February 23, 2026
Conor Lynch
In addition to these electoral wins, Democrats have come out largely on top in the gerrymandering wars that heated up last year after Texas initiated a mid-decade redistricting effort — at the behest of the president — to pick up five more Republican seats in the House. Since then, California has successfully passed its own partisan gerrymander, while Virginia Democrats are on course to enact a redistricting plan that would likely help flip four Republican House districts to Democrat.
These developments paint a markedly brighter picture for Democrats compared to this time last year, when their most realistic hope was to narrowly reclaim the House. Today even the Senate appears to be in play, although there is little room for error (Democrats have to pick up four seats in total to win a majority). All things considered, a blue wave on the scale of the 2018 midterms seems entirely plausible.
Despite these advantages, it would be a grave mistake for Democrats to grow overly confident about their prospects or to hinge their fortunes solely on the unpopularity of President Trump. Expectations of a blue wave — or, as some liberals are now predicting, a “blue tsunami” — should be tempered by the simple fact that the party remains deeply unpopular with most Americans. Indeed, despite the growing opposition to GOP policies over the last year, the Democratic brand remains toxic, with most Americans viewing the party as weak, ineffectual and out-of-touch with the core concerns of ordinary people.
The prospects for a blue surge will depend on many variables, but above all on whether Democrats can make compelling arguments to the kind of voters who have been drifting away from the Democratic Party for the last decade and, in many cases, given up on politics altogether. This includes working-class and lower-income voters, but also the Hispanic Americans and young voters who shifted dramatically to the right in 2024 in response to economic hardship.
After the 2024 election, Democrats fiercely debated the root causes of that year’s catastrophic defeat and how to come back from it. Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris prompted a number of different theories and critiques from different wings of the party. While centrist Democrats rushed to disingenuously pin the party’s losses on “woke” identity politics, progressives pointed to the absence of a populist economic program and the Harris campaign’s baffling efforts to court Wall Street and corporate donors. Though all sides basically agreed that the “affordability” crisis had doomed the Democrats, they diverged on what kind of platform and messaging the party should adopt to climb its way out of the electoral abyss.
More than a year later, rising living costs are now Trump and the Republican Party’s headache, giving Democrats an opening to make their own case on the economy. Yet divisions persist over what kind of pitch the party should make to win back the voters who deserted it in droves in 2024.
For this, the recent victory of Democrat Taylor Rehmet in a special election for a Texas Senate seat offers some important insights. Though Rehmet was outspent by his Republican opponent by 6 to 1 in a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024, the 33-year-old Air Force veteran and union leader wound up winning the special election by 14 percentage points, representing a massive 31-point swing toward Democrats (fueled, in part, by a 34-point swing among Hispanic voters compared to 2022).
Rehmet pulled off this impressive feat not by running a partisan campaign hyperfocused on the Republican president but by emphasizing his working-class roots and campaigning as a pro-labor (and anti-billionaire) populist. Throughout his campaign, the candidate remained laser-focused on affordability and other important local issues like public school funding and health care. In post after post on social media, Rehmet detailed to voters how his billionaire-backed opponent and Texas Republicans had prioritized the interests of their wealthy donors while “passing the bill down to working families.” As the candidate explained in a campaign video: “This campaign is all about money. It’s about how much we get in our paychecks. It’s about how much we spend on groceries and health insurance. … While my opponent helps billionaires get richer, I’m fighting for you.”
While painting his opponent and Republican state leaders as stooges of the billionaire class, Rehmet downplayed the importance of party and avoided polarizing social issues, telling The New York Times that he’s “not interested in the cultural war issues” but in improving the lives of working families. Ultimately, it was the candidate’s relentless focus on affordability and working-class empowerment that drove his victory, not unlike Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign for New York City mayor last year. These two candidates are very different — notably, Mamdani did not avoid social issues or contentious cultural debates — yet they shared a common commitment to foregrounding economic justice and a message centered on material improvement for ordinary voters.
Rehmet’s dominant performance in a deep red district just outside Dallas that last elected a Democrat nearly 40 years ago sent “shockwaves” through the Texas GOP and thrilled the state’s Democrats. “This is a seat no Democrat has held since the ’80s, and today we proved what we’ve known all along: Texas is in play, and don’t count us out,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who is currently running in a tight Democratic primary to be the party’s Senate nominee this fall. Echoing this sentiment, Crockett’s primary opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, declared, “Something is happening in Texas.” Many Democrats nationwide have also seized on Rehmet’s election as a harbinger that Senate seats in red and purple states — Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Maine among them — are up for grabs this year.
But Rehmet’s triumph speaks less to the party’s recovering brand than to the growing resonance of economic populism and the simmering anger toward billionaires and their political puppets.
