The Wrong Election
My last column named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as my pick for 2028. Take two and call me in 2028, I said. The trouble with that advice, I have since realized, is the date.
Political momentum is a lot like gasoline. It costs a fortune to get, and it never sits in the tank for long. On Tuesday, November 3, the tank was full. Democrats flipped seven Senate seats, Texas among them, and reached their largest House majority since 2008.
My argument, for which I take full blame, is this. The moment to run Ms Ocasio-Cortez was the midterms. The blue wave was powered by a reactionary, thoroughly fed-up electorate, furious at a president who has sold the country to corporations and billionaires at a steep discount. Had there been a presidency on the ballot, I believe that fury would have carried her into the Oval Office. Instead it produced a crop of new senators, several of whom have already started squabbling about Chuck Schumer.
Two things are likely to happen between now and 2028, and neither will help her. First, Democrats will spend two years repeating the mistakes that drove voters away from them and put Mr Trump in the White House. Voters have short memories for gratitude and long ones for grievance. Second, the momentum will fade. What would have been plenty this November may be nowhere near enough two Novembers from now.
By 2028 the tank may be empty. Worse, nobody in the party will have checked the gauge.
High Octane, Short Range
The last column leaned on Newton’s third law, the one about equal and opposite reactions. This one needs his first. An object in motion stays in motion unless something acts on it. Political momentum works the same way, except that in politics something always acts on it, and that something is usually the party that just won. Friction never takes a day off. Only fuel keeps you moving.
Tuesday ran on the best fuel in politics, which is anger. It is high-octane, and it burns fast. A wave of voters is held together by a mood, and moods have the shelf life of a carton of milk. Gratitude fades. Outrage moves on to the next outrage. And the people who rode the wave into office immediately start doing the things that made voters wary of them in the first place.
Political scientists have a name for this. They call it thermostatic public opinion. When government runs hot in one direction, voters turn the dial the other way. They did it to Mr Trump on Tuesday. They have done it to Democrats plenty of times before. The thermostat is not partisan. It just has a very good memory for whoever touched it last.
The White House responded to Tuesday by making Stephen Miller chief of staff, which is one way of turning the heat up. Democrats should send him a thank-you note. He may be the most generous fuel supplier they have left.
There is also simple arithmetic. Midterm electorates are smaller, older and more motivated than presidential ones. In 2022 about 46% of eligible Americans voted. In 2024 about 64% did. The tens of millions who skip midterms and turn up for presidents were not part of Tuesday’s mood, and in 2028 they will decide.
The Biden Hangover
My other worry is that Democrats have a talent, honed over years, for wasting a victory. Hand them the keys, and here I am thinking chiefly of the Biden years, and they will find a way to drive into a ditch so spectacular that voters take the keys back and give them to Mr Trump.
Joe Biden took office in 2021 with a majority in both chambers and a country eager to be bored again. By that August his approval had slipped underwater during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, in which 13 American service members were killed. It never came back up.
What followed did not help. Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, the highest in four decades. Crossings at the southern border hit record levels. And then came the debate of June 2024, after which a sitting president was eased out of his own reelection campaign by his own party in the space of a few weeks. Voters noticed that too.
To be fair, Mr Biden passed an infrastructure law, a semiconductor subsidy program and the biggest climate bill in American history. Voters did not reward any of it, because voters judge a government by the prices at the checkout and the feeling in the gut, not by the legislative calendar.
To be precise, I mean the Biden years more than the Obama ones. Barack Obama left office with a Gallup approval rating of 59%, and Hillary Clinton lost anyway, for reasons of her own. But the lesson holds. If Democrats don’t learn from their past mistakes, the voters will teach it to them again, and the last lesson came with Mr Trump’s name on it.
Twice Shy
Then there is the history that makes timing matter even more for Ms Ocasio-Cortez. Democrats have twice tried to put a woman in the Oval Office, and twice lost to the same man.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 2.9 million votes and lost the Electoral College 304 to 227. Kamala Harris, handed the nomination in July 2024 with barely a hundred days to campaign, lost both, with 226 electoral votes to Mr Trump’s 312. He became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years.
Which brings up the perennial Democratic complaint. Every time a candidate wins the popular vote and loses the presidency, someone proposes scrapping the Electoral College. A Pew survey in 2024 found 63% of Americans would prefer a straight national vote. And after Tuesday some Democrats are talking about finishing the job by other means. The National Popular Vote compact, under which states pledge their electors to the national winner, now covers 18 states and Washington, D.C., worth 222 electoral votes. It needs 270 to take effect.
