Why American Exceptionalism Belongs to the People, and What the 2026 Midterms Should Teach Those Who Lead Them
I. A Supporter’s Candour
Let me state at the outset that I have been, and remain, a supporter of President Donald Trump. I share much of his Weltanschauung. I regard him as a necessary corrective, a “Disruptor in Chief” to an establishment that had grown comfortable, self-referential and indifferent to the people it governed, and I regard his indefatigable energy as the defining attribute of the foremost political athlete of our age. He believes, without irony or apology, in American exceptionalism, and he has sought to redress imbalances and slights, both real and perceived, that a generation of more polished leaders preferred to manage rather than confront.
It is precisely because I hold those views that Tuesday’s result demands candour. The President and his party were dealt a serious repudiation. In January, Democrats will control both chambers of Congress, having flipped at least seven Senate seats, including Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Maine and both Carolinas,[1] and having won a House majority that appeared on track to be the largest since 2008.[2] The outcome reinforces certain enduring truths about the United States and its political culture, and it offers further lessons that Republicans would be wise to absorb before the 2028 cycle, which, in practical terms, began this morning.
My thesis is twofold. First, the President and the GOP failed to make the affirmative case for American exceptionalism, and offered in its place a campaign about the President himself. Second, and more fundamentally, the American constitutional order was designed by men who abhorred the consolidation of power in the hands of any single faction, and the electorate, acting through the very machinery those men built, did exactly what that order invites it to do. Tuesday was not a breakdown of the Republic. It was the Republic working.
II. The Architecture of Restraint
The men who devised the Constitution did so after the Articles of Confederation had proven a flaccid and flawed foundational document. True children of the Enlightenment, they created a system that has endured for nearly two and a half centuries and that, in the very year the nation marked its two hundred and fiftieth birthday, remains resilient. Before ratification, the Constitution was debated publicly through a body of essays published in New York newspapers under the pseudonym Publius. Their authors, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, argued decisively that liberty would be secured not by the virtue of rulers but by structure: a bicameral legislature, an energetic but bounded executive and an independent judiciary, each set against the others in a deliberate system of checks and balances.
The text itself is the first witness. Article I vests “All legislative Powers herein granted” in Congress; Article II vests “The executive Power” in a President; Article III vests “The judicial Power” in the courts. Members of the House are chosen “every second Year,” while Senators serve staggered six-year terms, one third renewed at each biennial election, so that no single vote can deliver the whole of the government to a passing majority.[3] Madison explained in Federalist No. 52 that the House “should have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people,” and that “frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy by which this dependence and sympathy can be effectually secured.”[4] The midterm is not an inconvenience to presidential government. It is a deliberate design feature, a biennial audit by the sovereign people.
In Federalist No. 10, Madison confronted what the eighteenth century called faction and what we now call party:
“By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
He then described, with remarkable prescience, the two possible remedies:
“There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.”
Madison rejected the first remedy as worse than the disease, for “liberty is to faction what air is to fire.” His conclusion was that “the causes of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”[5] The Constitution is that means of control.
Federalist No. 47 put the point more bluntly still: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”[6] Note the words “or many” and “elective.” Madison’s concern was not confined to kings. It extended to any concentration of power, including one ratified at the ballot box. Federalist No. 51 supplies the mechanism: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” because “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.”[7]
The founding generation shared this anxiety across the factional divide that soon emerged among them. John Adams wrote in 1780 that “there is nothing I dread So much, as a Division of the Republick into two great Parties, each arranged under its Leader, and concerting Measures in opposition to each other.”[8] George Washington’s Farewell Address warned that “the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension … is itself a frightful despotism.”[9] The Founders could not prevent the rise of parties, but they built a structure in which no party could long govern alone without renewing its consent.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the most perceptive foreign observer the Republic has ever had, identified the same danger. “If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed,” he wrote, “that event may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation.”[10] The genius of the American system, in Tocqueville’s telling, lay in its refusal to allow any majority, however large, to become unlimited.
