2024 WASN'T PERMANENT AND 2025 WON'T BE PERMANENT EITHER

This morning, The New York Times posted a conversation between Ezra Klein and his editor, Aaron Retica. I wondered whether Klein would be chastened by the fact that Tuesday's election results didn't match up with his recent doomsaying about Democrats. While Klein acknowledges the magnitude of the Democratic wins, he's sticking with his theory that Democrats need to do more to regain the voters they've lost. He cites a fellow pundit's math:

I don’t think the question of what you would need to do to win an election in Ohio, Florida and Iowa is answered yet. Matt Yglesias made this point where he says: If you look at how Sherrill and Spanberger ran and how Harris ran, they both ran about five points ahead of her.

And if you just say: OK, what that tells us is that the off-cycle electorate right now — and this would be a big extrapolation, but just for the sake of argument — is plus-five Democratic compared to 2024. That is almost certainly enough to win you the House, but it is only maybe enough to win you Ohio. And it is not enough to win you Iowa, Alaska and places like that.

When I read that, I thought Klein was cooking the books -- Kamala Harris won both New Jersey and Virginia by just under six points, while Abigail's Spanberger's lead in the Virginia governor's race is 14.4%. And Mikie Sherrill's lead in New Jersey is 13.4%. But Yglesias was talking about percentage of the vote, not margin of victory. On Wednesday, he wrote:

Harris got 52 percent in Virginia versus a projected 57 percent for Spanberger. Harris got 44 percent in Ohio and 43 percent in Iowa. If you add five to those numbers, Democrats maybe win Ohio and still almost certainly lose Iowa. And this is the Senate problem in a nutshell: a really strong national climate isn’t good enough.

That math, regrettably, makes sense. If you add five points to a sub-45% Democratic vote percentage, you don't get enough to win the state. In 2024, an additional five points would have given Harris a victory in the popular vote and in the Electoral College -- she would have won all seven swing states -- but Senate races are tougher. John Cornyn's last opponent, M.J. Hegar, got 43.87% of the vote in 2020. The #2 finisher in Alaska the last time Dan Sullivan ran got 41.19% of the vote. Add five points and it's still not enough to win.

But just as 2024's apparent realignment in favor of the GOP proved to be a mirage, 2025 won't last forever either.

Some of the changes over the next year could favor the GOP -- for instance, the government won't be shut down a year from now (probably!). On the other hand, you have to ask youself: Does it really seem possible that America will be better off in 2026 than it is now? An America in which job numbers suggest we're heading for a recession while the markets seem to be headed for a AI-bubble crash?

I know that the Supreme Court's hostility toward President Trump's tariffs is a hopeful sign, but you really need to read this New York Times story (gift link), which makes clear that the Court is ruling on one method of imposing tariffs while Trump has many more ways of imposing them.

Multiple trade authorities exist that would allow the president to impose tariffs that are not subject to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, the law at issue in the Supreme Court case....

Some of those provisions are in use today, while others are more obscure. Together, they could be employed to impose tariffs on foreign countries or products, or even the entire globe. They could also be used to reinforce the trade deals that Mr. Trump has negotiated globally, which are based on tariffs issued under the IEEPA authority.

After reading the article, ou might not be ready to take a pop quiz on all the laws Trump can use, but you'll be persuaded that he will use them, and they'll keep prices high.

Will Trump stop militarizing cities and brutalizing their residents? No. Will he stop using the presidency to indulge his own sense of grandiosity? No. Will he stop threatening wars? No -- we might be in a war (or more than one) a year from now.

Among the lessons we learned on Tuesday were these two: Trump's horrible presidency can drive anti-Trump voters to the polls in large numbers and, at least so far, Trump isn't trying to interfere with the vote. The election monitors we were told the Department of Justice was sending to California and New Jersey didn't prevent fair elections in those states. I think Trump genuinely believes he's massively popular and the public is on his side, and that's prevented him from the kind of authoritarian election tampering we all fear. Will that still be the case next year? I don't know -- but it's possible that Trump's ego will be what saves us from a serious shutdown of democracy.

Democrats already have Senate candidates who are beating Republicans in red states in some early polling. Former governor Roy Cooper leads in every poll of the 2026 North Carolina Senate race. In the most recent Senate poll in Ohio, Sherrod Brown beats incumbent Jon Husted. A recent poll shows Mary Peltola beating Dan Sullivan in Alaska. And while it's a long shot, a couple of polls show Democratic contenders beating Republican candidates in Texas.

Democrats need good candidates and good messaging in 2026. But Trump might continue to make their job easier -- and might not use his authoritarian muscle to deprive them of the chance to win.