In this ECPS interview, Professor Daniel Schlozman examines the 2026 US midterms through the deeper crisis of American party organization. While arguing that “voters are tired of Trumpism,” he cautions that Democratic gains may reflect electoral fatigue rather than durable realignment. The interview traces Trumpism’s roots in long-standing currents on the American right, the centrality of immigration, the accommodation between populism and concentrated wealth, and structural vulnerabilities in the constitutional order. On the Democratic side, Professor Schlozman stresses class dealignment, weakened institutional loyalties, and the limits of policy “deliverism.” His central lesson is organizational: political loyalties are built through lived collective experience, and durable democratic politics ultimately requires renewed institutions, participation, and deep party organization.
Interview by Selcuk Gultasli
As the United States approaches the November 3, 2026 midterm elections, the political landscape is marked by an unusual convergence of electoral fatigue, institutional strain, partisan asymmetry, and organizational weakness. In this wide-ranging ECPS interview, Professor Daniel Schlozman, Joseph and Bertha Bernstein Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, situates the midterms within a much longer transformation of the American party system. His central diagnosis is strikingly concise: “Voters are tired of Trumpism.” Yet Professor Schlozman is careful to distinguish electoral fatigue from a deeper realignment. Even if Democrats perform strongly, he argues, such gains may reflect “much more a reaction against an incumbent who’s been around for a long time than the stirring of Democratic forces” capable of generating a durable alternative.
That distinction frames the interview’s broader inquiry into Trumpism, MAGA, and the condition of American democracy. Professor Schlozman emphasizes continuity as much as rupture: Trump, he argues, emerged from “long-standing currents on the American right,” even as anti-immigration became perhaps the most consequential innovation in the contemporary Republican coalition. At the same time, the Republican Party’s transformation cannot be understood solely through ideology. Trumpism combines leader-centered populism, anti-immigration politics, cultural resentment, and alliances with concentrated economic power. As Professor Schlozman puts it, the contemporary tech elite has “basically made its peace with Trumpism,” creating a political configuration in which populist attacks on cultural elites can coexist with plutocratic power.
The interview then turns to the institutional foundations of democratic resilience. Professor Schlozman argues that the vulnerabilities exposed by Trumpism are not wholly new: “the Madisonian system … was always vulnerable.” The Supreme Court, presidential power, the pardon authority, Senate malapportionment, and the difficulty of constitutional amendment all reveal structural weaknesses that make a simple return to the pre-Trump status quo inadequate. For Professor Schlozman, the deeper problem is not merely constitutional design but the erosion of political organizations capable of translating interests into durable loyalties.
This is especially visible on the Democratic side. Working-class voters, he observes, are no longer being politically formed “in the union hall and the clubhouse”; increasingly, “they’re getting educated on TikTok.” His critique of Biden-era “deliverism” follows directly from this diagnosis: material benefits alone cannot generate political attachment when parties lack institutions embedded in voters’ everyday lives. “Political loyalties,” Professor Schlozman insists, “are made through the experiences of voters’ actual lives and the ways they see themselves in political collectivities.”
Across the discussion—from the DNC and party gatekeeping to democratic socialism, Zohran Mamdani, unions, civic associations, and digital political life—Professor Schlozman returns repeatedly to the same institutional imperative. Elections can be won through money, advertising, and mobilization, but durable politics requires something deeper. As he puts it, “If you want a politics that’s more durable than that, you go back to institutions and institution building.” The interview ultimately asks whether American democracy can rebuild those forms of organization before electoral competition becomes ever more personalized, fragmented, and detached from durable collective life.
Here is our interview with Professor Daniel Schlozman, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
These Midterms Are Not the Most Important Elections of Our Lifetime
Professor Schlozman, welcome! Let me begin with the broader stakes of the November 3 midterms. You and Sam Rosenfeld describe contemporary American parties as “hollow,” but argue that this hollowness manifests asymmetrically—as Democratic organizational weakness on one side and Republican extremism on the other. With the House narrowly divided and the Senate also highly competitive, should we understand the 2026 midterms primarily as an ordinary contest over congressional control, or as a test of whether elections can still provide an effective institutional constraint on an increasingly personalized presidency?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: Midterm elections in the United States tend to have this phenomenon called midterm loss, where the president’s party loses seats. In particular, this happens in the so-called “six-year itch,” after a president has been in power for six years. Donald Trump has been president for six years and has now dominated national politics for a decade. That’s what we’re seeing.
