If you’re looking for my initial takeaways from last night’s unprecedented midterms, check out my post from this morning — it’s free for all to read. This longer, more detailed analysis is for Slow Boring’s paid subscribers. Paid subscribers also have a few more hours to submit questions for Friday’s midterms Mailbag. Get them in by 3 p.m. Eastern!
In some ways, pessimism is a frequent rhetorical register of Slow Boring and has been since its inception. I’m the one warning people that the Senate map doesn’t get any kinder after 2026, that the median voter in Iowa doesn’t share the concerns of the median Bluesky poster, and that state elections are a constant reminder that public appetite for sweeping change is actually quite limited.
But what I want the dominant register to be is actually something different: agency.
I want everyone reading to see that the choices made by politicians, staffers, aligned nonprofits, and even highly engaged citizens who pay for subscription newsletters or post about politics online make a difference. That politics isn’t just about “vibes” or vertical video skills or superficial rhetorical choices.
And I think this is truly what we’ve seen over the past two years.
The exact same country that delivered a real mandate to Donald Trump in 2024 — a mandate to secure the border and bring down inflation — turned sharply against him because he utterly failed to bring down inflation and embarked on an alarming orgy of corruption. Those choices set the table for a plausible Democratic Senate majority despite the map, and then Democrats ran very good candidates in a lot of key races.
In Texas and Kansas, strong Democratic candidates ran against bad Republican candidates and crazy things happened. Florida is not, in principle, less winnable than Texas, but the Florida G.O.P. put up reasonable candidates and Democrats did not have a Josh Turek or an Annie Andrews in the Florida Senate race. It turns out that in the right circumstances, even South Carolina can be on the map.
But note that part of winning in South Carolina was that Andrews had to align with public opinion on women’s sports teams. Progressives seem to have been happy with James Talarico, and I am happy for them, but he pulled off a win by campaigning for the kind of all-of-the-above energy strategy that post-Obama Democrats abandoned and Slow Boring has argued they should bring back.
The key to carrying all this momentum forward is to remember — and to remind people — that good things don’t just happen because of small-dollar fundraising or campaign gimmicks.
What candidates say they’ll do in office matters, and what they actually do matters even more.
In the context of 2026, that meant Trump’s broken promises were the most important factors in this election. In the context of 2028, his choices will continue to matter but so will the choices of the newly empowered Democratic majority. If they make smart choices, they can spend the next two years putting the boot on the neck of MAGA and the four after that restoring the country’s confidence in Democrats.
If they get sloppy, lazy, or undisciplined, we’ve seen over and over again that large electoral swings are very real and they happen in both directions.
But if the kinds of people who won these tough races dig in and make sure the right lessons are learned and the right momentum is carried forward, we can transform the party, and the country, for the better.
Winning the narrative and the transition
Back in 2018, moderate Democrats flipped critical House seats and gave Democrats a majority. But a handful of left-wing primary winners in deep-blue districts — the Squad — managed to make themselves the story of the midterm.
Common Sense Democrats as a community need to do a better job this time around of focusing on the people who won the tough races and put up the most impressive performances.