The Hard Road Ahead for the Democratic Majority

Anne Kim: To lay some groundwork for our conversation, what’s your take on what happened with these midterms? Did Democrats breach the red wall, or did it just collapse?

Ed Kilgore: I’m firmly of the belief that midterm elections are almost entirely a referendum on the party that controls the White House. It’s particularly true this year because we happen to have a president who has dominated the landscape like none before him, and who insisted on personalizing the midterms to a laughable degree, thus guaranteeing it would be about him rather than policy or the two parties even. 

That’s important because the real key to this election are the so-called double haters, people who aren’t really fond of either party, many of whom actually voted for Trump in 2024 and are disappointed by his performance in office, but who are not necessarily swinging to the Democratic Party. 

That affects what Democrats do in the short term with their new congressional majorities, and most importantly, it affects how they think about 2028. They should not assume that this midterm victory will carry over automatically to 2028, even though Donald Trump will still be in office then, because presidential elections are by definition elections of choice, not referenda. Democrats need to pivot very rapidly. They’re no longer going to be able to just coast on unhappiness with Donald Trump.

Anne Kim: That raises a host of questions about how to keep the double haters happy. What kind of policy ideas would help keep these people in the tent?

Ed Kilgore: Democrats need to figure out quickly how to address the cost-of-living concerns that pretty clearly drove this election, and in a situation where they’re not going to be in a position to enact legislation. 

More immediately, there’s going to be a lame-duck session of Congress controlled by Republicans who are frantic to get one more bite at the apple while they still maintain trifecta control of the federal government. That could mean another big nasty budget reconciliation bill with all kinds of ideological snacks for the Republican base in it, because they won’t have an opportunity to do that for the next two years. So before Democrats even get into a position to do any legislating of their own, they’re going to have to figure out how to cope with that. Do they try to strike some grand bargain with Trump to make it possible to get through the lame-duck session without anything catastrophic happening? And how does that fit into their long-term goals? It’s going to be very, very tricky.

They’re going to have to make some decisions very, very quickly about how to proceed. And a particularly tricky issue is what to do with a pent-up desire for investigations of the Trump administration and possible impeachment—if not of Trump, then of some of his subordinates like the “Secretary of War.”

Democrats can convince themselves that anti-corruption was indeed an important reason for their victories in 2026. Some polls showed it matching cost of living as a concern right towards the end, probably because Republicans also claimed to care about corruption (though in their case they were talking about Medicaid fraud). That could provide a rationale for a vengeance agenda by Democrats—addressing some of the more egregious abuses of power by the Trump administration. But at the same time, that could poison the well for any kind of legislation on anything else.

This is the new reality of American politics in the age of polarization. Without a governing trifecta in Washington, it’s very difficult to get anything done. That will be true at least until the filibuster is finally abolished. So that’s sort of the dilemma Democrats are in right this minute.

Anne Kim: Well, the problem with having a trifecta, or at least in more recent times, is overreach. We saw that in 2010, right, when there was overreach by the Obama administration in those first two years. 

Ed Kilgore: And then again in 2021 with the race to enact legislation to deal with the COVID pandemic and the economic collapse it created. There was a lot of bad lawmaking done by Democrats in 2021. 

I think it’s going to be particularly interesting to see if Democrats are capable of addressing the anti-government sentiment that’s out there today. That probably helped them in the 2026 midterms, but that is a long-term vulnerability of the Democratic Party, which for good and bad reasons is perceived as the party of government. And in the kind of public climate we have right now, there’s just not much of a constituency for a pro-government party. 

Democrats have a hard time understanding anti-government populism. They understand the economic variety perfectly well, but when it comes to attacking their own constituents, as they often think of it, in government itself, they struggle, and that’s going to be a problem for them between now and 2028.

Anne Kim: The New York Times reported that Trump said that he would work with Democrats and that he would accept the election results. Is he trustworthy? Or is it a trap for Democrats to go down that road?

Ed Kilgore: Well, it’s complicated. First of all, let’s hasten to say that it is a good thing that Donald Trump did not claim victory last [week]. He has in all the other previous elections he’s lost, and I think that’s one of the little-understood effects of this size of a midterm victory is that it really made it impossible for Trump to claim victory and then claim that subsequent votes that predictably overturn early Republican leads are the result of fraud. He didn’t do that, he couldn’t do that, and that’s a good thing, because that probably means that Democrats will be able to transition to power in January without too much in the way of obstruction. And that’s very, very important. In terms of working with Trump, is he trustworthy? Of course not.

Does he mean what he says? Who knows? Is he capable of flip-flopping back and forth on precisely this kind of question? Absolutely. We saw it before when he was dealing with congressional majorities in at least one chamber of Congress during his first term. Above all, you have to understand that the man only thinks about himself and his legacy. It’s just unclear to me at this point what Democrats really feel like they can give him that will make him reasonable on all the stuff that they care about that he doesn’t, which is a potential narrow path to getting something done. But of course the 2028 election is going to hang over this whole thing for the next two years. I think a very important question to ask about Trump is: Does he care whether his successor is a Republican or not? I’m not sure about that anymore. If he really doesn’t care and he would just as soon throw JD Vance under a bus, then maybe some accommodations could be made. But it’s way too early to figure that out yet.