Trump is unpopular. He is basically not unpopular for the reasons that political scientists worry about his democratic erosion. He’s unpopular because the cost of goods and services is high, because he’s launched this war in Iran that nobody likes, and because his old tricks don’t seem to be working anymore. Voters are tired of Trumpism.
If Democrats do well, which it seems like they will—almost certainly recapture the House and probably take the Senate, or more likely than not take the Senate—the right way to describe the polls is that this is much more a reaction against an incumbent who’s been around for a long time than the stirring of Democratic forces that opponents of Trumpism as a phenomenon might hope for.
There are two other things to say. First, these midterms are not the most important elections of our lifetime. That was 2016. That was the arrival of Trump and the demonstration that this right populism had enough purchase to make it again, and then in 2024.
Yes, it means that Trump, who doesn’t have much of a legislative agenda to start with, will have even fewer options in his last two years. Yes, if a justice on the Supreme Court retires, Democrats have some leverage. But there’s only so much that we can say about the midterms.
The other is, not unrelatedly, that midterm elections tend not to be predictive of what happens in two years, and there are plenty of examples of parties that have really good midterms and then go on not to win the presidency two years later.
Neither Rubio nor Vance Has Trump’s Personal Appeal
MAGA has evolved from an insurgent faction into the Republican Party’s dominant organizing force, while Trump remains central to candidate selection and mobilization. How should we distinguish Trumpism as personalist leadership from MAGA as an institutionalized movement—and which elements are most likely to outlive Trump?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: It’s a hard one to answer because this is of the “predict the future” variety. What Trump has offered is personalist leadership that is very much about the flash and sizzle of him. But he says, “I am MAGA,” so it’s unclear whether what survives is MAGA or not.
Without going too deep into that, I’d say Trump has emerged from long-standing currents on the American right. Sam and I are very much in the continuity, not change, school of “Did everything change with Donald Trump?” No. The mobilization of resentment and the rather tactical deployment of issues are long-standing concerns.
The biggest single change that Trumpism offers is around immigration. Race is not as much a departure as some people like to imagine, and the anti-immigrant policies that Trump has adopted have now become de rigueur on the Republican side. The other is that Republicans’ commitment to fiscal rectitude was always in the breach. There are these big tax cuts—Reagan in 1981, Bush in 2001, etc.—but the claims of straightforward macroeconomic management are, with Trump, of a different order, and that is likely to continue.
The ways that comparativists will see Trumpism as resembling the very thin, leader-led populism around the world will also continue. We don’t know who the next Trump is. Marco Rubio is a much more traditional Republican who has successfully changed his stripes. J.D. Vance is much more focused on taking some of the currents of the grassroots right and moving with them. Neither of them has Trump’s personal appeal.
Trump Has Not Just Pushed Against Norms
Populism claims to restore sovereignty to “the people,” yet it often collides with institutions designed to constrain power. At what point does populist majoritarianism become democratic erosion, and how should we understand the tension between electoral authorization and constitutional restraint in the Trump era?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: I was telling my students this week that if you ever have a question where they say, “On the one hand, on the other,” don’t just say one—say both, and then you’ll look very sophisticated. So, I’m going to be very sophisticated and say both.
In 2017, Trump arrives, shatters all sorts of norms, and the reaction of a lot of good, right-thinking liberals is to see this as an absolute, unmitigated disaster. A decade on, we are less in that. The two books by Levitsky and Ziblatt epitomize this. The first is very much that democracy is about norms, and the second is that maybe American democracy—and the institutions that we’ve got and the Constitution that we’ve inherited from the 18th century—aren’t all that to start with.
