The Midterm Landslide Rejected Trump Without Giving Democrats a Mandate

Jonah Goldberg sees a pattern behind the rapid turnover of power in American politics: parties increasingly campaign to mobilize their most committed supporters, then govern as if they have permission to pursue an all-or-nothing agenda. The result, he argues, is a cycle of narrow coalitions, ambitious governing, voter backlash and another “throw-the-bums-out” election.

The problem is not simply that voters are volatile. The parties have also made themselves easier to reject. Goldberg describes them as “two moon parties”: instead of competing for a broad majority, they cater to their bases and treat winning as an existential necessity. Once in office, they swing for the fences, making it more likely that the next election will deliver a correction.

That strategy is reinforced by the primaries. Goldberg argues that the system established after the McGovern reforms gave parties less control over candidate selection and transferred more influence to primary voters. In his account, those voters are often hostile to their own parties, though more hostile to the opposition. Candidates promising to work across party lines can be punished by party loyalists; candidates who promise to destroy the other side can win nominations. The result, he says, is a choice between “cartoonish figures” that leaves many voters feeling they are choosing the lesser of two evils.

Goldberg illustrated the dynamic with a cartoon of two dogs at a bar. One tells the other, “It’s not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail.” He sees that impulse—to punish the other party rather than produce results—as part of the reason people increasingly call themselves independents. “We have strong partisanship in this country ’cause we have weak parties,” he said. Weak parties, in his view, are easier for demagogues to hijack.

That account helps explain why a decisive result need not mean that voters have signed on to the winning party’s full program. John Cochrane agreed that the election looked like a rejection of the incumbent rather than an affirmative vote for democratic socialism. Many voters, he said, are independents who move between parties. Texas had not necessarily changed its political culture overnight; it had changed which candidates it was willing to elect.

The distinction matters for both parties. Goldberg warned Democrats against reading a large victory as ownership of the voters who produced it. Some voters who backed Democrats this week had voted for Donald Trump three times. Events can change people’s minds, he said, and voters are not permanently assigned to a party.

Cochrane saw the size of the victory as an opening for Democrats to govern from the center. A broad majority would give party leaders more room to assemble coalitions than a razor-thin margin would. But that opening is conditional: Democrats could use their limited congressional power to present thoughtful legislation and show voters how they would govern, or focus instead on investigations and more polarizing proposals.

The panel’s closest historical comparison was the 1974 backlash against Republicans after Watergate. Niall Ferguson said the losses were larger than the familiar midterm reversals of 2006 or 2014, and Goldberg agreed that 1974 was the best analogy available. But the resemblance did not extend to the economic conditions. Ferguson contrasted the present economy with the recession and stagflation of the 1970s, arguing that the election’s scale was striking precisely because the economy was strong by historical standards.

Cochrane pointed to a different explanation: voters’ concerns about corruption, foreign-policy chaos and the cost of living. He welcomed “affordability” as the central political question, even while disputing some of the answers Democrats offered. In his view, voters were focused on whether ordinary Americans could improve their economic prospects—not on identity politics or other cultural conflicts. The political question, he said, was the right one; the proposed remedies might not be.

Bill Whalen countered that economic statistics do not erase the experience of high prices. Voters, he argued, respond to what prices feel like in shops and at the gas pump, not to an explanation of how wages or retirement accounts have performed.

Goldberg and Cochrane both stressed the difference between the rate of inflation and the accumulated rise in prices. Lower inflation means prices are increasing more slowly, not that they have returned to where they were. Goldberg compared it to a heat wave: if temperatures continue to rise, just at a slower rate, people do not feel cooler. Cochrane said economists had too often emphasized the declining rate of inflation while dismissing people’s frustration with the resulting price levels. Average real wages, he noted, do not mean every worker’s wages have kept up.

Goldberg also offered a broader explanation for why economic pressure may feel persistent: more of daily life is organized around subscriptions, with recurring payments that seem to take small bites from income. Trying to isolate affordability, the war, tariffs and corruption as separate issues, he argued, can miss the way voters connect them. For many, these were aspects of a single judgment about Trump.

Ferguson identified policy decisions that, in his view, made the economy politically salient for Republicans. Trump had campaigned on immigration and inflation. His administration had sharply tightened immigration enforcement, but Ferguson argued that aggressive tactics produced a backlash. On trade, he called the “Liberation Day” tariff announcement chaotic and a source of uncertainty. And the war in Iran, he said, became unpopular when it went wrong and the Strait of Hormuz was disrupted.

