I posted on LinkedIn Wednesday morning that I’d forgotten how good it feels to wake up in a blue state. I live north of Houston, and on Tuesday night Texans sent James Talarico to the U.S. Senate and handed Democrats the Texas House for the first time in more than two decades. If you’d told me that a year ago, I’d have asked what you were drinking (and whether you planned to share).
NBC News projects Democrats will hold 258 House seats in January, a number the party hasn’t reached since 1993. They flipped seven Senate seats, including Kansas (which hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century), along with Iowa, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas.
The Democratic establishment is already lining up to take a bow for all of that. They need to sit the fuck down. The Blue Tsunami happened in spite of establishment Democrats—not because of them. Establishment democrats actively campaigned against many of those who won Tuesday night. Voters didn’t hand this majority to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries as a reward for a job well done, and if party leadership reads Tuesday as a mandate for more of the same, they’ll squander it the same way they squandered the last one.
Playing Nice Is How We Got a Second Trump Term
I’ve spent most of my career in and around cybersecurity, and I don’t recall any business building a defense strategy around the hope that the attacker will play fair. That’s more or less what Democratic leadership did for a decade, though. Trump and the movement around him treated every institution as something to bend or burn, and the Democratic response was usually a sternly worded letter followed by another attempt to reach across the aisle to people who had no intention of reaching back.
To be fair, Trump’s return in 2024 had plenty of causes, and inflation sits near the top of that list. A lot of voters were angry about rent, groceries, and child care, and what they heard from establishment Democrats was a defense of the status quo they were angry about. Centrism sounds reasonable in a cable news segment. In the real world, it reads as a party that’s more worried about upsetting donors and pundits than about whether you can make rent.
In March 2025, barely two months into Trump’s second term, Schumer handed Republicans the votes to pass their funding bill and keep the government open, without extracting much of anything in return. Months later, a group of moderate Senate Democrats joined Republicans to end the shutdown, and MoveOn said roughly 80% of the members it surveyed wanted Schumer out of leadership. When reporters asked Jeffries whether Senate Democrats should change leaders, his answer was “Next question.” Leadership kept dodging the fight and hoping voters would reward them for being the adults in the room, and meanwhile Trump had pretty much free rein to do whatever he wanted with his second term.
Voters Rewarded People Who Deliver
If you want to understand what happened Tuesday, New York City is a better place to start than Washington. Zohran Mamdani took office on January 1 promising a rent freeze and free child care, and the establishment mostly treated him like a nice idea that would collide with reality. Eight days in, he stood next to Gov. Kathy Hochul to launch free child care for 2-year-olds, with the state covering the cost for the first two years. In February, he appointed six of the nine members of the Rent Guidelines Board. In June, that board voted 7-1 to freeze rents for roughly one million stabilized apartments, the first time a freeze has covered both one-year and two-year leases.
A few of his promises are still sitting on the shelf, though. Free buses got pushed past 2026 over the budget and MTA funding, and Mamdani said so plainly instead of spinning it. That candor is part of the appeal, though. He calls what he’s doing “pothole politics,” and the point is a government that actually fixes things people can see.
Mamdani also backed insurgent challengers in New York’s June primaries, and they ousted two incumbents even with Jeffries campaigning against them. In Michigan (a place this Detroitphile watches closely), Abdul El-Sayed beat Rep. Haley Stevens in the Senate primary by less than a point, despite record spending against him and the backing Stevens had from the party establishment and AIPAC. Stevens then endorsed the Republican, Mike Rogers. On Tuesday, El-Sayed won the seat anyway.
Roy Cooper spent eight years as North Carolina’s governor before he ran for Senate, and I doubt many voters there were thinking about Queens when they voted for him. Plenty of Tuesday’s other winners aren’t democratic socialists, either. Even so, the whole party ran on affordability this year, which is the agenda Mamdani dragged into the center of the conversation while leadership was busy keeping its distance from him. The voters who showed up wanted candidates who say what they’ll do and then actually go do it, which seems like a pretty low bar for the establishment to keep tripping over.
