male audiences of Joe Rogan and Logan Paul.

But even a historically unprecedented partisan divide between male and female voters in 2024 is unlikely to match the dramatic contemporary gap in gender representation separating Democratic from Republican politicians. For the Democratic Party, a future of relative gender parity among its elected leadership is realistically within sight. But for Republican politicians, it's still very much a man's world.

Post-Debate Wrap Up: Not Much to Learn, But a Clear Story Forms

 1. Most debates, whatever their other (dubious) merits, are not good vehicles for determining how candidates differ on substantive policy questions. This debate was no different. The policy discussions, when they occurred, often stayed at a superficial level or departed from reality, and the moderators did not consistently follow up when candidates dodged their questions (which both Trump and Harris did repeatedly). The assumption that these events are essential elements of the democratic process continues to be thoroughly unconvincing.

2. Harris is often compared to Barack Obama for obvious reasons, but her debate style is actually much closer to that of Joe Biden (at least, the pre-2024 Biden). She's not really a facts-and-figures memorizer or someone who shows off command of policy detail; she prefers to state more general themes and present her personal biography as an adequate answer to questions about what she would do to solve this or that specific problem. In another context, an opposing candidate would be able to repeatedly push her out of this comfort zone.

3. Luckily for Harris, (a) she's not running against another candidate, and (b) there's nothing the political media appreciates more than strategic cleverness. Harris's transparently intentional attempts to distract and infuriate Trump by talking about people leaving his rallies in boredom or Wharton School economists trashing his economic plan will be widely hailed as a stroke of political genius, ensuring—in combination with Trump's behavior—that the press will declare her the winner by a wide margin. Add "they're eating the dogs" to the mix, and you have the formula for a solidified conventional wisdom that the debate was disastrous for Trump. But we'll see if it actually registers in the polls.

4. We can also expect considerable media coverage of Taylor Swift's post-debate endorsement of Harris. That's surely welcomed by the Harris campaign, and any positive story is valuable in a very close election. But if high-wattage celebrity support actually moved millions of votes, the Democrats would never lose.

5. A very confident Harris campaign immediately challenged Trump to another debate, and Trump may well accept the offer in order to try for a comeback in Round 2. But, really, what's the point of having another one of these?

Democratic Convention Wrap-Up: 16 Years Later, It's Still Obama's Party

A few notes on the week the Democrats just had in Chicago:

1. 20 years after his national emergence as a keynote speaker at the 2004 convention, and 16 years after he won his first presidential nomination, Barack Obama remains the defining face of the contemporary Democratic Party. The 2024 convention demonstrated the potency of Obama's legacy in three major respects.

• On policy: the convention presented Harris as a center-left candidate in the Obama mold, consistently liberal on both economic and cultural issues but not doctrinaire in manner and maintaining a quiet distance from the Sanders/Warren "progressive revolution" platform that some observers have viewed as a harbinger of the party's future. The convention programming consistently emphasized practical incrementalism over ideological transformation. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's speech on Monday night did not take a distinct ideological tack from the rest of the party, and nobody was in the mood to stir up factional conflict.

• On representation: Obama's demonstration that white voters in swing states could support a person of another race for high political office (not at all an obvious assumption when he first ran for president in 2008) has, in the years since his election, unlocked the door to a steadily widening stream of non-white candidates who have sharply increased the demographic diversity of the Democratic Party's, and the nation's, leadership. Harris is, of course, a beneficiary of this trailblazing, but the convention stage this week was occupied at various points by many other Obama legatees: Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Wes Moore, Angela Alsobrooks, Ruben Gallego, Hakeem Jeffries, Catherine Cortez Masto, Andy Kim, and so on. But like Obama, Harris prefers not to invoke her race (and gender) explicitly in a cry for historical justice, but instead assumes that voters will notice it anyway and hopes that they view it as a symbol of positive change.