The two great originalists of the modern Supreme Court have made the same argument from the bench. Justice Antonin Scalia, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2011, put it with characteristic vigour:
“Every banana republic has a bill of rights. Every president for life has a bill of rights. … [T]hink of the word ‘constitution;’ it does not mean a bill of rights, it means structure. … The real constitution of the Soviet Union did not prevent the centralization of power in one person or in one party. And when that happens, the game is over.”[11]
At the same hearing, Scalia told Senators that Americans “should learn to love gridlock,” which the Framers “believed would be the main protection of minorities.”[12] Writing in NLRB v. Noel Canning, he added that “the Constitution’s core, government-structuring provisions are no less critical to preserving liberty than are the later adopted provisions of the Bill of Rights.”[13]
Justice Clarence Thomas has been, if anything, more insistent. In Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads, he reminded his colleagues that the Framers “were concerned not just with the starting allocation, but with the ‘gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department,’” and that “it was this fear that prompted the Framers to build checks and balances into our constitutional structure.” He closed with a sentence every conservative should commit to memory: “We have too long abrogated our duty to enforce the separation of powers required by our Constitution.”[14]
These are not liberal jurists lamenting a conservative President. They are the intellectual lodestars of the conservative legal movement, and their teaching applies with equal force when the faction in power is one’s own. A Republican who celebrated divided government as a check on Barack Obama in 2010 and 2014 cannot, with intellectual honesty, regard it as illegitimate obstruction in 2026. Scalia would have recognized Tuesday instantly: the structure, doing its work.
I write as a Canadian, and the contrast is instructive. Ottawa is drifting toward a more absolutist and less accountable style of rule. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Building Canada Act permits his cabinet to designate projects in the “national interest” and then override federal laws, environmental reviews and permitting to approve them,[15] and its successor, Bill C-39, a 246-page omnibus bill, would make those once-temporary powers permanent.[16] Its review is moving at an unusually quick pace, with only six committee meetings set aside to hear witnesses.[17] The Fraser Institute observes that the government has paired omnibus legislation with time allocation and other procedural devices that compress or eliminate parliamentary scrutiny altogether.[18] A Prime Minister who treats Parliament as an inconvenience, and who answers the common man’s struggle with rents, groceries and stagnant wages by enlarging the discretion of his own cabinet, has, in my view, lost the common touch before he ever cultivated it.
Nor is the Canadian bench a dependable check, for it has grown too comfortable substituting its own policy judgments for those of Parliament. In Quebec (Attorney General) v. Senneville, a 5-4 Supreme Court of Canada struck down the one-year mandatory minimum sentences for possessing and accessing child pornography,[19] reasoning not from the offenders actually before it, who had admitted to possessing hundreds of abusive files, but from a hypothetical teenager.[20] In a Westminster system, where executive and legislature are already fused, an unrestrained cabinet joined to an activist judiciary leaves the citizen with few of the defences Madison built. Canadians would do well to envy, rather than mock, the gridlock Scalia urged Americans to love.
III. Coalitions and the Temptation of Hegemony
America has been, in substance, a two-party system since the Civil War era. At intervals one party has enjoyed near-hegemonic power: the Republicans of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, and the Democrats of the New Deal. Such flirtations with hegemony arise when the coalitions underpinning a party become semi-permanent. For the post-war Republicans, the cement was the Union victory, the abolitionist cause, the votes of freedmen, the economic preponderance of the North and the martyrdom of Lincoln. For Franklin Roosevelt, it was a coalition of industrial workers and organized labour, urban ethnic communities, Catholics and Jews, Black Americans who had abandoned the party of Lincoln, and the white South, held together by the undeniable perception that FDR and the Democrats were the party of action and remedy. That coalition, in various forms, endured until Ronald Reagan assembled the modern conservative alliance of free-marketeers, social conservatives, defence hawks and the “Reagan Democrats” of the industrial Midwest.
Donald Trump’s coalition was something new: a coalition of the disaffected, Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables,” including robust portions of previously rock-solid Democratic constituencies. These were Americans who saw themselves left behind by coastal elites and lectured by Ivy League “know-betters” after the hyper-divisive Obama years, and who found identity and confidence under the Make America Great Again banner in 2016. In 2024 they returned, aided by exceptional strategists, material alliances with leaders in technology and an incredibly weak opponent, and swept every swing state. Hispanic voters, historically a pillar of the Democratic coalition, divided almost evenly, 51 to 48 per cent for Kamala Harris according to Pew Research.[21]
Yet the lesson of American history is that no coalition is permanent, and the Constitution ensures that every coalition must be re-earned at two-year intervals. The realignment that seemed in 2024 to herald a durable Republican majority proved, on Tuesday, to be contingent.
