A Conversation With Academic Dean Daniel Drezner

On November 3, Americans headed to the polls to vote in the 2026 Midterm Elections. The resulting divided government, with Democratic majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate and two years left in the Trump administration, will almost certainly create friction in both domestic and foreign policymaking. 

The day after the election, The Fletcher School sat down with Academic Dean and Distinguished Professor of International Politics Daniel Drezner to understand how these results might play out over the next two years. Watch the full interview and read the transcript below.

The Fletcher School: What do the midterm results tell us? What was different this year versus 2024 and what do you think that means for 2028?

Academic Dean Daniel Drezner: The midterm results tell us a lot. It was an unambiguous signal, which is that voters were rejecting Republicans and particularly the Trump administration. In 2024 Donald Trump won, but he didn't win by much. It was always a narrow win in terms of the popular vote, something like 1.5 percentage points. But Trump being Trump, of course, sold this as the greatest mandate in electoral history. But, it turns out that if you launch a whole series of trade wars, launch an inconclusive war with Iran, and generally raise interest rates and prices for everyone, that isn’t going to be very popular. In fact, it's so unpopular that Democrats didn't just win in places you were expecting them to win, like North Carolina. They won in South Carolina. They won every statewide race in Texas. This has been truly a scale of a midterm victory that we haven't seen, frankly, since the Watergate years of 1974.

So the implications for 2028 are pretty significant. If for no other reason, it indicates it’s going to be a difficult two years for Trump going forward because he's going to have to deal with a Congress that is going to start out being rather hostile to him and with sizable majorities by Democrats. I think the other thing that makes this different is that the Republican side of the race in 2028 for the presidential election is now completely up in the air. You could have argued prior to the election that J.D. Vance was probably the front runner for a whole variety of reasons. The fact that Vance is already walking away from Trump’s foreign policy agenda the morning after and the fact that Ron DeSantis, the former governor of Florida, or soon to be former governor of Florida, was doing the same—that’s telling that Republicans are about to have a civil war, along with the Democrats, in terms of the contestation for the party nominations for the presidential election of 2028.

Donald Trump said that he thought that the results had to do with him not being on the ballot. What do you make of that?

I mean that's very convenient for Donald Trump to say that. There is a grain of truth to it. Donald Trump's political super power has always been that when his name is on the ballot, generally speaking, he has overperformed the polling. There is clearly a swath of the public that are not ordinary voters but will come out and vote for him, and that didn’t happen this year because his name wasn’t on the ballot.

That said, his fingerprints are all over what happened in 2026. First of all, as he was holding rally over rally over the past month, he said “act as if my name is on the ballot.” And it's worth remembering that while Donald Trump can mobilize his own voters, he also mobilizes his opponents in ways that you haven't seen before.

The other thing that Trump did is that he directly intervened in some pivotal elections in ways that hurt his party. So, backing Ken Paxton as the Republican nominee for the Senate in Texas, for example, or Darline Graham for the South Carolina Senate seat—those directly led to Democrats winning those seats. Similarly, forcing out Tom Tillis in North Carolina, that also led to a loss of a Senate seat.

And the other brutal fact of life when it comes to politics is that midterms are always a brutal referendum on the President whether their name is on the ballot or not.

What do these results mean for U.S. policymaking over the next two years?

In terms of what this means for policy for the next few years, you’re going to see a lot of gridlock. It’s possible there are issues where you could see Democrats and Trump cooperating. I mean certainly the Democrats have talked a lot about housing affordability. Donald Trump actually does have genuine expertise when it comes to real estate, and one could imagine trying to hammer out a bill. Although, it should be noted that one was passed last summer that Trump refused to sign even though it went into law.

There's a couple that have to be done—funding the government, that's gonna take up a lot of time and it wouldn’t surprise me if we see a couple of government shutdowns over the next two years.

I think the only policies you'll see that are actually likely to be implemented are those that can actually generate veto-proof majorities in Congress, which of course means that some Republicans as well as Democrats would have to agree to them. 

Now, I do think there are a couple of issues where there might be veto-proof majorities. You saw a massive blowback on AI and data centers. So I think the possibility of AI regulation is a big one, one that might actually command majorities from both parties. I also think you might see attempts to rein in Trump's use of tariffs. You've already seen Republican commentators blame the tariffs, among other things, for the midterm results. I could see a swath of Republicans deciding tariffs are taxes and we don't like raising taxes. So yeah, let's join the Democrats in restraining Trump in terms of imposing them.

Beyond that, there's not going to be much, short of another pandemic where you're going to have to pass emergency legislation. A lot of bills are going to be passed and a lot of bills are going to be vetoed.

