Waiting for a Trifecta

Time for an electoral reality check

Here’s a map that keeps me up at night:

This is the projected Congressional reapportionment that will occur following the 2030 census. It also reflects, therefore, changes in states’ electoral votes starting with the 2032 presidential election.

Shifting four electoral votes from California to Texas, three from New York to Florida, etc., absolutely blows up the existing electoral math. The Democrats’ “blue wall” (which has proven more of a paper wall recently, but still…) will no longer be present: winning all the reliably blue states of the past 20 years plus Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan won’t add up to 270.¹

Here’s another rough set of maps:

I’m hardly the first one to point this out, but to reiterate: it’s going to take a low-percentage bankshot for the Democrats to retake the Senate in 2026 (even while they are favored to retake the House).² Assume it’s a good election for the Dems, and they hold all the toss-up seats where there is a Dem incumbent. It’s not hard to see how a Roy Cooper candidacy could flip a North Carolina seat, and maybe Susan Collins finally cracks in Maine.³ That’s 49. Where’s the 50th seat coming from? Texas? In 2024, a red New York was closer than a blue Texas. (And of course, so long as there is a Republican president, they actually need 51 seats for a majority.)⁴

The following cycles’ maps don’t get a whole lot friendlier; per liberal political analyst Michael Baharaeen, the 2030 map is actually the worst of the next three.⁵ With the demise of the last red-state Democratic senators like Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown, the Senate structural advantage is strongly with the GOP for now. Maybe if you’re the Dems you can pick off the other NC seat in ‘28 and flip Ron Johnson’s seat in Wisconsin—but also you better not lose any of your own seats, including in red-trending Nevada and now-perennial battlegrounds like Arizona and Georgia.

Even beating the odds and winning a threadbare Senate majority comes with big governance challenges. The party may well have to rely on moderate-to-conservative candidates like the former Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards, or independents like Dan Osborn in Nebraska. As Joe Manchin proved time and again, that kind of a caucus will work for confirming (most) judges but is incredibly fragile when it comes to passing major legislation.

(And of course, while all this is happening, you have to win the presidency and can’t ever lose the House! The latter task also becomes harder once the post-2030 reapportionment comes into effect, because it will hand House seats from blue states to red states with legislatures that will eagerly gerrymander them into safely Republican hands.)

Why am I doing electoral prognostication on a family policy Substack? Because if we hope to advance substantial federal advances for children and families, waiting for the Democrats to have a trifecta again may mean waiting for a long, long time. It’s not a strategy so much as a hope.

I do want to offer one caveat before going further: American politics can and does change, change drastically, and change in relatively short order. We’re living through one such realignment right now, with youth and working-class voters sliding more rightward and college-educated voters drifting more leftward. Here’s one last map to illustrate my point:

Just 30 years ago, Bill Clinton won West Virginia, a state that Donald Trump in 2024 won by more than 40 points! Heck, the Democrats had 60 senators as recently as 2009. So I don’t think anyone can reasonably predict what the electoral context will look like for the 2044 election (Malia Obama For Prez?).

But by the same token, these tectonic shifts rarely happen over the course of one to two cycles. If I were laying odds around a Democratic trifecta prior to 2032, I’d probably put them around 20%. Given the post-reapportionment electoral vote shifts, I wouldn’t put odds above one-in-three for any cycle in the 2030s, either.

So it seems to me that leaves those of us on the left with a few options:

1. Give no ground, circle the status quo until a Dem trifecta hits—This is basically a siege mentality: agree to no compromises, give the other side no wins, fight for basically flat funding, and hold tight until Democrats somehow come back into power; meanwhile, maximize executive authority if a Dem takes the White House but total control of Congress remains out of reach. We’ve seen this strategy before from Republicans; during Obama’s first term, as former Ohio Senator George Voinovich was quoted by journalist Michael Grunwald, “If he was for it, we had to be against it.”

