The time after a presidential election can feel like a moment of clarity. The results, after all, are finally in.
But over the last two decades, the post-election period hasn’t offered any clarity at all about the future of American politics. The winning party repeatedly convinces itself it has won a mandate, or even a generational advantage. The shellshocked losers retreat into internal debate. And then just a few months later, it becomes clear that the next phase of American politics will not be what the winners imagined.
This week, the next two years of American politics began to come into focus, and it does not look like a MAGA or Republican “golden age.” The special House elections in Florida and the Supreme Court election in Wisconsin confirmed that Democratic voters were not, in fact, stunned into submission by last November’s election. More important, President Trump’s sweeping tariffs — and the economic downturn that may follow — have created enormous political risks for Republicans.
In one key respect, the elections on Tuesday were not significant: They do not suggest that Democrats solved any of the problems that cost them the last election. Instead, they mostly reflect the party’s advantage among the most highly informed, educated and civically engaged voters. This advantage has allowed Democrats to excel in low-turnout elections throughout the Trump era, even as he made enormous gains among the disaffected and disengaged young, working-class and nonwhite voters who show up only in presidential elections.
Still, Democrats won’t have to face many of those disaffected and disengaged voters until 2028. The results last Tuesday thus offer a plausible preview of the next few years of elections: major Democratic victories, including in next year’s midterm election.
There might not have been anyone marching in pink hats, and congressional Democrats might have been “playing dead,” but the Democratic special election strength looks just as large as it did in 2017 and 2018, before the so-called blue wave flipped control of the House.
Perhaps this shouldn’t necessarily be a surprise: It’s what happened the last time Mr. Trump won. But it’s not what triumphant Republicans or despondent Democrats had in mind in the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory, when there was seemingly no “resistance” to Mr. Trump and the “vibes” seemed to augur a broad rightward cultural shift.
The tariffs announced Wednesday, however, introduce a political problem of an entirely different magnitude for Mr. Trump and his party. No party or politician is recession proof. Historically, even truly dominant political parties have suffered enormous political defeats during major economic downturns.
In none of those cases — not even with the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff — could the president be held responsible for the downturn as self-evidently as today. And whatever it may have felt like after the election, the Republican Party is not even close to politically dominant.
If anything, Mr. Trump and the Republicans today could be especially vulnerable, as so much of his political strength is built on the economy. Throughout his time as a politician, he usually earned his best ratings on his handling of economic issues. He’s benefited from his reputation as a successful businessman and from effective economic stewardship in his first term. He won the last election, despite enormous personal liabilities, in no small part because voters were frustrated by high prices and economic upheaval that followed the end of the pandemic.
In New York Times/Siena College national surveys last fall, more than 40 percent of voters who backed Mr. Trump in 2024 but not 2020 said that the economy or inflation was the most important issue to their vote.
Even before this week’s tariffs, Mr. Trump had squandered his post-election honeymoon. His approval rating had fallen back under 50 percent, back toward where it stood before the election. His early threats to raise tariffs, including on partners like Canada, Mexico and Europe, probably played an important role in diminishing his support. In a reversal of the usual pattern, the latest polls had found that Mr. Trump’s ratings on the economy were even worse than his overall approval rating. There were other indications that his actions had taken an early political toll: Consumer confidence was falling, inflation expectations were rising, and polls found that tariffs themselves were generally unpopular.
This all pales in comparison with the tariffs Mr. Trump enacted Wednesday. It is, of course, too early to judge the full economic effect and thus the political fallout. It may even be too soon to know the ultimate Trump tariff policy. For the same reason, many of Mr. Trump’s supporters will give the policy a chance. His approval rating might not plunge overnight.
But if the tariffs cause a recession and significant price increases, as many economic analysts expect, a plunging approval rating might be only the beginning of his problems. While Mr. Trump may not run for re-election (third-term dreams notwithstanding), many Republicans will be — and many of them were never entirely on board with tariffs in the first place. Already, a half-dozen Republican senators have supported legislation to rein in the president’s authority to impose tariffs. This is nowhere near enough to overcome a presidential veto, but it is an unusual level of Republican opposition to Mr. Trump, and the time for opposition to build is nowhere near over.
If the economic fallout is bad enough, the dissatisfaction with the Trump administration could combine with the longstanding Democratic turnout advantage to make seemingly safe Republican states in 2026 — think Kansas, Iowa and Texas — look plausibly competitive, perhaps even along with control of the Senate. Congressional Republicans’ continued support of (or acquiescence to) Mr. Trump — whether on tariffs or his other excesses — could be in jeopardy.
For now, all of these potentially extraordinary developments are in the distant future. They are not necessarily likely, either. But as Mr. Trump’s second term takes shape, it increasingly seems clear that the “golden age” augured by the post-election “vibes” are even less likely still.
