Just days after the 2026 midterm elections delivered a major popular repudiation of inequality, war and attacks on democratic rights, the Democratic Party has launched a campaign to redefine the election as a mandate for austerity, accommodation with Trump and opposition to socialism.
The New York Times, speaking for the Democratic Party, set out the program in an editorial published Monday. Under the headline “This Winning Combination Is the Future of American Politics,” the Times claims that Democratic candidates won in states Trump carried in 2024 because “they ran as economic populists and cultural moderates.” This combination, it writes, “meets the moment, after years of disappointing laissez-faire economic policies and a decade of cultural excesses by the progressive left.”
The editorial praises Democratic candidates for adopting right-wing positions on what it calls “hot-button culture issues.” On immigration, it highlights candidates who attacked the Biden administration as lax on the border, including Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, who credited Trump for the fall in crossings.
But the assault on immigrants is not a “cultural” issue. It is the spearhead of the Trump administration’s war on the Constitution, including mass roundups and detention camps, deportations carried out in defiance of court orders, troops deployed in American cities and federal agents who have shot and killed citizens in Minneapolis. Its architect, Stephen Miller, took over as White House chief of staff the same morning the editorial appeared.
Nor is the epidemic of police violence a matter of “culture.” Yet the Times hails Democrats who embraced law-and-order demagogy and “well-funded police departments.” It applauds support for voter ID requirements, which disadvantage the poor and elderly and have been at the center of the administration’s efforts to delegitimize the elections.
The Times’ model candidate is Adam Hamilton, the Kansas senator-elect, whose campaign ad declared, “On one side, the far left pushes socialism and open borders.” The Times says this “captured the mood.” It praises another winner, Josh Turek in Iowa, for boasting that he voted with Republicans “more than 700 times.” The Democratic victors, it concludes, showed “an admirable pragmatism and a willingness to compromise that are central to maintaining democracy.”