Schumer and Jeffries Need to Go
I said on LinkedIn earlier this week that so-called centrist Democrats are functionally Republicans, and that Schumer and Jeffries need to be replaced by real progressive leadership. A few people pushed back on that, so I want to walk through why I said it.
According to reporting by Sludge, AIPAC’s PAC has funneled more than a million dollars in earmarked donations to Jeffries over the years, including $149,300 to his joint fundraising committee in May 2026, a couple of months before he came out against an amendment to cut Israel aid. Using OpenSecrets data, Sludge also counted Schumer as the Senate’s top recipient of pro-Israel money, at least $1.7 million. Add in the crypto super PAC money tied to both of them and Schumer’s history with health insurance lobbyists, and you get leaders who answer to the people writing the big checks first instead of the voters and constituents they actually work for.
Jeffries went on Meet the Press to disavow Medicare for All and say he doesn’t support the DSA agenda, while primary voters in his own state were picking candidates who ran on exactly those ideas. Schumer has spent two years explaining away fights he chose not to have. Our Revolution, a progressive group, surveyed more than 3,500 voters and found 90% wanted Schumer to step aside. That’s a self-selected crowd, obviously, but it lines up with what I hear from just about every Democrat I know who isn’t on a payroll.
Senate Democrats typically pick their leader in a closed-door vote shortly after the election, and Jeffries is in line to become Speaker. Both of them will try to ride Tuesday’s wave straight back into the top job. The new members who won as insurgents, and the voters who sent them, have more leverage right now than they’ll have at any other point in this Congress.
Put the Olive Branches Away
Establishment Democrats like Jeffries and Schumer are already talking about healing and finding common ground with the other side of the aisle. I’d love to know who they think is standing over there. The MAGA GOP spent the last two years gutting Medicaid and letting Affordable Care Act subsidies lapse, and then it dragged the country into a war with Iran that even JD Vance is now blaming for Tuesday’s losses. Nobody on that side extended an olive branch, and I’m not interested in the party I vote for offering one.
When Democrats say “work together” with this crowd, what it usually means in practice is that Democrats give up something real and Republicans pocket it and come back for more. It’s a bit like negotiating with ransomware operators. You can pay, and you might even get your files back this time, but you’ve just told them exactly how this works, and they’ll be back.
Democrats are about to have subpoena power again, and the first thing they need to do is use it (and actually enforce it). Restoring the ACA subsidies and reversing the Medicaid cuts belong at the top of the list, along with real oversight hearings on how the Iran war started and what it has cost. It also means going after the money. When Gil Duran joined me on the TechSpective Podcast to talk about The Nerd Reich, we spent a lot of time on how a handful of billionaires can pour hundreds of millions into a single election, and campaign finance reform should be on the table in the first hundred days rather than the last.
CNBC reports party leaders are planning a hard-charging legislative and investigative push once they take control in January. That would be great. I’ll believe it when I see it, though, because I’ve heard that promise from these same people before. Fuck MAGA, and fuck the idea that the answer to authoritarianism is a bipartisan working group.
The Majority Is on Loan
Voters lent Democrats this majority, and they’ll call the loan in 2028 if the people running the party treat it as permission to go back to platitudes and polite letters. Mamdani took a lot of heat for promising big things and then delivered on enough of them to make his critics look silly, and people well outside the five boroughs were paying attention.
“Vote Blue, No Matter Who” doesn’t cut it anymore. That ship sailed. Establishment and centrist Democrats who protect the status quo instead of fighting for the people who elected them are no better than the Republicans they tell us to fear. A blue jersey isn’t a substitute for doing the job. We expect results, not talking points, and action, not another press conference.
If you helped make Tuesday happen, the most useful thing you can do this month is call your newly elected senator or representative and tell them plainly that you expect them to vote for new leadership. Freshmen haven’t been absorbed into the machine yet, and they still remember who knocked on doors for them, though that tends to change pretty fast once they get to Washington. Make sure they understand that your support isn’t a lifetime subscription. Deliver results, or we’ll find someone who will.
