Honoré Daumier: We Worship You, Beloved Voter,
published in the Parisian magazine Le Charivari, 1869

Since 2019 Joseph O’Neill has been writing essays for the Review exhorting the Democratic Party to play offense in the face of what was beginning to seem like an aversion to winning. So in November 2024, in the bewildering days after Donald Trump’s reelection, I wrote to O’Neill in search of a diagnosis of the Democrats’ ills and a prognosis for the country’s recovery. His assessment—“it’s our job to make Trump fail, fail again, fail worse”—inspired what has become a series of conversations in the intervening two years aimed at figuring out how Democratic leadership might be pressured into mounting effective resistance to the president’s alarming authoritarianism.

Now that the Democrats have finally scored an unambiguous victory in the midterm elections, the question is no longer how they might regain power, but what they should do with it. With two more years still to go in Trump’s second term, I wrote to O’Neill this week to take the measure of the “blue wave.”

Daniel Drake: For the first time since we started doing these interviews, there is good news to discuss. The Democrats’ midterm victory outpaced even the more optimistic polls, and made clear that there is enthusiasm for progressive causes in states like Texas that were long written off by the party. (And it is looking more and more likely that they will flip Senate seats in Mississippi and Alaska, too.) How do you interpret this shift in political fortunes? What do American voters want?

Joseph O’Neill: It’s all quite extraordinary, in a wonderful way. The Republican Party brand has collapsed, and it’s hard to see it improving while Trump is in office. But it would be wrong, I think, to interpret what happened merely as a symptom of dissatisfaction with diesel prices, grocery prices, and so on. The magnitude of the results signals that something bigger is afoot. Americans are sick of the ruling class—its corruption, its incompetence, its unresponsiveness. They are angry and worried, not only about the cost of living, but about a national trajectory that’s leading us into a dystopia dominated by artificial intelligence, environmental destruction, and a kind of neo-feudalism. Their vote was not as much a materialist spasm as an act of the imagination. This is the nature of the mandate that Democrats have received. A mandate is a command, we sometimes forget. It is mandatory for Democrats to respond to the voters’ concerns. If they don’t, their party could soon suffer its own collapse.

I’d like to take a second to ask, for once, what do you think the Democrats did right this time? What can​ the national party take credit for? 

So much depends on understanding as accurately as possible the forces that produced this historic electoral victory. It’s important, in our magnanimous euphoria, to not allow the national party leadership to misappropriate political credit.

The biggest, most popular Democratic themes of the election—cost of living, corruption, data centers, ICE, Big Tech, billionaires, the Iran war (and the US-Israel military partnership)—were popularized by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, then successfully taken up by gifted communicators such as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. “Affordability” aside, the party leadership has assented to this agenda with great reluctance, if at all.

I’ve read that Chuck Schumer should get credit for “recruiting” strong Senate candidates. But on inspection, his contribution is hard to discern. It hardly took unique skills to persuade established politicians such as Mary Peltola (Alaska), Roy Cooper (North Carolina), and Sherrod Brown (Ohio) to run in the most propitious cycle of their careers. Adam Hamilton, James Talarico (Texas), Josh Turek (Iowa), Peggy Flanagan (Minnesota), and Annie Andrews (South Carolina) self-recruited. El-Sayed and Troy Jackson (Maine) were not favored by Schumer, whose preferred candidates, disastrously, were the scandalously sore losers Haley Stevens and Janet Mills. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, led by Schumer appointee Kirsten Gillibrand, declined to support the left-wing Angie Nixon, possibly depriving her of a win in Florida. And Scott Colom, who seems poised to flip the Mississippi senate seat, names Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Raphael Warnock, not Schumer, as his earliest and strongest supporters.

To whom, then, does the credit belong? When the Republican Party finally blew itself up, it was devoured by a gigantic blue electoral creature—what one might term the ActBlue coalition. Made up of countless ordinary citizens, this grassroots coalition has for more than a decade sustained a listless Democratic Party by donating, organizing, protesting, fretting, and voting. Renée Good and Alex Pretti were two such citizens. The credit belongs to them.

Already, Hakeem Jeffries has indicated that, when he is majority leader, he may not pursue impeachment proceedings against Trump. Do you think it would be worth expending political capital on an effort to hold the administration accountable for its vast apparatus of corruption? Or ought the Democrats prioritize policy victories first?

We have huge Democratic majorities and a bunch of new political stars who are chomping at the bit. There will be no shortage of political capital and no shortage of people ready and able to take action. It will be feasible and necessary to pursue legislative maneuvering (on the economy, health care, ICE, etc.) simultaneously with oversight investigations into government wrongdoing and corporate overreach. A two-year long drama of interrogation featuring Pete Hegseth, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, Todd Blanche, Alex Karp, Sam Altman, the many Epstein protagonists, et al., would establish where the Democrats stand: the elites are not above the law, corruption and cruelty are unacceptable, democracy can work. Impeachment of the president doesn’t seem called for at this moment, but that could change if Trump’s misconduct worsens.

It seems clear that the “blue tsunami” was in large part due to voters’ rejection of Trump and not their affinity with the Democratic Party. What can Democrats do to prolong and strengthen their own electoral appeal?