If Democrats want to ride an electoral wave back into the majority in November, their best bet is to harness this popular discontent in the same way that Republicans did back in 2024. The good news is that Republicans have given them plenty of ammunition. In the past year alone, the president has stacked his administration with billionaires and made little effort to disguise his own self-dealing. At the same time, the GOP’s major legislative achievement has been to deliver fresh tax breaks to the ultrarich along with steep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps for the poor. Across the board, Republican policies have left working Americans worse off while further concentrating wealth in the hands of billionaires, who now possess more than the bottom half of U.S. households combined.
All of this creates a favorable environment for Democrats to reclaim the mantle of populism from the right. Yet the party is far from united on whether to seize this opportunity. While some candidates have recently woken up to the country’s antiestablishment mood and started to lean into populist messaging, many prominent Democrats continue to shy away from directly confronting billionaire power or backing policies that could jeopardize their relationships with major donors.
Earlier this month, the centrist New Democrat Coalition released a blueprint for Democratic candidates to address affordability while avoiding “splashy populist promises” that could alienate the party’s elite backers. The New Democrat playbook adopts much of the “abundance” agenda that has been promoted by liberal commentators like Ezra Klein, combining a deregulatory effort to cut “bureaucratic red tape” in housing and other sectors with a techno-optimistic push for public investment in emerging technologies. The abundance approach largely avoids any proposals that might threaten the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Not surprisingly, the movement has attracted the support of many top Democratic donors.
As serious as Trump’s recent threats to meddle in this year’s midterms are, the greatest obstacle to a blue wave this November isn’t him — it’s the corporate wing of the party, which would rather risk defeat than upset major donors. Recent polling has consistently demonstrated that a majority of voters — especially Democrats and independents — favor bold and disruptive populist solutions over technocratic proposals that leave the status quo unchanged. In the coming months, Democratic voters will have to choose between centrist candidates who might appear more “electable” on paper and populists who are more attuned to the widespread economic frustration and antiestablishment anger that permeates today’s political environment. One thing should be clear: A blue wave is far from certain.
Conor Lynch
Hopes for a major gains in the
midterm are high, but the party is still divided on whether to embrace voters’
anger at the uber rich.
In recent months, Democratic
hopes for a “blue wave” in this fall’s midterm elections have surged as Donald
Trump’s approval ratings have tanked and public opposition to the GOP’s agenda
has intensified amid growing pessimism about the country’s future. This new
optimism has been further bolstered by recent triumphs at the polls, including
last year’s elections and a recent string of special election victories in
districts that heavily favored Republicans in 2024.
In addition to these electoral wins, Democrats have come out largely on top in the gerrymandering wars that heated up last year after Texas initiated a mid-decade redistricting effort — at the behest of the president — to pick up five more Republican seats in the House. Since then, California has successfully passed its own partisan gerrymander, while Virginia Democrats are on course to enact a redistricting plan that would likely help flip four Republican House districts to Democrat.
These developments paint a markedly brighter picture for Democrats compared to this time last year, when their most realistic hope was to narrowly reclaim the House. Today even the Senate appears to be in play, although there is little room for error (Democrats have to pick up four seats in total to win a majority). All things considered, a blue wave on the scale of the 2018 midterms seems entirely plausible.
Despite these advantages, it would be a grave mistake for Democrats to grow overly confident about their prospects or to hinge their fortunes solely on the unpopularity of President Trump. Expectations of a blue wave — or, as some liberals are now predicting, a “blue tsunami” — should be tempered by the simple fact that the party remains deeply unpopular with most Americans. Indeed, despite the growing opposition to GOP policies over the last year, the Democratic brand remains toxic, with most Americans viewing the party as weak, ineffectual and out-of-touch with the core concerns of ordinary people.
The prospects for a blue surge will depend on many variables, but above all on whether Democrats can make compelling arguments to the kind of voters who have been drifting away from the Democratic Party for the last decade and, in many cases, given up on politics altogether. This includes working-class and lower-income voters, but also the Hispanic Americans and young voters who shifted dramatically to the right in 2024 in response to economic hardship.
After the 2024 election, Democrats fiercely debated the root causes of that year’s catastrophic defeat and how to come back from it. Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris prompted a number of different theories and critiques from different wings of the party. While centrist Democrats rushed to disingenuously pin the party’s losses on “woke” identity politics, progressives pointed to the absence of a populist economic program and the Harris campaign’s baffling efforts to court Wall Street and corporate donors. Though all sides basically agreed that the “affordability” crisis had doomed the Democrats, they diverged on what kind of platform and messaging the party should adopt to climb its way out of the electoral abyss.