I am not the precise line-drawer of exactly where normal, ordinary politics descends. However, it’s very clear that, in all sorts of ways, Trump has not just pushed against norms but violated very basic pieces of what democracy is all about: going after his opponents and doing all of what he’s trying to do on voting rights. These are very fundamental violations of the core of democracy—and January 6th, above all, is a very fundamental violation. Calling that just populist majoritarianism is treating things lightly.
I think the response from the opponents of Trumpism is then to think in much bigger terms about remaking the American constitutional system, which is all to the good. There is a little bit of a “Well, we want our executive power too,” but the limits of left populism have meant that this is not as large a strand in American thinking about how to respond to the populist right as you’ll see in Europe.
US Can’t Just Return to a Status Quo That Wasn’t Working
You argue that today’s democratic dangers reflect both right-wing radicalization and structural weaknesses in the American constitutional order. Does Trumpism mainly expose pathologies already embedded in the Madisonian system, or has it fundamentally transformed how those institutions operate?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: I’m going to play both again. Actually, it’s probably that the Madisonian system—and this is all of the many veto points in the United States—was always vulnerable, and it’s always been vulnerable for a bunch of reasons, all of them going on their own timetables. The Supreme Court has life tenure and nine justices, now consistently following the partisanship of the president who appointed them. Republicans have a supermajority. Republican justices have taken their pre-Trump ideology, and even if they’ve gone against Trump when he’s done some of his most egregious stuff, or lawyered it poorly, the power of the Court, the power of the presidency, the presidential pardon power, and the Senate with its maldistribution of states—this is the most maldistributed legislative body in the world—all of these are long-standing problems with the American constitutional system that are newly salient.
And, to my answer to the last question, they are all problems that make it harder and harder to say, “We just need to return to a status quo that wasn’t working.” If you basically believe that presidential power is good for the system and Trump’s just done it poorly, that’s also an argument that doesn’t really wash at this point. Saying that we will give the loaded gun of the American presidency in the hope that virtue and norms restrain it is pretty weak sauce.
Now, the American Constitution is also the hardest to amend in the world, and so it’s very easy for me to say that this is a system with lots of problems, and it’s very difficult to figure out how to get from here to there.
Wanting a Secure Border Is Very Different from Roving Interior Enforcement
Why has anti-immigration become such an effective vehicle for right-wing populism? Does its potency derive primarily from material concerns, ethnonational identity, institutional distrust, or its role in defining “the people” against outsiders?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: You ask an excellent question to which I, as a scholar of party politics who reads the literature on immigration, want to get a good handle on, and I’m not going to try to BS my way through an answer by saying, on the one hand, and then repeating your question as an answer.
On the one hand, we see from all of the data—both from reading the papers that you and I read and from looking at the election returns—that immigration is the issue that motivates so many voters, some but not all of whom are erstwhile center-left voters, to support right populism. On the other hand, when we say immigration, what exactly is inside that black box, and why is it that voters are so worried about immigration in places where they don’t see many immigrants?
We do know that contact theory works, and if you get to know immigrants—they could be your co-workers and your friends—you become less anti-immigrant. But why is it that immigration has this magical power? Some people say it’s just immigration because it’s the issue that voters say is top of mind and comes to the top of our regression coefficients. That is both important and somewhat question-begging in exactly the way you were asking.
This is me not being a real immigration person—it’s important to know, but it doesn’t really tell me everything that I want to understand about what is, across the rich democracies, the issue. Donald Trump has been an anti-immigrant figure—I could use some not-nice words than that—for a long time. He intuited, in ways that nobody else did in 2015, just how potent this issue was. Then he’s ridden that, and many of his most effective political aides, Stephen Miller, have done that.
Now, there are limits to that. Americans are not crazy about—they want a secure border, but the interior enforcement, going after people on the streets, picking them off, that we saw in Minneapolis over the winter, is not something that most Americans are really signed up for. It is one of the places where the nuances of public opinion do matter: having ICE, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has interior enforcement, as a roving paramilitary unit taking people off the streets is a very different matter from voters wanting a secure border. So, I’m not sure that’s a great answer, but that’s what I know.