2. Focus on incremental gains—Two strange things happened in the family policy world during the first Trump administration: all federal workers got access to 12 weeks of paid family leave, and there was a substantial $2.3 billion increase in Child Care and Development Block Grant funding. These were part of bipartisan compromises (the paid family leave for federal employees was traded for, of all things, establishment of the Space Force. Gotta love public policy!). In a divided government, this approach means continuing to find ways to put one foot in front of the other toward an ultimate goal, even if the steps are small.

3. Develop a Grand Compromise—While it may seem Pollyannaish to talk about a Grand Compromise in an environment where the administration is actively talking about suspending the writ of habeas corpus and kicking hundreds of thousands of children off their health insurance, I invite you to think about this in context of a post-Trump world. As I have written before, there is a family-focused wing of the Republican party that has shown an openness to some workable principles, even if there is disagreement about how to pay for them. Recall that 14 GOP senators co-sponsored a bill in 2022 that would have made child care free for every family making under 75% of the state median income (with no funding attached, to be fair). There are Republicans willing to at least play ball on paid leave conversations, and so on.
   
   A Grand Compromise is different from an incremental approach in that it results in major transformations, even if they are transformations that don’t exactly match any side’s ideal. The Immigration Act of 1990, for instance, significantly raised legal immigration caps and introduced the Temporary Protected Status program while at the same time strengthening enforcement around employers that employed undocumented workers. It was co-sponsored by Ted Kennedy and signed into law by George H.W. Bush. Similarly, the McCain-Finegold campaign finance reform legislation (the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002,” technically) heralded a sea change in how money flowed into U.S. elections—at least until the Supreme Court struck it down in Citizens United.

It won’t shock you to hear that my inclination is toward the Grand Compromise approach on family policy. And I think that work needs to start now. Not in any major public debate forums, but quietly, behind closed doors, with sober conversation and analysis and the offering of new ideas, and a process for coming to a reasonable agreement on core elements. Quite frankly, some of that work probably needs to happen first within the two parties, as there is hardly consensus there. The goal should not be coming to a milquetoast, lowest-common-denominator compromise that will hardly change things on the ground for kids and families: there’s nothing Grand about such an agreement. The goal should be finding the place where maximum policy impact meets the outer limits of political viability.

Let me say this to close: I understand and respect those who simply cannot stomach the idea of compromising with members of a party that is causing so much harm to children, families, and democracy. That’s fine. But if that’s one’s stance, then one needs to furnish a theory of the case for how Democrats are going to get a trifecta anytime soon, and what should happen in the meantime if they don’t. For my part, I’ll both keep cheering on and working for such a trifecta while also helping forge a path to the mountain that may necessarily go through divided lands.

1. Winning PA, WI, and MI plus Arizona, Georgia, or North Carolina becomes required in this scenario; potentially two of the latter set if Nevada stays Republican.

2. I know this elides the big, important conversation happening right now about how the Democrats need to evolve in face of new political realignments, but for the purposes of this piece let’s put a pin in that and assume average performance in terms of messaging, candidate quality, etc. This is really more about structural elements.

3. Easier said than done—right now, even with the midterms looking favorable for Democrats, the party is having trouble finding a high-profile candidate to take on Collins.

4. To be fair, not everyone is as pessimistic about the Democrats’ Senate chances; as Nate Silver has written, while it may still be unlikely, a combination of the right candidates -- people like Mary Peltola in Alaska -- plus President Trump continuing to tank his approval rating and the Republican brand could open a narrow but viable path.

5. Baharaeen writes, “As things stand right now, [in 2030] there is just one Republican-held seat that might be in play for Democrats: Pennsylvania (Dave McCormick). Conversely, at least four Democratic-controlled seats will likely be up for grabs again: Arizona (Gallego), Michigan (Slotkin), Nevada (Rosen), and Wisconsin (Baldwin), all states that Trump carried in 2024.”