Kansas hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. On Tuesday it did.1 Texas, which hadn’t elected a Democrat statewide in 32 years, elected two: James Talarico to the Senate and Gina Hinojosa as governor.2 Democrats flipped seven Senate seats and took both chambers of Congress.²
Waves are common. Realignments are rare. A wave changes who holds the gavel; a realignment changes what the country believes government is for. We’ve had two in the last century. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt used his opening to prove that government could work for the people who pay for it, and that coalition governed for a generation. In 1980, Ronald Reagan used his to sell a new story: cut taxes at the top, unleash the market, and the wealth will trickle down. Tuesday can be the start of the third, or one more wave Democrats spend living inside Reagan’s story.
The Bill
Fifty years in, we can read the bill. RAND researchers asked what Americans below the top 10 percent would have earned if income had kept growing with the economy, as it did in the decades after World War II. The answer: $47 trillion more from 1975 to 2018, and $2.5 trillion in 2018 alone.3 Meanwhile, the odds of out-earning your parents went from 92 percent for children born in 1940 to 50 percent for children born in 1984. The researchers who measured that were blunt about the cause: faster growth alone can’t bring the old odds back. Sharing growth the way the country once did would close 71 percent of the drop between the 1940 and 1980 cohorts.4
The wealth didn’t trickle down. It moved up, and what it moved up on was everyone else’s ladder: the degree that became a lifetime of debt, the healthcare that hangs on a job you can’t afford to lose, the chance that your kids would do better than you. That’s the trade the last fifty years made. Republicans wrote it, and Democrats signed it.
Why Trickle-Down Outlived Reagan
Signing it came with a theory of politics, and Matthew Yglesias stated it plainly to Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo last week.5 A self-described “chill centrist person,” he treats public opinion as something to read, not something to change: “Raising the salience of immigration issues is a win for Trump.” When Hasan cited John F. Kennedy refusing to “take the temperature every week or two” on civil rights, Yglesias first granted the point: “I give credit to Martin Luther King and to other people there in the movement. Like they changed opinion.” Then he said that era’s politics “don’t strike me as a really good model for today’s politics.”⁵
So opinion moves, and somebody moves it. If some politicians won’t, the only ones moving it are those willing to, and for fifty years that has been the right, which built a machine of think tanks, legal foundations and media to do exactly that, as I laid out in The Real Deep State. Translation: don’t try to change anyone’s mind. Wait for Republicans to change it, then call wherever it lands “the center.”
After Reagan’s 1984 landslide, Democratic strategists founded the Democratic Leadership Council, and by 1990 it declared the party’s mission was “to expand opportunity, not government.”6 Its chair, Bill Clinton, won two years later. Every win on the other side’s terms ratified those terms, which I traced in The Freedom Illusion, Part III. What Democrats kept was protection: Medicaid, ACA coverage, civil rights enforcement. That’s worth defending, but stopping the bleeding doesn’t take the knife out of the room. People stop feeling the difference, and a demagogue harvests the despair. The Army warned soldiers about this in 1945: “the only way to prevent fascism from getting a hold in America is by making our democracy work.”7 (I walked through that warning in This Is American Fascism!)
Two Kinds of Democrat
The question Tuesday raises isn’t left versus center. It’s whether Democrats manage that decline or end it.
Managing it has a familiar sound. Its candidates run on what’s already popular, and its favorite word is “electable.” In Michigan’s Senate primary, Rep. Haley Stevens had the party establishment behind her and about $62 million in outside spending, roughly nine times her opponent’s.8 Her argument was that nominating Abdul El-Sayed could cost Democrats the seat.9 He won it by about seven points.⁹ Two days before the election, after a feud with his campaign,⁸ she endorsed the Republican, Mike Rogers.10 She called him Trump’s rubber stamp at least fourteen times.¹⁰ Then she lent him hers. A candidacy built on a forecast has nothing underneath it when the forecast fails. Stevens was sold as the safe choice. The safe choice was the one who walked.
Ending it sounds different, and it isn’t one wing’s property. El-Sayed ran on universal healthcare and taxing the rich.⁹ Talarico’s victory line was “Texas is not for sale.”11 Adam Hamilton, a centrist pastor running on affordability, beat a Kansas senator who had sued more than 700 of his own patients over bills.¹ What they share is a promise to change something people can feel. That promise won. Whether it becomes a program is the whole question.
What Not Wasting It Looks Like
Not wasting this once-in-a-lifetime realignment opportunity means aiming past affordability, at dignity: a country where the place you start doesn’t decide where you end up. Healthcare that doesn’t hang on your job. Education that opens a door instead of locking you into debt. A fair shot for your kids that isn’t a coin flip.
