Will 2026 Be the Year Voters Pull the Emergency Brake?

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:19I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. And this week, we have the band back together. David French, Jamel Bowie, my fantastic colleagues and columnists. It is so good to see you for the first time in 2026. It has been such a quiet start to the year. How are you feeling? Good? I'm tired already, Michelle. You're tired already? Tired already. Jamel? I'm feeling as good as one can feel given the circumstances, which I'll let people figure out what that means. Yeah. Everybody can just Google that. But Jamel, we missed you last week. But I hear that for our Jamel stands, of which I know there are many, you're going to be doing an event live in Southern California.

1:07That's right. So they have the opportunity to catch up with you. Tell me about this. Tell me. Give me the details. Yes. Next Tuesday, the 20th in Los Angeles, we'll be having an event. will be me, our boss, Katie Kingsbury, and Ross Douthat, our colleague, talking about the first year of the Trump administration and what it means and what it portends and all those things. Oh, so it's a feel-good event. Yes, a feel-good event. Lots of, I don't know, laughing and chortles and like. Okay, so it's 7 p.m. at the Aratani Theater, which means nothing to me because I only go to L.A. sometimes, but I'm sure that means a lot to those there.

1:46Okay, and we'll put a link for people to get tickets in our show notes because I know we've got some demand. Yes. All right. So moving right along. We spent our last episode of 2025 looking back. So now we got to look forward. As a political writer, I am already obsessed with the midterms. Both parties have red hot primaries coming up as early as March 3rd in Texas. And then the drama just keeps on rolling straight through November. So, okay, as political nerds, we keep close tabs on this. But for our more normal listeners, and I am so happy for y 'all's sanity, let me give a quick lay of the land in terms of what's at stake in these midterms and what the parties need to do for success in November.

2:34I'll briefly get the ball rolling, and then I want you guys to have at it too. So as far as what is at stake. The midterms are a referendum on the sitting president. So for everyone, Republicans, Democrats, all of us, what is on the line is basically the shape and power of the remainder of the Trump presidency. If Republicans keep unified control of Congress, Trump is going to take that as a mandate to just do whatever the hell he wants for as long as he can hold on to the office. Does that seem right to you guys? Yeah, that sounds basically right. If Republicans hold on to both chambers, then it's sort of all bets are off for the next two years after that.

3:16At least two years. At least two years. Yeah, I think that's 100 ,000 percent true because he'll take it as a validation of all of the brutality because there is a sort of silent majority theory operating behind the scenes in the White House. They like what we're doing to the immigrants. They like what we're doing to quote criminals. They love all this. They're just not going to tell pollsters. And so, yeah, if he keeps that majority in the House, if he maintains or extends that majority in the Senate. But yeah, I mean, all bets are off. Absolutely. It'll be a total validation of the administration's strategy and approach.

3:53I say not total. Let me be clear. Political validation, not moral validation. That's a good distinction. Political validation of the administration's approach so far. All right. So nothing focuses the political mind, though, like a good butt whipping. So if voters rebuff his team, Republicans are going to need to decide if they really want to go down with that ship. Right. Yeah. I mean, a lot of this is about expectations. It's always about expectations. Right. So I think the expectation right now is that Democrats are probably going to win back the House. I'm not sure anyone has a sense of the scale of that, and that's going to shape how people react as well.

4:29If it's a narrow win, right, like narrowly take back the House, I think that would be read as basically like a good performance for Republicans. If Democrats sort of crash through, you know, the wall like the Kool-Aid man and take back the House, then that's going to be taken as like a major repudiation. And likewise, with the Senate, any scenario in which Democrats take the Senate, which is a very tough reach for them right now, is a scenario in which there really has been, I think, a decisive repudiation of what the administration's been doing. And I think in that world, Republicans are going to be like, OK, we got to spend the next two years distancing ourselves from Trump.

