Misreading The Mandate: Why Democrats Are Ignoring The Voters Who Elected Them

This is republished with permission by the author. The original, “Democrats Move Against Voters’ Will On Trans, Race, Migration, And Government Weaponization,” can be read here. Subscribe to Public here.

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Voters rejected President Donald Trump and Republicans on Tuesday for reasons having to do with the war in Iran and affordability. Six out of ten said they were very concerned about grocery prices, while two-thirds said Trump’s policies had made the economy worse. Three out of four voters called the war a crucial or major reason for their vote. Sixty-three percent said it was the wrong decision. And when it came time to vote on core cultural issues for the Left, they often voted against it. In Washington and Colorado, for example, voters banned males from female sports, while in California, they voted against a billionaire wealth tax.

And yet many Democrats are acting as though they were elected to do something else. Colorado’s governor-elect, Phil Weiser, said the day after the vote that he would “take a look at these anti-trans measures and what adjustments are necessary and appropriate.” Washington’s Democratic Party chair said she would fight to overturn the ban in court. “DEI is back!” wrote Rep. Ro Khanna on election night. “We will rip ICE apart,” said Minnesota Senator-elect Peggy Flanagan. Maine Senator-elect Troy Jackson promised to “fight to abolish ICE.” Tech executives “are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing,” wrote Sen. Ed Markey. Senate Democrats are weighing bills to vet AI models before release, which opens the door to government censorship of content.

Some Democrats struck a more moderate tone. “We ran on affordability,” said Hakeem Jeffries, the incoming Speaker, on Wednesday. “We won on affordability. And now it’s our job to govern on affordability.” Asked about impeachment, Jeffries said, “I haven’t had a single member of the House Democratic caucus talk to me about impeachment.” Schumer said Democrats would “drive costs down with the president or without him,” and that “these voters did not give us the majority so we can do whatever we want.” Sen. Cory Booker said, “If we make Donald Trump the center of our focus, we will lose this moment in history. We need to deal with the American people’s problems.” Sen. Adam Schiff, who led Trump’s first impeachment, said of a third, “We’re going to need to see where the country is.” Rep. Jim Himes warned that Democrats would “misread victory as an endorsement of us or America falling in love with Democrats.” Senator-elect Roy Cooper of North Carolina promised to be “an independent voice ready to work with anyone.” Senator-elect Josh Turek of Iowa won after saying on ABC, “I agree with Trump. He’s done a better job on the border than Biden, for sure.” And Texas Senator-elect James Talarico said he ran as “a border security Democrat.”

But many other Democrats suggested they would weaponize the government to pursue their agenda. House Democrats on the Judiciary and Oversight committees are reportedly reviewing a plan for “a constant stream of high-profile confrontations” where executives could be “pressed to resign.” Democrats dropped open borders in only two of their winning campaigns, Talarico’s in Texas and Turek’s in Iowa. Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, in line to chair the House immigration subcommittee, promised in June, “When I am chair of the Immigration Subcommittee, we will pass permanent protections and pathways to citizenship for immigrant families.” Flanagan said Democrats would replace ICE “with an immigration system that is grounded in public safety for everybody, dignity, and due process.” America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group, called the election “a referendum on his agenda, with mass deportation at its center,” which “voters resoundingly rejected.” Detention Watch Network demanded that Congress “claw back every single remaining penny of the more than $240 billion that has been appropriated to ICE and Border Patrol” and “zero out ICE funding.”

The same holds on every other front. The Human Rights Campaign said it will make the Equality Act, a bill that would add “gender identity” to federal civil rights law, its highest priority for the new Congress. “We got to remember what that felt like yesterday and produce it day after day after day after day until full equality is won,” said Kelley Robinson, its president. GLAAD’s release on the results named neither Washington nor Colorado. “Election 2026 must go down in history as the last campaign to try it,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD’s president, of what she called fearmongering about transgender people. Prop 40’s union backers vowed to try again in 2028. Van Hollen said California’s defeat showed only that one state could not tax wealth alone, and Families Over Billionaires, a tax advocacy group, wrote, “The money is there, and voters have given Democrats the mandate to go get it.” Casar wrote that “voters rejected Republicans in part because they were bought and paid for by AI billionaires.” Sen. Maggie Hassan posted openings for investigators and oversight counsel the morning after the election.

