Now Dems gotta frickin' DELIVER. They'll need to pass an anti-corruption bill banning stock and crypto trading by elected officials. And dare Trump to veto it.
They need to undo the GOP's 50% cuts to both SNAP and Medicaid. As well as reinstating the Obamacare subsidies--hopefully *before* health insurance for the 90% skyrockets too much, and the 300 hospitals already in the red go belly up and close. Again, just dare Trump to veto it.
And they need to at least put a brake on Trump2 family corruption.
And continue pushing hard for release of the Epstein files. Taxing the very rich and corporations at pre-Reagan levels will likely have to wait for 2029 and a trifecta.
You won’t like what I have to say but what the GOP cuts were, were Covid increases by Biden that have caused our fiscal nightmare. We are no longer in a Covid emergency. We never were. There is no limit to how much more debt Democrats are willing to put on our children. We have SS and Medicare insolvency to deal with. A two trillion dollar deficit that keeps growing our debt. High interest rates will persist unless we deal with it. It won’t be solve by solely taxing the rich. But hey if that is the road they go down our economy will only get worse
This is great. I watched from abroad and had trouble sleeping as updates popped through the night.
I don't think the Democrats will have quite the pathology you worry about.
I don't think they will be punished if, for example, the US decides NOT to veto a UN resolution against Israel.
I also think that Aldi in Montana is an object lesson in being objective oriented as opposed to being ideologically pure.
The Democrats also will have enough of a cushion that 2 or 3 senators can vote with Republicans if a bad individual vote would lose the South Carolina seat.
I just landed in Japan. A staff member at the airport was looking at my phone for the online customs form, but then he saw my election results tab and asked me to switch to that instead!
The whole world was watching to see if we would elect embarrassing loonies.
Noah was doing pretty well up until the next to last paragraph. Palestine and affordability for US consumers are not exclusive issues for starters. And polling is rather clear that a majority of US citizens support ending aid to Israel and view what is happening and has happened in Palestine as a genocide. Whether the Democrats choose to address Americans’ concerns about healthcare by just shoveling more money into the existing system is a question worth asking. But polling also suggests that Americans aren’t happy with the current system, and they definitely aren’t happy with the cuts to Medicaid and to medical research that the Republican Congress and the White House have enacted. So reversing those would likely prove to be popular. If Noah wants to call that throwing more money at healthcare that’s his prerogative. On price controls and a billionaire tax, there’s no clear sign that the Democratic coalition elected to Congress agrees on any of that. There are bound to be debates within the coalition as they hash out how to respond to these issues. Hopefully, centrists don’t point to that debate and disagreement as signs of “Disarray among Democrats” or some such framing.
One problem that the Dems now face, though, is that they cannot actually DO much with their majorities, at least if you're talking about the stuff normal people care about. They can pass legislation in the House, but unless they end the filibuster, they can't even follow up in the Senate. And ending the filibuster won't solve the problem because Trump can veto, and they do not have the votes to override.
That's not to say there is no advantage to having yesterday's victory. They can launch investigations and they can block asinine nominations, including to SCOTUS. But the snag is that these are not the things that will make normal voters say, "Hey, these Dems get things done. They're solving on our problems."
All of which makes me think that the Dems' greatest opportunities will be at the state level. What will normal people in Pennsylvania experience over the next few years, now that the Dems hold a trifecta there? Ditto Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. And Georgia, Iowa, Texas, Ohio and Nevada with new blue governors.
Democrats have long focused on the national level, largely because they believe that the feds are the good guys, coming to the rescue against all injustices. (I hope that Trump, if nothing else, has succeeded in denting that misconception.) But most of what Dems can actually do for voters in the next two years will be at the state level, and they will need to do, or history is going to record November '26 as just a continuation of voters preferring the devil they don't know to the one they do.
One does hope that the repudiation of Fringe Factionalist logic (no swing voters, ignoring the reality of shifts in voting, the self-deceiving talk of "bases") takes hold although it seems to me the very badly designed primaries system needs a structural fixing to undo the faux-democracy where tiny factions sieze control of party aparatus.
I fully endorse this post and expect the whiplash of stupidity to continue until we have primary reform, reform the pardon power, redo the presidential immunity case, and a whole bunch of other things. But today, just enjoy a brief whiff of sanity.
Democrats Insependents and Republicans sent a message. That message was to Trump. It said stop. Trump however is still President and has a veto. Neither the HOUSE OR senate is veto proof.
Trump has bad ideas, doesn’t understand how business works beyond real estate.
Will he go quietly, manage his two years sanely? I doubt it.
