Jan-Werner Mueller argued in an Oct. 26 opinion column in The Guardian that Democrats appeared increasingly likely to win a significant victory in the 2026 United States midterms. His central advice was strategic: if Democrats win, they must decide what the result means because “no election outcome ever interprets itself,” and they should use the victory to challenge Republican claims to competence rather than stop at a rejection of President Donald Trump. Mueller described this as a historic opportunity to dislodge the Republican Party’s image as the party of national security and the party best trusted with the economy. He also noted that successful politicians are entitled to interpret a vote as they see fit.

His prospective analysis opened with the observation that it increasingly looked as though Democrats could expect a significant midterm victory, whether it was described as a landslide, earthquake or wave. The column did not report an outcome; it asked how Democrats should interpret one. Mueller said they should not rest content with the conclusion that only what moderate leaders and consultants like to call “kitchen table issues” really mattered.

Mueller’s cost-of-living example was a joke: “every gas station display of prices has become an ad for Democrats.” He said some displays connected the relatively abstract issue of corruption to the daily misery of many Americans. A separate photo caption identified Abdul El-Sayed as the Democratic candidate for Michigan’s Senate seat and credited the image to Robin Buckson/Detroit News/AP.

In his interpretation of 2024, Republicans massively benefited when elite actors, including Silicon Valley oligarchs and many journalists, read a globally important “vibe shift” into the presidential result. Mueller rejected the account that a large majority thirsted for a far-right agenda, writing that “what political scientists politely call ‘low-information voters’ were simply fed up with inflation, as opposed to a large majority thirsting for a far-right agenda.” Trumpists turned that perception to their advantage, he wrote.

Democrats could stay relatively timid and read the outcome as simply a rejection of Donald Trump and the most egregious elements of his misrule since January 2025, Mueller said. They should also point out the “spectacular cruelty of ICE” and the incitement to hatred in which Stephen Miller and JD Vance regularly engage, which he said was deeply unpopular with the public. But treating the result as only a referendum on Trumpism, he wrote, would be a mistake.

Economically, Mueller said the Republican Party had long benefited from its image as the party of business and the party best qualified to boost the economy. He added that some low-information voters continued to buy into the myth of Trump as a great entrepreneur. Mueller argued that the actual record showed something different, both for Trump and his string of bankruptcies and for the party as a whole. Trump’s tariffs exemplified policies so irrational and damaging that the old Republican establishment would never have contemplated them, making it easy to overlook continuities in the broader record.

Mueller contrasted the party’s professed concern about debt and deficits with its own historical record. He said Republicans had given the country Reagan, Bush and Trump, all of whom massively increased the national debt by pushing through enormous tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. He also described the party’s debt concern as one of Elon Musk’s “disingenuous justifications” for Doge’s “chainsaw massacres.”

In the postwar period, Mueller said economic growth, job creation and even stock-market returns had on the whole been higher under Democratic administrations. He said average gains were not enough for the uber-wealthy, who could buy tax cuts by donating massively to Republicans. Mueller predicted that once Democrats were in charge, Republicans would rediscover the debt they had helped cause as a national crisis requiring deep cuts to social security.

Foreign policy gave Democrats another opening, Mueller argued. He said the Trump administration’s catastrophic record was partly explained by conduct the old Republican establishment could never have imagined: recklessly alienating allies, with the result that the United States might never be trusted by NATO countries again; massively damaging soft power by mistreating foreign students and undermining American universities’ ability to attract international talent; and blatantly interfering in elections to favor the global far right. For Mueller, these departures from what the old establishment would have considered could coexist with broader continuities in the Republican Party’s record.

Mueller said the Iran war showed continuities with the George W Bush era that neoconservatives probably find uncomfortable to contemplate: an inability to think strategically and an apparent indifference to the loss of human life. He said a line could be drawn from the torture memos to the murders at sea and plans for a public execution under US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Yet Mueller said the Republican Party still lived off its image as the party of Ronald Reagan, which was supremely competent in national security. He advised Democrats not to compete over how often they used the word “lethality” in one sentence. Instead, they should point out the shame of Republican betrayal of Ukraine, with some murmuring on the part of has-beens like Thom Tillis aside; how damaging the loss of bases in the Middle East would turn out to be; and what he called the deep unseriousness of putting a second-rate TV host in charge of the world’s most powerful military force from the very beginning of Trump 2.0.

Mueller also wrote, “There might be monuments to both Trump and Hegseth in Moscow and Beijing one day,” adding, “after all, they effectively capitulated to the former and sped up the rise of the latter.”

Mueller then challenged the conventional account that the Biden administration had overreached by being too woke, pursuing too ambitious a Green New Deal and being too harsh in its criticism of MAGA Republicans. Within that account, the overreach made a backlash inevitable and carried the implication that the backlash was at least somewhat legitimate. His counterargument was: “But what if Joe Biden’s mistake was to assume that there were still many Republicans who cared about policy – as opposed to endless culture war performance a la Hegseth – and long-term success for the country?”

Finally, Mueller asked Democrats to seize the opportunity to discredit their opponents in the way Franklin D Roosevelt made the most of the Great Depression rather than “pining for bipartisanship.” He proposed showing that Republicans running away from Trump were complicit in the misrule and that the misrule was part of a larger story predating Trump. His closing argument was that the problems extended beyond one administration and could give Democrats a basis to contest the Republican Party’s economic and national-security record.