How The Democrats Beat Trump

Campaigns are billion-dollar contests to define the choice facing voters, but no election season this century has closed quite like this. President Trump approached his task with sarcasm and shiny objects, asking voters desperate for financial help to think only of him. If Republicans did not vote, they would “go to hell,” he said with a smile. If Republicans won the House and Senate, they would get a $5,000 check that even some of his allies dismissed as fiscal absurdity. Then he told them stories, endless stories, for hours at a time—about rounded butts, strong hands, “Dumocrats,” transgender swim meets, the Vietnam War, and the blue paint he had reapplied to the Reflecting Pool. “At this point, they are not even trying,” one Republican consultant told us about the White House in the final days of the campaign. Trump would do it his way, just as the Frank Sinatra song on the president’s iPad playlist advises.

Hakeem Jeffries, the next House speaker, answered Trump’s Borscht Belt tour with relentless repetition. He declared on Fox News last month that “costs are way too high” just hours before Trump interrupted a campaign rally to ogle what he’s called the “pile of muscle” on the rump of Ohio’s junior senator. Days later, Jeffries pledged yet again that Democrats would “relentlessly focus” on affordability while Trump boasted about the nation “making a fortune” from rising gas prices. After the president joked about the high cost of a hamburger at Mar-a-Lago, Jeffries listed his priorities as “housing, health care, and the cost of gas and groceries and goods.”

The New York congressman delivered the same message nearly every day—precise paragraphs punctuated with syncopated gesticulation and excessive alliteration. Rarely had two men atop the political pyramid been more opposite. In place of Trump’s billionaire power suits and cascading bouffant, Jeffries dressed in the capsule wardrobe of middle management, his white-soled dress sneakers unscuffed, his hair always trimmed a millimeter or two shy of a clean shave. By the final days of the campaign, the Democratic leader could barely contain his delight. “They’re talking about ballrooms and body parts,” Jeffries told a roundtable of Black pastors outside Richmond, Virginia, last week while campaigning in a district that Trump won by five points two years ago. “It’s more of the same—extremism, foolishness, and corruption—or it’s dramatic change.”

Tonight Democrats won control of the House and the Senate—and vindicated the discipline of Jeffries and his fellow Democrats. But they didn’t pull it off alone. They received extraordinary help from Trump, whose tariffs and protracted conflict with Iran juiced inflation, and whose obsession with building and profit-taking rattled voters. In two short years, Democrats have reclaimed the economic issues they lost on in 2024, and Trump has squandered the confidence of his winning majority. For the first time since 2014, public polling shows that Democrats are more trusted on the economy than Republicans. This story, about how that transformation unfolded, is based on interviews with 15 people involved in the inner workings of the campaigns on either side of the aisle. At its most basic, Democrats did what they needed by maintaining a tight focus, something Trump either believed was not necessary—or was not capable of achieving.

“We had to remain committed to keeping the main thing the main thing,” Jeffries told us a few days before Election Day, during some downtime between campaign stops. “If we were going to reverse our political fortunes we had to convince the American people that we were determined to make their life more affordable.”

Two months earlier, Jeffries gathered Democratic lawmakers in the Capitol for a slide-deck presentation that quantified how their focus was paying off. He showed them April polling data from Blue Rose Research, a Democratic firm, that ranked cost of living, the economy, inflation, and health care as the first, second, third, and sixth top voter concerns. Then he showed them the problem: Voters credited Democrats with making health care the top issue but listed nine priorities they believed Democrats placed ahead of the economy, and 14 priorities before inflation.

Jeffries clicked to the next slide, an August poll result on the same questions demonstrating that Democrats had found the solution: an almost perfect alignment between voter and party priorities. Cost of living, the economy, inflation, and health care now ranked as the top four issues, in order. Voters had come to believe that Democrats were focused most on the cost of living, followed by health care as No. 2, the economy as No. 3, and inflation coming in at No. 5.