He will ignore problems, as will Democrats. Our fiscal issues will persist, interest rates will remain high, and SS and Medicare insolvency won’t be touched.
As for the war? Simply leaving will be popular but the consequences of doing so will not effect oil prices in the short term. Iran will keep them high. Our allies will feel abandoned. The world is a mess. It’s not going to be an easy road and my fear is Noah’s. The crazy Democrats will force the party into doing crazy things. Time will tell
If the US abandons its Iran misadventure, the gulf countries will figure out how to deal with Iranian (and Omani) control of the straight. Transport costs will be a bit higher from the tolls, but oil and gas (and other things) will flow relatively freely and reliably. Things will get blown up occasionally (especially by the Houthies), but the chaos will be manageable.
Oh, and Iran probably gets nukes eventually.
That's where this ends. It's just a matter of how long it takes for the US to figure this out and accept how much of a disaster Trump has caused here.
Saudi Arabia gets nukes; Turkey does as well. Does Iran drop one on Israel? We don’t really no. The US allies in the rest of the world who have depended on the US nuclear umbrella will be told we are unreliable because we no longer have the will. South Korea and Japan get nukes. Will that make the world safer? Every cowboy having a gun didn’t make gun fights non-existent. Your simplistic assessment is because you truly believe it is that easy. You may not have lived long enough to realize nothing is that simple.
I don't think any of this makes the world safer or is simple or will be easy for anyone. That train has left the station. Safer would have been to stick with Obama's Iran deal, flawed as it was. Safer would have been to not put the Iranian regime under existential threat so they had nothing to lose and could bet on the longshot of closing the straight and bombing their neighbors.
The US has prevented the gulf states from negotiating with Iran and making deals they think that are in their best interest for like 50 years and it looks like that's about to change.
None of us really knows exactly how this plays out, but the middle powers of the region seem to be trying to set aside their differences and negotiating with Tehran to find a way to live together. We got a preview of how this could work when Trump signed his last deal with Iran. The gulf states were willing to pay a toll in exchange for some assurances on safe transport. Trump skuttled that uneasy peace so we didn't get to see how durable it could be.
It looks like we're about to see round 2 of this assuming the US can be talked into ending the blockade, which seems very likely now.
Now Dems gotta frickin' DELIVER. They'll need to pass an anti-corruption bill banning stock and crypto trading by elected officials. And dare Trump to veto it.
They need to undo the GOP's 50% cuts to both SNAP and Medicaid. As well as reinstating the Obamacare subsidies--hopefully *before* health insurance for the 90% skyrockets too much, and the 300 hospitals already in the red go belly up and close. Again, just dare Trump to veto it.
And they need to at least put a brake on Trump2 family corruption.
And continue pushing hard for release of the Epstein files. Taxing the very rich and corporations at pre-Reagan levels will likely have to wait for 2029 and a trifecta.
Lots of work ahead.
You won’t like what I have to say but what the GOP cuts were, were Covid increases by Biden that have caused our fiscal nightmare. We are no longer in a Covid emergency. We never were. There is no limit to how much more debt Democrats are willing to put on our children. We have SS and Medicare insolvency to deal with. A two trillion dollar deficit that keeps growing our debt. High interest rates will persist unless we deal with it. It won’t be solve by solely taxing the rich. But hey if that is the road they go down our economy will only get worse
This is great. I watched from abroad and had trouble sleeping as updates popped through the night.
I don't think the Democrats will have quite the pathology you worry about.
I don't think they will be punished if, for example, the US decides NOT to veto a UN resolution against Israel.
I also think that Aldi in Montana is an object lesson in being objective oriented as opposed to being ideologically pure.
The Democrats also will have enough of a cushion that 2 or 3 senators can vote with Republicans if a bad individual vote would lose the South Carolina seat.
I just landed in Japan. A staff member at the airport was looking at my phone for the online customs form, but then he saw my election results tab and asked me to switch to that instead!
The whole world was watching to see if we would elect embarrassing loonies.
Noah was doing pretty well up until the next to last paragraph. Palestine and affordability for US consumers are not exclusive issues for starters. And polling is rather clear that a majority of US citizens support ending aid to Israel and view what is happening and has happened in Palestine as a genocide. Whether the Democrats choose to address Americans’ concerns about healthcare by just shoveling more money into the existing system is a question worth asking. But polling also suggests that Americans aren’t happy with the current system, and they definitely aren’t happy with the cuts to Medicaid and to medical research that the Republican Congress and the White House have enacted. So reversing those would likely prove to be popular. If Noah wants to call that throwing more money at healthcare that’s his prerogative. On price controls and a billionaire tax, there’s no clear sign that the Democratic coalition elected to Congress agrees on any of that. There are bound to be debates within the coalition as they hash out how to respond to these issues. Hopefully, centrists don’t point to that debate and disagreement as signs of “Disarray among Democrats” or some such framing.