I oppose it. A national popularity contest would leave many states out of presidential elections altogether. Ours is a republic, and presidents are chosen by the states, sovereign states, not by a raw national headcount. Every state counts. That is hard to swallow when your side loses, but it is how the system is meant to work. It protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority, a danger James Madison described as “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”
My last column showed what that looks like up close. In Washington the Puget Sound counties outvote the rest of the state’s 39 counties every time. Call that democracy if you like. East of the Cascades it looks a great deal more like tyranny. A national popular vote would do to the country what Puget Sound does to Washington.
Defenders of the compact have a fair reply, and it deserves a hearing. The current system leaves most states out too. In 2024, by FairVote’s count, 94% of general-election campaign events were held in seven swing states, and 32 states got no visit at all.
There is one part of the Electoral College I do find hard to defend. The electors themselves are people we have no say in, and in principle they can overrule our votes. If that can happen, what is the point of voting at all?
It is not a hypothetical. In 2016 seven electors went rogue, the most in a century. Four of them were in Washington, Hillary Clinton electors who refused to vote for her, and the state fined each of them $1,000.
In 2020 the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the right of states to bind and punish such “faithless electors,” and 38 states and D.C. now do. No faithless elector has ever changed the result of a presidential election. Still, it seems a strange safeguard that relies on nobody using it.
Back to those two defeats. I don’t buy the idea that America won’t elect a woman. In 2019 Gallup found that 94% of Americans said they would vote for a qualified one. Both women also ran as heirs to a sitting Democratic administration and carried its baggage. Mrs Clinton inherited eight years of Obama-era fatigue. Ms Harris inherited Mr Biden’s prices, his border and his debate.
What I do believe is that a third attempt cannot afford to set off on half a tank. After two near misses, the next woman Democrats nominate will need every drop of momentum going. Tuesday was that momentum, and it was spent on the Senate.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez knows the history. In September she said she thinks about a run “personally,” citing her age, her identity as a woman and as a Latina. She also said that if she ran and lost, “I would be done.”
Then she added a line that would make a fine motto for this column. “Life doesn’t wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you.”
Life made things ready on Tuesday. The calendar did not.
History’s Receipts
History is on my side, mostly. In 1946 Republicans swept both chambers of Congress on the slogan “Had enough?” Two years later Harry Truman spent the campaign attacking what he called the “do-nothing Congress,” and won.
In 1994 Newt Gingrich’s Republicans took the House for the first time in 40 years. They then shut down the government twice, and Bill Clinton cruised to reelection in 1996. In 2010 the Tea Party wave cost Democrats 63 House seats, and Barack Obama won again in 2012.
The closest parallel to 2028 may be 1988. In 1986, Ronald Reagan’s second midterm, Democrats retook the Senate. Two years later Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, promised voters “a kinder, and gentler nation” and carried 40 states.
The pattern is not perfect, and a fact-checker should say so. The wave party did go on to win the White House in 2008 and 2016, both open-seat races like 2028 will be. But in both years the wave was running against a party that had held the White House for eight years, and voters were simply ready for a change. Momentum rarely survives on its own. It survives when someone keeps refilling the tank.
The End of Trump, Probably
There is one silver lining. Barring a constitutional crisis, which in this decade I would not rule out entirely, the country is finally done with Mr Trump. The 22nd Amendment limits a president to two elected terms, and Mr Trump has now been elected twice. The 2028 race will be the first presidential election since 2012 without his name on the ballot.
He has spent the year teasing otherwise. In July he told a crowd in Georgia, “I am here to announce my candidacy. I’m only kidding.” Two days later, at a press dinner, he declared his “intention to run for a fourth term.” But asked in August whether he was serious, he said, “I’d love to run, but the law is very strong.” For once, the law and the president appear to agree.
There remains the distant prospect of a sequel. One of his children, or even his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, could make a play for the job and turn the family business into a dynasty, à la the Kennedys or the Bushes. I don’t see it.
Mr Trump has said his family “could be” the next political dynasty, and called Donald Trump Jr. “a very capable guy.” Donald Jr. polls at about 10% in early Republican surveys. He has denied any plans to run, mostly by praising his “buddy JD.” Eric Trump has hinted. Mr Kushner, who runs a private-equity firm and has dabbled in Middle East diplomacy, shows no sign of wanting to shake hands at an Iowa pancake breakfast.
