Blake Fleetwood ScheerPost
The blue wave was a desperate demand to overthrow the status quo
Democrats should put away the champagne. Forget the victory laps, the self-congratulation, the triumphant television appearances and the inevitable declarations that the American people have finally come to their senses.
Yes, the midterm elections delivered an extraordinary Democratic victory. The party administered a humiliating rebuke to Donald Trump.
But do not misinterpret the mandate. Voters did not reward Democrats because they trust them. They used them as the nearest available weapon against the man in charge. Just this spring, only 28 percent of Americans viewed the Democratic Party favorably in a CNN poll,
But Democrats should be asking themselves a profoundly uncomfortable question:
Did Democrats win, or did Donald Trump lose?
The exit polls point to the second answer. About 60 percent of voters disapproved of Trump’s job. Roughly three in four said they were dissatisfied with the country’s direction, and nine in ten said the cost of living weighed heavily on their vote. These are the numbers of an electorate in revolt against whoever holds power, not one that has fallen back in love with the opposition.
Are Double Haters the Majority?
The growing double-hater phenomenon provides an enlightening insight into recent elections. It can certainly be postulated that the majority of Americans have become “double haters”- voters and non-voters who dislike the Democrats and Republicans status quo over the last 40 years. Democrats have 27 percent of the electorate; Republicans have roughly the same number.
Independents have grown quickly to 46 percent of voters. A 2024 poll found that 26 percent of voters held unfavorable views of both Biden and Trump. Up to 40% of eligible voters do not vote, many of whom are double-haters and convinced their votes will not change anything. The US trails 31 other countries in voting participation among 49 nations.
The question is: do double-haters represent temporary dissatisfaction with individual candidates or a more enduring crisis of confidence in the workings of America’s two-party political system and what it is doing to help or destroy the lives of ordinary Americans?
The Democrats have to understand the populist anger that propelled Trump to win the presidency twice.
Trump was prescient. He didn’t create the anger; he didn’t start the fire, but he recognized it, jumped ahead of the parade, and exploit on ed it.
In 2016 and again in 2024. While Democratic strategists were parsing suburban swing voters, he was talking to people in shuttered factory towns with overdrawn checking accounts who believed, with good reason, that the system was rigged against them.
But his diagnosis was right. Democrats spent a decade arguing with the patient instead of treating the disease.
Voters did not send Democrats to Washington to restore the way things were before Trump. They sent them to tear down the system that produced him. But Democrats are already misreading the mandate.
A party that mistakes a rejection of its opponent and the status quo for an embrace of itself is setting itself up for the next wave, and the next wave in 2028 may not be blue.
A Nation Desperate for Change
The American electorate has been trying to deliver the same message for decades. It has little faith in the political establishment, little confidence that either party represents its economic interests, and an increasingly desperate conviction that the American system, which brought us so much prosperity after World War II, is fundamentally broken and rigged against them.
For generations, both parties presided over an economy that stopped sharing its gains with ordinary people. From 1979 to 2020, American workers’ productivity rose about 62 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The hourly pay of a typical worker rose about 17.5 percent. The difference did not vanish. It flowed to shareholders, executives, and the top of the income ladder.
And unless Democrats quickly address these underlying causes, the country will eventually sink into more division and lead to another populist autocrat — perhaps one more disciplined, more intelligent, and far more dangerous. This is how democracies die.
Consider the extraordinary political whiplash of the past two decades.
In 2008, Americans elected Barack Obama, a relatively unknown senator promising hope and fundamental change after the disastrous Iraq War and the financial collapse under George W. Bush.
Eight years later, many of those same voters turned to Donald Trump, another fringe political outsider who promised to smash the establishment.
Voters, unhappy that Trump was continuing the status quo, threw Trump out in 2020 and elected Joe Biden.
Four years later, frustrated once again, they returned Trump to the White House.
Now, in 2026, they have delivered Congress to the Democrats in another dramatic reversal.
What does this tell us?
The American electorate is not marching steadily left or steadily right. It is pounding on the doors of the political system, demanding that somebody — anybody — change it.
The evidence of discontent is overwhelming.