That is a question of brand strength, which is a question of earning the public’s trust relative to the Republican Party, a big question that never goes away. For now, I’ll simply say this: the younger new senators—Talarico, El-Sayed, Hamilton, Andrews, Turek, and hopefully Colom—have terrific brand potential. Why? Because they are perceived to be authentic and incorruptible public servants who have the well-being of ordinary people on their consciences. If that perception is substantiated, Democrats will become more electorally resilient. The legislative substance—Medicare For All, higher minimum wage, billionaire taxes, anticorruption, and so on—will, almost by definition, require the party to turn strongly leftward. That probably won’t be possible without a new president in the White House. The big political drawback with focusing the next two years on “affordability” is that Democrats won’t yet have the power to make life much more affordable for anyone.

The structural problem, on this question of electoral resilience, is that the political playing field remains tilted in favor of the Republican Party. Democrats can use their new power to significantly fix this, right now.

The presidency—The Electoral College system is antidemocratic and favors Republican presidential candidates. There are now enough state legislatures under full Democratic control for the passage of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. First proposed in 2006, it is an interstate agreement that would compel state legislatures to award their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who won the popular vote. Make it happen.

The judiciary—Trump has appointed three Supreme Court justices. That’s more than enough. Any SCOTUS vacancy should remain unfilled, pursuant to the McConnell precedent. No federal judge should be appointed who does not pass basic fitness-for-office tests: affirming the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, affirming the correctness of Roe v. Wade, affirming the wrongness of Citizens United. Americans gave the Democrats a huge Senate majority precisely so that they could check the Republican agenda.

The House—The extraordinary margin of this midterm victory has obscured the fact that Republican gerrymanders will make it very difficult for Democrats to win the House again. It is exceedingly important that Democratic state legislatures reciprocate, and ideally surpass, the Republican gerrymanders. Perhaps that will incentivize the GOP to pass federal legislation banning partisan redistricting.

The Oligarchy—A handful of media billionaires (the Ellisons, the Murdochs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, et al.) control much of our ideological environment. Pumping out right-wing disinformation and hatred, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on political campaigns, they are corrupting our elections and undermining democratic norms (the rule of law, fair elections, access to reliable information and good education, the culture and practice of science, equality of persons, and so on). Meanwhile, deranged billionaires in the field of AI are imperiling our civilization, our humanity, and nothing less than the continued existence of homo sapiens. Americans of every political disposition are sick of it: on Tuesday, a large majority of Montanans voted to ban “artificial persons” like corporations and nonprofit organizations from contributing to political campaigns and funding PACs. This is the path that Democrats must follow, at every level of government. Despite the defeat of Proposition 40 in California, wealth taxes on billionaires must be pursued in multiple states, with interstate coordination and support from the national party. The oligarchs must be taken down. It’s no exaggeration, at this point, to say that it’s them or us.

A writer I follow observed:

Elections are just another moment, just another beginning. It’s only an end for the people who lose; the people who win then have to govern. The current reality is that while progressive orgs and organizers in the US have figured out several winning formulas for getting candidates on the ballot and then in office, they have yet to figure out a consistent mechanism for keeping their electeds in line once they’re elected.

Could you speculate on what a consistent mechanism for holding elected Democrats accountable to their campaign promises might look like? That is, how can the voters now ensure that a notoriously timorous party actually pursues the policies—universal health care, ending the war in Iran, cutting off funding to the Israeli war machine—it was elected to do?

It’s a good question. First off, Democrats need to figure out who the speaker and the senate majority leader will be. A congressional leadership consisting of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer could not be more emblematic of the failed political order that voters have just rejected. The concern is substantive, too: it is hard to see how these two creatures of the donor class can be trusted to do what voters have called for, which is precisely to bring to heel a donor class whose interests (in foreign policy, health care, AI, and so on) are in conflict with the interests of ordinary Americans. The likelihood is that the status quo will be perpetuated, at least for another two years. It will be up to the aforementioned ordinary citizens, yet again, to apply pressure to force our incorrigibly subservient Democratic leaders to act like a party mandated by a historic electoral majority. Grassroots uproar works. It is unlikely, for example, that Jeffries will again meet privately with Jared Kushner, as he did in the summer, reportedly to discuss the “common ground” between the parties. We still don’t know what was actually discussed at that face-to-face, which remains inexplicable to anyone who believes that there’s a difference between good and bad government.

One of the most surprising developments of the midterms—and of the off-year elections since 2024—has been the success of democratic socialists. After Tuesday, the mayors of New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and Providence will all be democratic socialists, a development that was hard to imagine before Trump’s second term. A great many Americans still profess distrust of socialism, broadly construed. Do you think these mayors, alongside the more prominent DSA and DSA adjacent politicians like Bernie and AOC, can reverse the more than century-long American antipathy to a social safety net and government services?  

It’s still unclear if we’re seeing a fundamental ideological shift or something more fleeting. Either way, it feels very good to live in Mamdani’s New York. Most significantly, to my mind, he and other young politicians are inspiring young people of every background to take an interest in political action. Voters under thirty turned out in huge numbers these midterms, and they seem to have swung left, hard. It’s very encouraging.

More by Joseph O’Neill at nybooks.com

If I Were Chuck Schumer

“Democrats must finally treat the Republican Party as the Republicans treat the Democratic Party: not as a partner in ‘bipartisanship’ but as an adversary—an adversary, in the case of the GOP, that will not respect the rules of democracy unless it is forced to by political defeat.”

The Politics of Raw Power

“The Republican Party, animated by fantasies of crushing liberals and minorities once and for all, is fundamentally devoted to achieving one-party rule.”

Authoritarian Blitz

The Republican Party’s attempts to suspend the rule of law can only be stopped if Democratic leaders show the moral clarity and political courage of a normal party of opposition.

All Bets Are Off

“The Democrats must do everything in their power and influence to oppose, slow down, and attach political costs to the Trump agenda.”

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