The Tech Elite Has Basically Made Its Peace with Trumpism
MAGA attacks “globalists” and cultural elites while coexisting with concentrated private wealth and donor power. How should we understand the relationship between populism and plutocracy? Can anti-elite politics flourish while economic inequality remains intact—or deepens?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: One of the important ways that Trump One is different from Trump Two is that, while Trump has been in office for basically separate reasons, economic inequality is a half-century-long story, but the tech elite’s wealth has absolutely ballooned. With the rise, first, of social media and then of AI, we now have a very elite stratum that has basically made its peace with Trumpism.
Now, an important part of that is the old-fashioned labor rebellion. Silicon Valley workers tried in the 2010s to unionize. They are worried about their own working conditions, they’re worried about the products that their companies are making, they’re worried about racism and sexism, and they see their employers implicated in that. Employers responded, as employers have responded ever since the Industrial Revolution, by joining forces of the right that they would otherwise find unsavory.
That is more or less how—someone like Elon Musk has got his own trajectory back to South Africa—but that’s more or less how a Mark Zuckerberg figure goes from being anti-Trump to being at the Trump inauguration and at the state dinner with Xi Jinping.
American parties—there are two of them—are big-tent parties, and so forces that, in a proportional representation system, would be in maybe uneasy alliance in a parliamentary majority in government are instead inside the same political coalition. There are all sorts of contradictions. Trumpism’s got all of these contradictions.
But two things are worth saying. The first is that there has been—and this is an important point in what Sam and I are writing—no cordon sanitaire in US politics in the way that many European parties have tried, sometimes succeeded and sometimes not, and sometimes it dissolves and sometimes not, to keep out parties on the extreme right. So, the pro-business right is in alliance with the most revanchist elements of MAGAism. Is that stable? No. But can it last for a pretty long time? Yes.
The other thing to say is that, with the rise of the tech right, the traditional US Chamber of Commerce pro-business right—and this is one of the salient parts of what’s happened with Trumpism—is at a pretty weak ebb. Instead, there are these very personal relationships, sort of neo-patrimonial relationships, between the most important figures in tech and someone like Trump, who is both going to his rallies and denouncing elites, by which he means cultural elites more than economic elites.
Jensen Huang of Nvidia is calling Trump, and they’re all buddy-buddy on the telephone. That’s the way that plutocracy and populism are working out in today’s GOP.
Working-Class Voters Are Getting Educated on TikTok, not in the Union Hall
Your analysis of 2024 highlights continuing class dealignment, with Democrats gaining among affluent, educated voters and Republicans among lower-income, less-educated constituencies. Is this mainly ideological realignment, or the consequence of weakened unions, local parties, and other institutions that once translated material interests into partisan loyalty?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: This isn’t quite a both; it’s more that one explains the other. In a time of thicker institutional loyalties, those institutions shaped what voters knew and how they saw the world. Without those institutions, working-class voters are not getting politically formed and educated in the union hall and the clubhouse; they’re getting educated on TikTok, and that is very bad for a center-left that looks out of touch.
What’s notable about Democrats is that they see long-term class dealignment as a problem, but they don’t really think about it in institutional terms; they think about it just in policy terms. It’s: if we build some battery factories, then people will see that there are battery factories, and they will vote for Democrats because Democrats are the party that builds battery factories. It turns out not to work very well, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that it doesn’t. But that’s the puzzle: that they thought it would in the first place.
Democrats Tried to Solve Class Dealignment Through Means Incapable of Doing So
In The Policy Bet, you argue that Biden-era “deliverism” could not reverse working-class defection. Is the deeper lesson that material gains do not generate political loyalty unless organizations connect policy benefits to collective identity and durable political attachment?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: Yes, that’s—you got it! Political loyalties are made through the experiences of voters’ actual lives and the ways they see themselves in political collectivities. Democrats, in a deinstitutionalized age, forgot that lesson and, in a sense, went big in ways that were unhelpful to them and that were, in turn, reflective of the often NGO-linked, funder-linked forces that were influential in the party in the first place. They look at 2016, they see the problem of class dealignment, they want to solve that problem, and they attempt to solve it through means that are more or less incapable of doing so.