More than a year later, rising living costs are now Trump and the Republican Party’s headache, giving Democrats an opening to make their own case on the economy. Yet divisions persist over what kind of pitch the party should make to win back the voters who deserted it in droves in 2024.
For this, the recent victory of Democrat Taylor Rehmet in a special election for a Texas Senate seat offers some important insights. Though Rehmet was outspent by his Republican opponent by 6 to 1 in a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024, the 33-year-old Air Force veteran and union leader wound up winning the special election by 14 percentage points, representing a massive 31-point swing toward Democrats (fueled, in part, by a 34-point swing among Hispanic voters compared to 2022).
Rehmet pulled off this impressive feat not by running a partisan campaign hyperfocused on the Republican president but by emphasizing his working-class roots and campaigning as a pro-labor (and anti-billionaire) populist. Throughout his campaign, the candidate remained laser-focused on affordability and other important local issues like public school funding and health care. In post after post on social media, Rehmet detailed to voters how his billionaire-backed opponent and Texas Republicans had prioritized the interests of their wealthy donors while “passing the bill down to working families.” As the candidate explained in a campaign video: “This campaign is all about money. It’s about how much we get in our paychecks. It’s about how much we spend on groceries and health insurance. … While my opponent helps billionaires get richer, I’m fighting for you.”
While painting his opponent and Republican state leaders as stooges of the billionaire class, Rehmet downplayed the importance of party and avoided polarizing social issues, telling The New York Times that he’s “not interested in the cultural war issues” but in improving the lives of working families. Ultimately, it was the candidate’s relentless focus on affordability and working-class empowerment that drove his victory, not unlike Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign for New York City mayor last year. These two candidates are very different — notably, Mamdani did not avoid social issues or contentious cultural debates — yet they shared a common commitment to foregrounding economic justice and a message centered on material improvement for ordinary voters.
Rehmet’s dominant performance in a deep red district just outside Dallas that last elected a Democrat nearly 40 years ago sent “shockwaves” through the Texas GOP and thrilled the state’s Democrats. “This is a seat no Democrat has held since the ’80s, and today we proved what we’ve known all along: Texas is in play, and don’t count us out,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who is currently running in a tight Democratic primary to be the party’s Senate nominee this fall. Echoing this sentiment, Crockett’s primary opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, declared, “Something is happening in Texas.” Many Democrats nationwide have also seized on Rehmet’s election as a harbinger that Senate seats in red and purple states — Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Maine among them — are up for grabs this year.
But Rehmet’s triumph speaks less to the party’s recovering brand than to the growing resonance of economic populism and the simmering anger toward billionaires and their political puppets.
If Democrats want to ride an electoral wave back into the majority in November, their best bet is to harness this popular discontent in the same way that Republicans did back in 2024. The good news is that Republicans have given them plenty of ammunition. In the past year alone, the president has stacked his administration with billionaires and made little effort to disguise his own self-dealing. At the same time, the GOP’s major legislative achievement has been to deliver fresh tax breaks to the ultrarich along with steep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps for the poor. Across the board, Republican policies have left working Americans worse off while further concentrating wealth in the hands of billionaires, who now possess more than the bottom half of U.S. households combined.
All of this creates a favorable environment for Democrats to reclaim the mantle of populism from the right. Yet the party is far from united on whether to seize this opportunity. While some candidates have recently woken up to the country’s antiestablishment mood and started to lean into populist messaging, many prominent Democrats continue to shy away from directly confronting billionaire power or backing policies that could jeopardize their relationships with major donors.
Earlier this month, the centrist New Democrat Coalition released a blueprint for Democratic candidates to address affordability while avoiding “splashy populist promises” that could alienate the party’s elite backers. The New Democrat playbook adopts much of the “abundance” agenda that has been promoted by liberal commentators like Ezra Klein, combining a deregulatory effort to cut “bureaucratic red tape” in housing and other sectors with a techno-optimistic push for public investment in emerging technologies. The abundance approach largely avoids any proposals that might threaten the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Not surprisingly, the movement has attracted the support of many top Democratic donors.
As serious as Trump’s recent threats to meddle in this year’s midterms are, the greatest obstacle to a blue wave this November isn’t him — it’s the corporate wing of the party, which would rather risk defeat than upset major donors. Recent polling has consistently demonstrated that a majority of voters — especially Democrats and independents — favor bold and disruptive populist solutions over technocratic proposals that leave the status quo unchanged. In the coming months, Democratic voters will have to choose between centrist candidates who might appear more “electable” on paper and populists who are more attuned to the widespread economic frustration and antiestablishment anger that permeates today’s political environment. One thing should be clear: A blue wave is far from certain.
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