Sweeping Democratic victories in off-year elections seem to be foreshadowing a very good midterms for the party, and one expert believes it’s even bigger than that.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which focuses on electing Democrats to statehouses, told Mother Jones.
To find the cloud in the silver lining, I can easily see how this doesn’t happen.
Currently we are outraged at ICE and military in our streets inflicting harm on innocents, nervous about getting in a war no one would have even thought of, suffering from tariffs increasing prices and ACA premiums going way up.
The thing about every single one of those is that Republicans caused them and Republicans can mostly fix them. Simply by undoing the things they caused in the first place makes folks feel like things are getting fixed, and many will forget why they were broken and just be focused on how they got better during the election year.
So I expect immigration enforcement to tone down (already saw a story to that effect), for them to manage a last minute ACA subsidy extension with much drama, pulling back a lot of tariffs, and chilling out on Venezuela for 2026. Going extra by cutting some “tariff fund” checks and some HSA deposits, to make sure the people get some money, even if it is smaller than the money lost, people fall for “windfalls”. Maybe throw some folks under the bus like RFK Jr and Hegseth, to drain the swamp so to speak.
It’s a possibility for sure but it leans on the idea of a sudden surge of 1) competence and 2) congress and scotus reeling in the presidential power
I think the PJ25b people are pragmatic enough to get those good optics in the short term.
If Trump actually gets adamant they can just make him a trophy and he’ll be happy.