Anne Kim: You started out your career working for Georgia Senator Sam Nunn as his communications director. You were also the policy director for the Democratic Leadership Council back in the day. And you’re from Georgia. What’s your take on this sudden “blue-ification” of the South? Is this ephemeral or something that could be more permanent?

Ed Kilgore: Man, I never thought I’d live to see it. And as you indicated, I’ve been around a while. I worked for three Georgia governors before I ever worked for Sam Nunn and so I’ve seen Georgia go from literally from being the Solid South to being solidly Republican, and then back again.

Depending on what happens in Mississippi, there are going to be six or seven Democratic senators from the former Confederacy. That’s astonishing. And if you look beneath the hood, it’s not just the big flashy wins like, you know, [Jon] Ossoff in Georgia or [James] Talarico in Texas. My God, it was an up-and-down-the-ballot trouncing for Republicans in those two states. Democrats might even flip one chamber of the Georgia legislature, and in both states, they won every single statewide race. 

And by the way, this wasn’t through the old Blue Dog formula of finding one or two progressive things that voters cared about and then moving to the right as rapidly as you could on everything else. That’s the way it used to work for Southern Democrats. These are reasonably progressive national Democrats winning elections in the South. I tend to think that they’re a little more pragmatic and a little less bound to interest groups than some national progressives. But they’re real Democrats. 

I think it’s kind of interesting. To the extent that there’s going to be some struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party over the next two years, which God help us, there’s going to be, I think these new highly diverse Southern Democrats may be an important faction in the pragmatic part of the national Democratic Party.

And there are a lot of rising stars now. I mean, we’re only beginning to understand who Annie Andrews is, or the possible future Democratic senator from Mississippi, Scott Colom. So it’s a really big deal and something I wasn’t sure I would live to see is the South becoming generally purple again, and again, not just in those advanced states like Georgia and North Carolina and Virginia that have become cosmopolitan in important ways, but South Carolina [and] Mississippi. We used to call those two states the “Super South,” that would never really change and that would always be subject to racial polarization between the two parties. Maybe not so much now.

Anne Kim: Who is powering those victories in the South? Is it the double haters, as you indicated before, or is there a different constituency? Are we talking Hispanic voters, but also Black voters energized by the Supreme Court decision in Callais? Is it a different coalition than in the past? 

Ed Kilgore: No, it’s pretty much the old coalition of black and white voters that was always the key for Democrats in the South, at least after the Civil Rights revolution. But you have a much smaller percentage of rural and small-town and exurban white voters that are willing to consider Democrats, but a pretty large and growing core of a lot of transplants, a lot of young professionals who have changed the white electorate of the South demographically. I haven’t really had a chance to study it yet, but South Carolina has had an extraordinary influx of migrants in recent years. I have a feeling they have a little something to do with what happened in South Carolina this year. It’s been true in Georgia for a while. And yes, absolutely, Hispanic and Asian American voters in several of these states have become very important. The Asian American voters, particularly Korean Americans in Georgia, have become a very important part of that new emerging Democratic suburban vote around Atlanta. And a lot of the political stars are coming from those communities too. So it’s the same in some fundamental ways, but also very different. And I think Southern Republicans have gotten lazy.

Anne Kim: I want to go back to something you raised about the desire for a vengeance or retribution agenda as part of what Democrats want to do. How do you think Democrats will handle that balance between affordability on the one hand and accountability on the other?Are they going to impeach Pete Hegseth? Are there other targets?

Ed Kilgore: Well, again it’s a complicated subject. But the problem is this. When you control the House and the Senate, but not the executive branch of the government and, you know, really can’t pass legislation, how are you going to spend your day? Oversight, investigations, the sort of political theater that Washington specializes in is the easy thing to do, and sometimes it’s the only thing to do. 

Can you do all of that without necessarily descending into the morass of impeachment proceedings? I don’t know. The conventional wisdom right now is that the Democratic base is avid to throw these bums out and prosecute everybody in sight and impeach everybody in sight. If you took a poll of rank-and-file Democrats, do they want a third Trump impeachment? Even if they know it won’t succeed in removing him from office? Absolutely they want that. So I think you’re going to see a phenomenon where Democratic leaders in the House will try to throw some chum into the water with the impeachment of Hegseth to start with, because there’s already an impeachment resolution that’s going to pop up on the House floor during the lame-duck session.

That could happen very quickly. I think that’s what you’re going to see, along with some bread and circus hearings. You can’t take the politics out of politics. So I think the desire to do something practical on living costs, which I think Democrats all understand are the keys of the kingdom, is going to be hard to accomplish, and it’ll be much easier to do what I’m afraid they will spend all of their time doing, which is just payback.

