Turn Out for What?

The Midterm Question We Need to Be Asking

Democrats — and Kamala Harris, specifically — have already done the most effective thing possible to win this year’s election: lose the last one. In today’s political environment, voters follow a predictable “throw the bastards out” pattern, choosing the party not in power in the midterms. As such, Democrats are owed a good night in November, and notwithstanding Republican efforts to keep voters from casting ballots or having them count, they’re likely to collect one. But have they done the work necessary to enact an agenda?

This question goes largely unasked. Democratic Party factions are locked in the argument they’ve waged for decades: Which message wins? Far fewer are asking what a new legislative majority is meant to deliver.

This omission is dangerous. A Democratic victory in 2026 that leaves the operating assumptions of institutional Democratic politics intact may make repudiating authoritarianism even harder than electoral loss would.

To be sure, electoral victories are essential. But if Democratic leaders interpret a win as an endorsement of their dominant approach, then the bipartisan gestures, the make-believe that norms still apply, and the reluctance to protect the communities in the line of fire all get read as proof of concept with a perceived electoral mandate. Then, the next cycle starts from a more deeply entrenched version of the same failed theory, and enacting a small-d democratic agenda becomes harder.

The receipts on this risk are everywhere. When Marco Rubio came up for Secretary of State, every Senate Democrat voted to confirm him — a unanimous grant of legitimacy to the incoming foreign policy apparatus. Doug Burgum sailed through as Interior Secretary 79-18. Doug Collins, Veterans Affairs, 77-23. In March 2025, handed a Republican spending bill that gave the regime full fiscal authority through September, in defiance of every constraint Democrats had sought, Senate Minority Leader Schumer announced he would vote yes. Ten Democrats joined him. Many Senate Democrats had already crossed over for the Laken Riley Act, stripping due process protections for immigrants accused of crimes and helping lay the groundwork for the anti-immigrant assault underway.

This well-worn approach has proven a failure. Democrats declare the threat to democracy existential, but the timidity of their actions tells a different story. In our research, we have seen how this leaves voters unsure whether the danger is real and the people naming it simply won’t act, or whether the alarm was partisan hyperbole. In 2024, the conflicted voters who broke for Trump or stayed home were not embracing Project 2025; they didn’t believe it would come to fruition. It’s hard to heed a warning when the messengers won’t act on it.

As political analyst Michael Podhorzer has chronicled, our last midterms in 2022 provided a natural experiment that confirms this reality. Democrats were the incumbent party and did indeed lose the House but without the anticipated “Red Wave” shellacking. Looking under the hood at vote counts within states reveals that in places where the authoritarian threat was made focal and rendered credible to voters, there was what Podhorzer named a “Blue Undertow” due to greater than expected turnout. But in the other states, notably New York and California, where candidates attempted to battle out the election on ordinary issue terms and failed to render the stakes of MAGA rule real, turnout conformed to prediction and Democrats lost.

We also lived through this during the Democratic trifecta of 2021 to 2023. In deference to comity and Senate tradition, Democrats failed to codify access to abortion, protect voting rights, and effectively prosecute Trump and his accomplices for their crimes — chief among them the violent attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. They helped enable Trump’s return in a more potent and harder to dislodge form.

This is a global pattern. In Austria, Italy, and Poland, for example, voters ousted far-right leaders only to have them return when their elected rivals refused to reckon with the damage, repudiate the authoritarian playbook, and deliver what voters desire.

Americans get this. In biweekly focus groups with swing and disaffected Democratic voters we helped conduct from the Fall of 2023 through 2024, we heard variations on this theme: “In 2020, they told me to turn out to stop all of these terrible things, and then they happened anyway — on Democrats’ watch. Now, they’re telling me the same thing?”

These voters understand that what Democrats do is far louder than what they post, no matter how snappy. By more than 3-to-1, Democratic voters said their party wasn’t doing enough to fight back. NBC News polling found nearly two-thirds of Democrats want their party to hold firm even at the cost of bipartisan progress — a complete reversal from Trump’s first term, when those same voters indicated they favored compromise two to one. Navigator’s post-2024 qualitative research found that Democratic voters described their own party as weak and unable to fight for people.

For those who view elections as contests to enact your desired policies and create durable desire for your party, rather than win a fleeting majority for its own sake, merely getting out the vote is insufficient. Even telling folks to turnout to defeat MAGA falls short if it carries no demand about what the people elected must do. A voter mobilized to drop a ballot in a box —with no clarion call about what that ballot must accomplish — is completing a transaction, not joining a struggle against authoritarian power. And if that transaction produces a win, it confirms for institutional leaders that no deeper reckoning is required.

A win must be toward enacting an agenda. The majority of voters want affordable healthcare, strong unions, taxes on billionaires, freedom for all to vote, and no more ICE agents abducting their neighbors and operating prison camps in their communities — not merely as slogans but as policy accomplishments.

The pundits offering pronouncements on how to win, and the groups turning out voters, have to aim at a vote that means something. The candidates we elect have to understand what they were sent to do. Not to post about prices. Not to find common ground with people who are destroying common humanity.

The central task for the midterms is to make every vote part of a larger demand: to protect the people targeted by this regime, undo the damage it has inflicted, and build the power to deliver the freedoms America has only ever promised. An electoral strategy disconnected from that purpose risks ratifying the conditions that allow authoritarianism to take hold and remain.