5:06Now, the trouble, the trouble is that Trump does not want to be distanced from. So there will be a push, but there are also there's also going to be a pull. It's like trying to break up with somebody who just won't take an overman's answer. It's like trying to break up with the most toxic partner you can imagine. But the Dems, if they underperform, this is a disaster for them because they are desperate to show that they heard voters' unhappiness in 2024 and have been working to correct some of those errors. And if the party cannot manage to beat a broadly unpopular president in a cycle when historically whatever party is out of power in the White House does better, if they can't manage that, then I believe it's hit the red button, break the glass, full-blown panic mode for them.

6:02There was a really interesting discussion of this online yesterday about this disparity between the general election voter and the primary voter. And I think that one of the problems that both parties have right now is there is too little participation in the primary. And that is driving candidate selection in a way that is going to be ultimately harmful to parties in general. Let's look at Texas and let's look at the Republican side. Republicans have a real problem right now in Texas and that the latest polling that I saw on the Democratic side, James Tallarico has about an eight or nine point lead over Jasmine Crockett and Ken Paxton, who might be.

6:45I mean, there's a lot of competition for this, but, you know, one day we should do sort of the horse race rankings. He might be the most corrupt elected politician in America this side of Donald Trump. And his wife is divorcing him on biblical grounds, despite the fact that he has been a huge player in Christian politics and driving out the evangelical vote. Oh, yeah. In the before times, I would be at conferences where he was holding court, holding forth as the model Christian politician, right? And so now his wife is divorcing him for adultery. And he's leading in the primary. But you're talking about in John Cornyn, one of the more respected mainstream establishment Republican senators.

7:23And he's in the fight of his life in a primary against a walking ball of corruption. And so that's one of the issues that's unfolding here. And look, the Republicans, I think, in particular have that primary voter problem. But I also think the Democrats have a primary voter problem issue as well. When you have a race that concentrates your most hyper engaged, hyper aware sort of political nerds, so to speak, their priorities don't align completely with the sort of the voter that kind of lays low and just kind of walks into the polls every two years. They have different kinds of concerns, and it's one of the reasons why these parties are lurching in and out of control because in many ways, these parties are built for their primary voters.

8:10They're not as built for the general election voter. Okay, so let's dig in a little bit to the Democrats. Looking at a midterm, which we all understand is different than a presidential year, what message should the party be focused on? They've leaned into the anti-Trump theme for cycles. Didn't work so well in 2024, but, you know, how do they balance that message in a midterm that acknowledges some of the Trumpian chaos that we've been seeing, but also gets in those, you know, quote unquote kitchen table issues and other things that voters are, you know, that are top of mind for voters. You know, part of the issue and one of the problems you're going to have in analyzing this election is, as we said at the very top of this, these midterms are mainly verdicts on the president.

9:02And so running for things like affordability or building more housing, those are kinds of issues. Of course, the kitchen table issues that voters want to hear about. Also, at the same time, when you don't have the presidency, it's very hard to implement an agenda. It's very hard to run on, this is the agenda we're going to implement if you vote for us. It's much easier to run on, here's all the crap we're going to stop. In some ways, I think what you're going to have is a kind of, you know, go back to this analogy, a break glass in the case of emergency sort of election, where you're saying we're in an emergency situation right now.

9:40There is a lot of chaos. There's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of rage. There's a lot of anger. and we're going to be able to at least provide some accountability and some restraint that doesn't exist right now. And I think that that's going to be just a very compelling top line message. You know, one thing that is fascinating to me is a lot of these things that just totally consume the online world do not escape into the offline world. But I don't think that's true of the killing of Renee Good, for example. The polling indicates that anywhere between almost 70 to around 80 percent of Americans have seen video, have seen the footage of that shooting.

10:19And so there will be these things that break through. You know, as we're recording this, the podcast, Trump has threatened the Insurrection Act. And, you know, these are things that they create a big online tempest. Maybe people don't, will not know 48 hours from now that Trump threatened the Insurrection Act. But if he invokes it, they'll definitely, He actually invokes it. They'll definitely know. Yeah. Jamal? I think David's right that in terms of messages to win, all you really have to do is like announce your intention to hold the administration accountable in like, you know, concrete ways.

