If Democrats win big, will they learn the right lessons from their victory? | Jan-Werner Mueller
No election outcome ever interprets itself. So how will Democrats interpret these results once they are known? Whichever metaphor one prefers – landslide, earthquake, wave – it seems increasingly like the Democrats can expect a significant victory in the midterms. As the joke goes, every gas station display of prices has become an ad for Democrats; what’s more, some of them have managed to connect the relatively…
Key points
- Jan-Werner Müller argues that no election outcome interprets itself, and Democrats must decide what lessons to draw from a likely strong midterm showing.
- He says Democrats should challenge the Republican image of strength on national security and economic competence.
- Müller asks whether Joe Biden's mistake was assuming many Republicans still cared about policy rather than endless culture war performance.
In a Guardian opinion piece, Jan-Werner Müller writes that Democrats appear increasingly likely to score a significant victory in the midterms, whether the result is described as a landslide, an earthquake or a wave. He notes that gas station price displays have, as the joke goes, become advertisements for Democrats, and that some candidates have tied the abstract issue of corruption to the daily struggles of many Americans.
Müller stresses that no election outcome ever interprets itself. He warns Democrats against concluding that only the kitchen table issues favored by moderate leaders and consultants really mattered.
A chance to change party images
Müller writes that Democrats have a historic opportunity to dislodge the Republican image as the party of national security and the party best trusted with the economy. He says Democrats could read the outcome narrowly as a rejection of Donald Trump and the most egregious parts of his misrule since January 2025, but that seeing it only as a referendum on Trumpism would be a mistake.
On national security, he argues the right response is not for Democrats to compete over using the word "lethality," but to point to Republican betrayals of Ukraine and the damage from lost bases in the Middle East. On the economy, he cites tariffs as an obvious example of irrational policy and notes that Reagan, Bush and Trump all increased the national debt while pushing tax cuts that mainly benefited the wealthy.
No election outcome ever interprets itself.
— Jan-Werner Müller
What if Biden did not overreach
Müller challenges the conventional view that the Biden administration overreached on issues such as being too woke or pushing too ambitious a Green New Deal. He asks whether Biden's real mistake was assuming many Republicans still cared about policy rather than endless culture war performance.
He suggests Democrats could instead discredit their opponents as Franklin D Roosevelt did during the Great Depression, and show that Republicans now distancing themselves from Trump were complicit in a larger story of misrule that predates him.