And it means being honest about who pays. The people who gained most from fifty years of growth flowing upward should contribute in proportion to what they gained. That isn’t punishment. Their gains were built on the ladder taken from everyone else, and this puts it back. The research says it works, too: sharing growth restores most of the lost odds; growth alone doesn’t.⁴
Trump holds a veto until January 2029, and much of this will die on his desk. Pass it anyway. Make him veto it in public, so 2028 is a vote on a program. That is what moving opinion looks like: showing people what you’d do, and who stopped you.
Your part: when someone calls a candidate unelectable, ask, electable to do what? Write down what the winners promised and read it back to them, by name, in January. Give to the movements as well as the campaigns. The 2028 primaries start now.
Because if Democrats take this mandate and go back to managing the decline, the anger won’t vanish. It will go looking for somewhere else to land, and what comes after could make Trump look like the good old days.
Voters opened the door. What we build through it is up to us.
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Fighting Fascism: How We Charge Ahead and Win — The strategic playbook for reclaiming power
The Trump Regime Messaging Guide — How to talk to people who’ve been captured by the machine
The Freedom Illusion — How we got here, and the counter-ideology that gets us out
The Record
Kaia Hubbard, “Adam Hamilton wins Kansas 2026 Senate election, CBS News projects, flipping seat for Democrats”, CBS News, November 3, 2026.
Reports that the Rev. Adam Hamilton, pastor of the largest United Methodist church in the country, defeated Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, and that “Kansas last elected a Democrat to the Senate in 1932, and President Trump won the state by more than 16 points in 2024.” It describes Hamilton as “a centrist Democrat” who “ran on an affordability-focused agenda,” and notes that Marshall was damaged by a New York Times investigation finding he had sued “more than 700 of his patients over outstanding bills.” Hamilton matters because he is a centrist: he won on a promise to change what people pay, which is why the mandate reads as a demand for change rather than a victory for one faction.
Tanner Stening, “2026 midterm election results: Who won the key House and Senate races?”, Northeastern Global News, November 4, 2026.
Reports that Democrats “seized control of the House and Senate,” flipping seven Senate seats (Kansas, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina). In Texas, Talarico “became the first Democrat to win a statewide office in 32 years,” and Gina Hinojosa defeated Gov. Greg Abbott, becoming “the first Democrat to hold the office since Ann Richards left in 1995.” It quotes Hakeem Jeffries, via NPR: “This is a change election. And we understand as House Democrats we need to deliver dramatic change. Things are broken.” It also carries political scientist Martha Johnson’s caution that the results are not “a clear victory for the Democratic Party’s policy agenda.” Voters demanded change; whether that becomes a program depends on the people they elected.
Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018”, RAND Corporation, September 2020.
RAND’s working paper compares actual taxable income with a counterfactual in which income kept growing at the pace of the economy, as it did in the decades after World War II. It finds that aggregate income for those below the 90th percentile “would have been $2.5 trillion (67 percent) higher in 2018 had income growth since 1975 remained as equitable as it was in the first two post-War decades,” and that “from 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.” The authors’ companion commentary (“A $2.5 Trillion Question,” October 6, 2020) explains that “starting around 1975, incomes for the bottom 90 percent of individuals grow more slowly than the economy as a whole as incomes for the top 10 percent grow faster.” The measure is pre-transfer taxable income, so it captures what the market economy paid people, which is exactly the claim trickle-down made and failed.
Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca and Jimmy Narang, “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940”, Science, April 28, 2017.
Using tax and census data, the authors find that “92% of children born in 1940 grew up to earn more than their parents. In contrast, only 50% of children born in 1984 grew up to earn more than their parents,” with the steepest falls in the middle class and the industrial Midwest. Their counterfactuals identify the cause: “increasing GDP growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility,” while allocating growth across income groups as it was for the 1940 cohort raises mobility to 80 percent, “closing 71% of the gap.” Their conclusion: reviving the American Dream “would require more broadly shared economic growth rather than just higher GDP growth rates.” That is the evidence behind the piece’s claim that the lost ladder is a question of distribution, and that putting it back is both fair and effective.
Mehdi Hasan and Matthew Yglesias, “Mehdi GRILLS Centrist Pundit Matt Yglesias for Calling Gaza A ‘Just War’”, Zeteo (YouTube), October 29, 2026.
A long-form interview, cited only for Yglesias’s own account of how politics works. He calls himself “a kind of chill centrist person” (about 3:30) and says “raising the salience of immigration issues is a win for Trump” (43:23). From about 1:04:29, Hasan reads him the West Wing scene (“You say these numbers mean dial it down. I say they mean dial it up... These are people you haven’t persuaded yet”) with its “French radical” line (“There go my people. I must find out where they’re going so I can lead them”), and Kennedy’s 1963 remark that civil rights “is not a matter on which you can take the temperature every week or two,” as Hasan quoted it. Yglesias answers that mid-century politics “don’t strike me as a really good model for today’s politics,” because the parties were not polarized and Black Southerners could not vote, and grants that “I give credit to Martin Luther King and to other people there in the movement. Like they changed opinion” (about 1:06:16–1:07:45). His strongest point, that the era was different, is a real one; it changes the conditions, not the job.
