One election ends; the next one begins. This will not attempt to be comprehensive, but as we move forward, here are some of the lessons we must keep in mind from the dreadful 2026 midterms.
The parties have changed.
When we older folks were very young, if an election flipped control from one party to the other, it meant some tax policy would change, the regulators would be harder or easier on the business community, there would be more government jobs for the new party and fewer for the old party. America was still America, and both parties seemed to want the best for it, while having different approaches on how to get there.
Today, the Democrat Party’s candidates no longer want the best for America. They may want America to pay to give some other countries the best, or to give other countries’ peoples the best, but they no longer want the best for Americans. It is unclear how evident this is to the Democrat rank and file. The Democrats have always had some segment of truly anti-American voters, but has that subset grown, or have the majority of their members just stopped paying attention?
The reason the results of the 2026 midterms feel so nightmarish is not that the Democratic Party won so overwhelmingly, but that they did so with such an anti-semitic, anti-capitalist, anti-American slate. These are not our grandparents’ Democrats.
Candidate quality matters.
Many Republicans worried when the Republicans nominated candidates in this cycle who were unprepared, unlikeable, or seriously flawed. But many Republicans (admittedly including this writer) believed that the Democrats they faced were so bad that it wouldn’t hurt. Ken Paxton had a messy divorce, but James Talarico is a blasphemous deviant marxist. Darline Graham is inexperienced and unprepared, but Annie Andrews is an equally inexperienced marxist, the polar opposite of her electorate.
Turns out, candidate quality only matters for Republicans.
We have noticed this differential for years, but the 2026 midterms drove it home. Democrat candidates have a form of teflon that Republican candidates lack.
But maybe we shouldn’t overstate that issue; there were also good Republican candidates who had zero “candidate quality” problems who still went down, just as badly. Rep. Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, for example, were both terrific, but lost their races just as badly as some of the candidates we were told “didn’t belong on the ballot.”
So the real problem might be found elsewhere…
A century of societal error.
Have you ever had the opportunity to see a grammar school test from the 19th century? I have. The material on an 8th grader’s history text in the late 1800s was usually as rigorous as the material on a freshman exam used in college today.
Our education system has diminished.
There are numerous reasons for this, but there’s no debating the result: a republic formed by elections depends upon an informed electorate. The public needs to both understand how government works, and what the candidates on the ballot really stand for.
First, we allowed our teaching of history and the Constitution to slip in the schools, and then we allowed our press coverage to diminish so that our voters don’t really know the contrasting visions confronting them on their ballots. This didn’t all happen overnight or just in one cycle, but it sure was exposed in 2026.
Many of us thought that with the explosion of radio and internet news sources, voters would become better prepared for elections than ever before.
What has happened instead is that, instead of all voters seeing the same (admittedly filtered) news on three big news networks, everyone now sees a different custom-curated view, depending on the radio stations they listen to and the algorithms on their Facebook or TikTok feeds.
Just for one brief example:
Ask someone who studied American civics over 50 years ago what the Constitution does, and he’ll tell you it balances factions and limits government to maximize individual liberty.
But ask someone who studied American civics within the past 50 years what the Constitution does, and he’ll tell you it gives Congressmen two-year terms and Senators six-year terms and presidents up to two four-year terms.
The foundational concept of Limited Government – the whole purpose of our War of Independence and the Constitutional Convention – has been forgotten.
Somehow, America needs to refocus on education, political philosophy, and political communication.
Vote fraud
We don’t know how much of a role election fraud played in the 2026 midterms, and we certainly won’t blame the results entirely on fraud. The broad numbers (such as Texas’ US Senate race) were probably beyond the margin of fraud.
But even so, we know there were fraud, deception, and rule-breaking. It was everywhere.
There were ballot dumps and software programming “errors;” there was a fake candidate nominated in Alaska; in other states the socialist Democrat dropped out so that a socialist “independent” could have a better chance at the prize. In Wisconsin and Maine, Democrat bosses swapped out their statewide nominees when unfavorable polling appeared for their voters’ choices.
If it was two or three or five percent in an election won by twenty, you can’t blame the loss on fraud, but there were still a lot of 51/49 races where the margin of fraud could have, and likely did, make the difference.
So we must never relent on the goal – which OUGHT to be bipartisan – of totally clean, unblemished election processes.
Even the very reasonable SAVE America Act, for example, is still 100% inexcusably opposed by the Democratic Party. The only reason to oppose clean elections is if you know that you win by dirty ones.
