Imagining A Democratic Majority
What do they intend to do about all this?
Steve Bannon thinks House Republicans are on track to lose 40 seats next November, in a wipeout driven by their participation in the Epstein-Trump coverup.
Assuming he’s right, Democrats will hold a fairly sizable House majority a year and a half from now, which raises one obvious question: What do they intend to do with it?
Democrats of course want to win. That’s what parties exist to do. The more seats they win in 2026, the more cushion they’ll have in 2028, and on and on into the future. Winning is good.
But I imagine they also want to win because they believe divided government under Donald Trump is safer for the United States and the world than two more years of unified Republican rule—that good will come of it beyond power-building for the Democratic Party.
One way drive the point home is to think in hindsight. If Democrats had won just a few more seats in 2024, the first months of Donald Trump’s second presidency would have played out differently. At the very least, millions of people would not be poised to lose their health insurance. There would have been no big tax-cut bill, and no Trumpcare. There may have also been more oversight, and less executive-branch lawlessness. The Epstein files might currently be under subpoena.
But what’s true in hindsight isn’t necessarily true looking forward. I, of course, do think Democrats should win power in the midterms, that divided Congress would be better than another GOP trifecta. All else equal, Republicans deserve to lose for karmic reasons. But it’s admittedly difficult to explain. It’s easy to barnstorm the country with a 10 point plan Trump would happily veto. It’s hard to wield legislative power nimbly to check Trump and create better-than-alternative outcomes.
So let’s think ahead to what that might entail, and thus what Democrats should be priming themselves to do.