Voters gave Democrats a mammoth victory in the 2026 midterm elections. But Americans didn’t vote for Democrats. They voted against President Donald Trump and the toady Republicans running in dozens of key races. Any Democrat who suddenly thinks his party is beloved should look in the mirror and repeat to himself, “We still suck.”
Trump is a uniquely bad incumbent whose policies are worse than nothing. His idiotic Iran war and his foolish tariffs raised prices when inflation was already too high. He’s openly disdainful of hard-working people struggling to fill their tanks and put food on the table. He deserved this drubbing.
But Trump is also just the latest in a growing list of incumbent politicians who can’t get the job done. Voters empowering Democrats in 2026 rejected the same Democrats in 2024, a repudiation of Joe Biden’s presidency. Voters booted the incumbent Trump and his fellow Republicans in 2020 and the incumbent Democrats in 2016. In midterm elections, the incumbent party holding the White House has suffered major losses every cycle since 2006.
What voters are really saying is this: Get rid of the incumbents.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with incumbents. But for the last 20 years or so, voters have expected the people they elect to solve serious problems. Their elected leaders keep failing. So voters get disgusted and throw the bums out. Since we only have two political parties, it’s a depressing loser’s bracket rerun with Democrats and Republicans simply switching places every two or four years.
Here are the fundamental problems voters want their leaders to solve:
Health care is too expensive
Child care is too expensive
Living standards are stagnant for too many people
The technology economy is benefiting too few at the expense of too many
Federal spending is out of control
We have more problems than that, but if any administration could solve just one of them—just one!—it would be revolutionary.
Democrats think they have solutions, and they’ll be highlighting many of them now that they’ll have control of Congress and the legislative agenda for the next two years. They’ll pass legislation restoring health care subsidies that lapsed in 2025 and undo benefit cuts Republicans passed as part of their landmark tax-cut package. They’ll propose new ways to regulate artificial intelligence and maybe tap some of the huge profits for the public good.
[10 ways the Trump economy has failed]
That won’t be nearly enough. Trump will veto any partisan legislation, needless to say. But more than that, these are very tough problems to solve and Democrats don’t agree among themselves on how to do it. At the most basic level, liberal Democrats want massive tax hikes on the wealthy and more government control over everything, while moderate Democrats want to let capitalism do what it’s good at and tinker at the margins.
What the Democrats sorely lack is a convincing leader able to wrangle the party’s various factions into some kind of unified force that can actually move the needle in a way Americans will notice. The last Democratic leader to do this was President Barack Obama. The Affordable Care Act that he signed into law in 2010—aka Obamacare—was a huge political lift requiring mind-numbing levels of compromise with industry, professional groups, and the whole Democratic spectrum. It was unpopular at first, because of Obama’s own mistakes and constant vilification by Republicans. But it did in fact help millions of additional people get health care, and the law is popular now.
There is no Obama now—no ostensible leader of the Democratic Party. It surely isn’t Sen. Chuck Schumer, the gasbaggy 75-year-old due to become Senate Majority Leader again next year. He’s a shrewd parliamentarian but nobody under 50 can relate to him. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the incoming House Speaker, is unproven, relatively reserved, and more of a behind-the-scenes manager than the next Nancy Pelosi.
The 2028 presidential election will test whether Democrats can field a leader able to focus their fractious party on a mission to solve Really Big Problems. This is not the place to handicap 20 or 40 presidential hopefuls, as much of the political media is already doing. But there are some characteristics the next leader of the Democratic Party must have if the party hopes to accomplish anything more than just a temporary changing of the guard. Here are four:
1. Avoid Joe Biden’s grab-bag approach of taking up every priority of every Democrat in order to appease identity groups, union members, climate activists, the business lobby, migrant advocates, and everybody else banging on the White House door. Biden tried to represent everybody and in the end appeared to stand for nothing.
[It’s time to revise the American Dream]
2. Choose a very small number of top priorities and devote everything to addressing those. I’d pick health care, housing affordability, and thoughtful technology regulation. You could still pursue green energy goals, immigration reform, and other important things, but these should be handled on the sidelines because voters won’t care unless you give them some deliverables first.
3. Be relentlessly pragmatic. This is a lot harder than it sounds. You can favor pragmatic solutions, but actually getting them done requires ruthless politicking and intense discipline. If Democrats do win the White House in 2028, they’ll have a very short two years to get something done. Make it something that matters and say no to every other agenda.
4. Tell the truth about fiscal constraints. It’s time for political candidates to start taking the risk of telling voters they can’t have everything. Sure, Congress can raise taxes on the wealthy. But that alone won’t solve the big problems and it could cause new problems if it spooks markets. Social Security and Medicare reform aren’t yet urgently necessary, but the time is coming and the next president could be the one who has to deal with it.
Democrats do have a remarkable opportunity to use the next two years to highlight the corruption and incompetence of the Trump administration. If they minimize internal bickering and focus on what’s most important to voters, they’ll have a good shot at winning the White House in 2028. But the party needs a gifted general who can ready the troops for a singular mission. If Democrats seize power but fail to deliver, they’ll be just another set of incumbents who failed voters and suffered the consequences.
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