Trump’s three presidential campaigns were contests between establishment and insurgent, steadfastness versus change, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” against “burn it all down.”
Trump did not offer new ideas. Rather, the vagueness of MAGA and America First promised an idea-generation machine powered by a pair of nationalist principles. The implicit pledge that anything would be possible was reinforced in his second term by out-of-the-box personnel picks like Gabbard and Kennedy.
Intellectually exhausted, in permanent defense mode, and paralyzed by the internal contradiction between their New Deal history and their Clintonite present, Democrats tacitly conceded the framing to the opposition. 2016, 2020, and 2024 were referenda about Trump.
Liberals took comfort in Biden’s win, failing to recognize that COVID was a black swan moment, that Trump’s weird disavowal of Operation Warp Speed was political suicide, and that “nothing will fundamentally change” is not an appealing campaign message under normal circumstances.
Yet here we are, ten years into this current political drama, and Democrats are entering the midterms with one repeatedly failed message—we’re not Trump—and one predicated on faulty assumptions: Black and Latino voters will be so angry about GOP efforts to disenfranchise them via gerrymandering that they will turn out in record numbers for Democrats.
About those assumptions: Latinos are no longer a majority Democratic voting bloc and probably never were. Blacks were, but are far less likely to support Democrats nearly unanimously as they have done historically. These days, it turns out, minority voters (and everyone else) often stay home unless something exciting—Obama, Black Lives Matter—compels them to head out to their local school gymnasium or firehouse to cast votes that, individually, as everyone knows, cannot make a difference.
Stupidity by people who seem smart enough to know better—when that stupidity is unmistakable, avoidable, yet repeated, and then repeated again!—fascinates me. How can it be that the Democrats are once again arriving at the field of battle without having prepared a set of policy prescriptions tailored to this moment, as well as a poll-tested messaging campaign to promote it?
The fact that they keep doing this—or, more accurately, not doing what they should be doing—suggests that they have not suffered enough from previous iterations of this misjudgment for the lesson to stick. What happens to individual Democrats who lose elections in a two-party system, after all, is less than awful. They while away their wilderness years in academia and the media until, inevitably, they return or someone close to them returns and hooks them up with some sinecure. Meanwhile, the party apparatus fundraises as an opposition unaccountable for either the outrages of the incumbents or those of its own past, cuz ahistoricity.
Punishment this fall, such as it will be, will probably see Republicans overperforming but losing the House—i.e., beating the spread. Because they won, Democrats will say, and privately believe, that the results reflect voter approval and thus validate running against Trump. This will be a repeat of the error of 2020. Winning a majority while throwing away a chance at a supermajority is political malpractice.
Given their vast experience, donor base, and media alliances, corporate Democrats have no excuse for their lack of imagination. That’s just as true of Trump’s MAGA movement; with nothing to lose, their pariah status ought to have freed them from establishment encumbrances. They had the chance to make good on their vision of a Republican Party opposed to foreign wars, dedicated to adding American jobs by leveraging our consumer base, and repealing and replacing Obamacare. They have instead succumbed to the siren calls of militarism, Zionism, and transnationalism, betraying their base and the country at large.
So 2026 has become a contest no longer between a party bereft of ideas and one offering the possibility of future ideas, but between a party bereft of ideas and one with no credible argument to make concerning future ideas.
Happy 250th.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)