IV. What the Numbers Tell Us
The statistics are sobering for any Republican and should be read with clear eyes.
- Presidential approval. National exit polling put the President’s approval at 38 per cent, a figure CBS News reported as on track to be the lowest recorded for a President at a midterm, below George W. Bush in 2006.[22] Forty-three per cent of voters said one reason for their vote was to express opposition to the President, against 16 per cent who voted to express support.[23]
- Cost of living. Eighty-nine per cent of voters said the cost of living was a major or crucial factor in their vote.[24]
- Latino voters. Republican House candidates won roughly 35 per cent of Latino voters, down from the 46 per cent who supported Mr. Trump in 2024; Democrats won 62 per cent.[25]
- Young voters. Voters aged 18 to 29 broke 72 to 25 per cent for Democrats.[26] Republican support in that cohort fell from more than 40 per cent in 2024 to about 25 per cent.[27]
- Union households. Union households favoured Democrats 59 to 39 per cent; rural and small-town voters remained Republican, 58 to 40, but were outweighed by suburban voters (58 to 40 Democratic) and urban voters (71 to 27).[28]
- Jewish voters. Notwithstanding the administration’s robust support for Israel and its forceful stance on campus antisemitism, Jewish voters remained two-to-one Democratic, 67 to 32 per cent.[29]
- Turnout. Roughly 54 million Americans voted before Election Day, shattering the previous midterm early-vote record of 45.9 million set in 2022.[30]
Vice President JD Vance captured the most uncomfortable truth: “The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.”[31] That is a harder verdict than a turnout failure. The farmers, workers and union members who formed the sinew of the 2016 and 2024 coalitions did not merely stay home. Many of them came out and voted for the other side.
Fairness requires context. Since the Second World War, the President’s party has lost House seats in 18 of 20 midterms, by an average of 26 seats, rising to 35 when the President’s approval is below 50 per cent.[32] Barack Obama’s Democrats lost 64 House seats in 2010, and Mr. Trump’s own Republicans lost 42 in 2018.[33] Midterm reversal is the system’s default setting. What distinguished Tuesday was its reach into the Republican heartland. Texas elected James Talarico, its first Democratic Senator since 1988, by roughly twelve points over Ken Paxton;[34] Kansas elected its first Democratic Senator since 1932;[35] and Democrats flipped five governorships to hold a majority of statehouses for the first time in sixteen years.[36]
V. Walk with Kings, Nor Lose the Common Touch
Rudyard Kipling, in the poem every schoolboy of an earlier age could recite, set out the test:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings, nor lose the common touch,[37]
Few lines better capture what made Donald Trump a political phenomenon. In 2016, a billionaire from Fifth Avenue, a man who had walked with kings his entire life, spoke to the laid-off steelworker in Ohio, the farmer in Iowa and the waitress in Pennsylvania in a language they recognized as their own. From the moment he descended the golden escalator, he stood as the champion of the American David against the institutional Goliath. He unified the great mass of Americans who believed their country had become something that no longer cared about them: the creation of Northeastern and Pacific Coast liberals, beholden to special interests, who used regulation, taxation and credentialism as a bulwark against advancement and who spoke of “flyover country,” the majority of the nation, as though it were a foreign land. Trump, unlike the lofty patricians John Kerry, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, or the mainstream media that indulged them, spoke to those Americans and, crucially, about them. The rallies were about their grievances, their aspirations and their dignity. He was the vessel; they were the cause.
