Republicans’ fate in the 2026 midterms is likely sealed. But they could be out of power for multiple subsequent election cycles if Democrats are smart.
While it’s valid to say Democrats shouldn’t count their chickens before they hatch, the Republican majorities in both the House and Senate are in grave danger of surviving into 2027 if current polling trends hold up. One undeniable fact is that since 1946, every incumbent administration’s party has lost control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections when that president’s approval rating is below 50 percent.
President Donald Trump’s approval rating is well below that, with a 37 percent approval rating in an April 2026 NBC News/Decision Desk poll. Even GOP-friendly Fox News found Trump had an approval rating of just 42 percent in a late April survey. Fox found that just 34 percent of registered voters approved of Trump’s handling of the economy. The New York Times also found Trump has just 39 percent approval among voters, with 58 percent disapproving. Only 28 percent of independents support the administration, which is down from 39 percent when he took office last January.
In October of 2018 — just before Republicans suffered a historic loss of 40 House seats — Trump had a 49 percent approval rating on economic issues. Trump’s approval rating in April of 2026 is roughly on par with where he was in late April of 2018, meaning another 40-seat rout is not out of the question for Democrats. Republicans only have a 217-212 majority (with five current vacancies), so Democrats can reclaim the House of Representatives with even just a small number of flips. The Senate is also in play, with Democrats only needing to flip four seats in November in order to take back the upper chamber of Congress.
What’s still an open question is how Democrats will fare in the 2028 presidential election — and, should they win, the 2030 midterms. Recent history has shown us that the American people will rightly turn on the Democrats they just elected if they pull their punches and carry on with business as usual.
How Democrats Squandered a Historic Trifecta
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was simultaneously a historic rejection of Republican policies and a mandate for sweeping change. Obama won the popular vote by nearly 10 million ballots, and dominated the Electoral College with 365 electoral votes to John McCain’s 173, even winning rural red states like Indiana and Iowa. Obama was even competitive in some of the reddest states in the country. His 44.6 percent vote share in North Dakota was the most competitive a Democrat has been in the state since 1976.
Obama’s election also resulted in a lopsided 255-179 House of Representatives majority and a 59-41 majority in the U.S. Senate. And after Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) switched parties in 2009, Obama briefly had a filibuster-proof majority. The American people spoke loudly: They wanted an abrupt one-eighty after thousands of American lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq, trillion-dollar bailouts of the banks that wrecked the economy with their greed, and Republican policies that led to the worst jobs numbers since the Great Depression.
But Democrats largely failed to meet the moment, as seen in their three signature legislative accomplishments prior to the 2010 midterms:
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Only 60 percent of Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) — the approximately $800 billion stimulus package — was made up of investments in public infrastructure, with tax cuts making up the rest. Economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman criticized the stimulus for not going far enough to spur job creation. He wrote in the New York Times that the ARRA was “obviously underpowered from the start.” And by the time funds expired in September of 2010, the job market was back to where it was before, and right in time for a drubbing in the 2010 midterms.
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The 2010 Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) was necessary in that it stopped insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions, strengthened states’ Medicaid programs, and allowed young people to remain on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26. But the Senate stripped the House version of its public health insurance option and watered it down into a bill similar to the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s plan that then-Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney signed into law. The key aspect of Obamacare allowed private health insurance companies to keep their monopoly in place by imposing the individual mandate. Even though there were government subsidies for low-income households, Americans were now forced to fork over their money to the same health insurance giants that spent millions lobbying against the public option.
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The 2010 Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (also known as Dodd-Frank) was beneficial in that it created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which protected Americans from predatory scams and returned money to consumers who were taken advantage of — and established the Volcker Rule, which prohibited banks from making the kind of speculative investments that led to the 2008 financial crisis. But it failed to renew the Glass-Steagall Act, which had forced banks to separate their commercial and investment banking operations until Bill Clinton repealed it at the behest of Wall Street in 1999.
