The Case for a Blue Wave
What Next
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Midterm elections are typically bad for the president’s party. Given how Trump’s second term is going, do the Democrats have a chance to do something historic?
Guest: David Faris, politics professor at Roosevelt University and a contributing writer for Slate.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Something I've started to realize is that 2026 is going to be a chance to answer a pretty strange question, which is what if one of the most powerful and theoretically coveted jobs in the world was actually a job |
| 0:21.5 | very few people wanted to keep. |
| 0:27.6 | The job I'm talking about is congressperson, or senator, honestly. |
| 0:33.1 | NPR has been tracking the number of lawmakers who've decided to throw in the towel this |
| 0:37.1 | year. |
| 0:45.7 | It's a record. By last count, we've got 11 senators headed for the exits and 46 House members doing the same. |
| 0:52.8 | Some are running for a different office. Some got sick. And some, like Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Green, |
| 0:59.4 | just decided to leave without even finishing out their terms, just walked out the door. |
| 1:01.6 | This is not a surprise to me. |
| 1:05.4 | Political scientist David Ferris has been tracking all this, too. |
| 1:10.4 | There's a sense that, like, you can't achieve anything in the American Congress right now, right? |
| 1:18.3 | It's too broken. You have standard retirements compounded by, I think, a greater sense of the institution's dysfunction and weakness, like vis-a-vis the executive branch. Already the margins are so thin |
| 1:24.1 | that the GOP, like that majority is looking shaky. One congressman has a medical |
| 1:30.6 | emergency and it's like a crisis for them. Like we just had a congressman die, Doug Lamalfa at 65. |
| 1:36.3 | Suddenly. |
| 1:37.0 | Exactly. But it means like the Republicans can only lose two party line votes to get something |
| 1:42.6 | through. For Democrats, is the congressional chaos an |
| 1:47.5 | opportunity? Yeah, of course. It's an opportunity. The opportunity, of course, will mainly come in |
| 1:53.9 | November when all 435 members of the House and a third of the Senate face their constituents in the 2026 midterms. |
| 2:04.3 | But I think like the hope that there's going to be this like massive wave where like 50 or 60 |
| 2:09.1 | Republicans are wiped out and people come to terms with the reality that we're being governed |
| 2:13.4 | by a by a total madman. I'm still not sure I quite see that in any of the data that I'm looking at. |
... |
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