In 2026 the common touch was lost. The marathon of rallies was no longer about them. The President spoke at length about himself, not as the Princeps, the first citizen who remains very much one of the people, but as the victor of this state, by this margin, reciting a litany of past triumphs and present slights. It removed the most important element of his past victories, namely the people who had given them to him. A self-regard that his supporters long forgave as showmanship came to resemble something else: his name affixed to public institutions, and monuments to American greatness proposed through the prism of a single man. Add to this the perception, amplified relentlessly by an unquestionably hostile press, that the President, his family and his friends have profited from the office. Whether fair or unfair, and much of it is unfair, voters cited concerns about corruption alongside prices and the war as reasons for their rebuke.[38]
Reagan understood the distinction instinctively. In his Farewell Address he disclaimed personal credit for his own success: “I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn’t spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation.”[39] That is the common touch in a single sentence. The man who walks with kings keeps it only so long as the people remain the subject of the sentence.
In the Roman idiom, the President should have campaigned as Donald Trump, Tribune of the Plebs, the people’s advocate against the grandees of the Senate. Instead he too often resembled Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome, or Lucius Cornelius Sulla, whose monuments celebrated Sulla. In a republic, it is the tribune who wins elections.
VI. The Case Not Made
What could the President have done to avoid this electoral Götterdämmerung? He could have made the case for American exceptionalism, the strongest argument any Republican possesses, and he left it largely unmade. Tocqueville, who supplied the very vocabulary, wrote that “the position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”[40] The British historian Paul Johnson, a man of the right and a lifelong admirer of the Republic, opened A History of the American People with these words: “The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind.”[41] He concluded that the American story “is essentially one of difficulties being overcome by intelligence and skill, by faith and strength of purpose, by courage and persistence.”[42]
That is the exceptionalism of the common man: the product of common sense and hard work, of the immigrant shopkeeper, the tradesman and the family farm, not the achievement of any one leader. Reagan reminded Californians in 1967 that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,”[43] and he spent a career describing a “shining city upon a hill” whose glory lay in its citizens, a city “teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.”[44] The 2026 stump speech offered little of this. Its stream-of-consciousness, rambling diatribes, delivered in every swing state, focused instead on the radical wing of the Democratic Party and sought to sow fear. It was no more persuasive than President Biden’s 2022 Independence Hall address, in which he told the nation that “MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”[45] Both were nonsense, and fear is a poor substitute for aspiration.
The war with Iran illustrates the same failure. I believe, as many do, that confronting Iran was necessary. But it has been prosecuted as a muted half-measure, and voters told exit pollsters plainly that they disliked it.[46] Here, too, the Constitution speaks. Article I gives Congress, not the President, the power “To declare War.”[47] Hamilton, the most vigorous advocate of executive energy among the Founders, explained in Federalist No. 69 that the President’s authority as Commander in Chief “would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces,” while that of the British king “extends to the DECLARING of war,” a power the Constitution assigned to the legislature.[48]
The President should have invoked the Clausewitzian trinity of government, military and people. He should have gone before Congress and sought a declaration of war, or at the very least an express authorization, against a genuine enemy. He should have told the American people, in no uncertain terms, that this war must be won and that there will be costs. Fighting wars as an opaque exercise of executive power is dangerous and unbecoming of the great Republic; it asks for sacrifice without first asking for consent. Vice President Vance has said bluntly that “the reason we lost is the war.”[49] I would refine that diagnosis. The war became a political liability not because it was waged, but because it was never truly argued. A war the people have not been asked to own is a war they will, sooner or later, disown.
VII. The Democrats: A Battle Won, a War Unsettled
Credit where it is due. The Democrats, despite an internecine struggle between their institutional and sensible wing and a postmodernist, frankly radical socialist insurgency, out-campaigned the GOP. They captured the mantle of economic populism, notwithstanding that their own party was the architect of much of the inflationary malaise of the Biden years that gave rise to this form of populism in the first place. They also capitalized on weak candidates. In North Carolina, Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chairman chosen by the President to succeed Thom Tillis, lost to Roy Cooper by nearly twenty points.[50] In Texas, Ken Paxton, impeached by his own party in the Texas House,[51] defeated Senator John Cornyn in a runoff with the President’s endorsement[52] and then surrendered a seat Republicans had held since 1988. Candidate quality matters.
A midterm wave, however, is not a presidential mandate. The question for 2028 is whether the Democratic primary electorate can produce a nominee capable of winning a general election, and on present evidence the answer is far from obvious.