Give Voters Political Connections Where They Are
You argue that Democrats need to become an “actual political party again.” What would rebuilding a mass party look like in 2026, and can unions, churches, immigrant associations, neighborhood groups, and local parties still anchor politics in an era of nationalized media and digital campaigning?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: This is the hard question, which is: “Schlozman, Rosenfeld, we love everything you say about the past, but we live in the present, and all those books you read about the past can’t help us now.” That is the charge against us, and point taken.
What I tend to say is, first, let’s see what we can do, and let’s see how we can move forward and try to think institutionally. The second is: what are your alternatives? It seems like the policy bet isn’t working. You run ads, and they can be pretty effective in their way, but voters forget them very quickly. The alternatives to institution building seem to be deeply flawed themselves.
The other piece is thinking about how forms of connection work, because they simply won’t be like those of the past. Someone I know in Democratic politics was saying that all these young people spend all their time on Twitch streams. I’ll sound like a middle-aged fogy and say I’m not really sure what that is, but they’re playing video games, talking to people, making friends, and receiving political content through the friends they’re making on their Twitch streams.
Whether or not that actually works, the idea is to figure out how to give voters political connections where they are and to take what is already present in their friendships and loyalties and develop it politically. That’s the right way of thinking about this. What we are offering from the past is a way to think institutionally about political loyalties, rather than a claim that the exact forms they take will be the ones we once saw, because that would just be an exercise in nostalgia, and I see the limits of that.
The DNC Is Salvageable
In The DNC Against Itself, you describe Democrats as rich in organizations but poor in organization. Has the rise of a para-party infrastructure hollowed out the DNC beyond repair, or could it still become a genuine coordinating institution?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: I want to say that the Democratic National Committee—and I wrote this long essay for The New Yorker, which was trying to understand the often baroque, insular politics of the National Committee—has, ever since 2016, been shorthand for the Democratic Party infrastructure, which is unhelpful. So, I was writing about the DNC itself.
I think getting a stronger DNC will require a Democratic president who makes it a priority and has a DNC chair who will knock heads and tell the state parties—the institutions in each of the 50 states that, because they control the ballot lines in those states, have a certain amount of formal power—to knock it off. If you want to build a strong party organization, you can’t just do it like we’ve been doing, and their interest in maintaining their prerogatives over things like fiddling around with the primary calendar for when the primaries are held in each state, just like convention delegates—enough with this. We are going to get serious.
That can be done. It would require a president who actually cares about these things to do it. That’s worth doing. But one of the tragedies of the DNC—and I tried to get this across in the piece—is that it has possibilities to be the nerve center for real organizing, but only if there are some drastic changes.
There are larger questions about what formal parties can do, and a lot of those are going to be answered at the state and local level. There’s also a very specific question about the Democratic National Committee. Even granting all of the structural challenges facing party organization, the DNC is both the worst example of—and it’s not the only time that, as they say in methods class, you learn things by looking at the extreme case—but because it’s the extreme case, it is salvageable in ways that are much less structural than a lot of the challenges for parties that we’re talking about.
Trump Emerges from Very Deep Currents on the Grassroots Right
Has the post-1968 shift toward candidate-centered primaries weakened parties’ ability to protect themselves—and democracy—from factional or anti-system candidates? Do American parties need more legitimate forms of internal gatekeeping?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: The answer is yes. In fact, I was just reviewing this week a book by Raymond La Raja and Zachary Albert. La Raja has long been a fellow party scholar in the tradition of his late teacher, Nelson Polsby at Berkeley, arguing that reform has destroyed American parties’ ability to set their own destiny.
A lot of the specifics that they advocate—empowering the national convention, having some kind of system of peer review again, having leading party officials vet candidates before they can appear on primary ballots, giving more money to the national committees, both the DNC and RNC, and then to the party congressional committees so they can throw it around rather than giving it direct handles—I’m in favor of all of these.