• On tone: Obama has made it unmistakably clear over the years that he doesn't like self-righteous, scolding, negative-affect political rhetoric, and he thinks it's politically counterproductive when it comes from the left. His address on Tuesday night echoed this point, albeit indirectly enough to ensure that "Obama trashes wokeness" wouldn't be the big media story of the evening. Harris obviously agrees. Her acceptance speech last night, as well as the bulk of the speeches over the four nights of the convention, were welcoming to non-progressives and explicitly presented a positive and patriotic view of the country, complete with repeated "USA" chants and signs in the crowd. This is not "1619 Project" progressivism, portraying the country as enduringly shamed by its history of injustice; this is instead a reaffirmation of Obama's preferred framing of the United States as a nation that can be proud of the racial progress that it has made and of the example that its multicultural democracy can now offer the world.

2. Harris is clearly a fan of short speeches. Since starting her campaign, she's tended to speak at her public rallies for only about 20 minutes ot so. Last night's speech was 37 minutes long, which turns out to be the shortest acceptance address since Walter Mondale's in 1984 (not counting Biden's in 2020, which had no in-person audience due to the pandemic and hence no breaks for applause). This offers a contrast with her opponent, who has delivered the three longest acceptance speeches in history. In a digital age of shrinking attention spans, perhaps Harris sees strategic value in relative brevity.

3. Of course, a shorter speech means leaving some things out. Harris's autobiographical narrative emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general but skipped over her tenure as vice president almost entirely. The reason is clear—with Biden's approval ratings hovering around 40 percent, she needs to win over some Biden critics and has decided to present herself as a new face in politics, unburdened by what has been. But this isn't a risk-free strategy. She also needs voters to view her as qualified for the presidency, and discussing her vice presidential experience could be helpful in passing that test.

4. In general, journalists don't like conventions all that much. For them, being stuck in a crowded arena while a parade of politicians deliver partisan boilerplate for hour after hour is boring and annoying; the excitement among the press corps provoked by the (false) rumor that Beyonce might made a surprise appearance at last night's session partially reflected media members' lack of interest in the people who were actually on the schedule. But for citizens who aren't already saturated in politics every day, the conventions can serve as a useful window into the political world. A non-expert who spends an hour or so watching both parties' conventions will usually get a pretty good picture of each side's main messages and how they differ. Conventions are also important for the internal operations of the parties as complex political organizations—a quadrennial national gathering of top leaders and activists where information can be shared, relationships can be built, and party business can be settled. Conventions, much more than debates, are truly essential milestone events during every presidential campaign, and they shouldn't be judged only by the superficial entertainment value of every speaker at the podium.

What the Tim Walz Pick Tells Us About Kamala Harris

Every four years, public speculation about the identity of the vice presidential nominees tends to focus on governors or senators from competitive states that may hold a pivotal position in the electoral college. But almost every time, presidential candidates wind up choosing running mates who don’t come from electoral battlegrounds. This should be a clue that presidential candidates don’t place as much emphasis on the potential ability to deliver a home state as conventional wisdom assumes. But that raises the question of what they do value in a VP, and why.

The 2024 Democratic veepstakes threw this puzzle into especially sharp relief. An unusual number of the party’s supposed current rising stars represent presidential swing states, including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Arizona senator Mark Kelly, and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. With an extremely narrow margin in the national polls and a uniquely truncated timeline for settling on a running mate, it seemed natural to many in Washington that Kamala Harris would turn to one of these prominent figures to enhance her chances of building an electoral vote majority. But she opted instead for Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who was not nationally well-known before his selection and who comes from a state that Democrats were already favored to win. Once again, a presidential candidate passed over the battleground states when selecting a VP.

There are four main reasons why this pattern tends to happen.

