7 Reasons Democrats Should Be Optimistic About Their Chances in 2026 and 2028

A guest post by Wally Nowinski.

The 2006 House election result

I’m pretty much finished with my election post-mortems, though I plan to return to those themes intermittently over the next few years. But before I move on, I wanted to do a more optimistic post looking ahead to the political future. Yes, Democrats screwed this one up very badly, and there’s a huge amount that they have to fix if they’re going to be competitive in the future. But I think that’s very doable — in fact, they’ve done it before. The pendulum of American politics always swings back.

So I thought I’d get my friend Wally Nowinski to write about the future of the Democrats. Wally Nowinski is a political risk consultant and co-founder of FTW PAC, who tweets at @nowooski. He’s a diehard Democrat, but also a vocal critic of the excesses of progressivism. He has written two excellent guest posts for me before — the first about how big environmentalist groups are blocking action on climate change (something that’s now common knowledge), and the second about how high-turnout elections are now bad for the Democrats. The latter proved to be extremely prescient last week. We should all probably listen to Wally more.

Anyway, in this post, Wally explains why he thinks the Democrats are well-positioned to bounce back from their big 2024 loss — as long as they make the right moves.

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The second election of Donald Trump is clearly bad news for Democrats. Trump energized millions of low-propensity voters and mobilized a new, multi-racial MAGA coalition. The liberal dream of an “emerging Democratic majority” composed of white college grads and people of color is gone. But the electoral prospects for the Democratic Party are brighter than you might imagine.

Democrats will spend the coming weeks and months trying to figure out exactly how to rehabilitate the party’s image, but if past elections are any guide, the main thing they need to do is sit tight and wait for Trump and the Republicans to overplay their hand. I believe Democrats would be more successful in appealing to working class voters if they moderate their image on public safety, and abandon the progressive obsession with identity politics. But whether or not they take my advice, there are many structural reasons for the party to be optimistic about its electoral chances in 2026 and 2028. 

1. Turnout will be lower, and that’s good news for Democrats. 

The old conventional wisdom that high turnout is good for Democrats isn’t true anymore. 

In a phenomenon I wrote about earlier this year, Trump has realigned American politics and attracted millions of low-propensity voters to his coalition while alienating the people most likely to vote: white college graduates. This tradeoff works for Republicans to an extent when Trump is on the ballot, but it falls apart when he’s not. 

The Harris campaign actually got more votes than Biden in several key swing states. In Wisconsin, she got 37,000 more votes than Biden. In Georgia, she got 70,000 more votes. And she ran 4,000 votes ahead of Biden in North Carolina. But these states all saw record voter turnout, and Trump improved on his 2020 performance by 66,000 votes in Wisconsin, 187,000 in Georgia and 119,000 in North Carolina, easily surpassing Harris’ gains. 

But the millions of low-propensity voters that Trump energizes turn out for him and him alone. One of the reasons Democrats won competitive Senate seats in four swing states Trump carried this year is that hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters voted for him, and didn’t even bother to cast a ballot for the Republican Senate candidate. 

Trump’s low-propensity supporters didn’t show up to the polls in 2018, when Democrats took the House. They didn’t show up in 2022, allowing Democrats to hold the Senate during a difficult midterm. And there is no reason to believe they will show up in the 2026 midterms when turnout is generally much lower. 

2. If there’s a Trump 2.0, they haven’t emerged yet. 

Trump has dominated Republican politics for 12 years, but he is about to be a lame duck with no clear successor who can drive turnout. Many Republican politicians have tried to emulate Trump’s style or policy agenda, but they have largely failed to excite voters in the same way. 

The Trumpiest GOP Senate Candidate on the ballot this year, Kari Lake, managed to underperform Trump himself by five points in Arizona, losing her second state-wide election. Many Silicon Valley Republicans are hoping that JD Vance will emerge as an effective successor to Trump, but I’m skeptical that Vance has the charisma to build a cult of personality in the same way Trump managed. The MAGA coalition relies on high turnout to succeed. If Republicans can’t find someone else who can replicate the Trump excitement, they will struggle to mobilize the MAGA coalition in 2028. 

