The Crystal Ball released its 2024 Senate Ratings this week. With 34 Senate contests, Democrats are defending 23 of these seats, while Republicans are defending just 11. That Democratic tally includes the 3 states with independents who caucus with the Democrats.
In this episode, Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, provides an overview of the initial ratings and why Democrats will be playing defense.
America was born out of rebellion against oligarchy.
When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.
Last year, voters strongly rejected Viktor Orban’s authoritarian Hungarian government, rife with corruption. Economic stagnation played a role, but corruption was the decisive factor.
America could be next. The decades of pay-to-play corruption at the center of America’s political system have delegitimized its democracy. Except in individual instances, however, corruption has rarely proven sufficiently potent at the ballot box to be determinant. That dynamic will be sorely tested in 2026 thanks to President Trump.
The Irony of America’s Oligarchic Governance
The Founding Fathers would be gravely disheartened at the state of their grand democratic experiment after 250 years.
American politics in recent decades has largely been the domain of oligarchs. It has devolved ironically to resemble the elitist political and economic system that inspired the Revolutionary War - a replica of the despised England the colonists first raised arms against at Lexington and Concord in 1775.
True, colonials believed their just cause was the rejection of an oppressive monarchy. In reality, the offending practices and policies blamed on the figurehead King George III - the tariff on Indian tea, for instance - were dictated by a Parliament dominated by oligarchs - nabobs like Sir Robert Clive and Cecil Rhodes. The 1688-89 Glorious Revolution, which deposed James II, also stripped the English monarchy of absolute power. Political, social, and economic power had abruptly migrated from the monarchy to the wealthy oligarchs who dominated Parliament– a transition that “dramatically curbed kingly authority.”
Like the England of 1775, America’s policies today are largely dictated by wealthy oligarchs like Elon Musk, many of whom share President Trump’s hostility toward taxes to fund social program spending. Charles Koch, for instance, has lobbied for cuts similar to Trump’s 2025 tax law, removing 4 million from food assistance and eliminating Medicaid health insurance for an estimated 17 million of America’s poorest, forcing rural hospitals to close.
Reduced food and health care for the least advantaged is just one facet of the consequences of America’s pay-to-play political system. Republicans, beginning with Goldwater and later Reagan, fully embraced pay-to-play, genuflecting to the wealthy who still dominate their Party. Partisan loyalists appointed to the Supreme Court have legitimized the practice, ruling, rather mystically, out of whole cloth, that money is constitutionally protected political speech. We are all entitled to a corner soapbox. But it seems you are also entitled to drown out my voice a million-fold, wallet permitting. They have even ruled that the legal fiction of corporations enjoys those same speech rights, ruling in Citizens United that ethereal political donors can be incorporeal wallets.
Political scientists term America’s faux democracy a functional oligarchy like Egypt or Turkey, or 18th-century England. But most American men and women view it simply as corruption - enabling the wealthy to profit by stacking the economy “against people like me.”
A Brennan Center survey in May 2026, for instance, found that 90% of independent voters believe “corruption is responsible for policies that benefit billionaires and big corporations at the expense of the American people.” This belief has become increasingly evident since 2017. Some 57% of respondents to a March NBC poll, for instance, believed that the rich and powerful are above the law – corruption that has grown worse in “the past five or ten years,” fostering a second Gilded Age.
This erosion of America’s democratic integrity has been recognized abroad: U.S. democracy fell on Transparency International’s government Corruption Index to a record low 29th globally in 2025 from 16th in 2015, below authentic democracies that limit the role of money in politics.
The Corruption Awakening
One important reason for growing sensitivity to corruption is rising American income inequality - the record surge in wealth at the top coming at the expense of workers. Real hourly compensation - wages and benefits - has virtually stagnated for the lowest earning 80% (111 million) of nonfarm salaried workers since the Reagan administration. (You may want to read that again.) Pay-to-play politics permits employers to offshore jobs while weakening unions, labor rights, and antitrust enforcement. That enabled employers to raise profits by capping workers’ pay, thereby doubling the national income share of the top 1% since 1979.
A second factor has been blatant global grifting by Trump – a Boeing 747 from Qatar and tungsten mines in Kazakhstan – corruption in flagrant violation of the Constitution’s Articles I and II emoluments clauses.
A Political Corruption Edge?
Only rarely has corruption provided a partisan electoral advantage to either political party. But this may be one of those moments, with surveys finding that corruption offers Democrats an electoral opportunity in 2026 and 2028.
An extensive 2025 analysis drawn from a panel of nearly 2000 voters, for instance, found that independent voters view Republican Party office holders as more corrupt than Democrats. These swing voters believe Republican politicians are nearly 30% more likely to be “very corrupt” than Democrats (29% of independents believe Democratic politicians are “very corrupt” while 37% believe Republicans are). Moreover, 38% of these independent panelists believed that the wealthy have the “most influence” on the Republican Party, while only 20% believe they have the most influence on Democrats. And a study of campaign spending by billionaires in 2024 found they favored Republicans by at least 2.5:1 - and that excludes their hidden dark money spending. The margin in seven pivotal 2024 Senate races was at least 7:1.
Restoring Democratic Legitimacy
Pivotal independent voters have come to believe that political corruption is widespread, multi-faceted, deeply embedded, and adversely affecting household economics. The 2026 and especially the 2028 elections offer them opportunities to rebuild the legitimacy of American democracy.