Senate strategists were seeing the same data and arguing for the same approach, especially as winning the chamber became more of a possibility. “There was a very simple solution to say, Guys, there’s an out-of-control affordability crisis that Democrats kind of missed the boat on, for whatever reason, to varying degrees in 2024, so we need to focus like a laser on that now,” Matt Canter, a Democratic strategist, told us. “Paying for gas persuades people.”

One of the most remarkable ads of the 2024 campaign cycle was a Trump attack on misplaced Democratic priorities. The spot focused on Vice President Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded sex-change operations in prisons, with a searing tagline: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Two years later, Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant, noticed how the dynamic had inverted. Trump was defending unpopular data-center construction and Flock surveillance cameras. His final televised address before Election Day was on the National Mall, not in a key battleground state, and focused on the Triumphal Arch and the new golf course he planned along the Potomac River.

“Republicans are focused on he/him,” Ferguson told us, “and Democrats are focused on you.”

The Democrats’ journey to reclaiming majorities in the House and Senate began as soon as Trump arrived back in Washington, D.C. Two weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, Jeffries described the Democratic problem as one of connection. “Maya Angelou said it best: People won’t remember what you say. They may not even remember what you do. But they will always remember how you make them feel,” he said on the comedian Jon Stewart’s podcast. “And I think what we have to do a better job of is making the American people feel that we understand the pain that they’ve been in economically for a long period of time.”

In Jeffries’ telling, economic anxiety was the leading political issue for the past four decades. Seeking relief, voters had ping-ponged between ideologies and parties—electing George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, Joe Biden, and then Trump again. “What’s consistent? The American people have a constant desire for change,” he said. “Why? Because no one has solved the fundamental problem.”

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By that point, House Majority PAC, the independent group affiliated with Jeffries, had already done a deep dive into the 2024 results, asking for an analysis of every public remark and paid communication in each contested congressional race. The clear result: The more a candidate talked about the economy, the better they performed. What mattered most was the frequency of talking about voters’ top concern. When Democratic pollsters asked voters to pick between a binary of economic concerns and any other issue—such as crime, immigration, abortion, foreign policy, regulation—the economic concerns were chosen by 75 to 95 percent of voters. “We lost because Democrats were perceived to be out of alignment” in 2024, Mike Smith, the president of the House Majority PAC, told us.

Within weeks of the podcast taping, Jeffries and his top advisers received more sobering news: Democrats were being overwhelmed by the shock and awe of Trump’s second term—the pardoning of the January 6 rioters, the mass firing of civil servants, the closure of whole government agencies, the immigration raids, the obsequiousness of corporate leaders, the remaking of the global order. A Democratic consultant arrived with voter research that showed the average American paid attention to politics for about four minutes a week, and three minutes and 30 seconds were focused on what Trump was doing. At best, Democrats were competing for 30 seconds every seven days—about .007 percent of an average voter’s waking hours.

Jeffries concluded that Democrats could not compete on Trump’s terms. The president’s megaphone would blare louder. “We always understood simplicity and repetition is the only way to break through,” Jeffries told us about the challenge presented by Trump. “It quickly became apparent to me that the downside of his strategy, as long as we didn’t fall for it, was that the American people would conclude, Well, I may not be following all of the craziness that’s being unleashed on us, but I do know he ain’t focused on the thing that he promised he would focus on, which is to lower our costs.”

The wisdom of this plan was not always obvious to Jeffries’ caucus. The dramatic cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency led some lawmakers to demand a defense of government institutions. The abuses of immigration enforcement created constant outrage. The attacks on media outlets and university independence rattled constitutional scholars. But Jeffries demanded that the caucus find a script and stick to it. When Trump pushed through his summer tax bill last year, Jeffries urged the caucus to focus on the Medicaid cuts it would force—a proxy for the help that working people needed—even though some Democrats argued that such a message could be attacked as a defense of poverty entitlements. By the late summer, with Obamacare subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, Democratic leaders settled on a strategy of forcing a government shutdown. The question was why.

Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist closely read by the Democratic rank and file in Congress, urged Democrats to make the shutdown about a broad range of things that were no longer normal—not just rising costs but also Trump’s corruption and authoritarian impulses. At a Democratic caucus meeting days later, Jeffries faced a divided party, including those sympathetic to Klein’s argument that the party needed to go big. But the leader pushed back, saying it should focus on only one issue: health-care costs. “It’s the right fight, and it’s a good fight,” he told his members, before quoting the late Vernon Johns, a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr.: “If you see a good fight, get in it.”

Klein told us that he came to admire Jeffries’s judgement, even if it contradicted his advice at the time. “He chose his shutdown, and he won his shutdown, and that is pretty rare for the minority party,” Klein said. “I think the Democrats have done a good job listening broadly to the public rather than narrowly to people who just vote for Democrats.”

Several Democrats told us that they also credit Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, as well as the party at large, for staying unified, both during the shutdown and throughout the remainder of the election cycle. A Democratic pollster told us that the Democratic coordination was not just a happy accident. “It was the result of a lot of advance planning, a lot of outreach to various stakeholder groups,” this person said. Lauren French, the communications director for Senate Majority PAC, the independent group affiliated with Senate Democratic leaders, told us that the major role Schumer played in candidate recruitment proved crucial; he helped persuade Mary Peltola in Alaska, Roy Cooper in North Carolina, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio to run, and he was also supportive of Josh Turek’s candidacy in Iowa and James Talarico’s candidacy in Texas. Cooper proved so strong that Democrats could pull money from North Carolina and use it elsewhere.

Trump, meanwhile, went in the opposite direction. He helped push out Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican, clearing the way for the Democratic pickup. He undercut Texas’s incumbent senator, John Cornyn, in favor of a troubled candidate, Ken Paxton, who had been impeached by his own party and faced other scandals. Republicans soon had to redirect hundreds of millions more to a state that hadn’t elected a Democratic senator in nearly 40 years. Paxton then lost, as did Texas Governor Greg Abbott. After the unexpected death of Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina this summer, Trump  selected Darline Graham, a political novice with none of her brother’s foreign-policy expertise, to replace him. Graham struggled on the campaign trail, prompting claims that she was a “nepo sister”—and yesterday, South Carolina elected a Democratic senator for the first time in more than two decades.

Since the start of his term, Trump’s approval rating has been on steady decline. But the sharpest dips in 2025 coincided with particular presidential actions: in April, weeks after Trump announced his tariff regime; in July, weeks after Trump passed his tax bill; in November, around the end of the government shutdown and a House vote on releasing the investigative files of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Epstein scandal, Democrats realized over time, was unexpectedly tied to economic insecurity. It fed into a broader concern that elites were operating by a different set of rules. Trump’s ballroom and allegations of improper stock trading by Republicans in Congress fit within that narrative. At the House Majority PAC, strategists realized that they could turn corruption into a cost–of-living argument—things are expensive, they began telling their ad makers, because the system is rigged. “Corruption is not an abstract thing,” one Jeffries adviser told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private strategy. “It is not about systems and not about institutions. It is about you and your life.”

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

Democrats already felt they were on the right path, but then, at the end of February, Trump launched a war against Iran that spiked gas prices and again pushed inflation higher. Jeffries pushed for an immediate vote to put Democrats on record in opposition, and Republicans on record in support. Then he began the argument that this, too, would be a fight about pocketbook issues, not abstract debates about geopolitics, collateral damage by the U.S. military, a war for oil, or whether Trump was usurping the Constitution by not requesting a formal declaration of war from Congress.

As the war dragged on, Republican hopes collapsed. The clearest correlation in politics in 2026 was between gas prices at the pump and the generic ballot advantage of Democrats. “All of the polling couldn’t be more clear,” a Republican consultant told us. “We were on track towards a normal midterm map prior to the war, and you can see the favorability numbers for the administration, for Republicans at large, take a nosedive after the war began.”

Another Democratic polling operation this year asked a broader question: Regardless of what you want from the election results, would you rather things stay the same as they are now or change? Eighty-five percent of voters chose change, and only 6 percent went with the status quo. The potential was enormous. “People are willing to accept change over their party controlling Congress,” Jon Fromowitz, a co-founder of the Democratic group Future Forward, told us. “People were upset enough about the way things were going that they were very open-minded.”

