A Democratic Senate with at least 54 seats, and Democrats flipping Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, Iowa and Ohio, is not a routine midterm correction. Voters in places the party was told to write off just handed it the power to govern. The only question that matters now is whether Democrats will act like people who were handed it.
I worry, because I know the party's habits. After 2008 and 2020 the pattern was the same: win big, then explain to your own voters why the big thing you promised can't be done. The parliamentarian, the moderates, the 'norms,' the next election. Every Democratic majority in my adult life has found a respectable reason to underdeliver.
This time the arithmetic is different, and the excuses are thinner. Fifty-four is not sixty, so the filibuster remains. That is the whole story of the next two years. Anyone in the Democratic caucus who defends that rule while sitting on a majority won in Kansas and Ohio owes voters an explanation. Why does a procedure invented by accident and used for generations to block civil rights get a veto over an electorate that just spoke this clearly? Republicans have never been sentimental about Senate customs when they wanted a Supreme Court seat or a tax cut. Democrats should stop being sentimental on behalf of a party that isn't grateful.
The map matters, too. Winning Texas and South Carolina means winning places where Democratic voters spent years being told their votes were decorative. The party should not read that as a license to chase imaginary swing voters by sanding off its agenda. The people who just sent Democrats to Washington from red states did not do so to watch them nibble. Whatever drove them, whether prices, health care, or a government that keeps asking working people to absorb the cost of other people's greed, they want something done. Not a bipartisan commission to study it.
Two races are still open, and the Left should be vigilant about both. In Mississippi, Scott Colom leads Cindy Hyde-Smith by about 2,500 votes, with mail and affidavit ballots still to be processed. Alaska is tight between Dan Sullivan and Mary Peltola. Count every lawful ballot, in full view, without the manufactured panic about 'late votes' that has become a reflex on the right. Affidavit ballots are not suspicious ballots. They are votes from citizens who showed up and had to prove who they were, and they deserve the same respect as the first ones counted.
Then there is the item that looks like a footnote: Senator Chuck Grassley, 93, will not resign before his term ends in 2029. That is his right, and it is also a symptom. A 93-year-old holding a Senate seat through 2029 is not a Republican quirk alone; it is the gerontocracy that both parties have normalized, and Democrats have their own versions of it. A party that just won on the strength of voters demanding something new should not be smug. It should clear its own house, make room for younger members, and stop treating seniority as a substitute for a mandate.
So here is the test. Democrats have the House, the Senate, and an electorate that crossed old partisan lines to give them both. If they protect the filibuster, hide behind the parliamentarian, and spend 2027 wooing Republicans who will never reciprocate, they will have turned a landslide into a cautionary tale. If they use it, they may finally prove that the voters in Texas and Ohio were right to take the risk.
Voters lent Democrats this majority. Interest accrues quickly.
