Some analysts believe the Democrats risk losing the Jewish vote in the upcoming midterm elections thanks to anti-Zionist antisemites like their senatorial candidate in Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
But history suggests that the Democrats risk losing the patriotic American vote, as well. Supporting anti-American radicals to block Donald Trump in 2027 may help elect a Republican successor to Trump in 2028.
Historically, midterm wins have sometimes proved self-defeating, offering still-relevant cautionary tales. Democrats gained 93 congressional seats in 1874, only to lose the presidency two years later. In 1938, Republicans jumped by 81 seats, then watched Democrat Franklin Roosevelt win reelection in 1940.
Democrats today should learn from their miscalculations in 1982 and 1986. Back then, the Republican president who drove liberals crazy was Ronald Reagan. By winning impressively in the midterms, Democrats entered the 1984 and 1988 presidential contests overconfident—then lost.
Republicans framed their rivals as unpatriotic and hostile to Main Street decades before far-left streamer Hasan Piker’s anti-American rants, the ritualized burning of American flags at pro-Palestinian rallies and the revelation of El-Sayed’s Muslim Brotherhood ties.
In 1982, running against what they cleverly called the “Reagan Recession,” Democrats secured 26 new House seats. That December, the Democrats’ eventual nominee, former Vice President Walter Mondale, held a 12-point Gallup poll lead over Reagan. Yet by November 1984, Reagan won a 49-state landslide, securing 58.8% of the popular vote to Mondale’s 40.6%.
True, the economy had improved, and Reagan’s “Morning in America” magic outdid what even Joan Mondale characterized as her husband’s “Norwegian charisma.” But in 1984, more Americans voted against the Democrats than for Reaganism. Republicans convinced enough swing voters that Democrats were beholden to “special interests” and too radical to rule.
Reagan said every Democratic policy was “tax, tax, spend, spend.” While pursuing the Democratic nomination, Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) blasted Mondale’s “old and tired ideas, held together by paralyzing commitments to special interests and constituency groups” perpetually padding protesters’ pockets with pork and perks.
At the Republican Convention in Dallas, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick, a recovering Democrat, skewered her former comrades who convened in San Francisco.
These radicals, she said, “somehow … always blame America first,” even when terrorists murder Americans. “When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America,” she asserted, “the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies; they blame United States policies of a hundred years ago.”
Historically, midterm wins have sometimes proved self-defeating, offering still-relevant cautionary tales.
Kirkpatrick echoed the philosopher Jean-François Revel’s warning: “A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”
Reagan spun Kirkpatrick’s assault into electoral gold. Mocking Mondale Democrats who “reserve all of their indignation for America,” Reagan proclaimed: “We were right when we stopped sending out S.O.S. and started saying U.S.A.!”
Despite Reagan’s 1984 landslide, the Republicans lost eight Senate seats and the majority in 1986, leaving Democrats too cocky again. After securing his party’s presidential nomination in July 1988, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis enjoyed a 17-point lead in polls over Reagan’s Vice President George H.W. Bush.
But Bush brutalized Dukakis as a soft-on-crime, tax-addicted, liberal Democrat—a “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” treating the American Civil Liberties Union like the Communist Party. “I’m more in touch with the mainstream of America,” Bush declared on his way to victory.
One Democratic governor watching from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, realized that the only way to win back the presidency was to be a muscular moderate. And it worked.
Parties change over time, and issues vary. Nevertheless, just as since the 1930s, Democrats love calling Republicans too aristocratic, since the 1960s, Republicans love calling Democrats unpatriotic.
Given those ongoing vulnerabilities, it’s reckless for Democrats to elect so many barn-burning Democratic Socialists of America flame-throwers who trigger that long-standing anxiety about their party’s patriotism.
Do the presumptive Democratic nominees in 2028 want to be forced to keep distancing themselves from Piker’s latest anti-American antics or the rhetoric of members of Congress who romanticize socialism, deface the flag, and blame America brazenly and systematically?
Moreover, the 2028 campaign will probably pivot, again, on the rare undecided moderates in a few swing states. Democrats should have learned by now that the path to victory involves wooing these centrists, not riling up already roused progressives.
In America, suicidal politics spawn destructive policies. Even amid today’s polarization, most Americans still want private property, liberty and equality.
If radicals such as El-Sayed, Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) gain confidence from a 2026 victory and challenge those principles, they could demolish the Democratic Party for a generation—not merely an electoral cycle or two—and rightly so.