The only time that Jeffries and Trump formally met in person was a trap. Jeffries and Schumer were invited to the Oval Office last September, and Jeffries walked in concerned that television cameras would be there to film a staged confrontation that could rival Trump’s showdown months earlier with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

As it happened, Trump had something else in mind. He started by offering the Democrats Diet Cokes. When they declined, the sodas were delivered anyway and placed on the Resolute Desk. Then an adviser came in and put red Trump 2028 hats next to the drinks. As they debated the terms of the coming shutdown battle with House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a photographer started circling them to get shots of Jeffries with the hats in the frame. “It was the strangest thing ever,” Jeffries said afterward, trying to explain the experience to CNN. After Jeffries left for a press conference with Schumer outside the West Wing, Trump posted a video that had added animated Mexican sombreros on their heads.

Now, more than a year later, Jeffries is poised to become the leader of the House, and the first Black lawmaker to hold the position. Democrats will be able to launch investigations and subpoena witnesses, but they will still operate under the threat of a presidential veto and a 60-vote cloture rule in the Senate that will require bipartisan cooperation. As it stands, Jeffries and Trump have almost no relationship. After Trump posted a racist video that animated Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys, Jeffries filmed his own reaction in a video in which he said, “Fuck Donald Trump.” (Trump deleted the Obama video and blamed staff for posting it.) The president has called the man who will be house speaker “lunatic, Hakeem ‘Low IQ’ Jeffries” and called for his prosecution.

[Read: Here’s who Democrats want to impeach next]

Jeffries has argued for months that animosity toward Trump will not interfere with Democrats’ unified focus on lowering costs. He has pointed to a bipartisan housing-affordability bill, sponsored by liberal Democrats in the House and Senate, that passed in June, with 191 Democratic votes and 166 Republican votes. A more cynical party in an election year might have denied Republicans the chance for an affordability win in the summer, but Democrats moved ahead anyway, creating what Jeffries now believes can be a model. “Our view was do the right thing, and we’ll just deal with the politics of it when we have to deal with the politics of it,” Jeffries told us. “We’re running on affordability, we’re gonna win on affordability, and we have to govern on affordability.”

Democratic success also comes with notes of caution. There is a difference between winning a referendum against the status quo and winning the confidence of the American people to chart a new path forward. Democrats have the advantage on polls of economic trust because the Republican brand has fallen so far, not because the Democratic one has risen much. “I think Trump lost it,” the Democratic pollster told us, noting that polls still show no meaningful increase in the favorability of the Democratic Party.

At the same time, even those closest to Trump in the White House are hesitant to guess how he will react in the weeks ahead. The president has no record of taking responsibility for failure, and he regularly lashes out at others when things go wrong. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he posted on social media once his defeat had become clear. The official message from the White House was defiance and a recommitment to fight. But White House advisers have begun talking, quietly for now, about the “populist” issues they could get behind in the last two years of Trump’s term that would get Democratic support. Trump’s decision to create savings accounts for all American children began in the 1990s as a Democratic idea, called “KidSave,” a version of which was supported by President Bill Clinton’s administration. Hillary Clinton, in her 2008 campaign for president, proposed a similar “Baby Bonds” account. Trump’s team has been making plans to build upon them in the coming months.

But Republicans now face the same project that Democrats faced following sharp spikes in inflation under Biden: a sprint to get back on the right side of a voting majority, with only one issue at play. It is not a problem that will be easily fixed by mean tweets and diversion. It is also not a fight that Democrats are going to cede like Trump did over the last year.

After it was clear that voters had delivered Democrats control of the House, Jeffries took the stage at a victory party in Washington. “We are going to fight to make sure that we make this country affordable for every single American,” he said. “We hear you, we see you, we feel you, and House Democrats are committed to making life better for you beginning on day one.” Behind him was a printed backdrop with the message he had repeated hundreds of times—Fighting for an Affordable America.  Simplicity and repetition had won the day.