All of this is very odd. Voters rejected the Left’s agenda in 2024 and nothing they did in 2026 suggested they had embraced it. Voters very concerned about the cost of groceries, health care and gas backed Democratic House candidates, and about two-thirds said Trump’s policies had made the economy worse. Immigration was the one issue on which voters still preferred Republicans. Washington voters banned males from girls’ sports. Wisconsin voters approved a constitutional ban on government DEI. California voters are rejecting a billionaire tax. Jeffries said Democrats won on affordability. Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut said he worried Democrats would “misread victory as an endorsement of us or America falling in love with Democrats.” Voters punished Trump for prices and the war. They did not vote for the Left’s agenda. So why have Democrats not moderated?

Left-Wing Dream Worlds

The first reason is that the base of the Democratic Party still strongly supports the Left’s agenda and is less compromising than the politicians they voted for. Among Democrats, 78% favor abolishing ICE, against 47% of all Americans, and a plurality want immigration increased, against 31% of all Americans. Only 35% of Democrats support banning gender transition procedures for minors, against 56% of all Americans. About 85% of Democrats want workplace DEI programs continued, while voters overall split evenly. Eighty-two percent of Democrats want their leaders in Congress “pushing back against Trump, even if that makes it harder to address problems,” up from 70% a year earlier, and 74% rated their officials as doing a fair or poor job of it. In the primaries, the base chose the Left over the leadership. Flanagan won Minnesota’s Senate primary with 59% over Rep. Angie Craig, and El-Sayed beat Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan. The day after the election, Indivisible, the largest anti-Trump grassroots network, said, “The American people did not elect Democrats by historic margins just to bend the knee and go back to business as usual.” Rep. Ro Khanna said of impeachment, “The base will also demand it.”

A big reason for this is that the Democratic Party in general and its base in particular is dominated by the professional-managerial class (PMC). The class grew from about 3% of the workforce in the 1920s to a third today. This could be seen in elite institutions including Harvard which, in 2022, employed nearly as many administrators as it enrolled undergraduates. The class justifies its power by claiming to serve society, and for 60 years it has grown by expanding the welfare, administrative and regulatory state, and then DEI. As it grew, it took over the Democratic Party. In 2024 Harris won voters with college degrees 57% to 41%, and Trump won voters without them 56% to 42%. The PMC interpreted Trump’s 2016 election as an attack on its morality and thus its identity, not just its policies. From this the Left launched the “Resistance” to weaponize the government including the Intelligence Community, including through the Russia collusion hoax and two impeachments. It did not rethink its platform.

The policies that voters have repeatedly rejected create jobs for the PMC. Gender medicine creates work for doctors, therapists and nonprofit staff. DEI creates work for the diversity officers and trainers who run $8 billion a year worth of trainings, which half of American workers have been required to sit through. Mass migration employs immigration lawyers, NGO staff and resettlement workers. AI regulation would create new jobs for the PMC and the “AI safety” and “disinformation researchers” to advocate for censorship.

This class was always left-wing, but after 2010, it radicalized into an agenda that attacks civilization itself. It is so committed to its goals that the Left has been willing to violate norms and laws that protect free speech and democracy. The share of Democrats calling themselves liberal rose from 25% in 1994 to 55% in 2024, with 19% very liberal, both record highs. Musa Al-Gharbi dates the fourth and largest wave of progressive racial feeling, which he calls an awokening, to the years after 2010. It was in those years that PMC began sterilizing adolescents, euthanizing the poor and depressed, enabling addiction, pathologizing masculinity, demonizing white people, weakening nationhood, and undermining energy production, and then demanded more authority to fix the problems they had made. In 2018, 40% of Democrats said the federal government should restrict false information online even at the cost of freedom of information, about the same as Republicans. By 2023, the share of Democrats rose to 70%, and the Republican figure declined to 39%. Federal agencies pressed social media companies to remove disfavored posts, as the Twitter Files showed. The lawfare culminated in December 2023 Colorado’s Supreme Court removed Trump from the ballot, which the US Supreme Court later reversed.

