House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., speaks as House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, Democrat of Mass., and House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California, speak during a news conference at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee headquarters November 4, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
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Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
For more than a year, Democrats have hammered home a message at every opportunity: Give them power and Congress will take action to cut costs and root out corruption.
Democrats will soon have that chance when they take control of the House and Senate after Republicans’ rout at the polls.
Democrats must now unite a sometimes divisive caucus around an action plan to deliver on this central campaign promise.
The first 100 hours
Democrats say in the first hundred hours they want to restore the enhanced health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act and reverse the Medicaid cuts that Republicans passed last year as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is about to take effect.
They also want to reassert Congressional authority over tariffs and try to force an end to the war in Iran by bringing new votes on war powers resolutions. These are priorities that Democrats mostly agree on.
Even if they control both chambers by substantial margins, Democrats will continue to operate under divided government.
Most legislation still needs 60 votes to avoid a filibuster before passing the Senate, and President Trump has vacillated between promising to be “Mr. Veto” and saying he is open to working with Democrats.
“I want us to get to work passing legislation,” Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic senator-elect from Michigan, said in an interview last week. “If Trump vetoes it, it’s his fault. But I think you’re going to see a lot of Republicans thinking twice about whether they want these cuts to Medicaid, for example, to go through.”
Congress has other tools, like withholding war funding through the appropriations process, much-needed legislation that will require some compromise on the other side of the aisle, even if Democrats are now in charge, says Molly Reynolds, a congressional expert at the Brookings Institution.
“But when there is a wave of elections like this, the seats of the other party that are won often tend to be those on the more moderate side of that party,” she says. “And so that leaves you with a large Democratic majority, but also a comparatively more conservative Republican conference.”
Investigations will also be a major priority for Democrats now emboldened by subpoena power.
The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Robert Garcia, Democrat of California, issued a two-word statement on election night addressed to Trump and his orbit: “Advocate up.”
A bold and dramatic change
The likely next House Speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., told reporters Wednesday that Democrats would usher in “bold and dramatic change.”
Exactly what that looks like is a work in progress.
This fall, House Democrats organized working groups to determine how to address the costs of gas and groceries, utilities, housing and health care. Each is led by two Democrats, one from the progressive wing of the party, the other more centered.
“We’ll have a family conversation when we come back, and certainly in the new Congress, about how best to do this beyond what we know we need to do immediately,” Jeffries told reporters when asked about different approaches to reducing health care costs.
Some newly elected Democrats ran pledging to push for Medicare for All. Others have promised more progressive steps to expand access to health insurance and reduce costs.
Hints of the upcoming debate emerged even before the election.
The third-ranking Senate Democrat, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, told CNN: “If we want to be more ambitious, if we want to make bolder policy changes… that’s for 2028. Right now, it’s about stabilizing the country itself.”
“No one thinks this election was about returning to the status quo or about being the party of nervous lawyers tinkering around the edges,” Rep. Greg Casar, Democrat of Texas, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters Wednesday.
Is it always the same message?
This week, leading Democrats are downplaying that tension.
“If you listened to our candidates, whether they were progressive or more moderate, they were saying the same things,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters. “You talk about it differently in Maine and Kansas, but it was the same message.”
In the House and Senate, much of the new majorities will be made up of more moderate Democrats who flipped conservative-leaning districts and traditionally red states, like Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina. A new class of progressives is also preparing to join Congress, some of whom have also flipped Republican-held seats.
Will Lawrence, just elected to Congress in a Republican-controlled Michigan district, says that in addition to tackling costs and corruption, voters across the political spectrum want to see measures to not only end the war in Iran but also prevent taxpayer money from flowing to Israel.
“People are desperate and hungry for change,” Lawrence told reporters Wednesday. “They don’t want this to happen at our expense and with our weapons.”
Progressives’ ability to shift the agenda to the left will be more limited than they initially anticipated, because Democratic majorities will not be narrow.
“We had the right candidates in the right districts at the right time,” Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., who chairs the campaign arm of the centrist New Democratic coalition, told reporters Wednesday. “(Jeffries) has the flexibility to lead. No more talk about exploiting the speaker.”
But the clear lines between progressives and moderates are also less defined than in the past, as a new generation of Democratic candidates merge facets of economic populism with more moderate positions on other issues like immigration, energy and social issues.
For example, there are Democrats on all sides who want Congress to continue to reign in artificial intelligence and data centers.
Such a sweeping election for Democrats will also increase pressure to act, giving voters high expectations for what the party will be able to accomplish quickly.
“We shouldn’t overpromise and risk breaking promises,” Illinois Rep. Brad Schneider, who chairs the NDP caucus, said in an interview.
As Joel Rutherford, a local Democratic activist in Macomb County, Michigan, told NPR over the summer, “If Democrats hopefully take the Senate and the House, they better do something, okay? People better see real change.”
Rutherford said if they don’t do that, it won’t matter who Democrats nominate for president in 2028 because getting them elected would be a tough sell.
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