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In the 126 years since 1900, nearly 90 percent of the midterm elections have led to the party in the Oval Office losing House seats, and two-thirds of those same elections have led to it losing Senate seats. Given this history, midterm losses of some sort in 2026 were almost a sure bet. But what ensued in November went well beyond all normal expectations. When all the votes are tabulated, the current blue wave may match the massive midterm losses that buried Bill Clinton in 1994 and Barack Obama in 2010.
First, what does this massive 2026 slapdown now portend?
A second-term president in his final two years, facing a euphoric and frenzied opposition Congress, emboldened by a landslide, will have difficulty confirming federal judges or cabinet members. Most presidents in that dire situation try to rush through confirmations in the brief two remaining months of their lame-duck congressional majorities – not an easy task. Trump is, at this very moment, following in their footsteps.
Come next year, Trump will still not have to face a veto-proof Congress – unless renegade Republican senators and representatives join Democrats on key legislation to provide them with the necessary 67-Senate-vote/290-House-vote override.
It is critical for Trump, then, to shore up potentially apostate congressional Republicans and keep them in line to prevent this. Another problem: waves as huge as the 2026 blue wave can sometimes take two or three election cycles to correct themselves – meaning the 2026 left-wing momentum gives the socialist Democrats advantages in the 2028 presidential elections.
Even though the Democrats cannot hope to override the veto, some, like Elizabeth Warren, have recklessly called for ending the filibuster – a huge mistake when they don’t yet have the White House. (Why end this time-honored institution just to pass legislation that will be vetoed by an opposition president anyway?)
As for Trump’s own legislative initiative,, they are dead. Bipartisan initiatives with the new socialist Democratic Party could be explored, but they would likely be untenable in the eyes of the MAGA base. Otherwise, Democrats will vote against anything and everything Trump proposes – in the fashion of what Harry Truman once called his oppositional Republican legislators: “The Do-Nothing Congress.”
Nevertheless, sometimes presidents in the wake of bruising congressional losses find ways to stay dynamic and popular. The last two years of the Clinton and Obama administrations were supposed to be inert. They most certainly were not.
Clinton successfully went to war in Serbia against Slobodan Milosevic without congressional authority. He worked domestically with the Republican majority to ensure another two years of balanced budgets.
Obama was more confrontational after he had completely blown his huge congressional majorities. Even before the midterms, he had boasted that he had a pen and a phone and would govern domestically by executive orders and vetoes. And so he did to an even greater degree after losing Congress.
Abroad, Obama entered the most contentious and radical two years of his administration. He continued his targeted assassination campaign, which would finally total 500 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Obama restored relations with communist Cuba without congressional assent. And he signed on to the disastrous Paris Climate Accord and the Iran Deal. Despite claiming to be a constitutional-law expert, lame-duck Obama arbitrarily declared both agreements immune from Senate ratification.
At home, Obama, on his way out, nonetheless helped weaponize the FBI, the CIA, and the DNI and ordered them to dig deeper to find (nonexistent) evidence of Trump/Putin “collusion.”
So what should we conclude from this recent midterm upset?
First, not to panic or despair. Trump could still accomplish quite a bit, both domestically and internationally, even without a congressional majority.
Second, to ignore hubristic leftist claims that the election results prove widespread American support for the boutique neo-socialist agenda.
If Democrats fail to learn this lesson, Republican success in 2028 is practically guaranteed.