The Obama administration’s Department of Justice under then-Attorney General Eric Holder also failed to meet the moment and prosecute the big banks behind the financial crisis. Obama also refused to prosecute Bush administration officials behind some of the most despicable and shameful episodes in American history, like the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Americans voted for change in 2008, but for the most part, the Obama administration gave them business as usual.
This was confirmed in the 2016 Wikileaks dump of John Podesta’s email account, which revealed that Citigroup executive Michael Froman — whose company got hundreds of billions of dollars in government bailouts — hand-picked nearly two dozen Obama Cabinet officials. Froman recommended Holder at DOJ, Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff, Kathleen Sebelius to helm the Department of Health and Human Services, Janet Napolitano to lead the Department of Homeland Security, Arne Duncan as Education Secretary, and Timothy Geithner at the Treasury Department, among others. Obama later appointed Froman as U.S. Trade Representative during his second term.
Republicans’ wave election victory in the 2010 midterms was the natural result of the Obama administration failing to act on the mandate it was given in 2008. If Democrats win in 2028, they’ll need to avoid the same pitfalls that hamstrung them during Obama’s tenure by doing three specific things, in a specific order, and not letting off the gas the entire time they’re in power.
Democrats Need to Follow Roosevelt’s Playbook
The most successful midterm election for Democrats is likely the 1934 midterms, when then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Democratic Party gained nine seats in both the House and Senate. This happened despite the United States still being in the throes of the Great Depression. In October of 1934, the unemployment rate was still in excess of 21 percent. If any modern president faced a jobless rate that high it would be safe to bet that they would suffer a one-sided beatdown in their first midterm election.
But context is key: The unemployment rate was actually down four points from a high of nearly 25 percent in 1933, thanks to New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Civil Works Administration, and the Public Works Administration that created much-needed jobs for desperate Americans. FDR didn’t waste time after taking office, rightly viewing his 472-59 Electoral College rout of Herbert Hoover’s Republican Party as a mandate to enact sweeping progressive change.
What’s not as well-known about FDR’s first term is that in addition to passing New Deal legislation to tackle the Great Depression, Democrats also held high-profile hearings in which Wall Street executives behind the 1929 stock market crash were publicly grilled by prosecutor Ferdinand Pecora. The Pecora Investigation brought top bankers before the Senate Banking Committee including JP Morgan, National City Bank (now Citi) chairman Charles E. Mitchell, former Chase Bank chairman Albert H. Wiggin, and Sinclair Oil founder Harry Sinclair, among others. As Vanity Fair documented in 2010, this was seen as a profound moment of accountability for the bankers who ruined the finances of millions of Americans:
In the course of over a year of public investigations, Pecora cross-examined some of the most powerful and famous bankers and businessmen in America. He used his subpoena power to put people on the stand for day after day. He cross-examined Samuel Insull, the utilities mogul, who fled the country a year later; Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange and a man with close ties to Morgan, who surprised many in the audience by confirming what most lawyers knew but many citizens did not—that “no public agency … exercises any regulatory power over [the stock exchange]”—and who within a few years would wind up in jail; Thomas W. Lamont, Morgan’s most important partner; and many others.
Pecora’s goal was to lift the veil on the clubby, secretive world of banking, a world to which he believed no one—government, investors, press—had adequate access. He bored into what he considered the corrupt (if not necessarily illegal) practices of the great banks, asking seemingly mundane questions that drew his targets into his traps. Albert Wiggin, president of the Chase National Bank, who resigned in disgrace after it was revealed that he had been short-selling his own bank’s stock, was one such victim.
The Pecora Investigation led to several landmark achievements, like the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (the same legislation Democrats repealed in 1999) and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934. The combination of ambitious New Deal legislation and grilling of top bankers likely paved the way for Democrats to not only keep their majorities in the 1934 midterms, but to grow them — and get FDR reelected for an even more ambitious second term in 1936.