But the point where Schlozman and Rosenfeld—“Schlozenfeld,” as we like to call ourselves—differ from the political scientists who are beating that drum most loudly is that we are concerned about parties’ legitimacy, about parties’ ability to make the claim that parties matter, about parties’ standing in voters’ eyes, and about the stuff we were just talking about: parties’ lived presence in people’s everyday lives. That means that simply giving parties more formal power and more money is unlikely to solve the deeper legitimacy problems.
Now, the question of Trumpism and the Republican nomination is that, on the one hand, you can argue—and people like Raymond have—that Trump won in 2016 because of the post-reform nomination process: a different party, with a stronger ability to gatekeep, would have stopped Trump because party elites didn’t really like him. There’s a proximate question, which is that there was nobody left standing whom they really liked better, because they all loathed Ted Cruz, but leave that aside.
The deeper point is that Trump emerges from very deep currents on the grassroots right, and it is the rising of those currents, rather than simply the mechanical ability to stop that, that is how you get Trump. So, I would take issue with the larger implication that it is the post-reform nomination process that gives us Donald Trump.
The Key Phrase for Democratic Socialism Is ‘Not Yet’
Democratic socialism increasingly shapes Democratic primaries and policy debate, but it has not captured the party as MAGA captured the GOP. Is this because it lacks comparable institutional depth, because Democrats are structurally more pluralistic, or because the American left has not yet built durable organizations capable of converting movements into governing power?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: I think the key phrase there—and you could probably apply it to all three of the clauses you gave me—is “not yet.” Democratic socialism is on the rise. It is on the rise in ways that allow us to tell a story that starts with the Occupy protests of 2011, runs through the Bernie Sanders campaigns, and then sees Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elected to Congress.
Democratic Socialists are clearly capable of winning elections in very Democratic places. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani gets elected mayor of New York City. What they have not shown is the ability to win in deeply contested territories, and especially to win elections that more moderate candidates cannot. So, that’s how you have this inter-party battle.
The important election this year, for these purposes, is in Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed, who is not a member of DSA and is not really a Democratic socialist, but is clearly a figure of the left—much more than anyone else who is running for Senate. If he wins, especially if he wins by a margin that looks pretty healthy rather than just being dragged across the finish line in a white Democratic year, that’s a sign of vitality for his movement. If not, then not.
All of the above is true. The Democratic Socialists of America are funny because it’s an organization that, on the one hand, looms very large in public consciousness and, on the other hand, has a little more than 100,000 members, which is a flyspeck. So, no, the organizational depth, to use your phrase, is really not there.
There’s a broader progressive tendency. That progressive tendency is on the rise, and the Democratic moderates have not been—and without going too deep into punditry when you want political science—particularly effective over the last generation in figuring out what they want the party to look like and bringing all their forces together.
There’s a lot of moderate money around, but it’s not particularly well connected to people. The money—a lot of it finance- and tech-related—is concentrated where the finance and tech money lives, in New York and California, not in places like the swing districts where it matters.
So, the Democratic Socialists and the left have been a lot more effective in trying to have a vision and articulate where it goes than the party center, the still-reigning center. One of the stories about the rise of the left is also that centrists still seem to be able to win elections in swing districts better, but they have not had the vision that their leftist counterparts have had.
DSA Is a Very Not-Hollow Party
MAGA defines “the people” largely through national, cultural, and immigration boundaries, while democratic-socialist populism pits workers and ordinary citizens against concentrated economic power. Does the US party system increasingly feature two competing constructions of “the people,” or is that comparison misleading because MAGA has captured a major party while the left remains an insurgent current within a broader coalition?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: That question is rolling together two things. The first is notions of “the people,” and the second is the different levels of movement capture in the Republican and Democratic parties. There are notions of “the people” in center-left politics, too. Barack Obama’s got an understanding of what “the people” is; it’s just not a people-against-the-interests, classic populist piece.
