Ian: Democrats' biggest problem might be winning

It’s a week and change before the midterm elections, and Democrats are in a spot they could only have imagined a year ago if they ate a fistful of peyote and chased it down with original recipe Four Loko.

There is tightening happening now and probably still to come, but Democrats are a fairly easy favorite to win the House. And the Senate, previously considered a much tougher climb, is now truly competitive. Republicans are suddenly defending candidates in places where they didn't expect a fight, rushing resources out of the swing states we were talking about six months ago and shoring up GOP candidates in places Kansas, Mississippi and South Carolina.

Midterm results usually correlate pretty well with the president’s approval rating, and President Donald Trump has seen his political standing collapse with a volume that’s impossible to ignore.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll that dropped Monday put Trump’s approval rating at just 31 percent. When voters were asked which party they would support for Congress, Democrats led Republicans 47 to 35 percent. Democratic voters are more enthusiastic about voting against Trump and the GOP now than were many of the people voted for Trump in 2024.

If the polls were even mostly correct and elections were held today, it would be a really good night for Democrats, no doubt about it. But if that comes to pass, will Democrats know immediately what to do about it? You’re the dog that caught the car - now what?

I ask because there is another story buried in the same polling, which is that Americans are not feeling very “big-D” Democratic.

A recent Gallup poll found that 43 percent of Americans view the Democratic Party favorably - and that is considerably better than the Republican Party’s 35 percent. And yet, because two things can be possible at once - the majority of the country still has an unfavorable opinion of Democrats.

Another poll from AP-NORC - only around one in five voters believe either political party is focused on helping people like them.

Really, Americans are disapproving of politics and politicians in general, and I think the Democratic Party’s approval rating is unlikely to break free of that anytime soon even if they find real and lasting electoral success.

Voters in all shades of polling, from coast to coast, are unequivocal in this - they are angry about the cost of living and the war. Reuters/Ipsos found 78 percent of Americans believe Trump’s policies bear at least some responsibility for rising costs, and 57 percent of Republicans reported that prices were rising faster than their wages. Among independents, nearly two-thirds disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy.

When Republicans and independent voters are that unhappy, the opposition party does not necessarily have to inspire them - sometimes it just has to be hanging around.

This is one of the oldest patterns in American politics - the president’s party typically loses seats in a midterm election - sometimes a lot of seats - because these elections give voters an opportunity to register dissatisfaction with whoever currently holds power. But the danger is when the winning party mistakes rejection of the other party for endorsement of itself.

I would say Republicans made that mistake after Trump’s win in 2024.

Trump left office in 2021 in a dark cloud and things got worse fast, with criminal investigations into the classified documents, the Georgia election interference stuff, the New York business fraud stuff, the E Jean Carroll stuff.

But despite all that, he won an extraordinary political comeback where he and Republicans took control of Washington with impressive numbers just about anywhere we were counting. For many people, it was easy to interpret that result as a widely agreed upon mandate for an expansive and specific political agenda, rather than people just being mad at Joe Biden and struggling in this weird economy.

Two years later, and these are all the same voters, just about - but this time Republicans own the status quo, so they will take the blame at the ballot box.

What does all this mean for November 3rd? The 2026 midterms may turn out to be a sort of hollow victory for the Dems - one that they could badly misinterpret.

I don’t think big Democratic wins next Tuesday mean the country has undergone some dramatic ideological conversion to the left. It hasn’t. That interpretation would be impossible to square with a Democratic Party that remains unpopular with most Americans.

What’s happening is more basic: millions of voters who took a chance on Trump in 2024 do not believe they got what they were promised.

They expected lower prices.

They expected stability.

They expected an end to foreign wars.

Instead, we’re in another fishy war in the Middle East, and the cost of living keeps going up and up and remains the dominant concern for most of us. Republicans are now trying to convince people to stay the course while Democrats are asking them to vote for change.

Not great news for Democrats. Winning an election because voters want change is very different from winning an election because voters love your agenda. There’s a lot of daylight there.

If Democrats rack up huge wins on November 3rd, they’ll immediately be pressured to interpret the victory as a mandate for a long list of Democratic priorities. Some of those policies will be popular with all those voters - others will not, and that will probably be the story heading into 2028.

The giant political lesson of the last twenty years should be obvious by now: voters are going to punish whoever appears unable to improve their lives.

They did it to Kamala and Democrats in 2024 and I think they may be about to do it to Trump and Republicans in 2026.

If Democrats want to break this cycle of punishment and regret, they need to deliver huge numbers and then deliver huge results. A Democratic majority the size of the one Republicans have now (extremely slim) is going to create a lot of opportunity for discord and contention between establishment centrists and insurgent DSA members - if Dems cannot run up the numbers enough that the conference is big enough to neutralize disruptors and mavericks, they’re in trouble.

They have to deliver on what they ran on - and they have to deliver on what the people that voted for them believe they are capable of doing. But a Democratic Congress cannot wave a magic wand to lower grocery prices, make housing more affordable, or undo every unpopular decision of the Trump administration. Trump will still have the veto, and Republicans will still have plenty of opportunities to obstruct legislation. That's the political reality Democrats will have to work within.

But Democrats will also have to demonstrate that they understand why voters gave them another chance in the first place. That means offering an agenda that does more than investigate Trump, impeach Trump, frustrate Trump, reverse Trump, and promise to return America to the way things were before Trump.

Because here's the thing: A lot of Americans weren't real happy with the way things were before Trump, either.

The economic insecurity, the distrust of institutions, the sense that Washington is more interested in protecting powerful people than improving the lives of ordinary Americans... none of that started when Trump came down the escalator. Those are the frustrations that made Trump's political rise possible in the first place, and they aren't going to disappear overnight just because Democrats win a bunch of congressional seats.

A Democratic victory next week could represent a genuine rejection of Trump's policies without representing an embrace of the political establishment that preceded him. Both things can be true at once.

That's what makes the prospect of a major Democratic victory politically fascinating. The party could win control of Congress while remaining pretty unpopular with a majority of Americans. It could emerge from Election Day with a stronger claim to political power but not to public trust.

And there's no guarantee that those two things will eventually catch up with each other.

Donald Trump is 80 years old. He won't be president forever. But the frustrations that helped elect him are bigger than Trump himself, and there will be no shortage of politicians eager to exploit them after he's gone.

The voters who punish Republicans in 2026 might be perfectly willing to punish Democrats in 2028. They did it to the party in power two years ago, and there is little reason to believe their patience has increased since then.

Maybe that's the most important thing to understand about this election. Americans may be preparing to change who's in charge without having much confidence that changing who's in charge will make their lives any better.

And if that happens, November 3rd won't necessarily mark the beginning of a new political era.

It may just be another turn of the wheel.