Did the Democrats win or did Donald Trump just lose?

DENVER — Happiness may be a fleeting feeling for Democrats in Donald Trump’s America.

After years of struggling to find a way to defeat and counter the past and current president, the vast blue wave of last week’s midterm elections gave Democrats a sense of elation that has long eluded them.

As the party faithful gathered in Colorado for a “What’s Next” post-midterm event, questions quickly arose about what voters were actually saying and whether the results were a sign of Democratic strength, or primarily the struggles of Trump and his allies.

“Not only did we win, but we cleared their clock, and as a result, people think we’re no longer weak and woke and losing,” said Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor who is considering a Democratic run for the White House. “Now that doesn’t mean they believe in us and they trust us. They just believe ‘I’m going to give you another chance’ and now we have to demonstrate that we deserve what they gave us.”

Recent history calls for caution among Democrats. Trump’s first victory in 2016 gave Republicans unified control of Washington. Two years later, the midterm elections easily gave the Democrats the lead, but the Republicans strengthened their majority in the Senate. And when Democrats won back the White House and full control of Washington in 2020, the pandemic and fallout from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol clouded the news of victory.

The party now finds itself at a turning point it has not seen in decades. This has an opportunity to change the way people view a party that was toxic in parts of the country just two years ago. Cost of living woes and the Trump administration’s involvement in the war with Iran helped make this possible.

However, the old baggage of the party has not disappeared. Some of them are from the Biden era. Some trace back to legislative ground that Democrats lost during the Tea Party wave of 2010, during Barack Obama’s first term as president. Yet the election victories gave Democrats an opportunity to rebuild relationships with voters that had become fragile and fractured.

“The Democrats started to change what they were talking about,” said Sandra Jauregui, who last week won her race to become Nevada’s next lieutenant governor. In 2024, Trump became the first Republican since the George W. Bush era to win the state in a presidential race. “We finally started listening to voters instead of telling them what they care about. »

Even before the midterm elections, some Democrats worried that big victories would hide the party’s long-term problems, which no election alone can solve. They also feared that lopsided victories would breed overconfidence. That could hurt the party’s chances of winning back the White House in 2028, and with it any hopes of pushing the MAGA movement out of politics and into the history books as it prepares to take on someone other than Trump in a presidential campaign.

“Democrats will definitely ignore all the lessons and assume people love everything about them only to be devastated in 2028,” said a national Republican operative.

Some of the party’s most notable performances may not carry over to 2028. Last week’s statewide victories in Texas have Democrats imagining the state turning blue in a presidential race, which would fundamentally redraw the path to 270 electoral votes and the presidency. But Texas is extremely expensive, as this year’s Senate race showed. And the next Republican presidential nominee is unlikely to carry the political and public baggage of Ken Paxton, the impeached and acquitted state GOP attorney general who lost the Senate race this fall.