None of the Trump children has their father’s pull, and I doubt any of them ever will, which ought to worry Democrats more than it cheers them. Charisma is not hereditary, as the Kennedys and the Bushes eventually discovered. Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign is best remembered for the moment he asked a New Hampshire audience to “please clap.”
And the Trump brand was always one man’s act. A dynasty needs heirs who can sell tickets on their own.
Here is the catch nobody in the Democratic Party seems to have noticed. For a decade, Mr Trump has been the Democrats’ most reliable fuel. He filled their tank in 2018, again in 2020 and again on Tuesday, and he never sent a bill. In 2028 that supply runs dry. Whatever Democrats plan to run on, it will have to be something they make themselves.
The Kinder, Gentler Heir
More likely, MAGA will find a candidate who swings the country back its way and keeps the White House in 2028. More likely still, if Republicans are clever enough to manage it, that candidate will sound nothing like a Trump.
The early favorite is JD Vance, polling near 37% in the Republican averages, with Marco Rubio second at about 25%. Mr Vance carries the most risk from Tuesday, since he is tied most closely to an administration voters just rebuked. He has said there is “a chance” he will not run.
History is not kind to him either. Since Martin Van Buren in 1836, only one sitting vice president has been elected straight to the presidency, and that was Mr Bush in 1988.
Here is the scenario that keeps me up at night. A centrist Republican with a leftist flavor, a governor or senator who keeps the party’s base but borrows the left’s best tunes. Someone who backs a ban on congressional stock trading, talks about protecting workers from artificial intelligence, criticizes billionaires and promises to calm things down. Several Republicans are already auditioning for parts of that role. Josh Hawley has already done the first two.
Now add two years of Democratic nonsense. Expect plenty of fighting, plenty of anti-Trump and precious little pro anything. The Democrats are already arguing over Mr Schumer. Ms Ocasio-Cortez herself has not ruled out challenging him for his Senate seat.
If the next two years sound like a party running against Mr Trump without running for much of anything, that Republican will not need to win the argument. He will only need to look like a rest. Add a fresh reminder of why voters stopped voting for Democrats in the first place, and Republicans just might hold the White House.
That is how Mr Bush won in 1988, as a continuation that promised to feel different. It could work again.
Lawyer Up
If you want to know what Democrats plan to put in the tank for the next two years, they have already told us. It is the same fuel as before. Last week the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia, summed up the new majority’s approach in two words. “LAWYER UP.”
The investigations list is long. The Epstein files, the Trump family’s business deals, cryptocurrency, the East Wing, immigration enforcement, the Iran war, Elon Musk.
Asked about impeachment in September, Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to become Speaker in January, said, “We haven’t ruled anything out.” The reporting on those plans describes no legislative agenda for gas, groceries or health insurance.
Some of that oversight is legitimate, and some of it overlaps with my sister’s list. Congressional stock trading and dark money are on it. But a voter who hears two years of subpoenas will conclude, reasonably, that the party’s main product is being against Mr Trump.
Democrats have an obvious excuse. Mr Trump still holds the veto pen, so few big bills will become law before 2029. That is precisely why they should pass them anyway. In 1994 Newt Gingrich turned a list of bills into a campaign.
A House that passes a plan for prices and premiums, and dares the president to veto it, has written its 2028 platform in advance. A House that only holds hearings has written the Republicans’.
What Are You For?
Which brings me to the point I most want Democrats to hear, and Republicans too. “I’m not Trump, so vote for me” is a slogan, not a platform, and it has nearly expired. Being against something is not the same as being for something.
We know you’re against Mr Trump. So are we. Telling us again is like a mechanic explaining that he, too, dislikes your broken transmission. Lovely. Can he fix it?
We also know some things you have not mentioned, because we live with them. Life has gotten harder for a great many of us. Gas averaged $3.94 a gallon on Wednesday, according to AAA, 87 cents above a year ago. It has slipped back under $4, but only after the first November on record above it. Grocery prices are rising more slowly now, under 2% a year, but from a base that still makes the weekly shop feel like a hostage negotiation.
Health care is worse. A family plan through an employer now costs $28,303 a year, KFF found, and the worker’s share rose 9% this year alone. People who buy their own coverage saw average premiums jump about 26% after enhanced federal subsidies expired, and the average deductible rose 37%.
