What if you held an election and nobody won?
For now, Democrats are in a deep hole with their lowest polling and registration in decades while Republicans are tainted by a leader with the worst presidential polls in history at this point (and declining).
Both are true yet miss the far bigger trend line — the governing party of Donald Trump is heading into the 2026 and 2028 elections significantly on the defensive.
Although he won’t appear on either ballot, every Republican running will be asked to justify their unflinching support for his unpopular failures: a tariffs-induced economic slowdown, continuing Epstein cover-up, blowing up the historic independence of the DOJ, FBI, Fed and BLS, widespread reductions in Medicaid and health insurance, tax cuts for the wealthiest paid for by large deficits and masked ICE agents assaulting Brown people nightly on TV.
And not to mention the rhythm of off-year elections costing the party in power an average of 22 House seats since 1970. (Democrats need three more House and four Senate seats to win majorities.)
Bellwether contests in 2025 have indeed swung sharply in favor of Democrats (like a flipped Iowa legislative seat last Tuesday). Many town hall meetings in red districts have become shouting matches. Polling from January to August show Trump falling from 46% to 29% favorable among Independents (Gallup) and 53% to 31% among voters who think him “honest and trustworthy” (YouGov). Generic congressional polls currently show Democrats 3-5 points ahead.
Trump’s response to his Summer of Epstein has been not to directly respond, As in many prior scandals, he has resorted to diversionary razzle dazzle to dominate the “attention economy” — sending American troops into blue cities to play the crime and race cards, lurching between the invader and invaded in Ukraine, purging thousands of experienced experts from federal agencies, rechristening military facilities with their original Confederate names and of course his Niagara of lies that’s become a trademark (though occasionally with humor, like telling his servile Cabinet meeting “I have no ego when it comes to this stuff.”)
Yet none of his chesty gaslighting actually lowers prices, boosts real income or slows Russia’s aggression — all of which he ran on in 2024. Worse, the approaching national elections appear on track to be about the past versus the future, between his aim to “Make America 1898 Again” and Democrats’ promise to improve everyday lives.
The commentariat keeps lecturing Democrats “do something!” — i.e., not merely counter issue-by-issue but with a unified theory-of-the-case that both links his multitude of predations inspires millions more to join an aligning pro-democracy movement.
So here’s one approach: reframe the elections as a competition between “Progress or Retreat” — then build that case by fighting corruption and creating an economy-for-all, not just a “fewer-get-more” ethic that historians believe contributed to the collapse of ancient Rome.
That is, bluntly explaining what they’re against and what you’re for to win attention and votes. That means declaring that there is a “national emergency” and it’s his fringy government of Fox hosts, amateur billionaires and Proud Boys in ties. If Trump could run successfully against an elderly Joe Biden who wasn’t on the ballot, next time Democrats can run against an even more vilified Trump racing in reverse to the Gilded Age of McKinley.
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- FIGHT CORRUPTION BY STRENGTHENING DEMOCRACY
Trump’s rap sheet of recidivism — his felony convictions, court losses, sexual assaults and an actual lethal Jan. 6 insurrection — has elevated him to a special echelon: he’s objectively now the biggest public fraud since Charles Ponzi, who a century ago literally won naming rights to become the avatar of cheating. It’s likely that “to be Trumped” in the future will not be a compliment.
This is not a right-left but a right-wrong contrast. A detailed analysis in The Atlantic found that Trump had personally profited by an emolumental $3.4 billion since 2017 during his terms in office; and while Republican administrations from Nixon to Trump produced 206 total indictments, a comparable stretch of Democratic successors (Carter/Clinton/Obama/Biden) led to only three prosecutions.
Especially as he toys with a commutation for serial sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, will Trump’s GOP pay a political price for his insatiable narcissism and yen for yesterday? Presumably, having won three wars fighting tyranny — against the British, Confederacy and Axis powers — Americans would again prefer our flawed constitutional republic over his half-joking “Dictator Only on Day One” (plus 222 days and counting).
Here are four initial proposals that can advance this patriotic story-line:
- Reign in the pardon power.
Pardons, established in Article II, have been corrupted by Trump’s repeated claims that convictions were “extremely unfair,” hence the big majority of them have gone to his friends, allies and former staff. “Leave no MAGA behind” said the indiscreet Ed Martin when he headed his pardon staff.
Democrats can propose either a law or, if necessary, a constitutional amendment to slow the growth of what’s become an almost new branch of extra-legal government.
- Mute the megaphone of money.
