Tuesday was an incredible day for the United States. For me, it was more like a relieving Wednesday morning because, well, time zones. But in any case: The promised “blue tsunami” has indeed swept across the U.S. and, apart from outliers here and there, most states have moved into the blue. For me, personally, this was incredible.
But now that the dust of the victory celebrations has settled, we should also be talking about the elephant in the room: for all the awe that came from Tuesday’s midterm elections, they were but a first step into a different direction than what the Trump administration has been doing over the past two years. A lot of damage has been done to the U.S. – both internally and externally – that will take decades to heal. And despite the Democrats now controlling both House and Senate with comfortable majorities, this does not automagically mean that the U.S. will now start to heal. To the contrary, I expect this to become an incredibly strenuous uphill battle for the progressive forces in the U.S., lest this victory turns into a pyrrhic win.
Pretext to the 2026 Midterm Elections
I personally was extremely invested in these midterm elections. If you haven’t heard, I have worked for six years on U.S. Congress and wrote an entire dissertation on it. I have seen the abysses that have opened in the past of policymaking in the U.S. I have studied how we got into the mess that led to the first and now second Trump administrations. But I started my dissertation essentially on the day Joe Biden was elected 46th President of the United States, and Trump’s first administration could not do too much damage, since a lot of the institutions and personnel required were not yet in place.
The first direct exhibition to the cruelty of the MAGA movement was January 6th, 2021, the violent insurrection that almost ended democracy in the United States. And, coincidentally, this has also given me the resolve to finish my dissertation. I wanted to understand: how could this “beacon of democracy,” as I have grown up knowing it since my childhood, be actually so fragile? The answers I found through my research are slowly being published, with the first paper having been recently published in Network Science.
When Donald Trump was elected 47th President of the United States in November 2024, I was starting to finish my dissertation with a final paper. While I had a bad feeling about what the future may hold (and we all knew about “Project 2025” already by that time), this would only be confirmed when the Trump administration and a lot of the people he brought into power started systematically dismantling essentially the entirety of the U.S. government, with many more countries, groups of people, and institutions being caught in the crossfire. And these people were effective. So much so that, by the time I defended my dissertation in October 2025 – a mere nine months after the inauguration – I saw little hope for anything in the United States. And I believe many people both inside and outside the United States shared this feeling. It felt a bit like watching a real-life version of “American History X” but perpetrated not by Nazi groups, but by the U.S. government against its own citizens.
On the one hand, all of this cruelty has certainly heightened the excitement we all collectively felt when the results of this year’s midterms started rolling in. I think it was very hard to see any negative sentiment on social media on Wednesday – except, maybe, for Elon Musk, who saw half a billion dollars go up in flames as Texas turned blue.
On the other hand, however, all of this pretext means that it will be magnitudes harder for those Democrats who just got elected into various positions in the House, Senate, and on other levels of the federal government, to even think about repairing the damage the last two years have done. And as much as I personally am rooting for them, I am still a political sociologist, and as such feel the professional urge to analyze exactly how screwed y’all are.
So let’s dig in.
Challenges Ahead
While scrolling social media on Wednesday, one could get the impression that all the ails of the U.S. had been fixed in one swift election. But of course that’s not the case. Just because a new Congress has been elected, this does not mean that everything is okay suddenly. ICE is still on the streets, the trade war is still ongoing, and last time I checked the Straight of Hormuz was still closed.
Even worse, unless a series of additional wonders happen after January 3rd, all these three things will remain true for many months thereafter. The newly elected Democratic candidates will face a slurry of challenges as they assume their offices early next year:
- The Trump Administration has been very effective at dismantling democratic institutions permanently.
- The Trump Administration can choose to ignore what Congress is doing, and has so for the past two years.
- Republicans have become masters at sabotage. If there is a way to “delay, deny, defend” some Democratic initiative, they will find it.
- The Supreme Court is still mostly staunchly conservative and has sided with the Trump Administration many, many times in the past two years.
- The Heritage Foundation still exists, and it would be naïve to assume they don’t have made contingency plans that will further aid the Trump administration and hamper any Democratic reform attempts.
- The Democrats are still far from speaking with a unified voice. There are still rifts between party leadership and especially more socialist oriented representatives.
- On that matter, the U.S. is still deeply polarized, and while we don’t have much research on how external events shape Congressional discourse, what we do know is that its effects can be much more limited than what would be required for the fundamental changes the U.S. would need to start recovering from the first two years of the second Trump Administration.
This is likely an incomplete enumeration, but the basic problems Democrats have are the still strong MAGA camp in the Republican Party, the entire current state of the union, and themselves. So let’s discuss.
