Well before the final tally of the 2026 midterms had been registered, begun, the Narrative War had. As far as the White House was concerned, Tuesday wasn’t a verdict on President Trump. It was a brief, almost spasmodic reaction by voters to an uptick in gas prices—which, supposedly, would soon go down again.
The result, Trump insisted, wasn’t “a hit on me.” He conceded that the war with Iran played a part in the GOP’s drubbing, reasonable man that he is, but then minimized its role as much as possible.
The war “drove the gasoline up a little bit,” he granted, but then added, without evidence, that this was merely in the “short term.” Soon-to-be-former House Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, opted for an even more fatalistic interpretation, saying Republicans would have had to “defy more than a century of midterm history” to hold the House. (It is true that the party that takes the White House tends to fare poorly in the subsequent midterms, but there is an appreciable difference between “faring poorly” and experiencing, as outgoing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called the election, “an extinction-level event.” )
At any rate, the subtext was clear: Neither Trump nor MAGA had been rejected on any fundamental level. The outcome was either the will of history, per Johnson, or, per Trump, an example of voters throwing a tantrum in response to a supposedly temporary inconvenience. Either way, both implied, the electorate would soon return to MAGA Republicans.
Democrats, of course, were telling a different story: By their reckoning, the election showed that American voters had decisively and definitively rejected Trump and MAGA, period. There would be no going back.
Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is all but certain to soon become the first Black speaker of the House in U.S. history, called the results “a stunning rebuke for MAGA extremism.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is likely to once again be master of the Senate, this time at the head of a much larger caucus than during the Biden years, declared that “the days of Trump’s supplicant Senate are over.” And Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who won a smashing reelection and is widely seen as a potential 2028 front-runner, said that “in sweeping and decisive victories, the American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption and incompetence of the failed lame-duck President Donald J. Trump.”
Now, at this point, you might expect me to adjudicate which one of these narratives is “correct.” But the truth about elections—and especially wave elections—is that their results can never be reduced into a single cause. Millions of people across a vast continent voted; no individual explanation could possibly encompass all of their motivations. So, yes, voters gave the GOP a shellacking because they were furious about gas prices and inflation. And, yes, voters gave the GOP a thumpin’ because they were sick and tired of MAGA’s lawlessness, authoritarianism, and corruption.
This may sound vexing, and I’m sure that pundits and anxious Democratic backbenchers will be providing gossip rags like Axios with endless “Dems in disarray” content as they try to navigate between these two narrative shoals. But I have good news for Democrats, if they’re willing to listen. And it comes from that most unlikely of sources, at least as far as good news is concerned: Hannah Arendt.
In the Trump era, Arendt has been quoted endlessly on the subject of political lying, which is fair enough; no one has written about the subject with more intelligence or contempt. But in “Truth and Politics,” an essay she published in The New Yorker in 1967, she explained why these two human concepts—the truth and politics—are actually frenemies at best. The gist of her argument was that politics is a realm where opinion and emotion, and not facts, reign supreme.
Naturally, that doesn’t mean it’s OK to straight-up lie. It simply means that any clear-eyed politician has to understand that their job is to take the facts and create a story about what they mean. As she put it, “Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth.”
For Arendt, facts and opinions, “though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same realm.” A fact (her example is Germany’s invasion of Belgium in August 1914) “acquires political implications only by being put in an interpretative context.” Whoever reports what happened, she wrote, “always tells a story, and in this story the particular facts lose their contingency and acquire some humanly comprehensible meaning.”
It’s nicer to think, of course, that politics is simply about presenting people with empirical observations and allowing them to use their own powers of reason to draw the right conclusions. But Arendt warns, correctly, that when left on their own, “the mere telling of facts” results in “no action whatever; it even tends, under normal circumstances, toward the acceptance of things as they are.” Facts without narrative create confusion, paralysis, or even fatalism. It’s only when they’re used to tell a fact-based story that collective action becomes possible. It may be true that, as the far right likes to chortle, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But that’s only because facts don’t care about anything. Facts don’t do anything. They have no agency; they’re just facts.
But when people, with all their feelings and opinions and capacity for action, are empowered with a fact-based story, it turns out that facts and feelings can get along very well indeed.
What does that mean, translated from Arendt-speak to the grubby language of partisan politics? It means that Democrats not only do not have to choose between the two competing narratives to “explain” the election but that they should positively refuse to do so. In the name of offering a story that provides that “interpretive context” Arendt calls for, Democrats can—and, indeed, as politicians, must—braid facts from both of these narratives together into a story of their own making and for their own purposes.
There’s one story that does this better than any other: anti-corruption. To many voters, it is the explanation for why gas costs so much; why inflation endures; why education, housing, and health care have become so expensive; and especially why they feel like they can’t get ahead. In an NBC News exit poll, 90 percent said government corruption was a crucial or major factor in their vote. And in Trump, they see corruption incarnate: CBS News, meanwhile, found that about six in 10 voters think Trump puts his own personal interests over the country’s.
Many of the Democratic Party’s most respected strategists have been saying as much already. “The candidates who have been most successful are the ones who have tied the cost of corruption to the cost of living,” Celinda Lake told The Christian Science Monitor last week. And Jesse Ferguson summed up the shift for Politico: “Democrats used to talk about corruption as a crime. Now corruption is the explanation for costs.”
There’s a recent international example of this approach working—spectacularly—as well. After more than 15 years of Viktor Orbán’s kleptocratic authoritarianism, Hungarian voters voted earlier this year in overwhelming numbers for Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, which ran a campaign that, as one analysis put it, set out to negate “Orbán’s populist, anti-elitist politics by focusing on corruption.” Magyar didn’t ask Hungarians to choose between their democracy and “kitchen-table” issues. He told them they were one and the same, and the voters agreed.
That is what Arendt meant when she argued that organizing people together to change the world—that is to say, doing politics—requires an approach that rejects outright lying while also avoiding a complacent expectation that “the truth” will reveal itself for voters to follow. The narrative wars have begun. If Democrats are smart, they’ll opt for storytelling instead.