10:53I do think that Democrats are going to be using the midterms to test out messages, right, to try to reach out to voters they know they're going to need in 2028. And so I would expect to see some version of what Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said a couple days ago, I believe. She was like walking on the steps of the Capitol and said to a reporter, you know, they cut your health care to pay for this ICE stuff, right? That's both a accountability message and like a kitchen table affordability message, right? It's both they cut food stamps so they could shoot a woman in the face. I mean, I don't know if anyone's going to go that.

11:33Like, that's how I, if I were running for office, I would say it. I'm a little blunt in that regard. But I would imagine you'll get some version of that. That, like, the government could be doing these things to help you. But they cut all of that to pay for, you know, armed thugs harassing your friends and neighbors. That, I think, is going to be the way they try to capture both ends of this. And I actually think that's a pretty effective message, right? I think it's both a recognition of kind of like the material stuff that people really care about and a recognition of the kind of soul of America stuff that people do really care about.

12:14There's also an appeal that Democrats can make to sort of the educated Republican voters. And you've got some messages there that I think could resonate with them. You know, Trump just proposed a$600 billion increase in defense spending,$600 billion for one year. OK, he proposed a plan that the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget would say would add almost$6 trillion in deficit to the United States to in debt to the United States. And, you know, why is that? Well, his Don Rowe doctrine is going to bankrupt America because when you alienate all of our allies, guess what? They actually carry, all of our allies collectively carry more of the defense burden than we do.

12:59Okay. And so if you alienate our allies, we're going to bankrupt ourselves trying to pick up that slack. And so there's lots of things that how you can make a Greenland controversy or the Venezuelan intervention resonate in domestic terms and say this, your bank, your arrogance and your pride and your alienization of allies is bankrupting this country. So I think that's exactly right. Earlier this week, I was talking to Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, and he was kind of walking me through the party's umbrella theme for the midterms of, and we got to go with the alliteration, costs, chaos, and corruption.

13:40That gives them a framework for saying these are all tied together. When Trump is doing all these things abroad, it adds to the chaos. when he is cutting, you know, questionable deals with certain companies or favoring his favorite players. You know, that kind of kind of quasi-corruption adds to not just the chaos, but the costs that you're going to pay. Even when he does something like decide he's going to prosecute the Fed chair, that doesn't really resonate with people in and of itself. But if you pitch it as, well, it's going to make everything more expensive if we destroy the independence of the central bank, then people are going to pay a lot more attention and they're certainly going to care.

14:35Mary Peltola, the former House member Democrat, just jumped into the race in Alaska for Senate. And you can see in her messaging already how these things all tie together. You know, she's saying that big corporations, because of the corruption in Washington, are being allowed to essentially rape Alaska's natural resources, that nobody in the lower 48 cares about Alaska. They're just like feathering their own pockets. So you see how the costs and the corruption and the chaos all tie together. And Schumer was saying that, you know, this is absolutely something that works as kind of a big framework.

15:15So the last thing on the Democrats, you don't want to overlearn the lessons of any particular election because obviously everyone's different, especially like depending on, you know, the off cycle year, presidential midterm. But there was a bit of a blue wave in the 2025 off cycle races. Are there lessons that you guys think the Democrats should be taking forward from those? I mean, the big lesson to me of the 2025 wave such that it was is that Democratic voters, they want people who are going to be aggressive, right? They want people who are going to be fighters. But one of the results that just shocked me the most was the Virginia attorney general race, right, where the candidate had, you know, texted about.

16:03Gosh, it was an unfortunate text. to air a shooting you know an opponent's family um and he won by six points and it's like that to me was a sign that was a sign that democratic voters in virginia were like yeah we don't care you know and and part of that is that we've been we've witnessed how the president talks about opponents yeah there's been a desensitization for years people are desensitized to it but i think it's also sort of like, you know, hey, if that guy's willing to say that, maybe that shows he's willing to fight. Right. Yeah. And I think I think that desire for fighters is the lesson to take from last year that I do not think that candidates who take a very kind of cautious, oh, we just all want to get along with our Republican friends approach are going to do very well.