And the list runs on from there. Mr Trump does shape our daily lives, as the receipts above make plain. But none of us, standing at the pump watching the numbers spin, wants a speech about the president. We want to know what you will do about the pump.
Remember when presidential candidates had plans? Instead of simply loathing their opponents, they told us what they would do for us, on health care, on national security, on the economy. They laid it out, in print, where it could be argued with.
In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt pledged “a new deal for the American people,” and then spent a campaign explaining what it meant. In 1952 Dwight Eisenhower, facing a stalemated war, made his national-security promise in five words, “I shall go to Korea,” and voters knew exactly where he stood.
In 1992 Bill Clinton’s war room in Little Rock hung a sign reading “The economy, stupid,” with “Don’t forget health care” underneath, and the campaign published a book-length plan called Putting People First.
Ross Perot bought half-hour slots on network television to walk viewers through charts on the deficit, and 19% of them voted for him, perhaps because of the charts.
Now compare 2016. In the final ten days of that race, the Wesleyan Media Project found, roughly nine in ten of Hillary Clinton’s television ads were about character, mostly Mr Trump’s. Only about one in ten were about policy. Mr Trump, for all his faults, told voters what he was for. Build the wall. Bring back the factories. You could disagree with every word and still repeat them at dinner.
Republicans have their own version of the disease. A party that has spent years running against Joe Biden, against “woke” and against whatever cable news flagged that morning is no fountain of white papers either.
Both parties need to rediscover the habit.
So here is my request for 2028. Bring back substantive plans and substantive debate, the kind where a candidate has to defend a number without changing the subject. Deal with the things we live with every day. Tell us how you will bring down the price of gas, groceries and a visit to the doctor, and how you will pay for it. Don’t tell me what you’re against. Tell me what you’re for.
Being against something is not the same as being for something. Voters learned that at the pump. It would be nice if the candidates learned it the easy way.
The Case for Waiting
There is a fair argument that I have this backward, and it deserves a hearing.
First, Tuesday was not a vote for Ms Ocasio-Cortez. As the last column conceded, many of the winners were moderates, and a fair share of the vote was simply a verdict on Mr Trump. Momentum against one man does not automatically transfer to another person.
Second, two years may help her. She is 37, and would be 39 on Inauguration Day 2029, younger than any president in history. Two more years of building a national campaign, raising money and answering hard questions could make her a stronger candidate rather than a weaker one.
Third, the party’s own early polling suggests the wave has not chosen her yet. The leading name in the Democratic averages is still Kamala Harris, at about 24%, with Ms Ocasio-Cortez fourth at around 12%. The market’s favorite this week is Jon Ossoff, who just won Georgia by 18 points and says he has “zero interest” in running.
A wave that had settled on her would look different. And in the summer, before the wave, Emerson’s polling had Mr Vance ahead of her in a head-to-head, 46% to 44%.
And open-seat elections, as noted, have favored the wave party twice in the past 20 years.
Those are fair points. I simply think they underrate the Democrats’ talent for squandering a gift.
Fill It Up
My view has not changed. I still think democratic socialism, in measured amounts, is the best antidote to a government sold out to corporations and billionaires. I still think Ms Ocasio-Cortez, with Bernie Sanders as role model and mentor, is the right person to deliver it.
But the timing worries me. Democrats have two years to prove they learned something from 2016 and 2024. That means delivering what my sister asked for in her letter, the stock-trading ban, the disclosure rules and the campaign finance reform, rather than spending two years in a family argument about who sits at the head of the table.
It also means walking into 2028 with a plan we can read at the kitchen table. What happens to our gas, our groceries and our health insurance, in numbers, with the bill attached.
“Not Trump” was enough for a midterm. It will not be enough for a presidency, because Mr Trump will not be on the ballot. Being against something is not the same as being for something, and in 2028 the thing you are against will be gone. You cannot fill a tank with “not Trump” when there is no Trump.
If they waste those two years, the momentum of Tuesday will have leaked away by 2028, and the Republicans will have found someone pleasant to run.
There is one way to keep some of the momentum. Ms Ocasio-Cortez cannot be on a ballot that has already been counted, but she can start the engine. Mr Trump announced his 2024 campaign on November 15, 2022, a week after a disappointing midterm, and the head start served him well. She has said she will decide after the midterms. Well, the midterms are over.
On Tuesday the voters filled the Democrats’ tank for free. In 2028 they will want to know what they bought.