Democrats are poised to surge in 2026, but don't expect reform
9 February 2026
The Republicans have truly fumbled it. After instigating a gerrymandering war in Texas, states with Democrat majorities in their legislatures, such as California and Virginia, have responded with gerrymandered congressional maps of their own, which have virtually eliminated districts in which Republicans are competitive. I have no love lost for the Republicans, who are as vile, ugly, and reactionary as they come, but should liberals and leftists expect anything good to come from this?
The obvious answer is “no”. When given historic leads in the House and Senate, Democrats have squandered opportunities for reform which their electoral bases have demanded. We are simply in the midst of a familiar political cycle: Republicans are elected, and do what their base wants; the rest of society wakes up for a minute, and kicks the Republicans out; the Democrats take power, and proceed to maintain a status quo which is neither popular nor defensible on its own merits. Worse, the Democrats make overtures to increasingly reactionary colleagues, which fall on deaf ears. The beneficiaries of this political cycle are the power elite, the members of the United States’s ruling class, who pull the strings of both major parties. It doesn’t matter which party has power, at the end of the day, both parties are beholden to a common interest, the interest of the capitalist class.
We’ve just seen it so many times before. In 2006, Democrats took the House and Senate from the Republicans, and in 2008, they achieved a super-majority in both chambers of Congress, alongside Obama’s victory in the presidential election. Activist pressure forced healthcare reform through, but only half-heartedly. The Affordable Care Act, the signature policy of the Obama administration (sans unrepentant drone assassinations and the expansion of US entanglement in foreign wars), has subsequently been gutted by Republican legislative initiatives. The next Democrat administration, Joe Biden’s, saw bipartisan legislative initiatives – the Inflation Reduction Act, mainly – that the Republican party promptly shredded upon returning to power.
This political cycle is partially the result of a fucked up federal political system. The very existence of the Senate ensures that popular reforms are gutted by the time they reach the president’s desk, so as to protect the interests of a capitalist elite, of elite politicians, and of federally-connected war profiteers. Popular reforms like Medicare for All are guaranteed not to pass because the Senate is designed to represent the minoritarian interests of the wealthy, including, perhaps especially, the suits who occupy health insurance company C-suites and the shareholders in these companies. In fact, it’s hard to get elected even to the House of Representatives without ingratiating oneself to these elite interests. Without elite donors, how can you afford to get the word out about your candidacy, to buy television and internet ads, lawn signs, and so on?
The Democrats are not reformists. Their failure to achieve lasting reforms is not an accident. They simply do not believe in reform. They believe, like the Republicans, in their party and the interests represented by it – namely, the interests of their wealthy patrons in the capitalist class. This is why Democrats have been keen to throw their own minority interests overboard – see Gavin Newsom’s abandonment of transgender people.
In Louisiana, the Democrats are not even socially liberal. The electoral base of the Louisiana Democrats is in the reactionary black churches, the social institution which re-produces patriarchy (and its attendant oppression of sexual minorities, such as homosexuals and transsexuals) in the black community. When Democrats in Louisiana won the governor’s office, what did they do? Well, their only lasting achievement was to ban abortion in the state. Black church attendance, however, has been in decline alongside white church attendance, such that in 2023, the white reactionary Jeff Landry won handily against the black Democrat candidate in the first round of the election. The wider black community (black people who do not attend church services), especially the black working class, lacks any substantive representation in Louisiana politics, and have turned off to representative politics altogether. Black communities in Louisiana get out to vote only when issues are on the ballot which directly affect them, to turn out against constitutional amendments which harm their communities, or against reactionary white politicians when there is a black politician on the ballot. Examples of this include the Caddo sheriff election and last year’s special election, which saw three racist amendments voted down, to the chagrin of our white reactionary political elite.
The Democrats are poised to win big in 2026, re-taking the House, and probably the Senate, too. The ugliness of the Republican party has never been more obvious. From the president’s long friendship with zionist pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, to the murder of US citizens by armed federal bureaucrat-thugs whose “crime” is that of civil disobedience, to the outrageous lies peddled by the White House day in and day out, it is now undeniable that the Republican party is motivated, in the main, by sadism, racism, and a desire to oppress any non-conformity to their idea of whiteness. Still, the Democrats are wildly unpopular. Despite leading the Republicans on generic ballot polls, approval of the Democrats is below that of approval of the Republican party, suggesting widespread left-wing discontent for Democrat leadership and inaction.
What’s the solution? As always, revolution. Working people have to throw the bosses off their backs, in politics and on the job. Working people do not have control over the traditional channels of political change, and they will have to get creative with it. There is no alternative to the overthrow and political subjugation of the capitalist class by the working class. National politics, which the average worker has no control over, must take a backseat to local- and state-based organizing. Socialists must begin to take an oppositional stance against the federal government, which has long been the mortal enemy of socialist movements in North America. We must begin to include the down-sizing and ultimately the dissolution of the US federal government into our platforms, as the federal government has never been our friend, and has always served the interests of elite minoritarian interests, those of white land-owners and capitalists. We must position ourselves as the real anti-establishment, anti-hegemonic, force in North American politics.