A 2026 American Values Survey found that 71 percent of Americans believed the country was headed in the wrong direction.
According to CBS News, 89 percent of voters considered the cost of living a major or crucial factor in their midterm vote.
Those are not the numbers of a contented population. They are the warning signs of a society that has lost confidence in its institutions.
The Democrats should not obscure the reality that millions of Americans remain angry about their stagnant economic prospects, astronomical housing costs, medical bills, student debt, disappearing pensions, and the fear that their children will live worse than they did.
The Democrats won because Trump failed to solve these problems and, in important respects, made them worse.
But over the last four decades, the Democrats have not solved these fundamental problems either. The American Dream Has Become a Bad Bargain, with most feeling less empowered, secure, and hopeful about the future.
For much of the twentieth century, the American economy delivered something remarkable: a broad and sustained improvement in living standards.
A worker without a college degree could often support a family, buy a house, afford health care, send children to college and retire with dignity.
Beginning around 1980, the relationship between national prosperity and ordinary Americans’ prosperity began to break down. Wages for non-college graduates—62% of the country—began to decline, while the rich got richer.
Productivity increased. Corporate profits soared. Financial markets reached new heights.
But the benefits flowed disproportionately to the wealthy.
A remarkable 2020 RAND Corporation study calculated that between 1975 and 2018, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would have received an additional $47 trillion if their incomes had grown as equitably as they did in the decades following World War II.
Forty-seven trillion dollars.
It measures how profoundly the distribution of American economic growth has shifted. In 2018 alone, the RAND researchers estimated, the bottom 90 percent would have received $2.5 trillion more under that alternative distribution.
Imagine what that money could have meant for working families: paid-off mortgages, retirement savings, college educations, decent medical care, and economic security.
Decades of failure, with both parties’ fingerprints
The rot did not start with Trump, and Democrats cannot pretend their hands are clean.
This is the great economic betrayal of middle-class America.
Republicans championed tax reductions for the wealthy, deregulation, and the systematic weakening of organized labor.
Democrats increasingly embraced Wall Street, corporate globalization, and the financial interests of their major donor paymasters.
Bill Clinton presided over NAFTA, welfare reform, and financial deregulation, helping consolidate a Democratic economic philosophy that put far too much faith in markets and far too little in the bargaining power of workers.
Obama inherited an economic catastrophe and prevented an even worse collapse. But the recovery rescued the financial system more decisively than it transformed the lives of millions whose homes, savings and economic futures had been devastated.
Biden made meaningful investments in infrastructure, manufacturing and clean energy. Yet inflation and ordinary families’ continuing inability to afford basic necessities politically overwhelmed those achievements.
Each Democratic administration delivered some accomplishments. None fundamentally reversed the upward redistribution of economic power.
Little wonder so many Americans concluded that the system was rigged.
A Democratic polling operation asked voters whether they preferred change or the status quo, regardless of what they wanted from the election results. In that poll, 85 percent of voters chose change, while only 6 percent favored keeping things the same.
The Richest Country in the World Is Failing Its Citizens
Consider America’s dismal statistics compared with other prosperous democracies.
The United States spends more on health care than any other wealthy nation, yet 500,000 generally die younger, needlessly, every year, than those in comparable countries.
A 2026 Commonwealth Fund report found that Americans are more likely to forgo medical treatment because of its cost and have fewer primary care physicians per capita than many international peers.
The United States also performs poorly on several international measures of educational achievement. In the OECD’s PISA assessment, American mathematics scores reached some of their lowest levels since testing began. Overall, the US ranks 8th in the world.
And in the 2026 World Happiness Report, the richest large economy on earth ranked only 23rd in happiness.
America is the greatest, smartest, longest-lasting, richest country in the history of mankind.
We have extraordinary universities, world-class hospitals, immense natural resources, technological dominance, and unprecedented wealth.
Yet we cannot guarantee affordable medical care, housing, education, or a dignified retirement for our citizens. In the 1950s, the US was first in all these categories.
This is not because the country lacks money. It is because the political system, fueled by lobbyists and special interests, has made choices about who receives the benefits of our growing national prosperity.