16:55So I have a question for you, Jamel, related to that, which is that. Yeah. So the attorney general candidate and Virginia was who he was, but Abigail Spanberger, Mikey Sherrill, premier races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, they weren't milquetoast, but they were very pragmatic in their approach. Do you think that there's a way to blend those two things, which is that I'm a fighter, I'm going to fight for you, but I'll work across the aisle with people who are reasonable as well. How do you see that kind of reconciling? Yeah, so I think one can think about fighter in any number of ways.

17:35And one of the ways you can think about it is in terms of accountability politics, right? Not fighter in terms of I'm going to humiliate my partisan opponents, but fighter in terms of there was wrongdoing that happened and I want to deal with that wrongdoing. And that is not incongruent, right? That's not intention with a more moderate and pragmatic politics in other places, right? You can be someone with moderate views on any number of issues and then also say, there's no way we can fund ICE in its current form. Or we have to think about reorganizing DHS, given the abuses we've seen, right? Those two things are not in tension with each other.

18:17You could make the argument, right, that sort of someone willing to be kind of bold and progressive in their policy preferences, maybe is a little more likely to be aggressive in the accountability front. But there's a bit of conceptual separation there. I had a question for David, actually, and this is thinking about post-Trump politics. Just to lay the cards in the table, I think that any post-Trump politics that's going to put us in a place that doesn't just lead us back to where we are is going to have to on aggressive accountability for wrongdoing and lawbreaking of a kind that I think Americans are actually kind of uncomfortable with, right?

18:54You know, if we, you know, investigations of the executive branch of what Stephen Miller's been up to, what has Russ Vogt been up to during these years? A willingness to say people who broke the law need to be held criminally accountable. People who were engaged in this massive corruption flowing from the White House, we need to freeze those assets. We need to refer them for criminal prosecution. And so that's going to read as very aggressive. It's going to read as very partisan. It's going to read as very divisive. But I think it's necessary. Or you just come right back to where we are. And my question, David, is like, how do you perceive that?

19:37Like, I don't perceive that as tit for tat trying to humiliate my opponents. I perceive that as trying to clean house. But I'm curious to know what you think. Yeah, I think that we have lost the distinction sometimes between the notion of fighting hard for a position and fighting hard for accountability, fighting hard for justice, and personally attacking human beings. So these are the distinctions that have sometimes been lost in this Trump era. And it turns out often that a lot of the people who are very good at lacerating other human beings and sort of very good at that politics of the attention economy of extremely aggressive politics, as we're learning in MAGA republicanism, are not often all that competent at things like governance, accountability, stuff like that.

20:29sometimes the people are extremely competent at the things that you're talking about, Jamel, which I agree with. I think there should be an accounting. Although I think you have to be very careful calling for that because one of the things Trump is doing going into the midterms is whining that if Democrats retake either chamber of Congress or retake the House, they're going to impeach him again. And he's using this as like, they're out to get me. It's another witch hunt. I mean, he is the master of victimhood. Boo-hoo, poor me. But you have to be really careful with that. No, I do agree with that.

21:05You have to fight hard and smart at the same time. My issue is that when you're talking about a creation of an attention economy in politics, it really, really puts a premium, especially in the online world, as to who has owned you or destroyed you. And that is a perversion of our political culture that I think has completely consumed the right. I mean, you've got cabinet officials who are more concerned about angry podcasters than they are about popular opinion. And I'm just saying this is very dangerous. This is one of the ways in which Trump has impacted our politics in a dangerous way that could easily outlast him.

21:51Well, I think the party, I think the Republican Party in general has gotten bitten by that lately. I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene, she basically learned her own lesson and got, you know, decided that it was time to leave the House when all of that venom got turned on her. So can I make a take that might age very poorly? Well, please do. Please do. Okay, so here is my theory. My theory is that we're going to be very soon reaching a point where you need to stop looking at Trump's approval rating to know how popular MAGA is. And here's what I mean. Trump, I think, at this point, we're now in the 10th year since he came down the escalator and announced his presidency.

