Democrats won a massive victory in the 2026 midterms, performing so well that Republicans’ best-laid gerrymandering plans actually backfired in a number of states, most notably Texas and North Carolina. There, Democrats held most of the seats Republicans had targeted and even flipped some districts drawn to be safely Republican. Democrats flipped Senate seats in places like Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina that were considered virtually unimaginable reaches in the very recent past.
That’s of course excellent news for the party, and, I would hasten to add, for our fight against the ever-present threat of the far right. But Democrats’ stunning upset also brings a strong temptation for moderates and progressives alike: to read the result as proof that the party has finally turned the corner with working-class voters and can ride carefree into the 2028 sunset.
But provisional data suggest otherwise. Our first look at the 2026 electorate comes from three sources. The New York Times’s Voter Trends estimates combine Times/Siena polling, reinterviews with voters after they voted, precinct-level results, and validated turnout records for about half of all voters. The AP Voter Poll is a large survey of voters conducted for the Associated Press around Election Day, and its predecessor, AP VoteCast, covered earlier elections. For longer-term trends, I rely mainly on Catalist’s validated-voter data for 2012–2024. I note instances where the Times and AP disagree, and unless noted, other 2026 survey figures, such as voters’ views of Trump, the economy, and the parties, come from the AP Voter Poll. We won’t know the true shape of the 2026 electorate for months, until validated voter data becomes available, but these sources give us a helpful initial look. Both show Democrats gaining real ground since 2024 with college graduates and voters without degrees alike.
But measured against results for the country as a whole, Democrats still lag badly with working-class voters, and their coalition remains as lopsided by class as at any point in the past decade. That leaves the party exposed to another 2024-style loss in 2028. It also keeps the broad working-class supermajority progressives would need to deliver real change for working Americans out of reach.
It’s the (Trump) Economy, Stupid
Few doubted heading into November that Democrats would take the House of Representatives. The president’s party has lost the national House vote in each of the last five midterms. This year followed a similar script as past midterms, but it was amplified by several additional factors.
First, Donald Trump is deeply unpopular. Only 38 percent of 2026 voters approved of his job performance, and 75 percent said the economy was in poor or not-so-good shape. Some 43 percent said they voted to express opposition to Trump, against 16 percent who voted to support him.
The second factor follows from the first. Trump’s unpopularity reached into his own coalition, especially the less partisan, less habitual voters who backed him in 2024 because they were pissed off with the Democrats on affordability and immigration. With the economy still souring and Trump himself not on the ballot (despite his many exhortations that voters imagine he was), however, many saw little reason to turn out for Republicans. Blue Rose Research estimates that 56 percent of Kamala Harris’s 2024 voters turned out this year, compared with 47 percent of Trump’s, and argues that this turnout gap drove most of Democrats’ gains. AP’s data imply a smaller but still sizable turnout effect of about 5 points.
Third, Democrats now have a stronger midterm coalition than Republicans. For most of the twentieth century, Democrats depended on working-class voters who turned out less reliably, so low-turnout midterms tended to favor Republicans. That pattern has flipped. Democrats now draw more of their support from college graduates and other highly engaged voters who tend to show up even in off years. Republicans, meanwhile, rely increasingly on less engaged, lower-propensity voters, many without degrees, who turn out mainly when Trump is a candidate. The upshot is that the lower the turnout, the better Democrats now tend to do.
The danger for Democrats is that these advantages are temporary and unlikely to reappear in 2028 when Trump will no longer be the Republicans’ national standard-bearer, and many of the low-propensity conservative voters who sat out this year will flock back to the polls.
The Class Divide Grew in 2026
The divide between college and noncollege voters survived the 2026 blue wave, even as Democrats gained among both groups. According to the Times’s estimates, Democrats’ margin among college graduates improved by about 11 points over Harris’s 2024 showing, and their margin among noncollege voters by about 17, enough to narrowly win noncollege voters by 4 points. That shrunk the education gap from 28 points in 2024 to 22. AP’s data are less encouraging: there, college graduates moved 12 points toward Democrats and noncollege voters only 8, so Democrats still lost noncollege voters by about 5 points, and the gap widened to 31 points.