Lily Geismer, “How the Third Way Made Neoliberal Politics Seem Inevitable”, The Nation.
A history of the Democratic Leadership Council, which “party strategists founded... in 1985 to reclaim the White House after Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection,” as “another in a long series of efforts to nudge the Democratic Party rightward.” It quotes the DLC’s 1990 New Orleans Declaration: “The fundamental mission of the Democratic Party is to expand opportunity, not government,” and the “free market, regulated in the public interest, is the best engine of general prosperity.” It notes that Clinton chaired the DLC in 1990 and 1991 before winning the presidency in 1992, and that the third way’s “most lasting legacy may well be its determination to consign the political left to the dustbin of history.” This is where the party chose to follow the opinion Reagan’s coalition had moved rather than move it back.
U.S. War Department, “Army Talk, Orientation Fact Sheet #64: FASCISM!”, U.S. War Department, March 24, 1945.
The orientation pamphlet the Army issued to soldiers in the last months of the war. Its prescription: “The only way to prevent fascism from getting a hold in America is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security,” and, “Only by democratically solving the economic problems of our day can there be any certainty that fascism won’t happen here.” The first sentence is quoted through “work.” The Army’s point is the difference between protecting people from a failing economy and making democracy deliver: only the second keeps fascism out.
Wikipedia contributors, “2026 United States Senate election in Michigan”, Wikipedia, November 5, 2026.
Used for the spending figures and vote tables. Citing the New York Times, the page reports that Stevens “benefited from an outside spending advantage, with approximately $62 million spent on her behalf, amounting to a 9–1 advantage,” including nearly $30 million from AIPAC and affiliated groups, and that she “received private backing from Senate Democratic leadership.” She was also endorsed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Sen. Gary Peters and former Sen. Debbie Stabenow. The primary result was El-Sayed 744,952 (48.45 percent) to Stevens 731,160 (47.55 percent). It summarizes the feud before her endorsement: an ad by an independent pro-El-Sayed PAC that his campaign had no role in, his refusal to play the “condemn game,” and her disinvitation from a campaign event. Wikipedia is a secondary aggregator; each figure traces to the reporting it cites.
Lauren Gibbons, “Abdul El-Sayed beats Mike Rogers in US Senate race: ‘Michigan, we did it’”, Bridge Michigan, November 4, 2026.
Bridge’s election-night report: the Associated Press called the race at 2:27 a.m., and with 98 percent of votes counted El-Sayed led 52.5 to 45.5 percent, about seven points. It describes the “common refrain” of Stevens and her high-profile supporters during the primary: that nominating El-Sayed “could cost Democrats the Senate seat and a chance at flipping the chamber’s majority.” It describes El-Sayed as “a progressive who campaigned on universal healthcare and taxing the rich.” It also reports that he had support from Barack Obama and Kamala Harris in the general election.
Sophie Hurwitz, “Here are some things Haley Stevens said about Mike Rogers before endorsing him”, Mother Jones, November 1, 2026.
Published the afternoon Stevens endorsed Rogers, “two days out from the election,” this piece collects her own posts about him. On August 1 she wrote that Rogers “will be another rubber stamp for Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda. We can’t afford to give MAGA another Senate seat in November,” and Mother Jones counts at least 13 other uses of “rubber stamp” about him, at least fourteen in all. Earlier posts called him “MAGA Mike” and “the worst kind of politician,” and attacked his records on Big Pharma, abortion and LGBTQ rights. The gap between what Stevens said Rogers was and what she did two days before the vote is the whole case.
Joe Walsh, Kathryn Watson, Stefan Becket, Kaia Hubbard, Caitlin Yilek, Caroline Linton and Melissa Quinn, “2026 midterm election live updates as Democrats prepare to take Congress, GOP grapples with stunning losses”, CBS News, November 5, 2026.
CBS’s running coverage of the results carries Talarico’s victory line, “Texas is not for sale,” aimed at Elon Musk’s spending for Paxton, and his call to get big money out of politics “for good.” It also records JD Vance saying “the reason we lost is the war,” Ted Cruz’s “Watergate-level repudiation,” and former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel’s point that Democrats couldn’t have won Texas, Kansas or South Carolina “without Republican voters actually crossing over.” Much of Tuesday was a vote against before it was a vote for; the results are network projections, not certified counts.
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