Democrats have developed an uncanny skill for seizing defeat from the jaws of victory in recent years. That didn’t happen, though, in the December 2 special election to fill a US House seat in Tennessee. While progressive Democrat Aftyn Behn fell short in her quest to flip a radically gerrymandered Republican district, she made up so much ground that smart Democrats have already begun to redo their calculations—and reconsider their strategies—regarding the midterm elections.

If they reconsider those strategies boldly enough, they could seize a national victory in 2026 from the jaws of Behn’s narrow defeat in 2025. By dramatically expanding the map of House and Senate races in which they invest resources, by recognizing the need not just to run against Donald Trump but to run for something, and by embracing the progressive economic policies that have boosted turnout for candidates as diverse as Behn and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Democrats could secure midterm victories that are about much more than partisan point-scoring. They could disempower Trump’s MAGA movement sufficiently to check and balance the corruption, economic plundering, cruelty, racism, xenophobia, and authoritarian overreach that has characterized the most dangerous administration in modern history.

The stakes are so high—and the threats to democracy so real—that many progressives still refuse to allow themselves to hope. Yet the spirit of resistance is alive in the land. And it is growing in a manner that tells us that 2026 can and should be seen as a critical juncture for a country that can no longer accept the backward politics of Trump and his MAGA satraps.

The past year, for all its frustrations and disappointments, drew the outlines of opposition. Courageous progressive activists and electeds stepped up from the start of Trump’s term with a boldness and clarity of vision—as this year’s Nation Honor Roll (page 46) illustrates. As the months went on, the reach of the resistance became ever more inspiring—and visible. Americans turned out by the millions for “No Kings” rallies in June and October, filling the streets of great urban centers as well as the town squares of rural communities to protest everything from ICE raids to assaults on science to Republican schemes to fund tax cuts for the rich by gutting Medicaid and anti-hunger programs. Then, on November 4, the resistance flooded polling places nationwide. Democrats swept gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey by far wider margins than predicted and secured overwhelming control of the legislative chambers in those states. They also won breakthrough victories for candidates in red states: flipping Georgia Public Service Commission seats and grabbing enough legislative posts to end Republican supermajority control of the Mississippi state Senate. And in Seattle and New York City, voters rejected right-wing demagoguery and centrist Democratic caution to choose dynamic young democratic socialists as their mayors.

The 2025 fightback against Trump, in the streets and at the polls, has been unprecedented. But will it be sufficiently powerful in 2026 to upend the Republican control of Congress that enables Trump, Stephen Miller, and their MAGA wrecking crew? An answer can be found in the results of Behn’s race and other 2025 campaigns that rallied a new generation of voters with an aggressively progressive affordability agenda.

In a Tennessee district where the party’s national ticket was on the losing side of a 60–38 split in 2024, Behn narrowed the margin to 54–45 in a special election that saw surprisingly robust turnout. That result wasn’t an outlier: In every special election for open US House seats since Trump began his second term, emboldened Democrats have, on average, outrun the percentages for the party’s 2024 presidential ticket by roughly the same 13-point swing that Behn achieved. “Whether you go from the suburbs of Washington, DC, all the way to the Southwest in Arizona, whether you’re looking at Texas, whether you’re looking at Tennessee, whether you go down to Florida, we are seeing the Democratic out-performance of Kamala Harris happening across the political map,” said Harry Enten, CNN’s veteran number cruncher.

Republicans and their amen corner in the DC pundit class can claim that special-election results tell us nothing about how upcoming midterms will go. But they’re wrong. “We actually have history to show that what happens in special elections doesn’t just stay in special elections; it spills over to the midterm results,” explained Enten. “When a party outperformed in special elections since 2005, five out of five times they went on to win a majority in the US House of Representatives. What happened…in Tennessee is a very, very bad omen for Republicans and a very, very good omen for Democrats.”

How good? A 13-point swing from Trump in 2024 to the 2026 midterms could flip more than three dozen GOP-held seats to the Democrats—a swing similar to the 2018 “blue wave” that disempowered Trump two years into his first term. Even Republicans acknowledge that the narrow GOP advantage in the House is now exceptionally vulnerable. And some worry that the party’s three-seat Senate majority might suddenly be threatened, with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) describing the Tennessee results as a “dangerous” indicator that disdain for Trump has become “a powerful motivator” even in red states.

If Democrats are looking only for a confidence boost, then they can thank Behn and the party’s other 2025 special-election candidates—some of whom were elected, others of whom closed the partisan divide by as much as 28 points—for a collective bump to a party that currently lacks the ability to restrain or counter Trump, not least on Capitol Hill, where the Democrats have struggled with the basic demands of mounting a credible opposition to a president whose mismanagement of the economy, personal scandals, and chaotic and corrupt approach to governing has decimated approval ratings for both Trump and the GOP.

Americans are ready to give Democratic candidates enough support to get the party back into the fight politically. But the Democrats—whose own approval ratings are nothing to get excited about—should not be satisfied with merely offering an alternative to Trump. It is true that the president is unpopular and that his policy stances—even on issues like tariffs and immigration—have been massively discredited in the eyes of the electorate. But Trump hates to lose.