In our 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, Ruy Teixeira and I argued that if Democrats continued to gain middle-class professionals and the growing minority vote, while maintaining sufficient support—we estimated 40 percent—among the white working class, they could rebuild the enduring majority they enjoyed between 1932 to 1968. Since the collapse of that majority, American politics has been on a teeter-totter where it has not had a dominant party. One party has held control of the presidency and both houses of Congress for only fourteen of the last forty-six years. Since the 2008 election, power has changed hands in one of these three centers of power in every biennial election. Power has been elusive. The electorate has been volatile. In that sense, the 2026 midterms were not unusual.
But in another respect, they were unusual—and we should therefore ask again whether a new Democratic majority is on the horizon. Since 1954, both chambers have changed hands in an election only three times: in 1994, 2006, and 2026. The 1994 election completed the realignment of the South to the Republicans, which had been delayed by Watergate. That realignment had a lasting impact on the electoral map: The automatic Democratic hold on seats in Southern states was gone. In 2006, the backlash to George W. Bush’s disastrous foreign policy adventures set up Democrats to further press their advantage in 2008, but most of those gains were wiped out in the 2010 midterms. It was back to the teeter-totter.
Does this week’s midterm result more closely resemble 1994 or 2006? I think the answer is obvious. The Democrats would have probably picked up seats if a different Republican had been president, but it was Donald Trump’s performance in office that triggered the tsunami that has engulfed his party. In 2016 and 2024, Trump ran and won on a program that included securing America’s border while deporting those who had committed crimes; using tariffs and tax expenditures to revive American manufacturing; “draining the swamp”; eliminating the excesses of what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently called “Woke 1.0”; ending (not starting) “forever wars”; and “drill baby drill” to push down oil prices. But the law-and-order appeal of Trump’s immigration approach has been clouded by ICE’s killing of Americans. Instead of a coherent plan to revive manufacturing, we have an arbitrary and erratic tariff regime. Instead of draining the swamp, Trump has overseen the spread of corruption. The list goes on.