Democrats Watch Gop Dysfunction With Glee: ‘that Should Put Us In A Very Good Place In 2026’

Democrats are starting to cobble together a playbook for the second Trump era: Mock Republicans for their dysfunction, attack the incoming president for being a step behind Elon Musk and keep praising themselves as the adults in the room.

Democrats are still deeply depressed about the election results and unsure of how to crawl out of their hole. But they watched with barely contained glee as President-elect Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Musk nearly caused a government shutdown last week. Ditto when Trump and his allies vowed to field primary challenges against Republicans who didn’t take their side on the funding battle. And then they couldn’t believe their luck when Trump fumed about House Speaker Mike Johnson, opening up the possibility of a messy leadership fight next year that could stall his agenda.

“Watching the Elon Musk/Donald Trump/Mike Johnson/Freedom Caucus/Addams Family last week just shows us that they’re so out of their league in knowing how to be responsible and governing,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.). “That should put us in a very good place in 2026.”

On Monday, two other news developments drew attention back to Republicans. A House Ethics report into former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) alleged that he committed statutory rape, solicited prostitutes and obtained illicit substances. (He has long denied wrongdoing.) And the family of Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) confirmed that she has “dementia issues” and has been living in an assisted living facility — something they acknowledged only after a local media outlet broke the story first.

CJ Warnke, a spokesperson for the Democratic leadership-aligned House Majority PAC, forecasted that Democrats are already planning to make GOP dysfunction a key part of their midterm messaging.

“President Musk and House Republicans are the living embodiment of a dumpster fire,” he said. “From threatening to withhold military pay over Christmas to voting to defund childhood cancer research, the agenda put forward by House Republicans will assure Democratic victory in 2026.”

Since Trump won a second term, many Democrats have worried that he would be more effective this time around because he has government experience and top aides who were known for bringing order to his campaign.

But Democrats are now desperately hoping that the last week has been a sample of the next two years, and that with a narrow House majority, Republicans will not be able to achieve as much as they hoped. Democrats are slowly growing more confident that voters will reject the GOP at the ballot box if chaos reigns — especially if Trump is also not able to bring down prices, an exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, thing to do outside of a recession.

“There is something uniquely dysfunctional about the Republican conference in the House,” said Democratic strategist J.J. Balaban. “There are few upsides to not having control of any branch of the federal government. But one of the very, very few upsides is that starting soon, blame for things that go wrong will fall squarely on their shoulders, and voters tend to not like that.”

Yet Republican dysfunction is not new, especially in the House — and it hasn’t necessarily helped Democrats. It took 15 rounds of voting for Kevin McCarthy to win the speaker’s gavel in January 2023, and then by October, the GOP conference deposed him and spent three weeks without a speaker in an embarrassing and public display of their deep internal divisions. At the time, Democrats crowed that voters would punish their incompetence in the 2024 election.

Instead, Republicans clung to a narrow majority in the House, took back the Senate, and captured the presidency. It was hard to remind voters of year-old Republican disorder as inflation soared. And in fact, a crisis at the border and high prices made many voters feel that it was Democrats, not the GOP, who were incompetent. Democrats, meanwhile, had their own internecine battles, pressuring President Joe Biden to drop out just months before the election and Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the last-minute nominee.

“If Democrats want to take the position that they don’t have to change as a party or their platform, and they’re automatically going to win back control of the House and pick up seats by Republicans actually arguing in public about what’s good for the country, then so be it,” said GOP operative Josh Novotney. “I advocate that the Democrats continue that course of action and that strategy because it will be a long, long trip in the woods for them.”

When Democrats won control of the House in 2018, they campaigned on the GOP’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and cast its tax overhaul as a giveaway to the wealthy. It was a simple yet specific message that painted Republicans as a party that did not care about the working or middle classes. That and backlash to Trump’s 2016 election won them a resounding House majority in the midterms.

Democrats’ top priority in 2026 will be seizing control of the House. The GOP’s 53-seat majority in the Senate will be hard to reverse in the midterms, given the states where Senate seats will be up for reelection. The Republican House majority is narrow, but Democrats ousted many of their easier GOP targets in the lower chamber in 2024. To flip the House, they will need to win seats that Trump carried in the presidential election.

Not all Democrats are certain they’ll be able to pull that off. Some are concerned that their party is facing an existential crisis as working-class voters of all stripes abandon them. And they point out that Democrats currently lack a coherent message or strategy toward Trump’s second term. Republican dysfunction isn’t enough.

“You’ve got to mount an opposition apparatus and I don’t see that happening yet,” said Democratic strategist Ashley Etienne, who worked for Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during the 2018 midterms. “I don’t see that they are aggressively leaning in in any sort of way, and that’s concerning.”

To be successful, Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.) said, Democrats “need to stay focused on our message, which is we are the ones that are here to solve problems for the American people.”