Kamala Harris leads early primary polling, with 12 per cent in a recent New York Times/Siena survey.[53] Yet her penchant for circuitous, meandering “word salad” answers became a national punchline, and in 2024 voters cited a lack of clarity about what she actually stood for.[54] She lost the 2024 election, and her first presidential campaign ended before a single primary vote was cast.[55] Even fellow Democrats, including Senator Elissa Slotkin, have said publicly that she should not run again.[56]
Gavin Newsom is a greasy, lifetime politician, the polished and pomaded product of San Francisco’s political machine, who has held public office almost without interruption since the late 1990s and who leaves the governorship of a state synonymous, for many Americans, with high taxes, high costs and visible disorder. He is bound to the Pelosi political family by marriage, through Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law Ron Pelosi, and the former Speaker has called him “extraordinarily talented” while declining, for now, to formally endorse him.[57] One former Pelosi aide described her as “a Gavin fan girl.”[58] Newsom has also said he would not run if Ms. Harris does,[59] hardly the posture of a man confident he can carry Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a gifted communicator and a formidable fundraiser, but she is, in my respectful view, an unqualified socialist. A self-described democratic socialist whose working life before Congress consisted of a few years in organizing and hospitality, she has never run a government, a business or a budget, and her signature policy contribution, the Green New Deal, is a manifesto rather than a programme. Prediction markets nevertheless placed her chances of winning the presidency at 13 per cent the morning after the election.[60] No avowed socialist has ever won a general election for President, and the America that elected Reagan twice is unlikely to make her the first.
The Democrats do have genuinely excellent possibilities. Governor Andy Beshear has twice won the governorship of Kentucky, a state the President carried by roughly thirty points. Former Congressman Harold Ford Jr. is a thoughtful centrist with a gift for speaking across the aisle. Senator Jon Ossoff, who held his Georgia seat on Tuesday,[61] has overtaken the Vice President in the prediction markets.[62] The question is whether any of them can survive a primary system that would require them to genuflect to the progressive wing of the party.
VIII. The Republican Bench and 2028
The GOP enters the 2028 cycle with the stronger bench, led by Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Governor Ron DeSantis, and with a nominating culture that has, in recent cycles, produced winnable candidates, something the Democrats have struggled to do.
JD Vance is the most articulate exponent of the working-class conservatism that may prove to be the President’s most important legacy. A Marine veteran, a graduate of Yale Law School and the author of Hillbilly Elegy, he knows the Americans whom coastal elites dismissed not from a seminar room but from the school of hard knocks, a bootstrap ascent out of Middletown, Ohio, and he can speak to them without condescension. His post-election statement displayed a candour rare in Washington: “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.”[63]
Has Tuesday hurt his chances? Almost certainly, at least for now. His odds of winning the presidency on the Kalshi prediction market fell from 20 per cent on November 2 to 14 per cent the morning after the election, and his odds of winning the nomination from 35 to 30 per cent.[64] He now faces the classic vice-presidential dilemma: distance himself from the President and risk the base, or embrace the President and inherit the rebuke. History is not encouraging; only one sitting Vice President since Martin Van Buren, George H.W. Bush in 1988, has been elected directly to the presidency. But 2028 is, as the Council on Foreign Relations noted this morning, 735 days away,[65] a political eternity. If Vance can convert his candour into a coherent programme on prices, war and the dignity of work, the damage may prove temporary.
Marco Rubio brings gravitas, foreign-policy depth and a personal story, the son of Cuban immigrants who worked as a bartender and a maid, that speaks directly to the very Latino voters who deserted the party on Tuesday. Some Republicans are already quietly hoping he will challenge Vance for the nomination.[66]
Ron DeSantis can point to the one large Republican state that held. Amid the carnage elsewhere, Florida Republicans won every statewide race,[67] and Byron Donalds became the nation’s first elected Black Republican governor.[68] The margins were uncomfortably thin, and DeSantis, to his credit, said so plainly: “we’re in a deep hole nationally as a result of this election.”[69] That combination of results and realism is precisely what the party will need.