Other wealthy capitalist democracies have demonstrated that market economies can coexist with universal health coverage, stronger worker protections, affordable higher education, and more extensive family benefits.
The choice is not between capitalism and socialism.
It is between a government that delivers for its people and one that increasingly serves concentrated wealth and its political contributors.
Donald Trump grasped the resentment simmering beneath American politics better than many professional politicians.
He cast himself as a wrecking ball aimed at a corrupt Washington establishment that had sold out working towns through bad trade deals and endless foreign wars. He told voters Washington was corrupt; elites had abandoned them; trade agreements had destroyed their communities; and politicians cared more about powerful donors than ordinary citizens.
He vowed to stay clear of foreign wars. He was right. Much of the diagnosis resonated because it reflected genuine grievances.
But once back in power, he increasingly embodied the very excesses he claimed to oppose.
Mar-a-Lago became a modern version of the mansion in The Great Gatsby: a gilded theater of wealth, privilege and conspicuous consumption.
Trump’s preoccupation with monumental construction projects, grand displays, personal prestige and the trappings of power seemed grotesquely disconnected from households struggling to pay for groceries and gasoline.
The man who promised to drain the swamp came to personify its excesses.
His administration’s handling of the Iran war, Gaza, rising fuel prices, and economic anxiety helped turn voters against Republicans in 2026.
Trump promised to overthrow the system of endemic corruption. Instead, he became its most flamboyant beneficiary.
The Democrats cannot defeat Trumpism permanently by simply offering a more polite version of the same rigged economic arrangements.
The Democratic Party Must Confront Its Own Oligarchy of Donors
This brings us to the most difficult question facing Democrats.
Can a political party hooked on corporate-indentured election money genuinely challenge its paymasters?
The Democratic Party leadership, including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, must understand that this electoral victory is not a blank check for business as usual.
For decades, Democratic leaders have cultivated relationships with Wall Street, major corporations, wealthy donors, lobbyists, defense contractors, and industries seeking favorable government treatment.
Republicans have done the same, often even more aggressively.
The result is a system that has made organized wealth extraordinarily influential in American politics and produced millions of double-haters.
The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision helped unleash unlimited independent political expenditures by corporations. Later court decisions and campaign-finance arrangements further expanded wealthy donors’ influence.
Corporate lobbying consumes billions of dollars annually: $5.13 billion in 2025 alone.
And this is only the visible portion of a much larger system involving campaign contributions, super PACs, revolving-door employment, privately funded policy organizations, and privileged access to legislators.
For ordinary Americans, access to government often means writing an unanswered letter to a congressional office. For wealthy interests, it means helping shape legislation before the public even knows it exists.
This is not the representative democracy most Americans understand. It is a political marketplace in which influence is distributed according to financial power.
Democrats must stop pretending that modest ethics reforms will solve the problem. They should prohibit congressional stock trading, reject contributions from individuals and corporations that do business with the government, reject corporate PACs, establish far stronger lobbying restrictions, protect voting rights and pursue public financing of elections.
They should also make overturning the constitutional framework that permits unlimited independent election spending a long-term priority.
And they should be prepared to challenge their own leadership.
Schumer and Jeffries should be judged not by how effectively they raise campaign money or manage congressional strategy, but by whether they are willing to confront the economic interests that have dominated both parties.
If they cannot, Democrats should and will replace them.
America Needs Another Franklin D. Roosevelt
A powerful historical example shows what the Democratic Party could become.
FDR confronted a country devastated by economic inequality, mass unemployment, institutional failure, and a crisis of confidence in capitalism.
He did not answer that crisis with slogans about incremental improvement.
He understood that the economic system needed fundamental reform.
FDR’s New Deal established Social Security, strengthened labor rights, regulated banking, created employment programs, and made the federal government responsible for protecting ordinary citizens from some of the marketplace’s most destructive forces.
Roosevelt was no revolutionary socialist.
He was trying to save democratic capitalism from its own excesses, to ensure its long-term survival.
And he succeeded in creating the foundation for decades of broader prosperity.
Today’s Democrats need that same sense of urgency.
