Like many Democrats I have pondered the meaning of Donald Trump's rise in American politics, a process now complicated by deciphering the significance of yesterday's Blue Tsunami in the 2026 midterm election. Cynics will be tempted to read Trump's ascent purely as a measure of the racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry in American society, and to view the Democratic victory as a function of pure economic self interest. That is to say, MAGA drew support from grievance and hatred, and lost support only when the pleasure of giving vent to grievance and hatred was dampened by personal greed. Watching Trump "own the libs" was fun until his sheer incompetence sent the price of gas and groceries climbing too high, at which point the party ended.
Though this reading of events will have real visceral appeal for Democrats, it would be a mistake to embrace or indulge it. The shifting coalitions that brought Trump to power in 2016 and returned him to the White House in 2024 had varied roots and divergent impetuses. Bigotry and religious chauvinism were contributing factors, but those forces alone cannot fully explain the durability and elasticity of Trump's support. By the same token, if the rising cost of living alone were enough to cause voters to abandon Trump, the Democrats should have been hit by a comparable "Red Tsunami" in 2022, when affordability was an even more urgent concern than it is now.
Why, in the larger picture, did voters gravitate to Trump, and why have they revolted? Only one explanation makes sense to me. The immensity of the gamble that voters took on Trump and the intensity of their rejection of him in this cycle were driven by a common force: widespread disaffection with the state of American society and the conditions of the U.S. economy. Wealth inequality has increased in the last fifty years. The richest 0.1% of US households have doubled their share of the US economy, while the bottom 50% of US households have seen their share cut in half. Social mobility today is half of what it was fifty years ago. Access to health care and education is costlier. Opportunities have narrowed, and been reserved for entrenched elites. Though the country as a whole gets wealthier and wealthier, the vast majority of American households feel (rightly) that they are living with increasingly more stress and insecurity, while their chances for improving their situation or that of their children grow ever narrower.
The long time frame of this deterioration does more to explain the broad appeal of Trump than the particular pathologies (racism, sexism, etc.) to which he appealed. Through a series of administrations led by Democrats and Republicans Americans watched as their leaders did nothing to combat narrowing of opportunity and swelling inequality. They saw that politicians of both parties were too captive to corporate interests to effect real change. The resulting anger and desperation this inspired led voters to cast about for someone who was completely different, who could be counted on to break the rules that perpetuated the status quo. They were not wrong in gambling that Trump would be different than any US president who had served in their lifetime.
The fact that voters stuck with Trump so long is not a sign that they are stupid (as many cynics will no doubt conclude), but a measure of just how desperate they had become. Real wages grew slightly in Trump's first term (largely as a result of policies adopted by the Obama administration, like the ACA), creating the illusion that all of his norm-breaking was actually paying off. Even then a critical mass of voters abandoned Trump out of fear of his erratic behavior. Voters only decided to gamble on Trump's "maverick" leadership a second time because the economic woes of the Biden era made it seem once again that aggressive change would be necessary to yield real improvements to the status quo.
Why the Blue Tsunami? For two years we have been given an object lesson in how Trump will lead when all restraints are removed. Voters can see that he has maximum scope to pursue whatever policies he desires, and he has adopted a number of dramatic and novel policies on his own initiative that have materially impacted the lives of virtually all Americans. There can be no doubt that Trump leads differently than any president before him. His expansion of ICE and deployment of its personnel on the streets of America's neighborhoods, his imposition of tariffs on all imported goods, and his launching of a war against Iran were all actions that no other president, Republican or Democrat, would ever have taken in Trump's place.
Two things have thus become obvious: 1)Trump will indeed depart radically from the status quo, but... 2)Everything Trump does can be counted on to make things worse. To these one might add that Trump obviously does not care what happens, as long as he becomes richer and continues to enjoy the praise of spineless sycophants. But a good case could be made that voters knew that about Trump before they re-elected him, and only took a chance on him because they were so unhappy with the way things are and felt so hopeless in the face of Washington's political inertia.
Voters have derailed the MAGA experiment because they have seen enough to know that it has failed. Democrats would be foolish to extrapolate from this that they have and can count on the voters' confidence. Democrats have a short window to prove to voters that they can deliver meaningful change. They must redistribute wealth, reduce the cost and environmental impact of energy, widen access to health care, repair the social safety net, and increase educational opportunity. The urgency of the situation is difficult to overestimate. The consequences of failure will not be the return of MAGA, but much worse: a general abandonment of our system of constitutional democracy. How that would happen and what it would look like are open questions. We must work to ensure that Democratic leadership does not lead us to the place where we discover the answers to such questions.