IX. Conclusion: The Republic Repairs Its Faults
All is not lost for the GOP or for the President’s legacy. The American economy remains extraordinarily dynamic, propelled by onshoring and a renaissance in industrial investment. Innovation and entrepreneurship continue to advance. The United States has been a net total energy exporter since 2019.[70] The work of DOGE, although muted, placed mass and institutionalized waste at the centre of the national conversation, and the “One Big Beautiful Bill” made substantive changes to taxation, much of which has strengthened the lives of working families. Those are real achievements, and history will record them.
Nor is divided government a calamity. It is the Framers’ design. A President armed with the veto and a Congress armed with the purse must now bargain, as Reagan bargained with Tip O’Neill, and the country has often been well served by exactly that discipline. Tocqueville observed that “the great privilege of the Americans does not simply consist in their being more enlightened than other nations, but in their being able to repair the faults they may commit.”[71] The Republican Party should now repair its own: return the people to the centre of its message; make the case for American exceptionalism as the achievement of ordinary Americans rather than of any one man; ask Congress and the people to own the nation’s wars; and nominate candidates of quality.
Were 2028 to offer a choice between two exceptional, rational and dedicated candidates, America, regardless of the electoral outcome, would be in good hands. And the Republican who wins will be the one who can walk with kings, nor lose the common touch.
Trevor R. Parry, M.A., LL.B., LL.M. (Tax), CLU, TEP
Barrister & Solicitor · TRP Strategy Group
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[1]Associated Press, “Democrats win the US House and Senate as voters deliver a decisive rebuke,” November 4, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/midterm-election-house-senate-democrats-republicans-trump-f126e12e05b579a327b98481c0ae2226
[2]The New York Times, “U.S. House Election Results,” November 4, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/11/03/us/elections/results-house.html
[3]U.S. Const. art. I, § 1; art. I, § 2, cl. 1; art. I, § 3, cl. 2; art. II, § 1, cl. 1; art. III, § 1. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
[4]James Madison, The Federalist No. 52 (1788). https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed52.asp
[5]James Madison, The Federalist No. 10 (1787). https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp
[6]James Madison, The Federalist No. 47 (1788). https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed47.asp
[7]James Madison, The Federalist No. 51 (1788). https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp
[8]John Adams to Jonathan Jackson, October 2, 1780, Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-10-02-0113
[9]George Washington, Farewell Address (1796), Avalon Project, Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp
[10]Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, ch. XV (Henry Reeve trans., 1835). https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de-tocqueville/democracy-america/ch15.htm
[11]Considering the Role of Judges Under the Constitution of the United States: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 112th Cong. (2011) (statement of Justice Antonin Scalia). https://www.congress.gov/event/112th-congress/senate-event/LC1576/text
[12]David G. Savage, “Justice Scalia: Americans ‘should learn to love gridlock,’” Los Angeles Times, October 5, 2011. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-xpm-2011-oct-05-la-pn-scalia-testifies-20111005-story.html
[13]NLRB v. Noel Canning, 573 U.S. 513, 570-71 (2014) (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgment). https://www.supremecourt.gov/xmls/archive/12-1281.xml
[14]Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads, 575 U.S. 43, 74, 91 (2015) (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment), quoting The Federalist No. 51. https://www.supremecourt.gov/xmls/archive/13-1080.xml
[15]CBC News, “Carney’s major projects bill passed. Now he says ‘the real work begins.’” https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bill-c5-what-next-1.7575849
[16]CBC News, “Critics accuse Carney government of proposing ‘sacrifice zones’ for the environment,” November 3, 2026. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/building-canada-strong-c39-expert-environmental-concerns-9.7357425
[17]“This is no way to ‘build Canada strong,’” St. Catharines Standard, November 4, 2026. https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/politics/political-opinion/this-is-no-way-to-build-canada-strong/article_4e9f374e-60da-50e4-b46f-35d0ad3aea59.html