The ways Trumpism uses “the people,” in that classic exclusionary nationalist way that the populism literature describes, are probably more helpful for understanding where he’s coming from than the ways the left uses “the people.” The Chantal Mouffe left-populism peak has come and gone. If I read the DSA theorists, they are less enamored of that framing. You don’t really see AOC talking about “the people” in that way.
Yes, there is a hard-edged us-versus-them-ness in where the left edge of the Democratic Party is going, but I don’t think the comparative populism literature is the key to unlocking what is rooted in—DSA is a very not-hollow party. This is actual volunteers who have very deep connections, going door-to-door. That’s what elected Mamdani, along with a broader sense of system discontent. But it’s not quite left populism in that 2010 sense, and I don’t know quite what it is. Some of the instincts of a comparativist to look and say, “That’s it,” aren’t quite there.
Democrats Have to Figure Out How to Be Connected with the Civil Society
If anti-Trump constitutionalism is insufficient and progressive policy cannot substitute for organization, what would a durable Democratic alternative require? Can the party defend liberal-democratic institutions, rebuild working-class ties, accommodate ideological heterodoxy, and harness democratic-socialist energy without fragmenting?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: Damn, I hope so! You very carefully read everything I’ve written and identified all the things I’d like to have happen, and I hope this works. What I’d say is that big-tent parties with a sense of themselves are not parties with a litmus test where everybody agrees about everything. That’s unrealistic in the American electoral system in a pluralistic country.
They are parties that have some sense of where they want to go. Historically, the Republicans—Sam and I are writing about this—during the party’s founding generation from 1854 to 1877, the party that wins the Civil War, frees the Union, and brings equality into the Constitution, epitomize this. Various members of that party will want to go faster or slower, but they have a deep common—a deep common direction is not a great metaphor. They have a strong sense of their North Star, the place they want to go, and exactly how fast they want to do it. They are connected with the institutions of civil society.
That is what Democrats have to figure out how to do. Yes, there will be a fractious primary in 2028. That’s fine. The candidate who emerges—and on some level, what you’re asking is both an institutional question about how to organize a party, but it’s also, in a very proximate sense, not a question for political scientists like me to say, “Can they do it?” but a question for political leaders to figure out: do they understand that that’s the challenge, and how do they do it?
Successful presidential nominees—Trump is an exception. Trump is this kind of figure who disrupts the existing qualities of his party to a very great degree. But under ordinary circumstances, not Trumpian circumstances, successful presidential nominees are ones who don’t appear purely factional, don’t take one item from your list and say, “We’re doing only that.” They take a little from column A, a little from column B, some of this, some of that, and then orient toward the future rather than the issues that have internally divided their party for the last while.
So, there’s some heterodoxy, to use the term of the hour from my friend Adam Jellison, some sense of where democratic socialism is coming from, and some sense of institution building. The reason that Jon Ossoff of Georgia is getting such a moment right now is that he does have, intuitively, a sense of what that challenge is. That’s what makes him, to Democrats, an appealing prospect: that we can have someone who’s trying to do lots of the different things we want our party to do.
But, having said, “Oh, there’s a person,” this is not a great man story. This is, ultimately, a question of how political leadership is translated into institutional capacity, and that’s a much bigger story that I think will lead to your next question.
Winning an Election Is Not Enough
What do cases such as the Nevada Democratic–Culinary Workers alliance, Ben Wikler’s organizing in Wisconsin, and Zohran Mamdani’s campaign suggest about resisting democratic backsliding? Is democracy defended most effectively when constitutional commitments are embedded in organizations that produce participation, solidarity, and political efficacy?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: I certainly think so. This is an institutionalist story that Sam and I are trying to tell: you can win elections, and a lot of money is spent to win elections through advertising that voters remember very quickly, remember for a very short period, that affects their vote choice, and then they move on. But if you want to take your victory and make something of it, that requires deep institution building.
It was interesting for me that Hyperpolitics—Anton Jäger is to my left—has some sense of looking at the 2010s and seeing the failures. It’s pretty easy these days to organize a protest. You organize on social media, you get the word out on social media—it’s not really organizing. You go off, you’re in the streets, and then, poof, everything vanishes.
