Before the 2026 election results had even begun trickling in, progressives were already claiming a mandate. In an email to supporters, Senator Bernie Sanders wrote that “if the pundits are correct and Democrats are able to take back the House and even the Senate, the Democratic Party must undergo fundamental and immediate reform.” Arguing that he and his supporters had “changed political consciousness in our country,” Sanders called for Medicare for All, tuition-free public college, and cuts to military spending.
The problem for Sanders, and for others who will interpret Tuesday’s results as an endorsement of a sweeping socialist agenda, is that Democrats won without resolving their own ideological disagreements. Americans delivered a rebuke to the party in power, but they did not demonstrate an appetite for its most extreme opponents’ agenda.
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At the same time, Republicans shouldn’t dismiss their loss as a standard midterm rout. President Trump returned to office promising to lower the cost of living, then made price-busting tariffs the centerpiece of his economic agenda. His prolonged war with Iran, and attendant spikes in gas prices, compounded voters’ frustration. As the Free Press’s Eli Lake argues in his postelection assessment, the president failed to make a coherent, sustained public case for the conflict. Whatever one thinks of the war’s strategic merits, its duration, economic costs, and uncertain endpoint created an insurmountable political burden.
Trump also squandered much of his advantage on immigration. In 2024, many voters supported securing the border and deporting illegal immigrants. But they undoubtedly recoiled from government agencies’ nasty social media posts reveling in the suffering of people being deported. And the deadly incidents in Minnesota hurt Republicans badly.
Meantime, the president’s fixation on White House renovations, wresting control of the Kennedy Center, and other personal grievances were at odds with the kitchen table concerns that had helped return him to office. And then there’s the stream of headlines about shady crypto ventures and alleged corruption involving administration officials and allies.
These were consequential choices. The usual midterm headwinds help explain why Republicans were vulnerable, but the failures of the Trump administration help explain the scale of Republican defeats.
Critically, however, those failures do not validate the Left’s preferred explanation for Democratic success.
Decades ago, political scientist Robert Dahl took aim at the “Myth of the Presidential Mandate.” American presidents, Dahl argued, have long pointed to their election victories as authorization for their full platforms. But a vote tells us only which candidate a voter preferred, not which policies he wanted or why. Ronald Reagan’s landslide 1980 victory, Dahl argued, may have been caused by many voters simply voting against Jimmy Carter.
Midterms, too, often signal less about ideology than victors like to claim. The president’s party has lost House seats in all but three midterms since 1934. Political scientists label this a thermostatic electorate: voters react against the party in power, seeking to restrain it and correct what they regard as its excesses. But that does not mean every voter is a moderate or that every election produces more centrist policy. Rather, it means that a party can benefit from public dissatisfaction without persuading voters to embrace its own program.
There’s an obvious implication for progressives. If mandate claims are shaky for a president who appeared on the ballot nationwide, or for a Democratic Party reclaiming Congress in the midterms, then they are even shakier for a Democratic Party faction claiming a mandate from a collection of state and district races.
California offers a particularly clear illustration. Voters elected Democrat Xavier Becerra as governor but appear poised to reject the billionaire wealth tax championed by Sanders. Even in one of the country’s bluest states, support for Democratic candidates does not necessarily entail blanket approval of the progressive policy agenda. North Carolina offered a similar picture, as voters there backed Democrat Roy Cooper for Senate by nearly 20 points while approving constitutional amendments to require voter ID, limit property-tax increases, and cut the top income-tax rate, each by similarly lopsided margins.
Our preelection Manhattan Institute survey found similar gaps on other issues. Nearly two-thirds of California likely voters supported limiting public-sector union power if doing so would improve accountability and service delivery. A majority favored restricting Medi-Cal eligibility to those with legal immigration status. Again, voters can prefer Democrats to Republicans while remaining skeptical of policies favored by the party’s left flank.
Indeed, it may be the case that progressives won in spite of their views, rather than because of them. A favorable national environment can help candidates—such as Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed or Maine’s Troy Jackson—overcome liabilities that would sink them in a closer election. In fact, the five Sanders-backed Senate candidates collectively underperformed their fellow Democratic Senate candidates last night relative to the party’s 2024 presidential performance. These Sanders-backed Senate candidates also put up some of the worst performances for Democrats relative to their own gubernatorial ticket-mates. Simply outperforming Trump, by itself, does not establish that a candidate’s ideology helped him—or that a less ideological Democrat would have done worse.
Nor should either party revive the demographics-as-destiny theories that have repeatedly embarrassed their proponents. Democrats once thought that a younger, more diverse electorate would deliver an enduring majority. After 2024, Republicans began telling themselves a version of the same story about their gains among Hispanic voters, younger men, and working-class Americans. Both coalitions were obviously fleeting.
The Trump era has featured substantial movement across demographic groups—and movement back again. Texas went from a narrowly decided Senate race in 2018 to a comfortable Trump victory in 2024 to Democratic victories in both its Senate and gubernatorial races this year. The fundamental fact is that parties still have to persuade voters and deliver once in office.
These hard swings are likely to create political tension in the new Democratic majority’s ranks. Democrats elected in Republican states will serve alongside progressives whose supporters regard compromise as betrayal. While opposition to Trump helped create their coalition, it can only paper over these differences for so long.
The resulting arguments could be revealing. Republicans will denounce a Democratic Congress as socialist while actual socialists denounce its members for refusing to behave like socialists. Sanders’s claim of an ideological mandate will be tested against the priorities of colleagues who have their own more conservative voters to answer to.
Democrats have won the chance to show that they can offer more than Republicans did. Sanders and his allies want to use that opportunity as a mandate for their agenda. But Trump’s experience should give them pause. Voters who put a party in power can turn against it just as quickly when its leaders mistake their own preoccupations for the public’s priorities.