[18]Fraser Institute, “Is Parliament no more than a democracy theme park?” (republished by Todayville, October 30, 2026). https://www.todayville.com/calgary/is-parliament-no-more-than-a-democracy-theme-park/
[19]Quebec (Attorney General) v. Senneville, 2025 SCC 33. https://www.scc-csc.ca/judgments-jugements/cb/2025/40882/
[20]Kerry Sun, “The flimsy excuse the Supreme Court used…” (commentary), Yahoo News Canada, November 4, 2025. https://ca.news.yahoo.com/kerry-sun-supreme-court-no-153653244.html
[21]Agence France-Presse, “Numbers that tell the story of the Democrats’ midterm blowout,” November 4, 2026 (citing Pew Research Center). https://www.afp.com/en/numbers-tell-story-democrats-midterm-blowout
[22]CBS News, “Live election results for the 2026 midterms,” November 3-4, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/live-updates/election-day-2026-midterms/
[23]NBC News, “NBC News Exit Poll: Three-quarters of voters disapprove of Congress,” November 4, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/live-blog/midterm-election-results-2026-news-trump-live-updates-rcna605763/rcrd122642?canonicalCard=true
[24]CBS News, “2026 House midterm election results as Democrats capture majority,” November 4, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/house-election-results-2026/
[25]NBC News, “Many voters saw midterm election as a rebuke of Trump, NBC News Exit Poll shows,” November 4, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/exit-poll-trump-midterms-voters-economy-disapproval-rcna607045
[26]NBC News, “National Exit Polls: Election 2026 Results.” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-elections/exit-polls
[27]“Top takeaways from the US midterm elections,” Charlotte Observer, November 4, 2026. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/nation-world/world/article317910748.html
[28]NBC News, “National Exit Polls: Election 2026 Results.” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-elections/exit-polls
[29]Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Democrats take Senate and House in shift that could push US further away from Israel,” November 3-4, 2026 (citing the NBC News exit poll). https://www.jta.org/2026/11/03/politics/americans-head-to-the-polls-in-races-with-major-implications-for-us-israel-policy
[30]“What early voting does and doesn’t tell us about the 2026 midterms,” USA Today, November 2, 2026. https://witness.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2026/11/02/early-voting-data-2026-midterm-elections/92562865007/
[31]Fox News, “Vance’s scathing Iran war postmortem puts potential 2028 GOP showdown in focus,” November 4, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/vances-scathing-iran-war-postmortem-puts-potential-2028-gop-showdown-focus-everyone-knows-why
[32]Domenico Montanaro, “How to think about the midterms,” NPR, November 1, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/11/01/g-s1-151146/how-to-think-about-the-midterms-and-the-political-moment-the-country-is-in
[33]Al Jazeera, “How the president’s party has fared in every US midterm election since 1946,” November 2, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/11/2/how-the-presidents-party-has-fared-in-every-us-midterm-election-since-1946
[34]Associated Press, “Texas U.S. Senate Election Live Results 2026.” https://apnews.com/projects/elections-2026/texas-us-senate-results/
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[36]Stateline, “Democrats win majority of governorships for the first time in 16 years,” November 4, 2026. https://stateline.org/2026/11/04/democrats-set-to-win-majority-of-governorships-for-the-first-time-in-16-years/
[37]Rudyard Kipling, “If” (1910), Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if—
[38]Associated Press, “Democrats win the US House and Senate,” November 4, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/midterm-election-house-senate-democrats-republicans-trump-f126e12e05b579a327b98481c0ae2226
[39]Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address to the Nation, January 11, 1989, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/farewell-address-nation
[40]Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, bk. 1, ch. IX (1840). https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America/Volume_2/Book_1/Chapter_9
[41]Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 3. https://ia600501.us.archive.org/29/items/paul-johnson-a-history-of-the-american-people/Paul%20Johnson%20A%20History%20Of%20The%20American%20People.pdf
[42]Quoted in Pauline Maier, “The Do-It-Yourself Society,” The New York Times Book Review, March 1, 1998. https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/reviews/980301.01maiert.html
[43]Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address as Governor of California, January 5, 1967, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/january-5-1967-inaugural-address-public-ceremony
[44]Reagan, Farewell Address, supra note 39.