How do these results impact foreign policy and global relations?

A lot of people have asked me, you know, how will the midterms affect U.S. foreign policy with a Democratic Congress. I actually co-authored a piece with Elizabeth Saunders from Columbia University in which we argue that frankly there's not going to be a ton of impact. The simple fact of life is that the President has much greater purview over foreign affairs than Congress. Congress can do some things, and I think Congress will use the power of the purse to try to constrain the Trump administration, particularly in terms of prosecuting the war in Iran. I don’t think the administration is going to get the $1.5 trillion dollar Defense budget they've been asking for, and it wouldn't surprise me if they impeach Pete Hegseth if he doesn't resign between now and the new Congress being sworn in.

That said, presidents still have an awful lot of sway over foreign policy, which means I expect that you’re going to see Trump still try to do whatever he wants. The difference is that you're going to see other countries be more willing to resist him because they know that Trump is a lame duck now and they know they can wait him out, an awful lot of the time.

I think the most radical things Trump will do—one possibility is that he might take military action in Cuba because he's got Marco Rubio whispering in his ear, and he might think of it as a problem that he could solve that's bedeviled U.S. administrations since Dwight Eisenhower. The other possibility is that he might decide to retrench the overseas basing of U.S. troops, particularly in Europe, in some ways as a penalty for what Europe has done. But, I don't think he can do it that quickly, and I don't think it's gonna be all that substantive.

How do these results impact the rest of the Trump agenda and the administration for the rest of his term?

How do the midterms affect the rest of the Trump agenda? There is no other Trump agenda? I mean, I'm not really joking here. I mean, if you think about what—ironically, Donald Trump has spent the first two years of his second term the way you would traditionally expect the lame duck to spend their second two years, which is he’s focused a lot on foreign policy, and he's focused a lot on remaking Washington, D.C. Beyond that the only signature piece of legislation was the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It is unlikely that there will be other significant legislation that will happen, and you will probably see Congress check the President's ability to remake the Executive Branch, things like renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War,” which they actually can't do without Congressional authorization.

So, I strongly suspect that what Trump is primarily going to focus on is remaking Washington, D.C.. It seems to be the one thing that he's genuinely interested in. It's telling that even today, the day after the election, he had a press conference where he was showing everyone what the ballroom is going to look like. And, his closing statement prior to the Midterms was in front of the Reflecting Pool—something else that he botched during the 250th celebrations. So, I actually think he’s going to focus more on what he can do to cement his legacy and I think he thinks of his legacy in the form of buildings.

This year, Democrats outperformed polling expectations, but in 2024 they drastically underperformed. What does that tell us about polling?

I would say that the thing to remember about polling is that it is a science, but it's radically an inexact one. Even in the last ten years, I have sympathy for pollsters because just the way you try to ask people questions has changed. It used to be that you only called people on landlines. Now, you can try to call people on cell phones, but a lot of people will block those. The other thing you can do is online polls, but that has a skewed effect, and we know that there are certain swaths of the public that don’t like answering polling questions.

I actually think, by and large, the polling error in 2024 wasn't that big. It was just that, when you have 50/50 toss-up races, even an error of two or three percent can make a huge difference. And indeed, in some ways we saw that with the 2026 Midterms where there was a two to three percent misplay on the Democratic side and that led to the sort of tsunami that we're seeing now.

I think the thing that I would tell people is that polls are a useful data point, but unless they’re outside the margin of error and unless it's a quality pollster, you have to discount the information somewhat.

What do you make of our country's tendency to be a reactive electorate? The last decade has certainly been more divisive than recent history, but the pattern of big swings back and forth isn't really new.

I would actually say that yes, it's true that Americans have swung back and forth between the two parties over the last, you know, ten to fifteen years. I would also say that’s not unique to the United States.

The truth is that in the post-2008 world, with the sort of surge of populism, I think an awful lot of people who live in democracies have a sort of permanent anti-incumbent attitude, and so whichever party in power gets punished no matter what. During the 2024 Election, it's true the Democrats didn’t win, but it was actually a year in which every single incumbent party that had an election underperformed how they had done in the previous election.

Democrats actually, relative to most other incumbent parties, didn't do that badly in 2024. And you are seeing that play out to some extent in 2026 as well, and frankly I would expect it to occur in 2028. There are serious long-term problems that bedevil a lot of democracies, ranging from the aging of the population to climate change to affordability issues. And until you have policies that can actually address those in a way that causes real and constructive policy change, you’re going to have people trying to campaign on empty slogans and that can work for one election cycle, but probably not more.