1. Running mates can’t be counted on to deliver their home states. It’s unclear from the evidence exactly how much of an electoral bonus a party can expect to receive from selecting a home-state VP, but it’s likely to be no more than a couple of percentage points under the most favorable circumstances. The idea that a swing state can be “locked up” by putting its governor or senator on the ticket is simply a myth. Some advocates of Shapiro’s selection argued that there is a non-minimal probability that this year’s election could come down to a few thousand ballots in Pennsylvania, and that even a modest “friends and neighbors” vote for him might therefore decide the entire election. There’s logic to this argument, but it’s still hard for campaigns to game out the probabilities; if running mates could guarantee a 5-point bounce in their home states, presidential candidates’ calculations would undoubtedly be different. According to CNN reporting, the Harris campaign decided from its own polling that putting Shapiro on the ticket would not provide enough of an advantage to justify his selection.

2. Presidential candidates think in terms of voting groups, not individual states. Presidential candidates need to win multiple swing states, not just one. This encourages them to focus on the potential ability of a running mate to attract specific subgroups of voters located across the entire electoral battleground. Donald Trump selected the pious Mike Pence not to win over people from Indiana (he was already assured of carrying the state) but instead to motivate conservative evangelicals whether they lived in Florida or Pennsylvania or Iowa; Barack Obama picked the experienced Joe Biden to reassure persuadable voters across every geographic region that he would be well-equipped to govern if elected. This year, the Harris campaign clearly hopes that Walz’s plain-spoken, regular-guy persona will help them limit the desertion of working-class whites that has endangered the Democratic Party’s competitiveness in exurbs and small towns from coast to coast over the past two decades.

3. The party has its say too. The last thing that presidential nominees want in the heat of an electoral campaign is an internal fight within their party. To this end, they aim to select a running mate that will inspire unity and enthusiasm across all major party factions. In addition, they seek insider intelligence about various potential choices that will help them avoid choosing someone who turns out to have a major political or personal fault. Extensive consultation with other key party actors helps them achieve these goals. As I argued in my piece four years ago about Biden’s selection of Harris, Biden’s lifelong instinct to act as a loyal creature of the Democratic Party mainstream made him very sensitive to pressure from other Democrats to add a woman of color to his ticket—and convinced him that Harris in particular was the best choice. This year, it seems clear that Walz had an active chorus of internal proponents, especially among House Democrats who knew him well from his six terms of congressional service between 2007 and 2018, that Shapiro couldn’t match. Like Biden, Harris appears to solicit and value input from peers in pursuit of a unified party, and it’s likely that these voices in her ear helped convince her to settle on Walz.

4. Presidential candidates want governing partners, not just campaigning partners. Our perpetually election-obsessed political world may only be thinking about the VP selection in terms of its potential effect on the outcome in November, but presidential candidates are also envisioning what life might look like after they win. It’s only natural that a nominee with vice presidential experience of her own will have especially strong preferences about what kind of vice president she would like to have. And personal chemistry is a legitimate consideration; tension between the president and vice president is in nobody’s interest. Multiple news reportssuggest that Walz won out over Shapiro and Kelly in part because he clicked better with Harris and her staff, and because he struck her as someone who would be a more loyal member of her administration (Walz apparently said that he held no ambitions of his own to become president).

So what picture of Kamala Harris emerges from the VP selection process? In general, she acted like a typical presidential nominee—who cared more about appealing to an electoral subgroup than trying to target a particular battleground state, who was responsive to feedback from other members of her party, and who prized personal compatibility as well as electoral strategy. But that doesn’t mean that she made the right choice. The historical record of success in vice presidential selection is rather mixed, and she was denied the usual benefit of having several months after locking up the nomination to gather information and weigh alternatives. But even well-chosen running mates are valuable less for the modest number of voters they might attract than for their ability to share the heavy burden of governing if victory is achieved.

Did Dumping Biden Make the Democrats Un-Democratic? Yes...and No

For the first time since the current presidential nomination system was created in 1972, a candidate who accrued the majority of pledged delegates will not be the nominee of his party. Instead, Democrats will deliver their nomination to a different candidate who entered no primaries and won no delegates.