Comparing 2026 with 2018, the last time Democrats rode a midterm backlash against Trump, is revealing. According to Catalist’s validated-voter data, which match surveys to records of who really voted, Democrats won the 2018 House vote by about 8 points but carried noncollege voters by less than 1, while winning college graduates by 19, amounting to an 18-point class gap. This year’s wave was bigger, a roughly 14-point win by the Times’s estimate, yet it left an even larger class gap of 22 points. In the AP data, which put the 2018 gap at just 10 points, the class gap ballooned to over 30 points by 2026. As recently as 2012, Catalist shows almost no difference between college and noncollege voters in House elections; the gap opened to 7 to 9 points in 2014 and 2016 and has run between 18 and 22 points in every election since 2018. The 2026 midterms clearly lifted Democrats’ fortunes with all voters, but it did not close the class divide.
The class gap matters because the road to the White House and sustained control of the senate still runs through voters without college degrees. Noncollege voters remain a majority of the electorate, and in 2024 they made up a majority of voters in all seven presidential battlegrounds, from about 62 percent in Pennsylvania to 67 percent in Nevada, according to validated-voter data from the Cooperative Election Study. With class-based support remaining so lopsided, Democrats remain vulnerable in the key presidential battlegrounds, to say nothing of expanding their reach further into red territory in a durable way that outlasts the political manna Trump delivered to them in 2026. Relying on larger margins among college-educated suburbanites alone is arithmetically insufficient and politically unsustainable.
Democrats’ problems with noncollege voters are hardly limited to white voters. According to Catalist, Democrats won voters of color without college degrees by 61 points in the 2018 House vote but by only 42 in 2022 and 35 in 2024, with the steepest drop among Latino voters without degrees (from 42 points to 12). This year, the Times estimates, Democrats won noncollege voters of color by about 55 points and Hispanic voters without degrees by about 41, recovering most of that lost ground. AP’s data show a much weaker rebound, to 40 points, which would recover only about a quarter of it. The sources also differ on the class divide among voters of color. In 2018, noncollege voters of color were slightly more Democratic than those with degrees; by 2022 and 2024, Catalist shows the reverse (though the gap was small). For 2026, the Times has the two groups running about even, while AP shows noncollege voters of color still trailing college-educated ones by about 7 points.
Do Democrats Even Need Noncollege Voters After 2026?
In short, yes, they matter very much. As we saw above, the Times estimates that Democrats’ margin improved by about 17 points among noncollege voters and about 11 among college graduates. Because noncollege voters are also the larger group, 57 percent of the electorate by the Times’s estimate, my calculation from those figures is that they account for roughly two-thirds of Democrats’ improvement on Harris’s 2024 margin. Had noncollege voters stuck with their 2024 margins while college graduates swung as they did in 2026, Democrats would still have narrowly won the national House vote, by about 4 points rather than 14. But, as we will see below, they would not have won the Senate.
Noncollege gains mattered even more on hostile terrain, and they decided control of the Senate. In each of the five red-state Senate upsets, the Times estimates that Democrats improved on Harris’s 2024 margin among noncollege voters by roughly 20 to 28 points, more than their national gain with these voters and more than the margin they picked up among college graduates in the same state. Had noncollege voters mainted their 2024 margins, Talarico, Brown, Hamilton, Andrews, and Turek would all have lost, by about 4 to 11 points, leaving Democrats with no more than fifty Senate seats and Vice President J. D. Vance holding the tiebreaking vote. College gains mattered too: without them, Hamilton and Andrews would have narrowly lost, Turek’s race would have been a coin flip, and Brown would have barely won. But in none of these races could Democrats have won without noncollege voters. AP’s state-level data show the same pattern.
The lesson is that Democrats’ 2026 successes, including their Senate majority, rested heavily on winning back voters without college degrees, not just on running up the score with college graduates. That is encouraging, but it is also a warning. These gains came from a very low 2024 baseline, with the help of a deeply unpopular Republican president, and they still left noncollege voters trailing the rest of the country by 10 points or more.
