The most fundamental factor behind Democrats’ massive victory last night was this: for the last two years, Donald Trump tried to govern like a strongman while lacking the power needed to actually do it.
It’s clear that this election was primarily a revolt against Trump — and, specifically, his flagrant disinterest in actually delivering the cost-of-living improvements he promised in 2024. The Iran war is the biggest culprit, but corruption and the tariffs seem (among other things) to have mattered.
These decisions were not one-off mistakes, but the direct product of the authoritarian structure of the second Trump administration: a policymaking process built around maximum deference to the president’s wishes and a total disregard for legal constraint. Trump’s insistence on personal control also prevented Republicans from running against him in any real way, ensuring that his administration’s mistakes would drag down the entire party.
Were Trump an actual dictator, there would be an easy solution to this problem: rig the election. Trump took several stabs in this direction but he faced an insurmountable level of pushback from courts, states, and civil society activists. The structures of American democracy held, allowing for free and fair elections in which the voters were able to punish the unpopular incumbent.
Understanding the election in these terms isn’t just a matter of semantics: it’s crucial to grasping its implications.
First, and most importantly, it shows that American democracy is a lot more resilient than is widely appreciated.
There are very few other countries where an elected strongman has received this kind of decisive rebuke from voters less than two years after launching an authoritarian takeover bid. This is in part a function of Trump’s own personalist incompetence, but also some pretty deep reservoirs of American democratic strength pushing back on him. That’s pretty damn great.
However, the results also augur new conflicts on the horizon — and potentially a reconfiguration of American politics.
If you see Trump not as a shellacked president, but a caged authoritarian, then it follows that his most likely reaction will be attempting to break the bars holding him back. Going forward, Republicans will have to decide whether to back him in this and/or how to fashion an identity in a post-Trump world; Democrats will need to commit to do more than just oppose Trump, and develop a new vision for a democracy without the vulnerabilities Trump has exposed.
All of this — the extraordinary democratic victory of the midterms, and the new era of American politics we’ve just entered — requires a new kind of political coverage. Which is why I’ve built Public Reason, a new publication on the ideas driving American politics.
More on what I’m doing with Public Reason at the end. But for now, let’s talk about the momentous election that just happened — and what comes next.
The personalism that failed
There are many different ways to structure an authoritarian state. But perhaps the most common, at least nowadays, is “personalism:” where power resides with one specific individual rather than, say, a political party or military junta. This person’s will is dominant, nigh-absolute; there is no check on what they decide, and any subordinate who pushes back too harshly risks ostracism or worse.
This is how Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey works — and it’s also basically the Trump model in America.
Since 2016, he has hollowed out the Republican party, purging anyone willing to challenge his leadership too aggressively. His victories in 2024 solidified this control, which he then attempted to port over to actual policymaking. His first moves in 2025 were aimed at removing checks on executive discretion, including removing career civil servants who might push back on legally dubious orders.
His immediate subordinates all understood the assignment. In one remarkable anecdote, relayed by The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker, a Trump staffer said they have an unofficial rule that whenever Trump tells them to do something twice, they execute on it immediately. Why twice?
“Well, to be fair, he does say a lot of crazy things, but if he says it a second time, we know he’s serious,” the subordinate said (in Parker’s paraphrase). “We know — regardless of whether it’s to fire the board of the Kennedy Center and take it over or to potentially march on Greenland — if that’s what he wants, we are there to make that happen.”
But the problem with personalism, one well-documented by political scientists, is that it tends to produce really bad policy. When one man is making decisions without any serious challenge, he often acts on biased information or personal whim.
Sometimes, the output is ridiculous — like when the Turkmen leader Saparmurat Niyazov renamed all the days of the week and months of the year.1 Other times, it’s disastrous — as with Putin’s 2022 decision to invade Ukraine.
Trump’s second term has seen a mix of both the ridiculous and the disastrous. His strange obsession with Canada led to a trade war no one else really wanted. He wanted more tariffs, so his staff hastily threw together a new regime that imposed duties on Antarctic islands mostly populated by penguins. He hated Jimmy Kimmel, so the FCC tried to silence him. He wanted to renovate the White House, so the East Wing got torn down.
But the most fateful personalist decision was the war in Iran. In their book Regime Change, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan describe a situation where Trump basically decided that the war would be quick, easy, and decisive — and while many of his subordinates had misgivings, no one dared forcefully push back.
The result is, by all accounts, the single most politically significant disaster of the second administration. Not only did the war drag on indefinitely, but it meaningfully contributed to rising prices — which was, again, the number one thing that swing voters elected Trump to solve back in 2024. There is no way to explain the spate of Democratic Senate victories in red states like Kansas, Iowa, and South Carolina — or the full Democratic takeover of Texas — without it. Indeed, even Trump himself admitted that
“I think a part of [the GOP defeat] was Iran,” Trump admitted in a Fox News interview last night.
America is still democratic
Since the early days of the second Trump administration, I’ve had a friendly disagreement with Steven Levitsky — a Harvard political scientist and one of America’s leading experts on comparative democracy.
Levitsky thinks that the United States collapsed swiftly after Trump took office. The president’s pervasive abuse of power, attacks on key democratic institutions, and efforts to tilt the electoral playing field in his direction cumulatively pushed the US over the line into a kind of authoritarian rule.2 I think that the continued viability of the political opposition, the persistence of free and fair elections, and the general ineffectiveness of Trump’s efforts to repress his opponents mean that the US remained within the democratic family — albeit in much-weakened form.