Democrats don’t have to reinvent the wheel: They can win power in 2028 and keep it in 2032 by holding rich and powerful criminals accountable and passing unapologetically progressive laws. As mentioned previously, this should be a three-pronged approach.
The 3-Step Blueprint for Democratic Success
Americans will be profoundly hungry for accountability and will likely vote for sweeping change in 2028, just as they did 20 years prior. Democrats can deliver on that by pursuing accountability, fixing the courts, and taking a gloves-off approach to governing, in that order.
The accountability process can begin almost immediately after the 2026 midterms, because Democrats would have subpoena power if they win back control of the House of Representatives. Just as Ferdinand Pecora brought Wall Street executives before Congress, Democrats like Reps. Robert Garcia (D-California) and Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), who would chair the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, respectively, can issue subpoenas for Trump family members and administration officials for anti-corruption hearings. Tackling corruption could easily be the defining issue of the 2028 election, given how the Trump family has made at least $4 billion off of the presidency in just the last 15 months.
Trump would still have the veto pen between 2027 and 2028, meaning the passage of anti-corruption laws would have to wait until 2029. But there would be nothing stopping Democrats from using their powers to subpoena Trump’s adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, for profiting from their father’s administration. Eric recently bragged about scoring a multimillion-dollar Pentagon contract. Donald Trump Jr. is deeply invested in prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, where mysterious bettors often place large wagers on administration decisions minutes before they’re made public, pocketing millions in the process. Democrats can and should use the 2028 election as an opportunity to make white-collar criminals terrified of the justice system again.
Should Democrats sweep back into power after 2028, whoever is elected the 48th president of the United States needs to immediately take steps to make sure the unaccountable abuses of power we routinely see under Trump’s second term can never happen again. Democrats can eliminate the Senate filibuster to finally stop Republicans from requiring 60 votes to pass legislation, then grant statehood to both Puerto Rico and Washington DC (both of whom have passed referendums to become US states) to create four new US Senate seats that will almost certainly be held by Democrats for the foreseeable future.
Democrats can then use their new, bigger majorities to pass legislation that would add new seats to the Supreme Court, while simultaneously imposing term limits so no judge can serve for life. They can also pass laws to create more judicial circuits (there are currently 11 regional circuits, plus the DC Circuit and the Federal Circuit). This would create a plethora of valuable new judgeship positions in new district courts a Democratic president and Senate could fill, and would free up backlogs currently clogging up the judiciary while allowing smart Democratic plaintiffs to litigate some of the worst abuses of the Roberts Court out of existence. I’ve previously suggested 15 Supreme Court justices and 15 judicial circuits.
Democratic lawyers can and should go judge-shopping in favorable circuits to undo the worst decisions the Roberts Court has handed down. This would include Trump v. United States (which made presidents immune from criminal accountability) to Shelby County v. Holder (which paved the way for red states to disenfranchise Black voters) to Citizens United v. FEC (which allowed for unlimited corporate political spending in elections) and any number of other awful decisions that tilted the scales in favor of the far right.
Finally, once the Supreme Court is made larger and no longer hamstrung by a conservative supermajority, Democrats can be free to pass sweeping legislation that conservative judges won’t be able to deem illegal. This can include everything from Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-Wash.) Medicare for All Act that would establish a universal healthcare system, to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) Federal Jobs Guarantee Act that would create millions of good-paying jobs to revitalize public infrastructure, to the For The People Act that would streamline the voting process and make it easier for people to participate in democracy, and more.
The plan is simple: If Democrats act with urgency and use their powers to the fullest, they can demonstrate that under their leadership, corruption will no longer go unpunished, criminals will be held accountable, government will be responsive to people’s needs, and wealthy and well-connected Ivy League graduates in robes will no longer be able to act as an unelected super-legislature to undo the will of the voters. The blueprint is clear: The only question that remains is whether Democrats will have the political will to follow it.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
