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.
