Austin Sarat
The 2026 midterm elections did not produce victory for a political party. Despite all the crowing about a blue tsunami, voters were no more enamored of the Democratic Party than they were two years ago when they put Donald Trump back in the White House.
A Gallup poll taken in October found that only 43% of the American public held a favorable view of the Democratic Party, down from 60% in 2000. Just 44% of respondents thought the Democratic Party would do a better job than the Republican Party in handling the issue most important to them.
The poll did offer some good news for the Democrats. As Gallup reports, “The public has become less likely to view the Democratic Party as too liberal and more likely to describe the Republican Party as too conservative. Currently, 46% of U.S. adults say the Democratic Party’s political views are too liberal, down from 55% in 2022.”
“At the same time,” Gallup adds, “50% of Americans now say the GOP’s political views are too conservative, up seven points from 2022 and the highest Gallup has recorded.”
But Democrats cannot rest on their laurels.
In fact, if you followed campaigns of winning candidates across the country, you would have barely known they were associated with the Democratic Party.
Take James Talarico, Texas’s new Senator-elect. His website does not mention his party affiliation.
It introduces him this way: “James is an eighth-generation Texan, former middle school teacher, and Presbyterian seminarian. As a state representative, he’s led the fight against the billionaire mega-donors and puppet politicians who have taken over Texas. Now, he’s running for U.S. Senate to take his fight against corruption to Washington and win power back for working people.”
Maine’s Troy Jackson also made no mention of being the Democratic candidate for Senate on his website. “Troy Jackson,” it said, “is a fifth-generation logger from Allagash, lifelong fighter for workers’ rights, and former Maine Senate President who’s ready to represent Mainers in the U.S. Senate.”
The same was true in Michigan, where Abdul El-Seyd described himself this way: “Abdul El-Sayed wasn’t supposed to be a politician. He studied to be a doctor, but realized it was our broken politics that was making people sick…. He is running for the U.S. Senate because he believes life in America shouldn’t be this hard, and as your Senator, Abdul will fight to build a government that works for you, not Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or their billionaire friends.”
The 2026 election was a rebuke to the GOP more than an embrace of the Democrats, a rejection of corruption, an expression of resentment against the privileges of the superrich, and a desperate cry for help from the millions of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.
And even more than that, as the campaign websites suggest, the result was driven by the populist consensus that carried Trump to power in 2016 and 2024 and then, in 2026, turned against him and the oligarchs with whom he has surrounded himself.
Populism, not party, was the order of the day in 2026. And if the Democrats don’t realize that and make good on their promises to “win power back for working people,” fight for workers’ rights, and make government work for ordinary people rather than the billionaires, their 2026 victory may turn into a 2028 defeat.
Populism is not picky about the party it seeks to colonize.
As a BBC report notes, “Populist parties can be anywhere on the political spectrum.” Republicans in one election. Democrats in another.
The central characteristic of populism “is the idea that society is separated into two groups at odds with one another – ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite.’”
Princeton University Professor Jan Wener-Muller argues that “The term (populist) is regularly used as a synonym for ‘antiestablishment,’ irrespective, it seems, of any particular political ideas; content, as opposed to attitude, simply doesn’t seem to matter. The term is thus also primarily associated with particular moods and emotions: populists are ‘angry’; their voters are ‘frustrated’ or suffer from ‘resentment.’”
That is why, as the BBC explains, “’A populist leader who gets into power is ‘forced’ to be in a permanent campaign to convince his people that he is not establishment – and never will be.’”
Trump quickly ignored that lesson after his 2024 election victory. Who can forget the tableau of some of America’s richest people behind him on the stage when he was inaugurated on January 20, 2025?
And early in his term it looked like we were witnessing “the formation of a “Muskoligarchy” –in other words, an economic elite (including tech barons such as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen) rallying around the figurehead of Elon Musk, whom Trump asked to lead what the president has called a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE)…”
The tech bros had their own reasons for welcoming Trump’s warm embrace. As The Atlantic’s Nick Clegg explains, they “said that uniting the power of Washington and Silicon Valley would help America in its fight with China for AI supremacy. “
“Silicon Valley leaders said that partnering with the government would help assuage public concerns about AI and overcome the ‘woke’ opposition to Big Tech…(and) hoped that earning Trump’s good graces would allow them to avoid unwelcome regulatory incursions outside the U.S., especially in Europe.”
Whatever their reasons, their partnership with Trump is hardly the face of a populist regime.
And it didn’t help Trump retain his populist credentials that he has used his position to glorify himself and to engage in ostentatious displays of wealth and privilege.
Democrats need to quickly retool so as not to run afoul of the maxim that populism quickly turns against any hint of attachment to the status quo or the establishment. Putting New York Senator Chuck Schumer front and center to lay out the Democratic agenda doesn’t suggest that they have gotten the message.
At his November 10 press conference, he said blandly that the Democratic Party would fight every day for the American people but then talked at length about particular bills he would support. Very inside baseball.
No hint of anger, frustration, or a determination to end the dominance of economic and political elites.
Polls have shown that Americans do not want to do business as usual. They want radical change.
In 2025, 77% of the public said that the “nation’s political system needs major changes or complete reform.” But “only 27% were confident that such changes could happen.”
So, if the Democrats don’t want to disappoint the American people, they need to show they can be the party of populism and deliver change.
Austin Sarat
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others.
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