The tariff decision also changed who voters held responsible for the economy. Goldberg argued that many people had initially regarded the economic problems as inherited from the Biden administration. By announcing sweeping tariffs, Trump effectively declared that the economy was now his responsibility. When conditions disappointed, the political ownership had shifted with it. Goldberg said approval ratings that appeared to fall after the Iran war were already dropping after “Liberation Day.”

The election-night chart shown during the discussion put October job additions at 165,000, against an average of nearly 75,000 a month that year. Ferguson cited those strong employment figures as part of the contrast between the economy and the scale of the Republican loss. The chart did not settle the argument about voters’ economic experience: the panel’s point was that a strong headline picture could coexist with frustration over prices.

The panel disagreed about how much of the rise in fuel costs could be attributed to the war. Cochrane argued that the relationship between the conflict and pump prices was being overstated, and pointed to long-standing constraints on energy supply. Goldberg replied that prices had risen at the same time as the conflict, and that shipping oil through the Strait of Hormuz could become more expensive even if the volume of traffic recovered, because insurance and crew costs had climbed. Cochrane maintained that oil prices and inflation could not be reduced to a single cause.

For Goldberg, those disputes did not displace the election’s central subject. The different complaints—corruption, prices, the war—were bound together by dissatisfaction with Trump. He described them as separate facets reflecting “the image of Donald Trump.” People might not vote on foreign policy in the abstract, he said, but they do notice higher fuel costs and can interpret them as evidence that the president has lost focus.

Republican officials offered competing explanations for the defeat. Whalen contrasted Ron DeSantis’s emphasis on poor administration and the conduct of immigration enforcement, Ted Cruz’s focus on affordability and working-class economic pain, and Vice President JD Vance’s claim that the war was the reason Republicans lost.

Goldberg regarded Vance’s intervention as political positioning rather than a neutral reading of polling. He argued that Vance emphasized Iran and Israel while leaving corruption out of his account, even though corruption ranked highly among voters’ concerns. Goldberg also questioned the implication that Republicans should take their cues from voters opposed to Israel when, as he described it, most Republican voters who had just turned out viewed support for Israel as about right or insufficient.

More broadly, Goldberg said the war argument could not be separated from Trump. He saw Vance trying to become both a leader of the opposition to Trump’s foreign policy and one of Trump’s strongest defenders. That is difficult to sustain, Goldberg said, because voters’ complaints about the war were not necessarily a rejection of foreign involvement in general. He pointed to Republican voters’ acceptance of other foreign-policy actions and rhetoric, including pressure on Venezuela, bullying of allies and talk about Canada and Greenland. In his reading, the objection was less to intervention as a principle than to the way Trump had handled this particular conflict—and to Trump himself.

Goldberg likewise connected the corruption issue to affordability. Voters struggling with costs could resent reports of people in Washington enriching themselves. Whatever the issue on the surface, he argued, the broader impression was of a president who had taken his eye off voters’ concerns.

The consequences may extend beyond the next congressional session. Goldberg said the election had exposed a weakness in the Republican map: Texas, which Republicans had previously been able to treat as safely in their column, had become competitive enough that they would have to spend money there. He thought it remained possible that Texas would vote Republican in a presidential election, but the need to defend it would complicate the party’s route to the presidency.

At the same time, he saw an opening for moderate Democrats. Candidates he described as centrist, including James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas, had performed strongly in red states. In his account, they outperformed more progressive candidates in blue states. If those Democrats could make their party seem less threatening, Goldberg said, it would be hard to see how Republicans could return to a competitive position quickly.

He was not predicting a permanent Democratic majority. Rather, the election showed that voters could move between parties and that electoral strength depended on candidate and message as well as spending. Goldberg pointed to Democratic wins in places where the party had been heavily outspent and argued that money can rent politicians but cannot buy the political system indefinitely. Billionaires in the technology industry, he suggested, had reason to learn that lesson.

The panel’s forecasts for 2027 were bleak, but not unanimous. Cochrane expected investigations and impeachment to dominate, while also arguing that both parties had an incentive to demonstrate that they could govern. Centrist Republicans seeking to take control of their party and more moderate Democrats seeking to hold power could try to show voters that practical legislation was possible.

Cochrane also saw the election as a chance for Republicans to decide what they wanted to be without Trump’s immediate control over the party. With Trump now a lame duck, he argued, his ability to pressure politicians through threats in primaries would diminish. Republicans would have time to develop an appeal to voters interested in practical problems—the “fix the pothole” constituency—if Democrats failed to use their new power wisely.

But that possibility competed with the expectation of institutional conflict. Cochrane said voters might see investigations as appropriate oversight, but warned that a cycle in which the winning party pursues the losing party through the legal system could make future elections more existential. Ferguson likewise cautioned that impeaching Trump again could backfire, comparing the risk to the political effects of earlier legal efforts against him.