The Unitary Executive Theory
The first, and possibly most difficult, roadblock the Democratic majority in Congress will encounter is the Unitary Executive Theory. This is a legal theory that basically says that the U.S. president has absolute authority over every piece of the U.S. executive. And the Trump Administration, counseled by the Heritage Foundation, has fully committed to interpreting the U.S. Constitution in this way. And it has arguably even expanded it far beyond what would be constitutionally allowed in any less-than-maximalist reading of the Constitution. Trump has started wars – both kinetic and economic – despite there being clear laws regarding the involvement of Congress in such decisions. And even where they were challenged, far too often have conservative judges sided with the Trump Administration, primarily the Supreme Court which, if you didn’t know, is tasked with ensuring that everything the U.S. Administration does is constitutional. In short, every constitution is only as strong as the belief in its validity, and especially with a vague constitution such as the U.S.’s, it is very easy to bend the intention of the law just enough to make authoritarianism suddenly look constitutionally approved.
To make matters worse, because there were suddenly experts involved in the policymaking of Trump 2, they have managed to dismantle a lot of the national infrastructure that could have been used to restrain the worst escapades of the administration. Take the Trump Administration’s war on research. Billions in grant money was withdrawn or not granted, researchers are now employing self-censorship, a multitude of vital research topics are no longer being proposed, and important research has been shelved. With the complete destruction of USAID, the administration has even managed to kill off most of the foreign aid the U.S. provides; a decision that is likely going to cost 14 million people their lives over the next five years. To put this number into perspective, that is a bit less than twice the entire population of New York City. Just imagine nuking New York City. Twice. Actually, nuking New York City would be less lethal (c.f. Nukemap).
In short, as long as the Trump administration can progress unimpeded, they will. This includes simply ignoring Congress. So even if the Democrats start passing legislation to heal U.S. democracy, they will have to be prepared to also fight for their own passed legislation in court to force the U.S. administration to honor the law of the land.
The U.S. Are Still Highly Polarized
Another factor that should not be underestimated is the incredible amount of polarization in the U.S. political system. Regardless of where you look – the public, Congress, even families – everything is highly polarized. And it doesn’t utter itself as you would expect it. When I was in the United States I got a small taste of how polarization works in everyday live: people simply prefer not to talk about politics at all. And if you try to bring it up, many Americans (at least on the East Coast, where I was) are very creative in finding ways to shut it down right away. Even if everyone in the round is on the same page politically, and everyone knows it. While the recent electoral victory will hopefully ease the fears especially of liberal citizens in talking about political issues, the problems remain in U.S. Congress.
As I have shown in my most recent paper (sorry for the absolutely brutal plug), Congressional representatives do no longer talk about the same issues at all. They don’t just disagree. You have one group talking about A, and another talking about B. And, worse, this is not fully correlated to party line. You have just as many camps within each party. Furthermore, polarization is not confined to political speech. There is also a lot of disagreement between the aging Democratic leadership and the young, more socialist leaning democrats. This is also something the Democrats will have to figure out before going into battle, because if leadership does not condone of the actions of its representatives in the House and Senate, it will make any legislative progress harder than necessary.
There is a silver lining, however. As I could show in another paper that’s available as a preprint, periods of high uncertainty can completely reconfigure Congressional discourse. The last time this happened was probably 9/11, although I only look at the Reagan era. But what is required for such a reconfiguration – this time away from political polarization and towards more constructive legislation – is that there are useful ideas that representatives can latch onto when heading into Congress. In the 1970s, these were neoclassical economic ideas. This time, it could very well be the idea that “socialism” does not need to imply dictatorship or authoritarianism, but that it can also imply a healthy democracy, too. But again, history is unfortunately not ripe with examples of such events, and as such only time will tell if this is going to improve after January 3rd.
Voters Are Myopic
The last “big” issue that the Democrats will have to play against is time. From now on, they have exactly two years to get things right. If they don’t, there is a high chance the entire country will swing Republican again. As Christopher Wlezien has shown, Voters are myopic. If economic conditions do not improve quickly after the new Congress convenes, there is a chance that this all may be in vain, and some of the swing states swing back to Republicans in two years. Which is going to be even worse than now, because, you know, midterms are being called like that because the U.S. doesn’t elect its president during their term.
And we can expect Republicans to exploit this. Just as Trump is trying to blame every of his own economic failings on Joe Biden, Republicans can employ the same strategy. And in the end, what wins – especially in a media-saturated country as the U.S. – is perception and the reigning narrative, not actual policy.
Final Thoughts
The recent electoral win of the Democrats has turned the tables in U.S. policymaking. However, if the party wishes to retain their momentum, and get the Republicans also out of the White House (or what will be left of it by then), there is a lot of work to do. The elections do not mark the endpoint of an incredibly tense and exhausting period in U.S. policymaking, but merely the start of a potential end, with a lot of asterisks.
Personally, I am rooting for the Democrats and for democracy in the United States. But professionally, I cannot help but see the mountain of issues that Democrats will have to climb if they wish to undo some of the harm of the recent administration. The newly elected representatives have little time to prepare for a two-year marathon until the next presidential election in 2028.