There is, at this writing, a better-than-even chance that Democrats will recapture the House of Representatives. They also have a shot at the Senate. If either or both happens, Democrats will declare victory. That’s fair.

They will claim a mandate. They will describe their win as vindication of their candidates and their ideas. Unfair. And dumb.

About “mandate” and “vindication”: As Inigo Montoya famously says in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

To be fair to the future probably-victorious Democrats of mid-November 2026, both parties overstate the extent to which voters want them to aggressively promulgate their policy agenda. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump declared after winning the 2024 election after winning 49.7% of the popular vote. Biden claimed “a mandate for action” while the 2020 votes were still being counted. “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” George W. Bush said after earning 51% of the vote in 2004—four years after the Supreme Court installed him in a judicial coup d’état and while his Iraq War was spinning out of control.

Victory is usually clear-cut. Mandates and endorsements are ambiguous—especially in a two-party system like ours.

“We really don’t know why voters cast their ballots,” Julia Azari, author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate,” told NPR. “And one thing we do know about elections, and it’s very much true in 2024, is that elections seem to be kind of a broad referendum on the status quo.”

She left out an important qualifier. Figuring out why people vote the way they do is especially hard in a two-party system. In a multiparty representative democracy—there are 80 to 90 of them, far more common than our unusual duopoly—it is much easier to discern what people want. In a parliamentary system, left libertarians and animal rights activists and nativist nationalists don’t have to choose between non-voting and voting for a party they barely agree with. Whatever you believe, there’s probably a party for that.

Where there are only two choices on the ballot, it is impossible for most citizens to select a party with whom they mostly agree. People vote for the party they disagree with least. Or they vote against the party they disagree with most—in 2024, most Kamala Harris voters voted against Trump more than they voted for her. Or they don’t vote. Restrictive two-party setups like ours have lower voter turnout than multiparty systems.

Strategic voting is also a thing in multiparty democracies. French leftists and liberals routinely turn out for centrist candidates in order to fend off the far right in the second round of presidential elections. But it’s sporadic and specific to circumstances.

Americans routinely cast anti-ballots because they hate the other party more, a phenomenon social scientists call “affective polarization.” Studies show that incumbent candidates are far likelier to be the target of negative voting than challengers.

It is hardly surprising that a challenging party or candidate would claim a sweeping electoral mandate. In the U.S., however, that ignores reality. More often than not, the number of negative voters exceeds the margin of victory in a given race. A successful candidate can and perhaps should interpret his win as a rejection of his opponent. He cannot and should not claim a mandate.

Misinterpreting voters’ intent is a major contributing factor to our toxic political culture. Yet it is rarely discussed or analyzed. In a two-party system, disgruntled voters have only one way to express their anger at the polls: voting against the incumbent for a challenger who will become the next incumbent to be voted against, and on and on and on. We’re trying to send a message. We wind up flailing like a dying fish.

Such a system serves the two parties. Defeat and exile are temporary. Sooner rather than later, the party out of power returns to majority rule. Voters, on the other hand, are perpetually dissatisfied because, first and foremost, they are never heard. Historically, representative democracies have failed when autocrats could make a credible case that traditional parties were unable and unwilling to address citizens’ concerns.

If Democrats win the 2026 midterms, they will have to contend with their lack of a veto-proof majority as well as a hostile president and Supreme Court. With gridlock the likely order of the day for the next couple of years, Democrats would be wise to frame whatever victories they achieve as a repudiation of Trumpism, and nothing more.

Polls clearly show that Americans disapprove of the Republicans’ handling of the economy, healthcare, and execution of mass deportations. Those are opportunities. If Democrats concentrate on those issues, and resist the temptation to overreach on transgender rights, affirmative action and other identity-politics agenda items, they can set the stage for a reset. Knowing the Dems, of course, they’ll mess this up too.

(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 John Kiriakou.”)