In these days of extreme weather events, it seems odd to say that the US needs a big landslide. But a landslide defeat for President Donald Trump in November’s midterm elections is exactly what is required if the country is to start reversing his deliberate and rapid erosion of its democracy.
The respected Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University argues that in 2025 the US saw one of the most rapid declines in liberal democracy on record. “Democracy in the USA,” says its Democracy Report 2026, “is now at its worst in 60 years.” As the imperial republic marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, the danger seen at the very beginning of its constitutional order by anti-federalists such as Patrick Henry – that of an overmighty president abusing his executive power in an attempt to become a new king – has come closer than ever before.
V-Dem analysts note that in 2025 Trump issued no fewer than 225 executive orders whereas the Republican-controlled Congress passed just 49 laws, most of them on minor issues such as “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the rules for postponing certain deadlines by reason of disasters”. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, crafted to advance the so-called unitary executive theory, is, according to the project’s own tracker, more than halfway to completion – helped by rulings from the supreme court.
An important chapter in any would-be autocrat’s playbook is fixing the next election. It seems Trump is hard at work on this one too. Beside outrageous levels of partisan gerrymandering (responded to in kind by the Democrats in some places) there are multiple attempts to deny the vote to groups more likely to vote Democrat, whether by restricting mail-in ballots, demanding on-the-spot documentary proof of US citizenship or other legal and procedural devices. If the 3 November election result were to be close in a number of congressional districts that might swing control of the House of Representatives, Trump and the Republicans would pull out every stop to disqualify or exclude Democrat victors.
Hence the imperative of a landslide. As Hungary showed this spring, if the popular revulsion towards an incumbent is sufficiently widespread, and channelled into turning out to vote, it sweeps away all the obstacles that the would-be autocrat puts in place – and those obstacles were, taking all in all, larger in the Hungarian case than they are here. The election may not be fair; it may not even be entirely free; but the result is still irrefutably plain for all to see.
Now, if you ask who is doing most to bring about an anti-Trump landslide, the answer is clear: Donald Trump. After he campaigned on bread-and-butter issues for ordinary Americans, the combination of his tariffs and his war of choice in the Middle East has actually increased the cost of living – most visibly, in petrol prices for motorists. There is, to put it mildly, no obvious path to a victorious peace in a war against Iran which, according to official figures, has cost $37.5bn, with the new administration already requesting another $67.1bn for this purpose. Popular opposition to the war is approaching 60% in opinion polls, as is the president’s disapproval rating. The blatant corruption of his regime adds to his unpopularity. According to one estimate, he has so far enriched himself and his family to the tune of roughly $2bn. The latest revelation is the plan of the Fifa president and Trump crony, Gianni Infantino, to sell stakes in running the World Cup to an investment fund led by Joshua Kushner, the brother-in-law of Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Satire wilts at the pairing of Fifa and Trump.
All this adds up to the electoral equivalent of an open goal for the Democrats. But where’s the Lionel Messi or Harry Kane to put the ball in the net? Nowhere to be seen. As a European in the US, one keeps looking around and asking: “Where’s the leader of the opposition?” Where, to recall the Hungarian example, is an opposition figure like Péter Magyar, leading a disciplined, effective nationwide campaign, answering the widespread feeling that it’s time for a change with “and this is the change you need”?
Friends who study these things here at Stanford University tell me I’m looking for something that usually doesn’t exist at this stage. The 1994 midterm election, when House minority leader Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” shaped a nationwide campaign and helped deliver a big Republican victory, is the exception that proves the rule. Usually, the midterms are essentially a referendum on the incumbent president and his party – and usually the incumbents lose some seats, especially in the House of Representatives. But looking back over the results since the second world war, one sees that the level of House seats lost at midterm varies widely, from 54 in 1994 and 63 in 2010 to just five in 1986 and nine in 2022. This time round, a single-digit result would be vehemently and perhaps even violently contested afterwards.
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Even if a unifying opposition leader such as Magyar is not to be expected in the US system – not until we get a presidential candidate in 2028 – the Democrats are making a pretty poor job of kicking balls into that open goal. The 75-year-old Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, hardly resembles a prize striker. In opinion polls, they vie with Trump for unpopularity. Much of the energy is with democratic socialists like New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, but can they win in places like Michigan or Wisconsin? The New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein has toyed with the notion that this very diversity might be a strength: you need one kind of candidate in Kansas and another kind in Seattle. Horses for courses. But getting the wrong candidate in just a couple of the 35 Senate seats up for grabs this time seems likely to cost the Democrats their already slim chance of flipping the Senate as well.
What’s at stake here is not the future of the Democrats; it’s the future of democracy. A normal midterm change in control of the House is the absolute minimum needed to start checking, if not actually reversing, the unprecedented erosion of liberal democracy under Trump. That check will come partly through Congress’s constitutional powers to control government funding, to investigate and to impeach. If there’s an electoral landslide, however, it will come even more through the psychological shift, as Trump begins to look like his own worst nightmare – being a “loser”. For that very reason, the man who would be king will try first to prevent, then to circumvent and delegitimate a Democrat-controlled House with all the means at his disposal. Nonetheless, this would be the end of the beginning.
Last summer, I wrote a column arguing that Americans had 400 days to save their democracy. It’s now little more than 90.
