It's the tyranny, stupid
Change through direct conflict.
How big was the blue wave? We are now getting a full picture. The Cook Political Report said yesterday that “with more than 116 million votes counted, Democrats’ lead in the national House vote is up to 13.5 points. It's now the largest margin for either party since 1974.” Chaz Nuttycombe, director of data firm State Navigate, pinned the benchmark 10 years prior. “Democrats have gained 545 seats in state legislatures this year. They've officially gained more seats than in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson won by a landslide.” This year’s election is the new benchmark according to which all future electoral achievements will be measured.
With friends like these …
Some are trying to bully the Democratic Party into seeing the results through a narrow lens, and some of these bullies are Democrats. One such “strategist” said voters didn’t punish Trump just to see him impeached. “Seventy-one percent want to end the Iran War, including a majority of Republicans,” he said, pointing to a Reuters poll. “Sixty-two percent want to end Trump's trade tariffs. This pales in comparison to the number who want to impeach Trump – just 41 percent.” I don’t know what the game is, exactly, but I do not trust anyone who reduces a wave election as massive as this one to the level of IKEA assembly instructions.
It’s the tyranny, stupid
The midterms were an across-the-board repudiation seen once a generation. What could have united so many people from so many backgrounds, from so many perspectives? It was not just the war. It was not just the economy. It was, yanno, everything associated with a president who acts like a king. The elite consensus, however, keeps insisting there’s only one way of seeing things, which in turn insists that the Democrats have only one course of action. Elite consensus does this because it is effectively blind to Donald Trump’s tyranny.
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Truth, but not the whole truth
Because elite consensus is blind to Trump’s tyranny, you are not seeing the whole truth about the midterms. In aftermath reporting, you are seeing plenty of mention of the economy, the war and corruption, and maybe about the link between them, but you are not seeing the key groups that forced the issue, and whose choices determined the outcome. Hispanic voters reacted to a lawless president’s paramilitary police force (ICE). Black voters reacted to a lawless Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act. No Kings reacted to lawlessness generally. Religious liberals reacted to the regime’s blasphemous attempt to whitewash evil with the word of God. Any explanation of the midterms that does not include these groups is not an explanation, but an agenda that should be immediately suspect.
The old gentleman’s agreement is over
The blindness of elites, especially among the members of the Washington press corps, is consequential in other ways. They don’t see the extremism of the Republicans, but the extremism of the Democrats is very much visible to them. More concretely, they don’t mind it when the Republicans are racist but do mind it when the Democrats call them out. The Republicans' racism is seen as natural and legitimate while the Democrats’ anti-racism, such as it is, is seen as a choice fraught with risk and peril, an act of “political polarization” threatening to divide the country over “partisan” issues. For lack of a better term, what I am describing is a kind of gentleman’s agreement – the consensus of American elites. If nothing else, however, the midterms should prove this version of the gentleman’s agreement is over.
The Republican fever
To be explicit, it’s a white elite consensus. After the 1960s, the deal was that Black people and other minorities can access the franchise, but they cannot have authority while in it. White people must dominate executive government, law enforcement, the police power, and levels of legitimate force and control over the daily lives of workaday Americans. That compromise was in place until 2008 when it collapsed under the weight of the Iraq War and the Financial Panic, and from the ruins of those disasters arose the first Black president. Barack Obama’s election was, for the Republicans, evidence of betrayal. It justified acting with increasing impunity from that day forward. The Democrats meanwhile could not respond without seeming to justify GOP extremism. The party’s “fever” eventually produced Donald Trump.
Biden’s mistake
Some Democrats believed there was a way to restore the terms of the old agreement if they could just hold up their end of it. We saw this in Joe Biden’s behavior as late as 2025. Donald Trump spent the presidential campaign savaging Hunter Biden, the former president’s only living son, to the point that Joe Biden feared for his freedom and preemptively pardoned him. Yet when the time came, Joe Biden kept up appearances and welcomed Trump back, attended his second inauguration and generally pretended there was no bad blood between them. In doing so, Biden normalized Trump’s extremism while deepening the idea that the Democrats are helpless in the face of authoritarian power or worse, complicit in its crimes.
Accountability first
I believe Biden had the best intentions, but other Democrats are nonetheless learning from his mistake. For instance, Amy Acton. She’s Ohio's governor-elect. Her GOP opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, used her mother against her. (He made an ad in which Donna Arthur accused Acton of being a liar. Fact is, Arthur’s husband raped Acton when she was 12. At the time, her mother accused her of lying about her stepfather’s crime. They have been estranged since.) Like Trump, Ramaswamy made politics personal, not expecting his opponent to retaliate. Yet Acton did. When asked if she talked to Ramaswamy after defeating him, she said no. “We can’t normalize behavior like this,” Acton said. “It was so beyond the pale, so no, I have no intention of speaking to him. Leaders’ words matter and we need to hold folks accountable.”
No more apologies
Acton is not alone. Democrat Troy Jackson refuse to play along with Republican Susan Collins’ bad faith. During a debate, she accused him of planting a heckler. He responded, “Oh, shut up. I don't even know that kid." Afterward, Collins’ campaign tried to make him seem like a misogynist, demanding an apology, but he stood firm. “What I'm not going to be is, you know, talked down to by Senator Collins. I'm not going to, you know, be accused of things like that. I mean, I'm fighting for Mainers, and, you know, I mean, I just think that was another situation where she was talking down to me. So I'm not going to apologize for that.”
“A stone-cold racist”
Last week saw the strongest evidence that the Democrats have stopped trying to hold up their end of a gentleman’s agreement that the Republicans stopped honoring after Barack Obama’s election. Hakeem Jeffries, who will be the first Black House speaker, told Jonathan Karl that Trump had not called him to congratulate him. When asked if he would call Trump, in a gesture of conciliation, Jeffries ignored the question. In follow-up questions, Karl seemed to be looking for signs that Jeffries would behave in a manner in keeping with the old ways, in search of common ground, compromise and so on. Each time, Jeffries refused to take the bait, instead restating what the Democrats will do for the electorate that entrusted them. Elite consensus holds that the Republicans can be racist but the Democrats cannot call them out on it without worsening polarization and dividing the country. If there was any doubt about that consensus collapsing, there was none after Jeffries called Stephem Miller “a stone-cold racist,” adding that there would be no talks with the White House through him.
“Come at me, bro”
In reality, the Republicans hope the Democrats will honor the old gentleman’s agreement, because if they don’t, the Republicans will be forced to back down. That hope was evident in today’s threat by the White House in which congressional Democrats were warned that investigating the administration could be a crime. The message was clear. You investigate us. We prosecute you. Such intimidation might have worked during the Biden years when administration officials feared being accused of “weaponizing” the Justice Department. Today’s Democrats, however, have no such fear. Not only do they have the advantage, they benefit from hindsight. If there’s going to be peace, it can’t be peace through compromise, because the Republicans see compromise as weakness to be exploited. The only peace is through strength. When asked about the threat, Massachusetts Congressman Stephen Lynch did not ask for cooler heads to prevail in a time of conflict. Instead, he said “come at me, bro.”
Change through conflict
The bottom line is that the crisis will not end until the Republicans realize they cannot get what they want by continuing as they have. The threats, the intimidation, and the crimes – if these stop working, they will be forced to concede. Similarly, the press corps will continue to act like authoritarianism is just another issue, same as tax cuts, as long as the Republicans deny democracy and the rule of law. The 2026 midterms are a chance for the Democrats to change all that. With the backing of the people, they can now confront the Republican head-on to force new elite consensus, a new gentleman’s agreement, that’s better than the old one.
