The sun still came up Wednesday morning, despite a dark night for the Republican soul. And while the view of Washington, D.C. looks the same from these office windows, the reality is that the landscape of the city has radically changed. By almost biblical proportions, good men and women were sent packing, the collateral damage of America’s final judgment on Donald Trump. Both parties have been here before, digging through the rubble of another agonizing chapter of self-reflection. But there were lessons for both sides in Tuesday’s verdict. And the question that will shape everything going forward is this: which party learned them?

Despite their wild euphoria over the wave that swept Republicans out to sea, Democrats will be returning to power deeply divided. Their party, which has tried to keep the internal war from boiling over before November 3, is facing an ideological reckoning. And while Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has managed to keep his caucus from publicly coming to blows, the speakership won’t afford him that luxury. He and Majority Leader-in-waiting Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) are officially out of runway on a problem that’s been dogging the party since Trump arrived on the scene 11 years ago. What do Democrats actually stand for?

Winning was always going to be a double-edged sword for Jeffries’s party, because it reveals the Democrats’ complete lack of vision and direction. For the last decade, the Left’s entire strategy has been running on anti-Trump hatred. They exhausted that playbook Tuesday. Now the American people, who graciously elected progressives without a coherent agenda, will eventually want to know what’s next. Are they governing as socialists? Moderates? Is there a plan to do any legislative work at all during the next two years of impeachments and investigations? And what, exactly, is their strategy for bringing down costs? 

Jeffries and Schumer will be on a short leash to figure this out, because if there’s anything we’ve learned about the electorate, it’s that voters aren’t a patient bunch. They want immediate gratification for their shifting loyalties, and woe to those who don’t deliver. 

“[The] civil war starts Wednesday,” longtime Democrat James Carville warned in the days leading up to the midterms. On one side of the party, you have a group of upstart Democrats who just mopped the floor with Republicans in deep red places like Texas, Iowa, and Kansas. They got elected by connecting to the concerns of traditionally centrist, right-leaning voters. A hard-left turn undoes all of the work they did to appear reasonable and jeopardizes their promise to find common ground. 

On the other side, there’s the increasingly emboldened fringe, who will want to draw blood after blowing past projections and rising to some of the highest positions of power. But the problem with giving the Democratic Socialists — or any Squad-like members — outsized influence is that it’s devastating to the party’s 2028 ambitions. Winning a Senate seat in Michigan as a radical Islamist is impressive, to be sure, but it’s not a viable formula for 270 electoral votes across a very diverse nation. Schumer and Jeffries know that. 

They must also acknowledge (at least privately) that Tuesday’s shellacking wasn’t necessarily a win for Democrats — it was a loss for Trump. Drawing the wrong conclusions about that would be a fatal mistake (not that it’s stopped them before). As National Review’s editors and many others emphasize, there’s less evidence “that Democratic wins represented an ideological victory. Voters said they trusted Republicans slightly more on taxes and immigration. Just 25 percent of the electorate defined themselves as liberal, compared to 34 percent who identified as conservative, and 41 percent who described themselves as moderate. Meanwhile, less than a third of the electorate said they had a favorable view of socialism, with just 9 percent having a strongly favorable view.” 

In other words, Joseph Backholm warns, this was not an endorsement of leftism. “But, as with Biden, the people running the Ds will interpret this to mean that America really does want government-run grocery stores and taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners, and they will be wrong.”

They need only to look to deep-blue Washington and Colorado to understand that their cultural wokeism is a political loser. In what were some of the most encouraging signs of the night, ballot initiatives to protect girls’ sports, outlaw the gender mutilation of minors, and restrict school facilities to birth sex were surprisingly popular — dealing another blow to the sexual radicalism Democrats have made a pillar of their platform for years. Continuing to press those points will only hurt their already slim chances of building a coalition before 2028 that can appeal to most Americans. 

Adding to their liabilities, Democrats are still deeply unpopular with the American people. Despite this week’s landslide, voters give Republicans a much higher favorability rating (38%) than Jeffries’s party (29%). All of this hints at Democrats being a useful weapon to blunt Trump, but not necessarily a long-term ally of swing voters or Independents. 

And yet, the party will almost certainly overplay its hand, Ned Ryun predicts. The founder and CEO of American Majority told “The Federalist Radio Hour” that, just as it did in 2020 and 2022, Democrats “will draw all the wrong conclusions” about their newfound power, and they won’t be able to control themselves. They will show the American people just what they’re made of, and that likely will prove catastrophic for a left-lurching Democratic Party.”

And this “elaborate plan” to “harass and imprison Donald Trump and his advisers” — at the expense of legitimate policy solutions for Americans’ problems — won’t help. “Instead of talking about ways to improve the lives of American citizens, they’re still fixated on retribution,” The Daily Wire laments. 

Unfortunately, outrage only powers a party for so long. Eventually, the fuel of anti-Trump contempt runs out, and Democrats are left to justify their outlandish agenda (whatever that is). “You can’t win a presidential election on opposition alone,” Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, told Axios earlier this year. “The midterms are going to be 85-90% driven by voter opposition to Trump and maybe 10-15% based on what Dems stand for,” he argued. “We cannot rely on that same calculation to win in 2028.” 

For either side to win, they need to have a unifying vision that resonates with the American people. And right now, a party hijacked by socialists who hate Israel but worship transgenderism and open borders isn’t going to cut it. 

Backholm, host of the podcast “Politics for Happy People,” reiterated, “Do not, for one moment, be concerned that the Left will use this moment to establish themselves as the mature, wise, even-tempered leaders that will lead us into the future. Their worldview makes them incapable of it. … [So] don’t expect any of these folks to solve your problems, now or later.” 

With these gains, FRC Action Matt Carpenter pointed out to The Washington Stand, the Democrats have a “wide array of candidates.” “Some claim to be Christians, others have close family members with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, some are backed by party leadership, others wore the insurgent DSA banner. The party is likely to find out in a few months that the promises they made on the campaign trail will run into the reality of managing this broad coalition, and, not to forget, President Trump’s veto pen.”

No one knows what this party stands for. “What we do know is that the party’s internal scuffles are starting to spill out into the open, as it did with some on the Democratic National Committee last year,” he noted. “It is possible the party enjoys majorities in Congress, but the gap between what they perceive to be their mandate and what the voters actually support will tear the party apart.” 

Just in time for an even bigger test: 2028.