The Told-you-so Primary Starts Tomorrow

Just hours from now, the 2026 elections will be over, and the 2028 elections will begin immediately with the first contest: The Told-You-So primary.

Recriminations, rationalizations, and exit-poll pedantry: People with a taste for these things will soon have a feast. The meal will come with an urgent subtext— as both major parties face acute choices about how to present themselves to voters in the coming post-Trump era of politics.

One paradox of 2026 is that for all the intensity of contempt the country’s two major coalitions have for one another — one side fully dominated by President Donald Trump, the other fully devoted to his personal repudiation and the demolition of his movement — this did little to suppress bone-on-bone factional disputes within the coalitions. To the contrary, the higher the stakes rose this year, the more surliness grew between competing wings inside each party.

Republicans and Democrats face different versions of the same basic contest. There is one side in both parties that believes the new hyper-online age of politics rewards a liberated political id: aggression, sharp lines, loudmouths, care and feeding of the most zealous members of one’s own tribe. There is another side that believes politics hasn’t changed so much that it doesn’t still reward conventional political virtues: message discipline, keen antenna for finding ideological safe ground, a determination to not let the opposition cast one as exotic or extreme.

These arguments won’t be settled today — when does that ever happen in modern politics? — but most of the possible scenarios for this evening’s results would represent powerful ammunition in the intraparty contests, including over the 2028 presidential nominations.

What if Democratic hopes for winning the Senate falter because Abdul El-Sayed, a fiery star of the left, is unable to hold Michigan? Or because Susan Collins once again transcends her obvious political vulnerabilities to keep Maine in the Republican column — a result that surely would be in part a consequence of Democratic disarray and ideological infighting throughout 2026?

Centrist Democrats would be fully justified in noting if former Gov. Roy Cooper manages to flip North Carolina — most polls show Republican Michael Whatley barely competitive — with a style and ideological profile at age 69 that didn’t necessarily quicken pulses but gave voters in a center-right state the reassurance they were looking for.

Speaking of recriminations: A result that a year ago would have been embraced cheerfully by Democrats — enough seats for a modest House majority and a narrowing of the GOP’s Senate majority — would now represent a painful fall from expectations. The New York Times over the weekend showed Democrats up strongly in Senate battlegrounds of Michigan, Maine, Texas, Ohio, and even Kansas, and up slightly in Alaska and Iowa.

Democrat's ire at a disappointing evening would be aimed not just at one another but on the entire polling industry— for once again, as in 2016, 2020, and 2024, underscoring Republican strength.

But let’s consider an alternate scenario: What if the Times and other polls leaning to a massive blue wave are right?

That would make the Democratic internal argument a good bit less pointed: If candidates as varied in style and ideological profile as Troy Jackson in Maine, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, James Talarico in Texas, and Adam Hamilton in Kansas all somehow won, the 2028 lesson would be clear: let a thousand flowers bloom, and no need to worry so much about the ideological and stylistic zigs and zags of different candidates. It would send a message to potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates that it is safe to pursue the affections of left-leaning activists without weakening general election prospects.

Instead, it would mean the real intraparty bloodletting would be on the Republican side. With episodic exceptions, the divisions within the GOP, though sincere, have stayed largely below the surface as Trump has turned his party into a dissent-free zone.

Trump consistently urged voters “to pretend I am on the ballot,” and it seems evident that many people in both parties did exactly that. If the result is comprehensive Republican losses, the voices who think it was a mistake for the GOP to become a cult of personality would surely come out of the shadows and put their on-background grumbling about Trump forthrightly on the record.

The old assumption was that Vice President JD Vance was the most probable Republican nominee in 2028, but that Trump himself could single-handedly upend the contest by endorsing someone else, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio. A terrible GOP night would offer strong incentives to others, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, to argue that it is time for the party to move swiftly past Trump and his obsessions.

Nor will the Told-You-So primary necessarily be confined to rank-and-file activists. Among the people who will be watching closely will be major contributors. Super-wealthy donors — including Elon Musk, the super-wealthiest of all — opened their wallets to the tune of hundreds of millions this year, with Republicans taking the greater share. If it turned out this money couldn’t do much to blunt the larger momentum, many of these donors would take note for future reference. In 2024, likewise, a legion of consultants and operatives got rich off the billion dollars or so that flowed to former Vice President Kamala Harris after former President Joe Biden was shooed from the race by his own party. But that money could not alter the powerful currents taking Trump to his second term.

The disruptive forces of modern politics — the breakdown of polling, Trump’s consistent ability to torment establishment adversaries in his own party and the media, ascendant generational cohorts in both parties — have an ancillary benefit. Election nights are exciting again, because even the pros don’t really have much confidence they know what’s going to happen.

One way or another, this means there will be some confused and angry people waking up Wednesday morning ready to begin the next argument.