The big driver of turnout in the 2026 midterms was anger. For Republicans who voted for Democrats or decided to stay home, it was anger about affordability. Everything is too expensive and getting more so the longer the United States continues its needless war in Iran, maintains economically damaging tariff schemes, and fails to address rising healthcare costs.

Democrats shared in the broad outrage over affordability, but that was only part of the story. They were also angry that the Trump regime has worked to destroy the lives of immigrants, women who need reproductive healthcare, LGBTQ people seeking basic protections of their civil rights, while financing a genocide in Gaza. Democrats were angry that the Trump administration has been wildly corrupt, staffed by incompetent, soulless Trump toadies like Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Linda McMahon who have irrevocably harmed their agencies. Beyond the Beltway, meanwhile, Republicans have kowtowed to the interests of tech oligarchs who are determined to pursue a maximalist and accelerationist approach to AI that may end up killing us all, while allowing white Christian nationalists to dictate priorities for public education and science funding in a way that is wildly destructive to both. They were angry that Republicans have pursued and hoarded power via lies, broken laws and norms, and completely—indeed, gleefully—neglected their responsibility to serve all of America’s citizens, and not just the ones who are white, male, Christian, straight, and Republican.

Thanks to all of this anger at the governing status quo, Democrats routed Republicans on Tuesday on a scale that even the most optimistic of us didn’t anticipate. Anger is a powerful motivator, especially when the reasons to be angry continue to multiply. Yet when they were charged with grasping and communicating the stunning new mandate they were entrusted with, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries—respectively the front-runners to serve as Senate majority leader and House speaker in the next Congress—behaved as if affordability was the only thing voters cared about, and the only thing that mattered. For Republicans who voted for Democrats, that might be true. But for the rest of us, the Democrats who have always voted for Democrats—or, to put it another way, actual Democrats—this seems like a willful refusal to hear what voters are telling them.

It also follows a dismaying penchant on the part of both Democratic leaders to act as though cultural and political disagreements inhabit different spheres. Their fetishistic belief in “kitchen-table issues” as the mystic, all-explanatory force in American politics hinges on the luxurious assumption that culture warfare can be dismissed as a distraction—a supposition that rests in turn on a mythical privileging of ideological consensus over pluralism and tolerance, and a set of policy agendas composed solely of safe things and sure things.

That, as Tuesday’s results demonstrated, is not the world we live in; it’s a fantasy world in which Schumer and Jeffries do not have to take risks, can always avoid confrontation, will continue appeasing the whims of tech oligarchs and their corporate donors in the healthcare industry, and won’t have to send back their AIPAC donations. In this well-appointed moneyed reverie, Democratic leaders won’t be forced to to take a stand on civil rights issues that by definition won’t lend themselves to consensus as a starting point. Most especially, they will be insulated from demands to cede or share power with the progressive wing of the party, which is in their view is a fringe movement led by naive young people—even though a majority of Democrats have indicated over and over and over again in polls that they support Medicare for All, want a reset of our relationship with Israel, and believe that their wealthy friends should pay more taxes. In other words, Schumer and Jeffries cannot behave as if their personal politics are synonymous with what voters want, nor can they assume that what voters want is the same thing voters wanted 10, 20, or 30 years ago.

They also cannot lump everything that they consider economically important under the amorphous heading of “kitchen-table issues” and pretend that everything else is culture-war nonsense. Any politician who doesn’t understand that what constitutes a kitchen-table issue depends on whose kitchen table you’re sitting at is mentally stuck in an era when the only people at the kitchen table who counted were white middle-class homeowners. You cannot build a party around that constituency; the people whose interests the party should serve are too diverse, and their needs are too multivalent to be addressed solely by targeted tax credits or incremental clawbacks of Obamacare premiums.

Most of all, though, Schumer and Jeffrey cannot ignore—as has been their frequent wont—that voters believe, overwhelmingly, that the serial abuses and predations of the Trump administration must be met with accountability—meaning real consequences for the legions of bad actors in its orbit, and not just strongly worded letters. Schumer and Jeffries may want to just move on, but voters do not.

Both men had plenty of opportunities to use the outcome of the midterms to signal an aggressive program for righting the Trump administration’s wrongs. Instead, they chose to ignore virtually everything voters told them that presented itself as too much of a chore, or too great a departure from the status quo—from pursuit of progressive social agenda items to legal consequences for corrupt lawbreaking Republicans to a more aggressive posture toward the opposition party both in tactics and style. Their joint refrain was that what voters wanted was, conveniently, what they wanted: to move forward without any uncomfortable litigation of all of the horrors of the last couple of years.

“The American people don’t want us to get even, they want us to get things done on their behalf,” Jeffries told MS NOW, shortly after the returns were announced. “We ran on affordability, we won on affordability, and now it’s our job to govern on affordability.” This understandably enraged a lot of voters—even centrists who otherwise are aligned with Jeffries politically—because it insultingly implied that the electorate’s desire for accountability is about petty revenge.

Jeffries’ claim, like so many Democratic extenuations of Trump-era abuses, confuses a politics of manners for a politics of morality. I always thought that Michelle Obama’s 2016 dictum, “when they go low, we go high,” counseled Democrats to uphold principled values in the face of corrupting forces. But in the hands of figures like Jeffries and Schumer, it’s become a mantra conveying disdain for the messy and often antagonistic nature of politics—especially when attaining and keeping power involves conflict, or God forbid, being rude. It childishly assumes that a healthy civil society is defined primarily by a rigorous sense of decorum. We don’t want to get even, it says; that sort of thing is beneath us.