3. Democrats will benefit from thermostatic public opinion. 

One of the most predictable trends in politics is that the American public turns against the party in power. When Democrats hold the White House and enact liberal policies, public opinion reliably becomes more conservative. When Republicans are in power and pursue a conservative agenda, public opinion moves left. The reason for this is that for all we hear about voters wanting dramatic change, the electorate is actually fairly small-c conservative and reliably punishes the governing party for big policy changes. 

With Republicans in control of all branches of government, this trend will benefit Democrats in 2026. 

4.Republicans will overreach and pursue unpopular policies. 

Trump made a lot of promises during the campaign–some of them contradictory–so I’m not going to try and guess which ones he will actually try to follow through on. But between his pledges to abolish all income taxes, repeal Obamacare, or propose an Elon Musk-led plan to slash the size of government right before the midterms, I think it’s safe to assume that Trump and the Republicans will overplay their hand and face a backlash over one or more major initiatives or nominees.

This is likely to play out like George W. Bush’s failed attempt to privatize Social Security or the many unsuccessful efforts to repeal Obamacare during Trump’s first term. It will drive unfavorable news cycles, get vulnerable Republican members of Congress on the record with toxic votes, and give Democrats real-word policies to organize against and campaign around. 

5. Trump’s tax policies will force him to choose between high interest rates or higher inflation.  

Trump has promised to spend a lot of money. His planned budget-busting agenda of expanded tax cuts would come at a time when the deficit is already high, putting upward pressure on interest rates, and keeping mortgages and auto loans expensive relative to recent memory. Indeed, as Trump's odds of winning the election increased throughout October, so did interest rates on treasuries and mortgages. Already, as of Nov. 12, the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage is back above 7% after declining most of the summer.   

Average 30 Yr. Fixed mortgage rate via Mortgage News Daily. 

As Noah wrote, Trump could try to deal with this problem by putting political pressure on the Fed to lower rates. But if successful, this would be inflationary. 

The economic environment of 2025 isn’t the same as it was in 2017. If Trump wants to follow through on his promised tax cuts, he is going to have to choose between two electorally toxic options: higher inflation or high interest rates. 

6. Social Security will be more salient by 2028.

Part of Trump’s political success came from disavowing the traditional Republican commitment to cutting Social Security benefits. While moderating on entitlements helped Trump make headway with working class voters, Republicans are not going to enjoy that same advantage in 2028. 

Under current law, there will be automatic cuts to Social Security benefits in 2033 according to the latest government projections. Those cuts will come even sooner if Trump succeeds in slashing taxes on Social Security benefits and tips, as he has promised. 

This looming financial cliff will likely make Social Security a central issue in the 2028 campaign. Without congressional action, the  typical couple receiving Social Security will be looking at a $16,500 reduction in yearly benefits. The threat of cuts that steep could force a split in the Republican coalition between its working-class populist and tax-cutting wings. 

7. Democrats will do a better job disavowing the activists on the fringe (maybe). 

Democrats spent the Trump era trying to paper over intra-party disagreements in the hope of holding their coalition together. Now that the coalition has lost an election where many more voters saw Harris as too liberal than saw Trump as too conservative, there will be a push for reform and realignment. There’s a growing consensus among elected Democrats that a failure to aggressively distance the party from activist demands, like gender reassignment surgery for migrants, or firmly reject academic word games like “Latinx” and “BIPOC,” tarnished the party’s brand in the eyes of moderate voters and provided ammo for devastating negative ads.  

I don’t know what the new Democratic coalition will look like, but if it’s pragmatic, its leadership will push back on unpopular fringe demands and do whatever it can to prevent the next “Defund the Police” debacle. 

The morning after

Despite a narrow but devastating loss in 2024, Democrats will have the wind at their back for the next four years. That’s helped along by one of the most consistent trends in American politics: People don’t like the party in power. Republicans have a razor thin margin in the House and Democrats are already heavy favorites on betting markets to take the chamber in 2026. If the party moderates its image and capitalizes on Trump’s screwups, they should be well positioned to take back the White House in 2028, too. 

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