That radicalization was a deepening of the Rousseauian anti-civilization ideology into the construction of a totalitarian dream world. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote against private property in in the mid-19th century, saying that “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society,” and that every evil since had come from that fence. Seven years later he wrote that whoever refuses to obey the general will “will be forced to be free.”

The Left came to view civilizational fences as structures of oppression. Today, the Left views borders as a civilization fence and so it declares that no human can be in the West illegally and in fact they have more of a right to be here than natives. The Left characterized policing, biological sex, and learning to read as structures of oppression. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin described in 1952 how when a totalitarianism is defined by dream worlds in which “nonrecognition of reality is the first principle.” When the dream fails, Voegelin wrote, its believers blame “the immorality of some other person or society.” So detransitioners are blamed on transphobia, overdoses on prohibition, illiteracy on white supremacy, and Trump on Russia.

The Backfiring Of Radicalism

All of this is troubling because the Left rejects moderation in the institutions it controls, which now includes Congress. At the 55 universities FIRE surveyed in 2024, 71% of faculty said a liberal would fit in their department but just 20% said a conservative would. Of 1,600 American journalists surveyed by Syracuse University in 2022, 3.4% were Republicans, down from more than 25% in 1971. For the next two years, the Left has the power to subpoena witnesses and shape the budget. Already it has already begun hiring the investigators and preparing subpoenas. The Democrats who might restrain have just removed Angie Craig and Haley Stevens for insufficient commitment to leftism. In the likely 2028 presidential field, Van Hollen and Khanna have adopted the wealth tax California voters rejected. And a movement that holds as a moral principle the nonrecognition of reality will not snap out of it any time soon.

But voters, the courts, and Trump’s veto can constrain the Left. In January 2025, 45% of Democrats and leaners told Gallup the party should become more moderate and 29% said more liberal. In May 2026, 52% of Democrats told the Times/Siena poll the next nominee should move the party to the center and 25% said to the left. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats said in a January 2025 Times/Ipsos poll that male athletes should not play on women’s teams. The Colorado and Washington measures passed with those voters. Senate seats that Democrats flipped in Iowa, Texas and North Carolina went to candidates who said the border should be secured. The Supreme Court that reversed Colorado’s removal of Trump from the ballot remains a check on laws that Congress passes. And Trump has promised to veto the Democrats’ agenda and before that bills must survive a Senate filibuster.

And today, compared with 2016 or 2020, a larger share of the electorate has seen what the Left does with power. In 2020, 73% of Democrats trusted the mass media, and in 2026, 50% do. Among all Americans, trust fell from 40% in 2020 to a record low of 28% in 2025. The share of Democrats who want the federal government to restrict false information online fell from 70% in 2023 fell to 58% in 2025. There is more situational awareness among Americans about the Left’s ambitions and strategies to control information and the levers of power.

And so our understanding of Tuesday’s vote should change. Americans voted against Trump over the war and prices. They did not embrace the Left’s anti-civilization agenda. Where they could vote on the Left’s agenda directly, they voted it down, on sports in Washington and Colorado, on DEI in Wisconsin, on the billionaire tax in California. Where they could choose a Democrat, they chose the ones who promised to secure the border and lower prices. They did not ask for trans medical procedures, open borders, or federal oversight of speech.

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Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award Winner, and author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (Harper Collins, June 30, 2020). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and other publications. His TED talks have been viewed over five million times.