It would be cheap to argue that the midterms proved me right: Democrats just won in a rout, so the US definitionally can’t be under authoritarian rule. But an election loss isn’t, in and of itself, proof that the prior regime was democratic. Viktor Orbán built what was undoubtedly an authoritarian regime in Hungary, and he was ousted in an election earlier this year.
Yet the Hungary comparison is revealing — showing both the resilience of American democracy and why Trump’s personalism backfired so badly.
In the first election Orbán faced after his authoritarian takeover, held in 2014, his Fidesz party maintained its two-thirds of seats in parliament despite losing about 7 points in the popular vote. The party would maintain its stranglehold for 12 years after that, reflecting an authoritarian regime that was increasingly adept at fragmenting and repressing the opposition. Their defeat this year was, according to opposition leader Peter Magyar, more a regime change than ordinary election.
The 2026 midterm, by contrast, was in some ways the textbook definition of an ordinary American midterm. The president’s party almost always loses seats in midterms; Trump was unusually unpopular, thanks to his bad policy choices, so he lost more than normal.
Had Trump been as effective an authoritarian as Orbán, he would have been able to compromise the midterms. Indeed, he certainly tried: Trump made an unprecedented push for mid-cycle gerrymandering, a tactic vital to Orbán’s grip on power. Trump demanded that states turn over their voter rolls to him, arrested over 100 people on voter fraud charges, sued to nullify the Alaska Senate race, and even tried to use the Post Office to blow up mail voting.
These schemes all failed. Even by Democratic estimates, which you’d think would inflate the danger, Trump’s gerrymanders were wildly ineffective in the face of the blue tsunami. States refused to hand over their voter rolls, beating Trump’s attempts to force them in court by a 27-0 margin. The fraud arrests had no discernible impact on voting, and a federal judge blocked the Alaska gambit. The Supreme Court blocked the mail-in balloting scheme in a 7-2 ruling, meaning that a majority of the court’s conservatives sided against the president.
This has been pretty much the norm for Trump’s power grabs. They’ve had a number of extremely damaging effects, both on the quality of American democracy and the world writ large, but failed to significantly marginalize opposing forces or majorly rig the actual voting process. That’s why I’ve long argued that Trump’s authoritarian bid would likely fail.3
Combine that with Trump’s insistence on destructive personalist rule, and Republicans were always going to have a catastrophic midterm like last night’s.
What comes next
In policy terms, the midterm outcome is hugely significant. Trump won’t be able to use Congress to consolidate power, and he’ll face a deluge of investigations and subpoenas that will take up his attention and likely expose some politically damaging stuff.
But — and this is a point on which Levitsky and I emphatically agree — the lesson here should not be that American democracy is safe and undamaged. Far from it.
First, we don’t know how hard the president will fight the results. According to Trump, he has never lost an election; every defeat has been the result of fraud or theft. So far, his reaction has been surprisingly muted (at least, by his standards). If he reverse to form, it could lead to a dangerous and destabilizing showdown.
Second, we don’t know what lessons Republicans and Democrats will take from the results.
Will Republicans finally break not only with lame-duck Trump, but the entire authoritarian turn he initiated? Will they conclude that they simply didn’t MAGA hard enough, and double down? Or, as I think is most likely, will there be a vicious and protracted internal struggle over which of the many of the Trump right visions will triumph?
Will Democrats, for their part, conclude that they’ve received a voter mandate — and ignore the clear signs that it was mostly a negative vote against Republicans rather than an affirmative vote for their agenda? Will they think seriously about the structural changes needed to shore up American democracy against a similar assault, or about how to build a new liberal moral compact that could knit together a fraying polity?
No one knows the answer to these questions for certain. But those answers will be determined not just by the ordinary push-and-pull of politics, but by the deeper ideas and beliefs influencing both sides of the debate.
I’m launching Public Reason because I want to build the place for tracking those intellectual currents.
After 11 years, the Trump era in American politics is coming to a close. What follows is as yet unclear. In this chaotic environment, new and previously sidelined ideas could move to the center of our political life. Indeed, the idea of turning the presidency into a personalist pseudo-dictatorship was widely seen as crackpot even after Trump’s first term — yet it just happened.
I’m going to give you pieces like this one, assessing the fundamental forces shaping the future of both American and global democracy. I’m going to examine the crisis of liberalism at the philosophical level, looking at why it’s in trouble and how it might be reimagined. And I’m going to give you deep dives into the wildest, most interesting ideas shaping the internal conversation across and inside of America’s major political factions, from arguments over the alleged decline of America’s collective morality to Elon Musk’s deeply weird thoughts about the future of the planet.
If you’re interested in any of this, you’ve got an opportunity to get in on the Public Reason ground floor — to presubscribe before our full launch this coming Monday. If you do, you get a 20 percent discount on your monthly subscription fee, which buys you access to Public Reason’s paywalled essays and its comment section.
It’s a scary time in the world — but also, in some ways, an exciting one. I hope we’ll be able to go through it together.
He also renamed himself “Türkmenbaşy,” which translates as “Leader of the Turkmens,” and then renamed the city of Krasnovodsk after his new name. Weird guy.
Levitsky and his coauthor, University of Toronto’s Lucan Wey, describe the US as being a “competitive authoritarian” state — which is, to simplify somewhat, an authoritarian state where elections remain competitive in some sense but are meaningfully tilted in the ruling party’s direction.
Levitsky and Way come to a similar, but slightly different conclusion — that Trump’s has built an authoritarian regime, but he will fail to consolidate it (which means build into something lasting).