Anne Kim: And then start hauling CEOs in front of committees and that kind of thing too, because they contributed to the ballroom et cetera.

Ed Kilgore: Boy, I hadn’t even thought about that.

Anne Kim: What about the GOP? What’s your prognosis for where they go from here?

Ed Kilgore: I haven’t had much time to think about it since what happened. But right now I think they’re going to have a bit of a nervous breakdown as a party, precisely because the two most active elements in the party, the ultra-MAGA Republicans and the rest of the party, are going to look at this very, very, very differently. You will find a lot of Republicans echoing what the president apparently thinks, which is that the party didn’t make itself even more ideologically extreme and more populist and more disruptive, and really became too much a part of the swamp, enjoyed power too much.

This could lead in some interesting ways. A lot of the same insurgent populist Republicans who think of themselves as ultra-MAGA are also very angry at the president’s handling of Iran and his preoccupation with vanity projects in and around the Washington area, none of which fits their idea of a disruptive populist movement. 

The immediate question they’re going to have is their congressional leadership, and expect Mike Johnson and John Thune will both be replaced by more ideologically oriented leaders. And most of all I’m fascinated with what all this means for JD Vance as the putative successor.

Anne Kim: I was just going to ask you that. How’s he looking?

Ed Kilgore: I don’t think he comported himself very well during this election cycle personally. We’ve learned more than ever that the man is just too far online, that he really has a little trouble operating as a retail politician. We tend to forget that he’s only been in one election before he became vice president.

And his association with the disaster in his home state of Ohio, including his defense of this despicable Ramaswamy ad that I think embarrassed most Republicans, isn’t going to go away. The idea that he is a cinch for the Republican presidential nomination is very questionable now. Who knows what Trump is going to do? Again, it’s not clear to me whether he cares who his successor is. And if so, is he willing to expend what little political capital he has left to make this man his successor, even as the Republican nominee and the head of the MAGA movement? I don’t know about that. At this point I think he’d probably prefer another vanity project in Washington to having a living legacy in the White House itself.

Anne Kim: That seems to imply that you think that Trump is not going to do anything terribly erratic or chaos-monkey-like in the last two years?

Ed Kilgore: I’m not making any bets. I don’t think he ever cared that much about most legislation. If you think about how he talked about legislation, like the Big Beautiful Bill Act, it’s basically as a bribe to voters. All he ever talked about was the money that he put in your pocket. 

Anne Kim: Which never materialized, by the way.

Ed Kilgore: It’s never materialized or was offset by really bad things on the health care front. But his attitude about legislation was always transactional. He’s always pursued his legacy in living monuments and, God help us, in foreign policy and international affairs. And it’s there that he can do the most damage over the next two years, where it’s really, really difficult for Congress to get hold of the levers of foreign policy from a president who doesn’t want to give it up. We saw that with Richard Nixon. A lot of us are worried about what he’s going to do in Iran in the immediate future, which will probably be a signal of how he’s going to comport himself in the next two years.

The idea that we’re going to have some dignified semi-retirement by the 47th president during the last two years of his presidency strikes me as highly unlikely and, you know, presumably wrong. So that’s a problem for the Republican Party, for the Democratic Party, and most of all for the country.

Anne Kim: Final question for you, as long as we’re talking about 2028, and that’s on the Democratic side. What kind of lessons should Democrats draw from what happened in the midterms about the kinds of candidates they need to put forward in 2028?

Ed Kilgore: Well, getting back to the double-hater analysis of the swing electorate and recognizing that the Democratic Party has some serious problems as an institution.

Democrats absolutely need fresh faces. I wouldn’t rule out a sitting member of Congress, but I sure would prefer a governor or mayor or someone who has actually had some practical experience in governing, someone who can manipulate not just words, but real things in the real world and show some results in the face of an electorate that really doesn’t trust politicians at all, less maybe than ever, and that frankly assumes they’re all corrupt. 

The very words that Democrats deployed during the midterm elections against the party running the White House will be turned against them in 2028, when populism of every sort, anti-government and economic, will affect both parties quite a bit. Having a credible presidential ticket doesn’t just mean being “authentic” in the show business sense. It also means someone who can talk about policy and point to some policy accomplishments and who understands the strengths as well as the weaknesses of the Democratic coalition.

I’m not endorsing anybody at all yet, but I do want to praise Pete Buttigieg for talking about bringing back reinventing government as a theme in Democratic politics, something that everybody else seems to have forgotten about. It’s sort of adjacent to what some have called the “abundance agenda,” which is simply a focus by progressive politicians in making things happen in the real world, not just agitating the air.

I think that sort of theme, whether it’s from him or somebody else, could be crucial in a general election. It’s always possible that the Trump era will have such an enduring hangover that Democrats will be able to win a trifecta in 2028 with just about anybody, but I wouldn’t count on it.