Following a whirlwind of a midterm election week, The Long View team is delighted to share a roundup of our content from this week recapping what happened—in particular, what lessons the two parties should learn and where each might go from here—as you head into the weekend.
Ruy in Conversation with Welcome’s Liam Kerr
Yesterday, TLV’s Ruy Teixeira went live on Substack with our pal Liam Kerr of Welcome to break down the midterm results. Among the topics they discussed:
Republicans “deciding to lose”1
What the results mean the Republicans’ coalition
Democrats and “minimum necessary heterodoxy”
How Democrats will interpret the results
Will the Democrats’ “big tent” hold up once they’re in power?
And plenty more. Check out the full conversation above!
Ruy in the Free Press
“There Goes Trump’s Coalition”
The engine of [Democrats’] success was twofold: the cost of living and opposition to Trump. This was a thermostatic reaction against the incumbent with a vengeance. Trump came into office with an impressive new coalition built on his promises to fix the economy, make life affordable, and bring things back to normal. He hasn’t delivered, so there goes his coalition, including especially big swings back toward the Democrats among groups like young voters and Hispanics that swung the hardest toward him in 2024.
What does it all mean? Above all, that we are in an era of very unstable political coalitions. A big victory like this one does not mean voters have realigned toward the winning party. Far from it. It just means that the losing party has been rejected, and restless voters won’t hesitate to go back the other way if things don’t change, and change fast.
Call it “politics without winners.”
Read Ruy’s full thoughts here.
Ruy in the Washington Post
“How a ‘blue wave’ ultimately could cripple the Democratic Party”
Democrats don’t have an easy road ahead. But, paradoxically, the better they do in 2026, the more likely they are to ignore their party’s weaknesses with working-class and rural voters. Those weaknesses led to Trump winning the 2024 election, but they are likely to fade from the party’s memory as Democrats, buoyed by the fool’s gold of midterms success, attempt to placate an energized left.
Celebration is easy; confronting underlying problems is hard. Thus, when Republicans get shellacked on Nov. 3, expect Democrats to see the result as an enthusiastic endorsement of the party rather than a repudiation of the GOP — a far more plausible explanation. […]
Democrats need to turn their good fortune into a lasting political advantage, but the party’s midterms strategy indicates this could be a challenge. Democratic candidates have adopted the “affordability” slogan, seasoned with a generous helping of economic populism. This has been a successful formula for this cycle. Post-election, it could have diminishing returns. […]
Democrats should keep a lesson from the second Trump administration firmly in mind: If you promise to fix the economy, make life affordable and get things back to normal, you’d better do it.
Read the full thing here.
Michael in UnHerd
“Republicans should start planning for a post-Trump future”
No one can predict with certainty what all this portends for the 2028 presidential election, but Republicans face real problems as they look ahead to a post-Trump world. The question before them now may simply be how much longer they’re willing to allow Trump to be an albatross around their necks.
Trump’s power has arguably never been weaker. He is now responsible for one of the worst midterm performances for either party in the modern era. His approval rating is near its lowest point on record — a data point that carries a little more weight in light of the polls’ resounding success this cycle. A healthy party might look at this picture and decide that for the sake of its long-term viability, it may be wise to increasingly crowd him out. Yet Trump still enjoys fairly high support among Republican voters, which could make such a move very risky.
This is perhaps the biggest decision Republicans have to make regarding their future, and — as these elections have shown — that future is approaching much more quickly than they may realize.
Read the full thing here.
Ruy on the Fifth Column podcast
Midterm Madness LIVE with The Fifth Column and Friends
The Latino vote has swung significantly back toward the Democrats, kind of like everybody else, but maybe more so. And particularly in a place like Texas, where it looks like there was a huge shift. … They swung extremely hard toward Trump in 2024—that was one of the big, salient facts about that election—and now, Trump has basically given all those gains back.
Trump assembled a really interesting coalition. Remember, people talked about the multiracial, working-class, populist coalition that Trump had put together. And essentially he’s blown it up in the course of two years. Now again, I don’t think those voters will necessarily stick with the Democrats because I don’t think they love them. I think they just wanted to get out of dodge [with Trump].
There’s some interesting data that suggests that Democrats are going to see this big victory as a license to run even more progressive candidates, which is maybe not the right lesson here. If you want to keep these voters, you should run hard at convincing them that you share their values, you’re aiming toward the center of the country—you just want things to get back to normal.
Watch Ruy’s full conversation with The Fifth Column crew here.
Ruy on The After Party with Emily Jashinsky
This was not an electoral environment where it was going to be that effective [for Republicans] to point out socialism, “Piker-ism,” “trans-ism,” whatever the things that Democrats or Democratic candidates were associated with that voters tend not to like—simply harping on that endlessly was not going to do you much good.
I don’t know what would have done them good in this environment, but it would have been better at least to take on the kinds of issues that El-Sayed himself was talking about, rather than just say, “Piker, Piker, Piker.” I mean, at the margin, how much difference was this going to make? I don’t know. But it certainly wasn’t the maximizing strategy.
And I don’t understand how [Republicans] can let Trump off the hook. … What was Trump’s message? He talked all the time about socialism, communism, Hasan Piker… The idea that he is simply the head of the Republican Party and he just wants to talk about kitchen-table issues is wrong.
And it’s interesting: if Republicans choose to respond to this shellacking in that way, I don’t think they’ll get very far. It’s sort of a “circle the wagons” kind of thing. “The problem wasn’t Trump and his administration and how much people detested it. The problem was rather the candidates who didn’t correctly implement the message.” I think that’s just utter nonsense.
Watch Ruy’s full conversation with Emily here.
Finally, a reminder that if you would like to recommend an article or submit a question, please leave a comment on any TLV post published in the seven days leading up to our Friday Five posts (including this one). We’ll collect our favorites and include them in future editions!
For context on this, see Welcome’s post-2024 report, “Deciding to Win”
The winners of the midterms are Iran, China, and Russia - thanks to the massive misinformation campaign by their social media ‘influencers’ and the long term effects of leftist propaganda and control of public education.
Chump and MAGA get boat raced and his response is to let Suzie Wiles go and replace her with the most reviled member of his administration. Stephen Miller is his new Chief of Staff. Let that sink in. He would lose a popularity contest to fire ants. This is Chumps big personnel decision for the stretch run. Maybe Carville is right...he will just wake up in early May and quit. No Action Comics heroes named "Mr. Veto".