Will November Be a Democratic Triumph?

Even if Democrats do prevail in November’s midterm elections, as most analysts now predict, their victory may yield fewer advantages than they expect.

That is the argument advanced by Michael Barone, a senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in a recent essay titled “Down the Home Stretch—and What Comes Next?”

The polling evidence is certainly favorable to Democrats. The generic congressional ballot—which asks voters which party’s candidates they would prefer to support for the House of Representatives—shows Democrats holding a substantial lead over Republicans. State-level surveys tell a similar story. Democrats are ahead in several large states that have voted Republican in recent presidential elections, while Republican incumbents are facing unexpected pressure even in reliably red states such as Kansas and Nebraska.

President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen below 40 percent, lower than it was in late September 2018 and roughly comparable to George W. Bush’s standing in September 2006. Republicans’ deficit on the generic ballot is approximately as large as it was in 2018 and greater than it was in 2006.

Absent a political miracle—or an “October surprise”—Democrats are therefore likely to erase the Republicans’ current razor-thin majority in the House. They may even gain the four additional seats needed to take control of the Senate.

There are, however, important qualifications.

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, has noted that in each of the previous four congressional election cycles, summer polling substantially understated the eventual Republican vote, although the gap tended to narrow as Election Day approached. This year, so far, there has been little evidence of such a convergence.

It is also possible that polling systematically underestimates Republican support. According to analyst Nate Silver, something similar occurred in each of the last three presidential elections. This is not necessarily a matter of ideological bias among pollsters, although social scientists, like much of the American intellectual class, tend to lean Democratic.

A more practical problem is that Republican voters have become increasingly difficult to reach. Many distrust surveys conducted by media organizations and are simply less willing to participate in them.

The war with Iran adds another layer of uncertainty. Since the start of the deeply unpopular conflict, which has contributed to higher gasoline and diesel prices, many Republican voters have become less enthusiastic about both Trump and their party.

But does that dissatisfaction merely make them less willing to answer pollsters’ questions? Or will it also keep them away from the ballot box?

No one yet knows. And the answer could determine the outcome of the election.

An even more consequential question is the one Robert Redford’s victorious character asks at the end of the film The Candidate: “What do we do now?”

More precisely: What would Democrats do if they gained control of both chambers of Congress, as they did in 2006?

One outcome can be predicted with considerable confidence. A Democratic Senate would be unlikely to confirm Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court—and perhaps to the federal judiciary more broadly. It would also probably demand substantial concessions from nominees for senior executive-branch positions. That calculation could change, however, if John Fetterman of Pennsylvania—the Democratic Party’s enfant terrible—were to deprive his party of the 51st vote required for an effective majority.

A Democratic Congress might also attempt to curtail Trump’s authority to impose tariffs. But Democrats would have limited ability to rewrite the underlying trade laws and might instead have to rely on the courts, as they have in several recent cases, to rule that those statutes do not justify the administration’s actions. Moreover, the recently enacted “hellish sanctions” legislation has restored to the president a powerful instrument that the Supreme Court had effectively taken away from him in February.

Democrats could likewise seek to bring an end to U.S. military operations against Iran, which have already become increasingly chaotic. Yet here, too, congressional control may prove less decisive than it appears. After Democrats won both chambers in the 2006 midterms, President George W. Bush nevertheless proceeded with the troop surge in Iraq despite congressional majorities that opposed his strategy.

Beyond these questions, Democratic campaign rhetoric offers surprisingly little guidance about what the party would actually attempt to accomplish with a congressional majority.

Democratic candidates have attacked high gasoline prices and inflation more broadly, blaming both on the Trump administration. Yet they are unlikely to return to the pandemic-era policies of the Biden administration, which relied on a dramatic expansion of federal spending. That approach helped drive inflation to 9 percent in 2022 and remained a major political liability for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris two years later.

The Democratic Party has long regarded the working class as its natural electoral constituency and has often sought to respond to its presumed interests through economic redistribution. That political instinct is rooted in the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and in the vast literature celebrating the New Deal.

But the model has become increasingly detached from political reality.

College-educated white voters now exert disproportionate influence in Democratic primaries and fundraising. They may remain attracted to the Marxist and progressive assumption that the working class possesses a special moral and political claim on public policy. Yet it is difficult to ignore the fact that working-class voters had already begun moving toward the Republican Party before Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his presidential candidacy.

Nor is it a secret that, in the political imagination of much of today’s Democratic Party, blue-collar workers have increasingly been displaced by migrants, including those in the country illegally. Republicans, by contrast, tend to regard large-scale illegal immigration as a major threat to national security and social stability.

This disagreement is not merely tactical. It reflects a deeper clash of values—one visible even to voters who have little formal education and pay relatively little attention to politics.

Americans in general, and Democratic politicians in particular, have often looked to government to solve an ever-expanding range of social and economic problems. From that perspective, one can reasonably argue—and opinion polling suggests that many Americans would agree—that the performance of the U.S. government during the first quarter of the twenty-first century has fallen well short of expectations.

The private sector, by contrast, has repeatedly exceeded them.

That is true not only in information technology and communications but also in hydraulic fracturing, which helped restore the United States to its position as the world’s largest oil producer—a status it had also held at the beginning of World War II. Elon Musk built a profitable electric-vehicle company that outmaneuvered Detroit’s traditional Big Three, long constrained by a dense web of regulation. His companies also surpassed NASA in the development of reusable rocket technology.

Looking back on the first quarter of the century, historian Niall Ferguson has acknowledged the failure of his own earlier pessimism: “My prophecies of decline and fall from 25 years ago have clearly not been fulfilled.” In relative terms, he argues, the United States remains number one by almost every important measure—perhaps with the exception of the number of robots.

That resilience has endured despite the disappointments and miscalculations of successive administrations and successive Congresses.

Whether Democrats win a convincing victory in next month’s midterms or Republicans once again defy the pollsters, both winners and losers will confront a familiar American dilemma.

Should Washington expand the role of government and the welfare state, as Democrats advocate—and, under pressure from the party’s left wing, move still further toward a more explicitly statist economic model?

Or should it place greater faith in private enterprise, competition, and the older American tradition of economic freedom—a tradition of which Donald Trump presents himself as one of the most forceful contemporary champions?

The election may determine who controls Congress. It is far less certain that it will answer the larger question of what that control is ultimately for.