They should offer Americans a clear, ambitious economic program:
- Universal, affordable health care, with Medicare for All as a serious policy option.
- A substantially higher federal minimum wage, indexed to inflation.
- Stronger Social Security benefits and protection against retirement insecurity.
- A national housing initiative to expand supply and reduce costs.
- Affordable public colleges, vocational training and apprenticeships.
- Stronger unions, collective bargaining rights and protection against corporate wage suppression.
- Higher taxes on extreme wealth and investment income, coupled with serious enforcement against tax avoidance.
- Tougher antitrust laws to restrain monopolies and concentrated corporate power.
- A major national commitment to clean energy, infrastructure and climate resilience.
These policies are not favors to the poor.
They are investments in the economic security of democratic capitalism and the productive capacity of the entire country.
The aim must be simple:
Make ordinary Americans materially better off.
Not in ten years.
Stop Financing Endless Wars While America Falls Apart
Economic renewal also requires confronting America’s enormous military commitments.
The United States has spent decades fighting and financing wars while critical needs at home have gone unmet.
There’s no reason the US military budget should be nearly $950 billion every year, or that the US should be maintaining 800 foreign military bases, even though we’re not involved in major conflicts most of the time. Trump recently proposed a $1.5 trillion military budget.
The war in Iraq, the long campaign in Afghanistan, escalating military commitments in the Middle East, the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and the current conflict with Iran demonstrate how readily military force can overwhelm diplomacy.
Meanwhile, bridges deteriorate, schools struggle, affordable housing disappears, and families face ruinous medical costs.
Rapidly changing technology requires that the Pentagon budget undergo a serious, independent audit and a fundamental reassessment of America’s worldwide military posture.
This does not mean abandoning allies, ignoring genuine security threats or pretending that a stable international order requires no military power.
It means refusing to treat every foreign crisis as a justification for expanding military spending.
It means recognizing that the preeminent national security includes the health, education, housing and economic stability of American citizens.
A country that can mobilize extraordinary resources for war should be able to mobilize comparable determination against poverty, illness and environmental catastrophe.
And Democrats should be willing to challenge military contractors, foreign-policy lobbyists and powerful interest groups — including those aligned with Israel — whenever their demands conflict with human rights, international law or American interests.
Foreign policy should be guided by democratic accountability, not by the fundraising needs of political parties.
The greatest danger facing Democrats after their landslide is slipping back into the very complacency that gave rise to Trump. Party leaders will be tempted to declare that sanity has returned, and America is “back to normal,” and to claim that the country has rejected extremism and returned to normal.
But normal is the problem.
Normal has meant a political system increasingly responsive to the wealthy and increasingly alienated from the majority.
Democrats must not squander the opportunity they have been given.
Beginning in January, their new congressional majorities will face a Republican president with veto power. They will not be able to enact their entire program immediately.
But they can hold hearings, investigate corruption, propose legislation, force public votes, and demonstrate exactly whose interests each party represents.
They can begin rebuilding the Democratic Party around working people rather than corporate donors. If anything the election should have taught us, it is that money cannot always buy votes.
And they can show ordinary Americans that government can deliver tangible improvements in their lives.
If they fail, the voters will eventually turn on them, just as they turned on Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again.
The lessons of the past twenty years are unmistakable.
Americans are no longer willing to wait patiently while political leaders congratulate themselves on managing a system that leaves ordinary people behind.
And if democratic institutions cannot deliver meaningful change, the temptation to embrace authoritarian alternatives will only grow.
The blue wave was not a vote to restore the status quo. It was a warning that the status quo has become intolerable.
Democrats can either become the party that finally changes America — or they can become the next establishment that angry voters throw out.
The celebrations should end and the hard work must begin.
Blake Fleetwood was formerly a reporter on the staff of The New York Times and has written for The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Village Voice, Atlantic, and the Washington Monthly on a number of issues.
He was born in Santiago, Chile, and moved to New York City at the age of four. He graduated from Bard College and did graduate work in political science and comparative politics at Columbia University. He has also taught politics at New York University. He can be reached at jfleetwood@aol.com.———-