[45]Joseph R. Biden, Remarks on the Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation, Philadelphia, September 1, 2022. https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/09/01/remarks-by-president-bidenon-the-continued-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-nation/
[46]NBC News, “NBC News Exit Poll: Iran war is unpopular with voters,” November 4, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/live-blog/midterm-election-results-2026-news-trump-live-updates-rcna605763/rcrd122646?canonicalCard=true
[47]U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 11. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
[48]Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 69 (1788). https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed69.asp
[49]PBS NewsHour, “Vance blames Iran war for GOP midterm losses,” November 4, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/vance-blames-iran-war-for-gop-midterm-losses
[50]NPR, “Democrat Roy Cooper wins a North Carolina Senate seat,” November 3-4, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/11/03/g-s1-150958/north-carolina-senate-results
[51]PBS NewsHour, “Live Results: Texas Senate midterm election,” November 4, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/live-results-texas-senate-midterm-election
[52]ABC10, “Live election night results: Texas Senate race 2026.” https://www.abc10.com/article/news/politics/elections/texas-senate-election-results-james-talarico-ken-paxton/507-a1bae84a-8d98-4850-8538-345f2be5fb73
[53]The Hill, “Democrats brace for a 2028 presidential free-for-all,” November 3, 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6175916-2028-presidential-race-midterm-elections/
[54]MS NOW, “‘Question of the hour’: Harris assesses her next move as 2028 looms,” October 26, 2026. https://www.ms.now/news/kamala-harris-2028-president-election-midterms
[55]Reuters, “Kamala Harris returns to US campaign trail with midterms, 2028 in view,” October 24, 2026. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/nation-world/national/article317759862.html
[56]MS NOW, supra note 54.
[57]“Nancy Pelosi talks 2026 midterms, potential Gavin Newsom 2028 presidential run,” Lodi News-Sentinel, October 27, 2026. https://www.lodinews.com/news/national/article_782d5749-f765-5f57-9864-edfd43e1e00a.html
[58]“Nancy Pelosi is Gavin Newsom’s ‘fan girl’ and will boost his 2028 bid,” Yahoo News, September 17, 2026 (citing Axios). https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/nancy-pelosi-gavin-newsom-fan-150700906.html
[59]Deseret News, “Top Democrats are positioning themselves for the 2028 presidential race,” November 1, 2026. https://www.deseret.com/politics/2026/11/01/where-top-democrats-are-campaigning-ahead-of-midterm-elections-gives-a-look-into-2028/
[60]Financial Times, “US midterms 2026 live: Vance blames Iran war for crushing Republican defeat,” November 4, 2026 (citing Polymarket). https://www.ft.com/content/6bc8be51-5bd8-468c-bd3c-82bbc2866ba1
[61]Associated Press, “Midterm elections live updates,” November 4, 2026. https://apnews.com/live/midterm-election-2026?version=1793754565742
[62]Financial Times, supra note 60.
[63]PBS NewsHour, supra note 49.
[64]The Independent, “Vance’s 2028 hopes took a hit in the midterms,” November 4, 2026. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/jd-vance-2028-midterms-maga-rubio-b3079286.html
[65]James M. Lindsay, “The 2028 Presidential Race Is About to Begin,” Council on Foreign Relations, November 4, 2026. https://www.cfr.org/articles/the-2028-presidential-race-is-about-to-begin
[66]Washington Examiner, “Vance blames GOP midterm loss on Iran war,” November 4, 2026. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/4792151/vance-blames-iran-war-midterm-blowout/
[67]“Florida Republicans narrowly avert blue tsunami,” Orlando Sentinel, November 4, 2026. https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2026/11/04/florida-republicans-narrowly-avert-blue-tsunami-but-still-get-splashed-by-voter-anger/
[68]Associated Press, “Florida Governor Election Live Results 2026.” https://apnews.com/projects/elections-2026//florida-governor-results/
[69]Politico, “Florida Dems scrape together a few wins but miss the big, blue wave,” November 4, 2026. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/04/florida-dems-blue-margins-midterms-01149055
[70]U.S. Energy Information Administration, “U.S. energy facts explained: Imports and exports.” https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-and-exports.php
[71]Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, ch. XIII (Henry Reeve trans., 1835). https://americanliterature.com/author/alexis-de-tocqueville/book/democracy-in-america/chapter-xiii-government-of-the-democracy-in-america-part-iii