If you want a politics that’s more durable than that, you go back to institutions and institution building. How do you do that? It tends to be some version, without trying to romanticize the old ways of doing this, of people talking to people they know, and talking to people they know, with institutional fora in which they do that and with actual investment in the capacity for them to do it. But you also do it in ways that give people some ownership of their own work.
The incentives are not just to have a good time and talk to your neighbors, but often some of the—and this is where the hotel workers in Nevada, at the casinos, in the Culinary, come in—are incentives about better pay, better working conditions, a better life, and not just the mythic view, some of which can seem a little seamy and materialistic, of what a better life looks like.
So, how does that all work in the 21st century? Is it possible? That’s the drumbeat of what you’re asking. I wish I had better answers, but I don’t see any alternative to trying.
The Republican Party Trumpified, but Our Uncertain Journey Continues
Finally, Professor Schlozman, looking beyond November 3, what would you consider the deeper significance of the 2026 midterms for the evolution of the American party system? Are we moving toward a durable asymmetry in which the Republican Party becomes an increasingly cohesive, leader-centered populist formation while Democrats remain a fragmented coalition of institutional liberals, moderates, progressives, and democratic socialists? Or could electoral pressure itself force both parties into a new phase of organizational reconstruction—and with it a redefinition of who represents “the people” in American democracy?
Professor Daniel Schlozman: To start where we began, it’s unclear what role these midterms will play, and that will become clear only later on. Is this a midterm election that ultimately sets up durable Democratic majorities that will do big things? One of the things political historians know that the victories of Democrats in the great civil rights legislation of 1960, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and Medicare in 1965 are all rooted in the now totally forgotten 1958 midterm elections, when Democrats made huge gains across the North and West in long-traditionally Republican territory. Those are the key voters who, half a dozen years later, made all this liberal legislation possible.
So, if Democrats do really well, and then it’s in exactly these seats that a Democratic majority into the 2030s matters, then yes, we will do that. There’s another chance that it’s not really a way for Democrats, that our 50-50 politics endures, and then the 2026 midterms will be as forgotten as lots of others. They’ll matter only insofar as the precise balance of Senate seats then sets things up later on.
That’s a point about the midterms in particular. To answer the more general question about what is going on with American parties, asymmetry has been a word for a couple of decades now. Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker started off by noting the ways that, in the 2000s, rational-choice assumptions of symmetry were wrong, and Republicans seemed to be moving faster away from the median voter. Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins said that Democrats were about groups and Republicans about ideology in the early 2010s, a formulation that I think works better for Democrats and their fractious qualities. Donald Trump may be many things, but he is not an ideologue.
But the feeling—and it informs everything that Sam and I are doing—is that, looking at Democrats and Republicans separately and at the ways that hollowness manifested itself, these parties are very different, even as they compete with one another and even as their 50-50 competition seems to be going on longer than anybody would have expected when this pattern began pre-Trump. No party has actually won the durable majorities that, for most of American history, were pretty typical. This pattern of absolute knife-edge control, seesawing back and forth all the time, is very atypical.
So, these are very different parties. Will that pattern continue? I don’t know. But it is still the case that, to Europeans, Democrats are a pretty—every party’s different—but these are recognizable species. Yes, it’s a much broader tent than anything you’re going to see in a PR system, but all of its individual components seem roughly familiar, even if Europeans look at Americans and are still shocked by the bigness of anything, including the bigness of the tent of our parties.
But Republicans are not. This is something different. It’s in the amalgam of extreme right and mainstream right, in the anti-democratic tendencies, and where that goes, I don’t think we know. But Democrats and the Democratic intellectual classes are thinking more seriously about constitutional reconstruction, about the ways that we might rethink the system more generally, than they were a decade ago. What that means in a constitution that’s hard to amend is unclear.
But we are not in the same Democratic Party that we were in 2017, just as the Republican Party Trumpified, and who knows what that will mean with a political figure who does not have the juice of Donald Trump. But our uncertain journey continues.
