Don’t worry, Democrats will blow it

There’s no such thing as a mandate.This simple truth is virtually always ignored by partisans. Take the Democrats who swept into Washington in 2020. Then, as now, the economy was the most pressing issue for voters. But Joe Biden and the Democrats quickly fumbled what should have been a slam-dunk recovery by passing a massive, ideologically motivated crony spending bill just as inflation was heating up.Democrats were compelled to spend the rest of their time in power convincing voters that injecting trillions of dollars into the economy to fund a bunch of lefty hobby horses was actually a prudent way to ease inflation. It did not go well. If moderate senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema hadn’t stopped Democrats from eliminating the legislative filibuster and passing the Build Back Better Act rather than the smaller Inflation Reduction Act, things would have been even worse.Then again, when Donald Trump won back the presidency in 2024, the economy was again the top issue for voters. And Trump made virtually the same self-destructive mistake as Democrats, though there was no way to slow him down.Rather than mitigating high prices, the president unilaterally dropped a giant protectionist tax increase on Americans. Everything afterward merely compounded that mistake.Washington is endlessly misconstruing political victories as endorsements of their grand vision when in reality they are almost always merely a rejection of those in power.On Election Day in 1992, George H.W. Bush’s approval rating hovered in the low 30s. Days after taking office, his successor, President Bill Clinton — who likely had third-party populist Ross Perot to thank for his victory — announced that his wife, Hillary, would be crafting a comprehensive socialist reform of the entire healthcare sector.By 1994, Hillarycare was, mercifully, dead. But the blowback helped Republicans win control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years.In 2008, President George W. Bush, dealing with an unpopular war and recession, also left the White House with an approval rating hovering in the low 30s. Democrat Barack Obama won the White House, and judging from the hosannas and exaltation of the media, voters might have been under the impression the country was on its way to generational one-party rule.The Democrats, armed with their imaginary mandate, soon began blowing up norms and crammed Obamacare through the Senate using reconciliation. In 2010, Republicans were rewarded with a net gain of 63 seats in the House, the largest shift in seats since 1948. Democrats, who would go on to lose over a thousand local seats nationally under Obama, were unable to accomplish anything noteworthy legislatively after 2010. The president was compelled to rely nearly exclusively on executive abuse. Most of those diktats would be rolled back by Trump only a few years later.The average American voter isn’t bogged down by ideology. Voters aren’t pundits who publicly detail all their positions. They feel free to change their minds at any time about any issue or politician without explanation.Right now, many MAGA Republicans are on social media trying to deflect blame for the midterm debacle away from the Trump administration onto Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Thune could go or not — one suspects many independent voters don’t even know who he is — but it would make zero difference. Indeed, “doing something” big in the Senate holds just as many risks as “doing nothing.” Competence, stability, and a strong economy win elections.Which is to say that while Republicans shouldn’t diminish the historic drubbing they just experienced, Democrats are now poised to make the same mistake.If voters had to name the defining policy issue of Democrats — other than opposing Donald Trump, of course — what would it be? I doubt voters would have an answer. I doubt Democrats have one.For the first time in American history, a significant bloc of Congress will openly hate the country they represent. Democratic Socialists of America and adjacent candidates want to dismantle the Senate, Supreme Court, abolish the police, prisons, borders, and “seize the means of production,” as the future congresswoman from the 13th District of New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier, the cofounder of a group that called to “eradicate America” and “Western civilization,” says.This doesn’t sound like a faction willing to work to build consensus and fine-tune policy to appeal to moderates. Normies who might be repelled by SWAT-style roundups of non-violent illegal immigrants in major cities do not necessarily support the anarchy of illegal immigration that progressives would surely unleash. Voters might be agitated by high grocery prices, but that doesn’t mean they are clamoring for Bernie Sanders-style nationalization of the economy.Indeed, by most accounts, moderate Democrats outran progressives.As it turned out, the Republican mid-decade redistricting was a huge gift to Democrats. By creating scores of new competitive districts in (formerly) red states in a bad year for the ruling party, the GOP weakened its strongholds.It could have been worse. One of the few states that rejected Trump’s efforts to create GOP-friendly maps was Indiana.“Now the votes of Indiana Republicans will matter far less than the votes of Virginia Democrats,” Vice President JD Vance warned at the time. “We told you it would happen, and you did nothing.”If Indiana had folded to the administration’s pressure and redrawn the state map, Democrats would have carried all nine new seats in the state.But competitive districts work both ways. The broader the victory, the more vulnerable seats a party is compelled to defend. Democrats have perhaps the most radical faction in the history of American politics, but it’s the moderates who gave the party its majority.Will new Senate Democrats like North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Mississippi’s Scott Colom, who ran as a pro-law-enforcement and anti-tariff candidate, “prairie populist” Adam Hamilton of Kansas, or Josh Turek of Iowa, sign up for nationalization efforts, packing the Supreme Court, socialized medicine, giant spending bills, or gun grabs should Democrats win the presidency in 2028?ADAM HAMILTON WARNS MIDTERM RESULTS WERE NOT A ‘ROUSING ENDORSEMENT OF DEMOCRATS’Considering the meek reaction of mainstream Democrats to the radicals thus far, it is not out of the question. But if they do, they won’t be in office for long.On that, the historical record is clear.