Democrats Are Still Unpopular
Democrats won a landslide, but not because Americans suddenly warmed to them. In Pew’s polling of all adults, 40 percent of Americans viewed the Democratic Party favorably a month before the election, and 58 percent unfavorably. That is a recovery from a low of 36 percent in August 2025, but it is still well below the 46–47 percent Democrats drew during Trump’s first term. Gallup tells a similar story: 43 percent favorable in September 2026, up from 37 percent a year earlier but below the party’s 49 percent average since 1992.
A good share of Democrats’ 2026 margin also came from voters whose support came grudgingly. About 16 percent of voters viewed neither party favorably, and Democrats won them by 25 points, which works out to roughly 4 points of the party’s national margin.
Trust in Democrats on the issues is also thin. Asked which party could better handle the economy, 43 percent said Democrats, 38 percent said Republicans, and 19 percent said neither. That is a 6-point edge in a year when three in four voters rated the economy poorly. Republicans still led on immigration, and the parties were tied on taxes. Recent research I conducted with Joan Williams, based on a February 2026 survey, shows how shallow Democrats’ gains on immigration are. Fifty-six percent of working-class respondents agreed that Trump “has gone too far, with masked men arresting ordinary hardworking people instead of just deporting criminals.” Yet only 36 percent preferred Joe Biden’s immigration policies to Trump’s. Many working-class voters are uneasy with how Trump’s policies are carried out, but they still prefer them to Biden’s by nearly two to one.
The Dealignment Carousel
American politics over the past decade has settled into a self-reinforcing cycle of backlash that virtually guarantees heightened polarization and increasing voter disaffection. The White House has changed parties in three straight elections, and control of the House has now flipped in three consecutive midterms. After each of these elections, the winning party has claimed a mandate to finally address Americans’ growing sense of economic dislocation and political disenchantment, and each time it fails to deliver.
This is what dealignment looks like. Neither party has a stable majority coalition, so outcomes swing with the national mood and with which party’s voters turn out. In the current arrangement, that produces a reliable rhythm. In midterms, the electorate is smaller and more educated, which now favors Democrats, and the president’s party is punished, so Democrats win big when a Republican holds the White House. In presidential years, the electorate grows by tens of millions, and the added voters are disproportionately noncollege, less attached to either party, and now lean slightly Republican.
But even as each election ping-pongs back and forth between the parties, the class divide has not closed. In Catalist’s validated-voter data and the Times’s estimates, the education gap went from almost nothing in 2012 to between 18 and 22 points in every election since 2018, including this one; AP’s data show it growing even faster, to 31 points in 2026. The electoral carousel goes up and down, but class dealignment remains stubbornly in place.
That is why even a midterm landslide like this one does little to change the underlying shape of American politics. A wave lifts the party’s fortunes with nearly every group at once, so on election night the gains among college graduates and the modest recovery among working-class voters blurred together into a single triumphant story. But when the tide goes out, Democrats are left with the same lopsided class coalition that has plagued them for more than a decade, and Americans are left in a seemingly endless limbo where neither party can govern for working people.
Rather than overreading this year’s victory, Democrats should look closely at where their gains came from. As we saw above, the landslide rested heavily on winning back voters without college degrees, and the Senate majority depended on it: in Texas, Ohio, Kansas, South Carolina, and Iowa, Democrats won only because they made large gains among noncollege voters. The question for 2028 is whether Democrats can hold onto and build on gains like these with noncollege voters through an affirmative economic message that cuts through even without the assistance of a historically unpopular chief executive.
There is plenty raw material to work with. Seven in ten voters in the AP Voter Poll said the US economic system favors the wealthy, and those voters backed Democrats by more than 50 points in 2026. That is a ready-made audience for an economic populist message aimed at working-class voters, many of whom agree that the system is rigged but don’t yet trust Democrats to fix it. Democrats again won lower-income voters by more than higher-income voters this year, and union households backed them by 20 points, compared with 8 among nonunion voters. Those are signs that a class-based appeal can still work. But they will not add up to a durable majority unless Democrats also find a way to maintain and expand their margins among voters without college degrees. Trump has handed Democrats a reprieve, not a realignment. They can spend the next two years taking credit for a blue wave delivered largely by outside forces or use them to figure out how to build lasting support among the working-class voters they will need when the wave recedes.
Jared Abbott is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics and a contributor to Jacobin and Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.
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