Some prominent figures have accused the Democratic Party of violating the standards of democracy by jettisoning its presumptive nominee after the end of the primary season. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas charged party leaders with “ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes.” Former ambassador and acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell argued that “undermining democracy should never be condoned.” Tech mogul Elon Musk asked, “Shouldn’t the nominee be decided by a party vote? Democracy etc.” Several critics, including Arizona congressman Paul Gosar, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and venture capitalist David Sacks, referred to Biden as the victim of a successful “coup,” while House speaker Mike Johnson even suggested that Democrats might not be able to legally replace Biden’s name on state general election ballots this fall.

Of course, these dissenters are all Trump supporters, not neutral observers. They are undoubtedly frustrated to watch Biden withdraw from the race just as Republicans had become increasingly confident of defeating him, and have clear partisan motivations for depicting Democrats as acting unfairly or hypocritically.

But self-interested arguments are not necessarily wrong, and in another time (specifically, 1968) it was liberal Democrats who claimed that the nomination of a candidate who didn’t compete in presidential primaries inherently lacked democratic legitimacy. The chaos that ensued in Chicago that year when Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Democratic nominee over the angry objections of anti-Vietnam War activists was the catalyst for the creation of the current nomination system, in which most convention delegates are selected by primary electorates rather than state party leaders. Advocates of nomination reform, which soon spread to both parties, argued that they were replacing a process that was controlled by corrupt insiders and bosses acting in secret smoke-filled rooms with a fairer alternative that was open, egalitarian, and sensitive to the views and interests of regular Americans. More recent attacks by members of the political left on the hypothetical ability of superdelegates to influence Democratic nomination outcomes have similarly been premised on the argument that there’s something fundamentally unfair about party leaders using institutional power to counteract the “will of the people” as measured by the results of primary elections.

If practicing democracy is merely a matter of adopting decision-making procedures that allow for mass participation while constraining the influence of party elites, the post-1968 reformers and the critics of superdelegates could convincingly claim that they were acting to advance democratic values. But, then, so too can today’s conservative detractors who are complaining about the Biden-to-Harris switcheroo. After all, millions of Democratic voters in all 50 states expressed their preference for Biden to be their party’s nominee this year by a lopsided popular margin and an overwhelming landslide in the delegate count. When a coordinated pressure campaign organized by a network of powerful politicians, donors, and strategists succeeds in elbowing such a candidate aside in favor of an alternative nominee whom nobody voted for, an infringement of procedural democracy has indeed occurred. (Biden himself made exactly this argument in a letter to Democratic members of Congress several weeks ago, when the dump-Biden movement was first gaining steam.)

But in practice, Democrats don’t seem to agree that their voices have been unjustly silenced by a nefarious cabal of scheming insiders. According to last week’s New York Times poll, 91 percent of Democratic respondents approve of Biden’s decision to leave the race and 92 percent currently back Harris for president. There is far more evidence of excitement than disillusionment; the self-reported enthusiasm of Democratic supporters has suddenly spiked over the past week, producing parallel surges in financial donations, volunteer activity, and media consumption.

Harris is also a more popular candidate than Biden across the broader electorate, as measured by personal favorability ratings and head-to-head trial heats against Donald Trump. Rank-and-file Republicans and independents don’t share the dissatisfaction with Biden’s departure expressed by Cotton, Grenell, Musk, and company; as the Times recently noted, the view that Biden did the right thing by dropping out is the rare contemporary political belief that unites Americans of all partisan persuasions. The violation of a long-settled procedural norm first adopted in the name of bolstering democratic legitimacy—the deference that the modern nomination process is intended to show to the ballots of primary voters—has thus produced an outcome that has simultaneously energized party members and gained widespread approval in the public at large.

Democratic leaders proved responsive to the changing preferences of the citizenry, measured not just by months-old elections that Biden won without serious opposition but also by more recent polling that showed declining support for the president both inside and outside the Democratic tent. If a party’s decision to cast aside the results of its own primaries is so demonstrably popular—even among many voters who participated in them—while delivering the American electorate a more desirable choice of candidates for the White House, perhaps representative democracy has indeed been served after all.

