On election day this year (November 3, 2026) the Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. While the former was predicted, the latter came as a surprise to a lot of analysts and the pundit class. And the extent that the House was gained was also beyond most people’s expectations. Not only that, but a lot of governors and state legislatures also turned blue. This is largely, and correctly, attributed to people’s dissatisfaction with the Trump regime. A stunning electoral success like this brings with it a mandate, but what is it the people who voted for this so-called Blue Tsunami actually want?
A lot of opponents to the Trump regime are taking victory laps and drinking in the tears of the MAGA talking class. This is understandable, given how smug they’ve been in exaggerating their own cultural relevance and political mandate. But as far as I can see this is largely unhelpful. For one, what this Blue Tsunami tells us is that people are suffering, which should not be taken lightly. Second, there are still going to be difficult times ahead. And not just in the sense of Trump using the veto to stymie the Democrat’s agenda and executive orders to cause more mischief, which are also the case, but there will probably be a delayed and prolonged economic reckoning from the lengthy inflationary pressures of the Iran war and the tariffs, the out of control government spending keeping interest rates high, the approaching cuts from the “Big Beautiful Bill”, and the AI hype finally starting to hit a ceiling from which it may very soon come crashing down (huge losses in the tech industry on November 5 already). Things are not going to be instantaneously rosy and the right-wing is going to use that as ammunition for the failure of the Democrats.
But what the Blue Tsunami also indicates, especially in places like Texas, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina (and, as of writing this on November 6, possibly Mississippi and Alaska), is that enough people who in the past were Republicans, and even multiple Trump voters, have told the Democrats that the chaos of the Trump regime warrants giving them a chance. Many of the people who won in these deeply red states are not super progressives or have some philosophical allegiance to left-wing ideas. Many of them are people who have been given a mandate by the people of their states or districts to help their constituents during a time of chaos and growing economic concerns, not to carry out some grand progressive agenda. The people who won in these states, and their constituents, need to be shown that the Democrats can deliver on their promises. And if you are looking for a greater progressive agenda to be implemented, convincing these voters that this is in their best interest needs to be step one. I think accomplishing this involves delivering within three broad categories: fixing the past damage, preventing future damage, and actually improving things.
Fixing Past Damage
This mandate is the one that requires that Trump’s policies so far be withdrawn and the institutions he’s damaged be built back up. Rescind the tariffs, stop the war in Iran, and reinstate the affordable healthcare act subsidies and SNAP benefits. But this also requires repairing much of the institutional damage done to agencies like the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FTC, the SEC, the CFPB, and so many others that have been gutted in the name of the unitary executive theory laid out in Project 2025.
Fixing the past damage is absolutely necessary, but it’s also the easy part. It’s the next two things that will require vision and political courage, which I think even many Democrats lack, especially among the leadership. If the next two legs of this mandate are not accomplished, the Democrats really have no one to blame but themselves.
Preventing Future Damage
This mandate can be broken down into essentially two sub-categories: accountability and prevention.
While accountability might also somewhat fit into fixing past damage, I think what is more important for accountability is showing future demagogues and grifters that they can’t get away with damaging the country through lawlessness and corruption. A popular saying is that laws are not self-executing, which means that when people break the law, then it is incumbent on others to hold them accountable. Certainly the people who passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act last November discovered this the hard way when they didn’t add any provisions for punishing noncompliance, allowing the Trump administration to stonewall. What incentive does the next demagogue or grifter have in following the law if they believe they can just get away with it? Accountability is not simply about exacting revenge on the wrongdoers, it’s to demonstrate to the future that the laws mean something, that it’s possible to enforce them, and that nobody is above them.
I’ve made the distinction here between demagogues and grifters because accountability has its own sub-sub-categories. One is the idea that the laws already on the books need to be enforced, and the other is to root out corruption. With the former, for instance, the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) of 1974 needs to be enforced so that the President or DOGE or someone like Russell Vought can’t just deny (i.e., through impoundment or rescission) money that Congress has already allocated to something. The latter (rooting out corruption) refers to trying individuals for enriching themselves though illegal or unethical means through their office and authority.
While observing the laws already on the books is necessary, it is not sufficient. One thing the Trump era has demonstrated is how many things everyone took for granted are merely norms and not laws, and how many laws lack any means of enforcement. For prevention, to ensure that no future elected officials can abuse the system to such a degree, new laws, and ones with real teeth, need to be passed that constrain officials and actually punish them for breaking the law.