A wise piece, Noah. We can only hope.
One problem that the Dems now face, though, is that they cannot actually DO much with their majorities, at least if you're talking about the stuff normal people care about. They can pass legislation in the House, but unless they end the filibuster, they can't even follow up in the Senate. And ending the filibuster won't solve the problem because Trump can veto, and they do not have the votes to override.
That's not to say there is no advantage to having yesterday's victory. They can launch investigations and they can block asinine nominations, including to SCOTUS. But the snag is that these are not the things that will make normal voters say, "Hey, these Dems get things done. They're solving on our problems."
All of which makes me think that the Dems' greatest opportunities will be at the state level. What will normal people in Pennsylvania experience over the next few years, now that the Dems hold a trifecta there? Ditto Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. And Georgia, Iowa, Texas, Ohio and Nevada with new blue governors.
Democrats have long focused on the national level, largely because they believe that the feds are the good guys, coming to the rescue against all injustices. (I hope that Trump, if nothing else, has succeeded in denting that misconception.) But most of what Dems can actually do for voters in the next two years will be at the state level, and they will need to do, or history is going to record November '26 as just a continuation of voters preferring the devil they don't know to the one they do.
One does hope that the repudiation of Fringe Factionalist logic (no swing voters, ignoring the reality of shifts in voting, the self-deceiving talk of "bases") takes hold although it seems to me the very badly designed primaries system needs a structural fixing to undo the faux-democracy where tiny factions sieze control of party aparatus.
I fully endorse this post and expect the whiplash of stupidity to continue until we have primary reform, reform the pardon power, redo the presidential immunity case, and a whole bunch of other things. But today, just enjoy a brief whiff of sanity.
Democrats Insependents and Republicans sent a message. That message was to Trump. It said stop. Trump however is still President and has a veto. Neither the HOUSE OR senate is veto proof.
Trump has bad ideas, doesn’t understand how business works beyond real estate.
Will he go quietly, manage his two years sanely? I doubt it.
He will ignore problems, as will Democrats. Our fiscal issues will persist, interest rates will remain high, and SS and Medicare insolvency won’t be touched.
As for the war? Simply leaving will be popular but the consequences of doing so will not effect oil prices in the short term. Iran will keep them high. Our allies will feel abandoned. The world is a mess. It’s not going to be an easy road and my fear is Noah’s. The crazy Democrats will force the party into doing crazy things. Time will tell
If the US abandons its Iran misadventure, the gulf countries will figure out how to deal with Iranian (and Omani) control of the straight. Transport costs will be a bit higher from the tolls, but oil and gas (and other things) will flow relatively freely and reliably. Things will get blown up occasionally (especially by the Houthies), but the chaos will be manageable.
Oh, and Iran probably gets nukes eventually.
That's where this ends. It's just a matter of how long it takes for the US to figure this out and accept how much of a disaster Trump has caused here.
Saudi Arabia gets nukes; Turkey does as well. Does Iran drop one on Israel? We don’t really no. The US allies in the rest of the world who have depended on the US nuclear umbrella will be told we are unreliable because we no longer have the will. South Korea and Japan get nukes. Will that make the world safer? Every cowboy having a gun didn’t make gun fights non-existent. Your simplistic assessment is because you truly believe it is that easy. You may not have lived long enough to realize nothing is that simple.
I don't think any of this makes the world safer or is simple or will be easy for anyone. That train has left the station. Safer would have been to stick with Obama's Iran deal, flawed as it was. Safer would have been to not put the Iranian regime under existential threat so they had nothing to lose and could bet on the longshot of closing the straight and bombing their neighbors.
The US has prevented the gulf states from negotiating with Iran and making deals they think that are in their best interest for like 50 years and it looks like that's about to change.
None of us really knows exactly how this plays out, but the middle powers of the region seem to be trying to set aside their differences and negotiating with Tehran to find a way to live together. We got a preview of how this could work when Trump signed his last deal with Iran. The gulf states were willing to pay a toll in exchange for some assurances on safe transport. Trump skuttled that uneasy peace so we didn't get to see how durable it could be.
It looks like we're about to see round 2 of this assuming the US can be talked into ending the blockade, which seems very likely now.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/28/gulf-states-multipart-peace-deal-avert-renewal-us-iran-war