22:40So in the 10 years. Oh, my God. I can't wait till that phrase is dead. I would like to burn that escalator to the ground as a metaphor. I just like imagining like a calendar where it's like B-E and A-E. Before escalator. Oh, gosh. I mean, so does Trump, Jamel. So does Trump. Go ahead. So we're in the year 10 A-E. So in the year 10 A-E, I think a lot of Trump voters, that is part of their identity now. It is fixed. And from now on, Republicans are going to be running without Donald Trump on the ballot. And so I think that the Trump position is going to be an artificially high indicator of the popularity of MAGA policies, that the actual indicator of MAGA policies is going to be much more indicated by, in some senses, although I think issue polling is often kind of quasi garbage.

23:37change, but if you start to see overwhelming numbers in issue polling, and then ultimately in the outcome of the midterm elections. And I think a lot of Republicans, it's starting to sink in that the rules that apply to Trump or the rules that don't apply to Trump still apply to them. Okay, which brings me to something I need both of you to address, which is we've spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about Republican members of Congress pushing back against Trump or rather not. Do you already see signs of this changing? I'm thinking in particular of like the opposition to Trump's persecution of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell.

24:17But there have been a couple of other episodes of this of late. And I was talking to Thomas Massey a couple of weeks ago, who, as I'm sure you know, is Trump's least favorite House Republican. And he predicted that after this cycle of primaries, some of his colleagues would start to loosen up and be more willing to defy the White House going forward. What do you think? I'll believe it when I see it, you know, like, okay, Representative Massey, sure. I'll believe it when I see it. I do think that you see, I mean, on sort of things that are truly beyond the pale, you do see Republicans kind of, you know, blanch a bit.

24:57You know, House Republicans recently joined with Democrats to put a health care, you know, ACA subsidies extension, you know, pass it out of the House. There's a decent chance it passes to the Senate. But as far as anything more serious than that, again, I will believe it when I see it. I want to add one comment on, I think, David's good point about the delta between MAGA issue and Trump issue, you might say. I think you can see that in the relative approvals of Trump and J.D. Vance, you know? Good point. J.D. Vance, not especially popular, right? In a post-Trump world, J.D. Vance clearly wants to be the standard bearer for MAGA, and he is just broadly disliked in a way that is obviously somewhat just him.

25:40Well, he's like the opposite of Trump as a cultural phenomenon, right? J.D. Vance is pure political aspiration and like your kind of just straightforward political business as usual. He's not a celebrity. He's not charismatic. He can't order a donut without looking awkward. He doesn't know how to talk to people. He's every senator in a suit who hears hail to the chief playing in his head on some level. Right, right, right, right. Exactly. And we consistently underestimate the extent to which Trump is a completely unique cultural figure as a politician. And those of us who have dived into this for a long time, the mystique is over with Trump.

26:22Like, the mystique is gone. But I think we underestimate to the extent to which, for a lot of Americans, the mystique still exists. Well, so talking about him not being on the ballot, him having a position that nobody else in the GOP has, you know, like, what are they going to do with the midterms? What should they do going into the midterms? At a House retreat for Republicans last week, the president told the party to campaign on his policies, you know, border security, anti-transgender athletes, tax cuts, the roadmap to victory, he called it. I mean, is that is that what they should be doing?

27:01I mean, what what is their path forward? If I were a Republican running in an unfavorable condition, I would try to localize things as much as possible. Actually, talk about the policies in the most abstract way. I brought you tax cuts for X, Y, or Z, but really try to keep things local and try to erase whatever connection as much as possible you have to Trump. That would be my advice in terms – but that never works. Every midterm cycle, when it's going to be bad for the president's party, people are like, yeah, you got to keep things local. And it never works, right? Like voters understand these things to be referendums on the president.

27:47Can I just say, this can be cut. If this is too much, this can be cut. Just depending on how much time he's been online. And Trump talks about this. He was like, things are going so well. Maybe we don't have to have midterms. and like there's like this chit chatter on the internet about like the president canceling the election and i just i feel like since we're having this conversation about the midterms i feel obligated to say that that's not a thing and i know the response is going to be look he does everything else he wants and i think that actually intelligent response to that is like actually there's a lot of things on which he's stopped or he's blocked but that in a very practical sense, right?