If we’re going to get even more hopeful on this front (perhaps with things that might belong in the next category, but that I think also fit here insofar as one of their primary aims is to prevent future harm), a few things that I think would be helpful are: getting rid of the filibuster; uncapping the number of people in the House of Representatives and tying the number to the size of the total population; reining in the power of the presidency to unilaterally start wars or impose tariffs; revoking the precedent of Judicial Review from the Supreme Court (their job should be to adjudicate whether a defendant is following the law, not nullify laws, which should be in the purview of the legislature); getting rid of the electoral college and making all elections ranked choice voting; overturning Citizens United; passing comprehensive campaign finance reform and getting money out of politics; putting a stop to stock trading among elected officials; reining in the power of the presidential pardon and presidential immunity; codifying the independence of the Department of Justice (perhaps even making the Attorney General a separately elected office, rather than one appointed by the President); and probably other things I’ve forgotten to name here.
Improving Things
This is really where vision and an ability to sell that vision will be needed. I could break this up into two sub-sub-categories, which are the necessary and the progressive.
The necessary are, as the name suggests, those things that people will need. This is where ensuring that the representatives and the senators from the red states actually get the things their constituents voted them in for. These could be things like raising the minimum wage, carrying out trust busting and other anti-monopoly policies, tax reform and raising taxes on the super wealthy, making it easier to form unions, enacting smart tariff policies, building more housing and other infrastructure, giving loans and subsidies for farmers and small businesses, enacting laws regulating data centers, granting small businesses and communities protections from big corporations, comprehensive immigration reform (stopping illegal immigration while making it easier for people to migrate legally), and plenty of other things I’m sure I could never guess but that the people in these areas are demanding. At this point, I would also include some form of medicare for all or other version of universal healthcare, an idea whose time has come, seeing as how its popularity is growing even among conservatives.
The progressive doesn’t necessarily need to mean progressive policies as they are typically understood, though I do think that many of those ideas would also need to be implemented (e.g., curbing emissions and adopting green energy, both to slow climate change and to achieve greater energy independence). What I mean by progressive here is that it is a look at improving things in order to ensure a better future in the medium and long term by gaining back trust in institutions and government legitimacy.
An example of what I’m talking about, and one thing that I think gets overlooked but is extremely important for making all of this work, is simplifying interactions with the government, reducing the hassle and paperwork that every interaction with the government requires. One of the reasons a lot of people really hate the government, to the point they’ll eagerly vote against their own interests, is because every interaction with it is stressful, onerous, or humiliating (this is often done on purpose to try dissuading people from using government services, or to deliberately create loopholes, and so enacting this sort of sweeping reform would fix those problems as well). If all these interactions can be streamlined, this would do a lot to regain trust in the government.
Another of the progressive but not necessarily “progressive” things is to balance the budget and start paying down some of the national debt. Soaring interest rates hurt everyone, but it could get a lot worse if the U.S. government starts defaulting on its debts. Such an outcome would surely lead to much worse political radicalization, as well as forcing austerity that will make the government run worse and lose a lot of trust and legitimacy.
I’d also (as a stretch goal) call for reform on how subsidies are given out. Stop or reduce supply side subsidies and instead give out something like a universal basic income as a sort of demand side subsidy. This would have have the effect of forcing companies to be more competitive and offer better services if they want access to that government largesse, rather than simply expecting it as an entitlement due to lobbying, rent-seeking, corruption, or being viewed as too-big-to-fail.
There are plenty of other things not mentioned here, but this is a start.
Concluding Remarks
The Trump presidency will go down as one of the worst in all U.S. history. Certainly the worst in living memory. Yet he may have inadvertently made it possible for better things. The failure of the right-wing project (which, I will warn, may be down, but it is certainly not yet out, regardless of its demonstrable failure) may make people more receptive to something more progressive, something more beneficial to regular people. But this possibility can only be realized if this unique opportunity is not squandered.
The worst thing the Democrats can do right now is waste this. One way they could do that is by succumbing to infighting. Particularly over the next couple years, while still opposed to Donald Trump as the President, they need to present a united front. If they can keep the momentum going after 2028, especially if they can get the Presidency, then they can start hashing out a more specific vision for the country. Right now they cannot take their current mandate as the mandate of heaven, as an inevitability that could never be revoked, and so they will need to deliver, or at the very least demonstrate that they are the ones trying to deliver even if Trump stymies them at every turn. Falling into internecine fighting would be the worst thing they could do right now. In a way, the fact that Trump may veto much of their attempts at legislation could be beneficial (from a purely cynical realpolitik sort of way) because they could just start attempting to pass legislation to benefit everyone in their coalition: Texas wants this? Pass a bill. South Carolina wants that? Pass a bill. Kansas wants this thing? Pass that, too. Michigan wants another thing? Hell, pass that bill, too. If all of them get the veto, they can at least say they tried and run on that in the next election, with the potential newcomers running in 2028 pointing to the Republicans preventing them from getting all that good stuff and that’s why they need to be voted out.
But, that’s my take. I’m sure there is a flurry of advice pieces for the Democratic party coming out right now, many of them saying the same thing I am here, but why not add my voice to the chorus?