Democrats have been deliriously giddy since the midterm elections.
Their party, rudderless and defeated for two years, appeared to come roaring back into relevance with a House and Senate majority. The once-defunct political careers of establishment Democrats like Chuck Schumer roared back to life, as even traditionally safe Republican seats faced the wrath of a disgruntled electorate.
But as Democrats celebrated their candidates’ wins in campaign offices across the country, dozens of conservative victories went largely unnoticed in the very same states Democrats claimed were now solidly blue.
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The Democrats’ victories were a backlash against broken Republican promises. They were not a mandate to usher in a vast liberal policy platform.
To understand this argument, you must look past the boisterous celebrations from the left’s election night parties and look a little further down the ballot. Across the country, voters codified conservative policy priorities through ballot initiatives that liberal groups spent millions of dollars to fight against. And even more surprisingly, those historically conservative initiatives found success in states that flipped blue on election night.
Let’s look at just a handful:
On election night, Colorado elected a Democratic senator, a Democratic governor, and is on track to have only one Republican out of eight seats in the state’s entire congressional delegation. You would think that means any conservative ballot initiative would have gone down in flames.
But that’s not what happened.
Colorado voters delivered a stunning rebuke to some of the left’s most entrenched policy platforms. Proposition 134, written to keep men out of women’s sports, passed decisively. Proposition 135, banning gender transition surgeries on children under 18, passed as well.
The same phenomenon happened in other so-called blue states.
North Carolina passed a ballot initiative to require voter ID on mail-in ballots by almost the same percentage with which it elected a Democrat senator. Even left-leaning statewide outlets in the Tar Heel state are calling on Democrats to pump the brakes on their midterm celebrations, pointing out the large number of unaffiliated voters in the state could cause true problems for Democrats in just a few short months.
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Arizona Democrats swept in the state’s legislative and gubernatorial elections, but failed to stop a Republican-led ballot initiative designating cartels as terrorist organizations. Despite fierce opposition from Democrats in the Arizona legislature, it passed Tuesday by over 13 points. The liberal bastion of Washington state voted in favor of biological sex requirements for school sports while electing Democrats. Nevada passed voter ID requirements while electing a Democratic governor and members of Congress. Wisconsin elected a Democratic governor on the same ballot where they soundly rejected far-left progressive DEI policies.
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In short, Democrats might need to pack away the party hats.
The midterm down-ballot election results present Democrats with a conundrum: How are they to successfully govern when the ideological positions their party has championed for years were so firmly rebuked by their own constituencies? Do they press forward with wildly unpopular policies and ignore the mandate from voters, or do they evolve and adapt to the will of the people?
There is yet another hurdle Democrats face as they prepare to assume House and Senate majorities in January: a large portion of the midterm electorate that propelled them to victory was comprised of independents and swing voters. That coalition is at odds with the base of the modern Democratic Party.
For the last three years, the Democrats’ base has been largely energized by Democratic socialist candidates and policy proposals. One in three Democrats now identify as Democratic socialists themselves. How are Democrats going to find long-term favor with their diverse midterm electorate of independents and swing voters who do not identify with socialist policies?
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If the more moderate Democrats in party leadership try and maintain the coalition of independents and swing voters, they will upset their party’s progressives. If the moderates try and appease the progressives, they will lose the independents and swing voters.
It’s a lose-lose situation.
Ultimately, I believe we will watch the Democrats self-destruct in spectacular fashion over the next two years as they fail to maintain their midterm coalition.
Moderates will cave — again — to the far-left progressives in their party. It’s what they’ve been doing for years. “Centrist” Democrats have put up all the resistance of a screen door in a hurricane to the rise of socialism in their party. As I noted in a recent appearance on “The Faulkner Focus,” establishment Democrats may have been willing to allow the Democratic socialists into their “big tent party,” but the Democratic socialists had no intention of allowing the centrists to remain with them in that tent.
For the next two years, centrists and far-left progressives will fail to play nicely with one another. They will not advance substantive legislation; they will be fixated on investigations and impeachments.
Democrats will be their own worst enemy. They will do themselves no favors as they try and force their unpopular agenda, once again, on an electorate who already rebuked it at the ballot box. Republicans must seize the opportunity to recapture this crucial coalition of independents that propelled Donald Trump to victory in 2024.
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Voters roared against the GOP’s broken promises by electing Democrats across the country. But it’s the down-ballot whispers that will help us chart the road to victory in 2028.