Ferguson raised the possibility that Trump might resign before the end of his term, perhaps after claiming a diplomatic success. He saw a Nixon-like pattern in Trump’s political circumstances and thought the president could find Washington increasingly frustrating if investigations consumed the town’s attention. Cochrane suggested that a president whose political allies were abandoning him might consider resignation before facing another impeachment fight. Both treated this as speculation, not a forecast.

For Ferguson, a downturn in the economy could make Trump’s position worse still. He also pointed to voters’ resistance to the alliance between MAGA and Silicon Valley, and to opposition to artificial intelligence and data centers. When asked what the next year would bring, Goldberg offered a bleak prediction: “The living will envy the dead.”

Data centers were a direct test of whether that political resistance would translate into limits on development. Whalen noted that proposals had appeared on ballots 41 times and won only once. Ferguson regarded opposition to the facilities as a potentially serious constraint on AI development, particularly after Democrats gained ground in state legislatures and in Texas. He warned that one major AI-related accident could trigger a regulatory backlash comparable to the political fallout from Three Mile Island, even if the accident were not especially large.

Cochrane rejected the comparison on safety grounds. A nuclear plant carries risks that a room of computer servers does not, he argued. But he agreed that the votes revealed the strength of local opposition to development. Communities were resisting projects over electricity, water and pollution concerns, he said, even when proponents described them as economically valuable and relatively clean.

The disagreement was less about whether resistance existed than about what it would do. Ferguson thought Texas’s shift could matter greatly because of the scale of planned data-center construction there. Cochrane argued that the facilities could be built elsewhere, since their connection to the internet made location flexible. That could reduce the damage to AI development, he said, while leaving intact a broader political lesson: voters may oppose projects in their own communities even when they support economic growth in the abstract.

In the lightning round, Ferguson distinguished Trump’s position after losing control of the legislature from Benjamin Netanyahu’s effort to assemble a governing coalition. Netanyahu’s task, he said, was more tractable: a parliamentary leader needs to find enough votes to remain in power. Trump, by contrast, would have little domestic room to maneuver and had limited experience with bipartisan government. Cochrane agreed that Trump was now a particularly weak lame duck, while noting that the presidency still carried substantial executive and foreign-policy power. The constraint, in his view, was not a lack of tools so much as the administration’s tendency toward chaos.

On Brazil, Ferguson said conservative voters had had a chance to defeat Lula but backed the wrong candidate in Flávio Bolsonaro. Cochrane emphasized a different contrast: an American party can lose an election, regroup and try again. He argued that the election had undercut claims that American democracy was on the verge of collapse. At the same time, he worried about the growing use of investigations and legal proceedings against political opponents in both countries. If losing an election means facing the courts, he said, politicians have stronger incentives to do whatever it takes not to lose.

A separate exchange asked whether Elon Musk’s offer to give American children shares of SpaceX could help secure Social Security. Cochrane dismissed that connection. A single share would not fund a retirement, and the proposal was not a transition from pay-as-you-go Social Security to a savings-based system. He described it instead as economic populism, separate from the larger changes to retirement and investment policy he thought necessary.

The discussion of Americans who moved to Europe and regretted it returned to the gap between personal impressions and average living standards. Ferguson said the difference between the United States and Western Europe had become more apparent over the nearly 25 years he had lived between them. Americans visiting London, Paris or Florence might mistake affluent tourist districts for the whole of Europe, he argued; life in provincial Britain, France or southern Italy could give a different impression.

Cochrane made a similar distinction between appealing destinations and ordinary material conditions. Americans may admire European cafés while overlooking the financial circumstances of the people working in them, he said. He contrasted American complaints about the price of a three-bedroom house with European concerns about affording a two-bedroom apartment, and described air conditioning and washing machines as ordinary expectations in the United States but less common across Europe.

The final exchange turned to Britain’s Remembrance Day. Ferguson explained that the November 11 observance commemorates those killed in the World Wars and traces back to the armistice ending the First World War at 11 a.m. on November 11. He planned to take his son to a school service honoring former pupils who had died. Remembering that the soldiers were often little older than the children attending such services, he said, was part of the occasion’s importance. For Ferguson, whose grandfather served in the First World War, the poppy and the ceremony were also personal.

Cochrane said Americans often failed to appreciate the scale of the losses suffered by Britain, France and Germany. The service, in Ferguson’s account, made that history tangible: it asked children to see the dead not as distant figures, but as young people whose lives were close to their own.