President Trump
The Trump Administration has been the most aggressive Republican administration in history, rivaling the Obama years for transformative policy efforts.
But President Trump’s personality – and more importantly, the way his personality can be reinterpreted by his opposition – has its problems. He is wonderful at unifying and exciting his own base, but he presents a terribly easy target for the Left to attack.
It’s bad enough when a House or Senate race can be decided based on a feeling that one candidate just doesn’t appear as “Congressional” as the other, but this country has a definition of “Presidential” that can be an absolute decision-maker for voters.
It is clear that – despite an unbelievably successful first two years in office, fulfilling most promises and setting the course for an economic boom time – the majority of voters chose to punish President Trump for being unlikable – unpresidential – in their view. And their chosen method of doing so was to punish themselves – and their country – by electing a swarm of hostile agents.
We can repeat the old saying all we want – “but that would be cutting off your nose to spite your face!” – and it won’t do any good.
This vote was not a repudiation of Trump’s policies, which have been overwhelmingly good for the country (not just for Republicans, but for everybody).
They didn’t even allow the Trump administration’s success on closing the border, defending merit hiring, protecting girls’ sports, reducing the rate of inflation, and creating long-term economic opportunity to enter into their decisions.
The voters either voted Democrat to punish Donald Trump for his personality, or they stayed home, to punish Donald Trump for his personality. To say this is shortsighted and even suicidal is putting it mildly, but it’s reality.
We need to consider the possibility that all the positives in the world can’t make up for a personality that turns off the broad middle, that we need so desperately in every election. Personally, this writer loves Donald Trump, but I sure disliked him at first, and it took me a long time to “get” the guy enough to love him. Most voters, especially those in the middle, aren’t ever going to give the matter that much effort; if they don’t like a candidate at first, they’re never going to.
So don’t run candidates whose personality alone loses votes.
We have to ask the question today: What if we had elected Ted Cruz in 2016? What if we had elected Ron DeSantis in 2024? How different would their midterms have been?
To be fair, there’s no way of knowing, but we need to consider the question.
The Congressional incumbents
Speaker Johnson has done a wonderful job with a razor-thin majority in the House, but almost everything they accomplished died in the Senate. Who’s to blame for that? Majority Leader Thune alone, or the several gadflies in the caucus?
The ability of the Democrats to stay united, even in support of horrendous policy, makes it all the more inconceivable that Republicans are unable to unite on broadly popular issues like the SAVE America Act.
The GOP – especially in the Senate – must learn from the Democrats how to present a united front, and deliver victories for the American people. The GOP has the right policies, but if they can’t pass anything, even with an apparent majority (the public neither fully understands nor approves of the concept of cloture), the public will say they don’t deserve reelection.
And it’s hard to argue with them.
The States
It was a bad night for the states as well; the general wave carried away state legislatures and county board members all over the place. This will have a long-term impact on crime, on affordability, on the electric grid, on property taxes, on fraud.
The next election, however, is the most important long term, since it’s the legislatures and governors in office after a census who determine redistricting for the following decade. The nation may be able to survive this storm, but we will need to recover in 2028 and 2030, in order to protect the nation for the 2030s.
The Invasion
Our Founding Fathers developed this country for “a moral and religious people,” as President John Adams put it in a discussion about our Constitution. He was speaking of the Judeo-Christian worldview, and what we currently call “the Protestant work ethic,” a broad societal attitude and construction that would produce an electorate that shared the views of the Scottish Enlightenment and saw America as the ultimate achievement of Western Civilization.
This isn’t about race or color; it’s not just about white congregational Brits. It’s a worldview, and if Italians or Pols, or Asians or Africans, or South Americans or Australians, come here to embrace that worldview, they are welcome, and the system will happily succeed for them too.
But too many of our immigrants – both legal and illegal – over the past century, and especially over the past twenty years – have had no interest in assimilating, and have no understanding or appreciation of how such assimilation is necessary for the whole project to work.
Some of the bad votes this year were by people who actively want to work against the American system (such as the islamists, the socialists, and the fraudsters).
But more of the bad votes were by people who don’t know they’re working against the American system. They (or their parents or grandparents) came from socialist countries for America’s opportunities, without ever realizing that these opportunities are entirely dependent upon the founding principles that they’ve never even heard of.
We need a solution to this shortcoming most of all.
May Divine Providence show us the way.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” and his brand new collection of stories about the heroes of the American Founding, “The Founding Generation: The Patriots Who Built America,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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