The 2011 Roberts majority opinion in Citizens United has turned our elections into auctions, as if one $280 million donation from Elon Musk to Trump was simply an example of speech by some soapbox orator. Polling shows the popularity of a constitutional amendment to restrict such legal bribery creating a government of purchased politicians.
- End political prosecutions.
DOJ is pursuing cases against Obama, John Brennan, James Comey, Tish James, and Act Blue. Presidents should not be allowed to order prosecutors to destroy or financially exhaust the opposition party. That recurring retribution alone would replace America’s centuries-long rule of law with Trump’s law of rule. (And along the same lines, prohibit use of federal troops against civilian populations unless there’s an authentic threat of insurrection, like the Whisky Rebellion of 1794 or Civil War in 1861.)
- Protect freedom and speech.
Banning abortions and books is not freedom. Nor is marshalling the huge power of federal contracting and licensing to censor — if not self-censor — the speech of universities, law firms, major networks and national museums based on #47’s definition of American “exceptionalism.” Five federal courts have all ruled against such First Amendment violations yet liberal targets still feel pressure to submit to such federal extortion.
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- CREATE AN ECONOMY-FOR-ALL
How can Democrats explain their continuing inability to campaign on the economy when GDP growth under Democratic presidents has been 50% higher since 1962 than under Republican presidents? Indeed, of the 43 million net jobs generated since 1989, 96% were created under Democratic presidents.
Thirty years ago, the ratio of average CEO pay compared to line workers was 30-1; now it’s 300:1. Will average-income voters stay calm when, say, it goes to a feudal 1,000-to-1 if the party of free enterprise gets its way?
Many economic proposals could start to win back a meaningful slice of white working class voters once they notice the growing delta between Trump’s euphoric rhetoric and their middle-class struggles. For examples:
- Restore the social safety net.
The federal minimum wage was $7.25 an hour in 2009 and $7.25 today. The next president should suggest a gradual increase to $25 an hour so that blue collar workers aren’t impoverished if they work full-time. Ditto with creating a program for parental leave and expanding the Child Tax Credit, which would appeal to millions of American families with young children.
According to Article I of the U.S. Constitution, tariffs can only be imposed by Congress, not a president using them to try to dictate economic terms to the rest of the world.
The U.S. Court of International Trade so ruled in May, which was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Friday. Turkuler Isiksel, a political theorist at Columbia, wrote that “The sovereign picking winners and losers — that’s something a 17th century king would do.”
Fifty years ago, two-thirds of federal revenues came from taxing capital; now it’s one-third. Instead, super-investor Warren Buffet popularized the idea that average workers at a firm should not be paying a higher percentage of their income in taxes than its CEO. In the process, Democrats can finally bury the GOP “trickle-down” designed to hide the GOP policy of picking our pockets to line theirs.
In the spirit of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary landslide, Democrats could advocate for a new TNEC (“Temporary National Economic Committee”), as FDR and antitrust chief Thurman Arnold instituted in 1937. An update could publicize how giant firms — even before super AI further consolidates corporate power — are systematically keeping prices high irrespective of federal budgets.
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Democrats appear to be running out of patience with a mainstream media repeating Trump hysteria about “communists” while ignoring evidence of his admitted slow-motion fascism. Can they rise to this occasion?
It’s happened at least once before.
When President Harry Truman in 1947 became convinced that Black soldiers returning from WWII lacked equal rights, he tried to bypass the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” Plessy decision and nationalization of white supremacy in federal hiring established by President Wilson.
As described by historian Corey Brettschneider in his 2024 book “The Presidents and the People,” Truman revived the principles of the Civil War Amendments by ordering a policy of fair employment throughout the federal government and ending segregation in the military.
After Senate conservatives denounced him, the plain-spoken president wrote one ally that if his support of civil rights “ends up in my failure to be reelected, the failure will be in a good cause.”
Truman’s party 80 years later seems to be finally finding a new generation of “give ‘em hell” patriots to try to pry our battered democracy out of the grip of the Mar-a-Lago Mussolini. Recently, Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Chris Murphy, and Cory Booker have been fighting fire with fire, in Newsom’s useful axiom, by excoriating Trump’s dangerous extremism.
With the Supreme Court’s supermajority appearing afraid to annoy the elephant in the room — and a cowed White House press corps largely just listening to his self-reverential monologues — the durability of Trumpism may now depend on which party best frames the choice in 2026 and 2028 — viz., when it comes down to your country and your family, who do you trust to tell you the truth and be on-your-side?
Trump or Truman? Wrecking America or winning America?
Green was the first NYC public advocate and is the author or editor of a couple dozen books, including two transition anthologies and three on Donald Trump’s record.