One of the many lessons we can draw from these unprecedented developments—and, really, from the last decade of American politics—is that strict deference to ostensibly democratic internal party processes like primary elections does not necessarily bolster the health of the nation’s democracy in a larger sense. Our parties bear a responsibility to conduct their operations with a degree of fairness and openness, but they also have the duty to supply Americans with skilled, qualified, and appealing candidates for public office. As critics of the current nomination process have argued, primary voters are not always any better at selecting such leaders than party bosses were in the bygone era of the smoke-filled room. Violating normal procedural practices may sometimes produce substantive outcomes that more closely reflect the interests of citizens both inside and outside the party. Surely, that can also be viewed as a case of democracy in action.

Biden Decides to Drop Out: The View from Political Science

Honest Graft has been on a long hiatus since last year—for good reasons that will be further discussed soon!—and it’s great to be back. Before the last few weeks, it seemed like 2024 might wind up being one of the least eventful national campaigns in recent memory. But now…well, here we are once again in “making history” mode.

Joe Biden’s abrupt decision to leave the presidential race and the imminent choice of a replacement nominee are big topics that will undoubtedly hold our attention for the next few weeks. Unprecedented developments like these aren’t just important because they liven up a long campaign season and provide fascination for easily bored journalists and scholars. By giving us brand new case studies and data, they help us better understand how politics works. So here are a few initial lessons we students of American parties can draw so far from these events. There are surely many more to come.

1. Presidents don’t just exercise power over parties; parties also exercise power over presidents. This is a familiar view among political scientists, but it doesn’t always receive enough acknowledgment by journalists and citizens who often view the president as the center of gravity around which the rest of the political system orbits. We have just witnessed a coalition of congressional party leaders, financial donors, professional strategists, media figures, and party-aligned voters convince a sitting president to abandon a re-election bid in the midst of the campaign season. That’s a very impressive show of influence, and exactly how that influence was brought to bear on Biden will deserve extensive examination for what it tells us about who holds internal power within the party and how they use it. (We’ll discover, I suspect, that Nancy Pelosi continues to be a tremendously important figure in Democratic Party politics; she’ll almsot certainly go down in history as the most important single Democratic figure of the past 25 years—and possibly the last 50 years—who never served as president.)

2. Joe Biden was the first president we’ve had since George H. W. Bush who wasn’t a dominant, charismatic personality. At times, that quality served him well. He didn’t inspire the personal attention—and divisiveness—that each of the last four presidents did, which allowed Americans’ focus in the 2020 and 2022 elections to linger on the vulnerabilities of his Republican opponents. But it also meant that he couldn’t count on a large reservoir of sentimental devotion among Democrats that could protect him once he looked politically vulnerable. Democrats never fell in love with Biden, but they hired him in 2020 because they thought he could do the important job of defeating Trump. Once it looked like he wouldn’t be able to accomplish the same task again this year, it was time to find somebody else who might have a better shot. Joe Biden, as it turned out, would not given the chance to go down in romantically doomed defeat.

3. The perennial number-one fantasy of political media members is to have a contested national convention with genuine uncertainty about the choice of nominee. Coincidentally, that’s also most party leaders’ number-one nightmare. The rapid consolidation of multiple party officials’ and delegates’ support for Kamala Harris as Biden’s replacement over the course of the day, including key members of all major Democratic subgroups from progressives to labor champions to suburban moderates to the Black and Hispanic caucuses, doesn’t mean that these leaders have all suddenly decided that Harris is an amazingly strong candidate—however generous their public praise of her might be. Instead, it reflects the view that the party can’t afford more delay or infighting and that she’s the obvious, broadly acceptable heir apparent. It’s likely that most Democratic insiders privately concede that Harris begins as the underdog in the fight against Trump. But they had begun to worry that renominating Biden might lead to a thoroughly disastrous election in November that would not only cost them the White House but a slew of House and Senate seats as well. If Harris can at least motivate Democratic voters to turn out at high rates and keep the margin close at the top of the ticket, congressional Democrats will feel justified in their decision to push Biden aside in favor of her.