Should reformers prevail at the ballot box, a top priority is upgrading the Supreme Court that has championed pay-to-play for decades. Congress and the President can reform the Supreme Court by term-limiting justices or by imposing judicial jurisdiction limits as permitted by Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution. But opposition will be fierce, led by billionaires determined to preserve the central role of money in American politics and their dominance.
Voters can rekindle the Founders’ high hopes for democracy in the coming elections. The question is whether the corruption issue has sufficiently ripened and economic conditions have become sufficiently dire that democratic reformers can attain a trifecta at the polls in 2028.
George Tyler is a former deputy assistant treasury secretary and World Bank official. He is the author of books including Billionaire Democracy and What Went Wrong.
As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary.
``You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany, Turkey, or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.''
Ronald Reagan in a 1989 Presentation Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom
My family is one of many cultures. My mother’s side, from former Czechoslovakia, my father’s side, from Canada and Ukraine. I am simply the product, a mosaic of Canadian slang and Czech accents, Cossack hats and ice hockey, pierogies and cabbage rolls, and yet I am unapologetically American. I stand proud and perhaps shed a small tear listening to the national anthem at football games, and I give a warm welcome to the troops I see around my rural hometown.
My father, born in Saskatchewan, Canada, is, too, a proud American. He saw the palm trees of Los Angeles, the harsh winters of Wisconsin, and the humid summers of Miami, and fell in love with the United States. He is not just a Canadian in America, but he is an American outright.
My mother was born to a military family in Frankfurt, West Germany, and later moved to the United States, where she has lived her entire life. She, too, is as American as my father is; she’ll never let an American flag touch the ground, and that is why I love my country.
As a newly naturalized American, my father would go on to work at UCLA in HIV research and assist in the revolutionary advancements in our understanding of the disease that ravaged the 1980s. He, in a lab full of Americans from all different backgrounds: Canadian, German, and Japanese, came together and accomplished groundbreaking research.
When Carl Sagan, son of a Ukrainian-born immigrant, said, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness of space is bearable only through love,” it resonated deeply within me. Perhaps because my Great Uncle Frank worked as a computer scientist at JPL on the Voyager alongside Sagan, or because it deeply connects with how we came together as Americans during the Space Race —through love and cooperation. For the first time in modern history, Women, African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and Whites all came together under the collective goal of reaching the moon. And frankly, there’s nowhere else in the world where this collaboration could have happened - because the foundations we’ve built upon in America permit those of all races to cooperate in the pursuit of technological advancement and the bettering of humanity.
Now, at the hour of my putting pen to paper —the 250th year of our nation’s existence —we are under attack. Not by a foe or terrorist, but by ignorance. Ignorance of the strife of immigrants such as those that came before me, those that crafted revolutionary ideas and carried out unthinkable tasks. And now, the question is, how do we fight a war of ideology? How do we defend ourselves from disinformation, such as how we cannot trust our fellow men and women from other countries?
The answer is simple. We must look to our future generations. Ignorance is a habit, and like all habits, can be nipped in the bud with education and action. The future must be a brighter place for our children. We must show them that they must not fear the immigrants that come through our borders in El Paso or Blaine, that walk off the planes at Dulles or JFK, we must show them that immigrants are truly the backbone of our nation. To do this, we must tell the stories of their ancestors who came on the Mayflower, who came from Italy and Great Britain by ship in the 1900s, and who cross our borders from Mexico even today. I have shared the immigrant stories of my family with you. As an American, you must share yours.
Jack Hnatyszyn, 16, Snohomish, WA
Crowd of protestors
Seeking to harness the energy of popular opposition to established institutions, some defenders of democracy have sought a version of populism with an inclusive alternative to the MAGA movement’s xenophobic and homogenizing view of “the people.”
This year, the No Kings protests around the country and the ICE Out resistance in Minnesota have been important actions led by ordinary people to enact and protect democracy. Taken together, they show that inclusive populism faces a challenge: social media can mobilize people around shared identities, but democracy requires relations of trust that social media erode. Using inclusive populism to defend democracy thus requires attention not just to the symbols that mobilize people but also to the offline relationships and organizations that hold people together.
Two Styles of Movement
The Trump administration is trying to reshape both the US constitutional order and the contours of the American people. Trump’s executive order to overturn the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment is an effort to change who counts as an American citizen, practically and imaginatively. It is also plainly unconstitutional. Similarly, Trump’s campaign of mass deportations is a large-scale violation of the rule of law and the US Constitution, as when ICE authorized itself to enter homes without judicial authorization, in violation of the 4th Amendment.
The No Kings and ICE Out protests respond to these events differently. The No Kings protests, beginning in June 2025, frame their messages around Trump’s undermining of the constitutional order. Organized primarily by chapters of 50501 and Indivisible, the No Kings actions use mass mobilization to show the breadth of opposition to Trumpism and are explicitly committed to nonviolence, deescalation of conflict, and opposition to property destruction. By contrast, ICE Out protests are framed in opposition to Trump’s racial remaking of “the people” and often engage in direct action and mutual aid rather than mass mobilization. They began in opposition to the Trump administration’s federalization of the National Guard to support immigration raids in major city centers and reached their peak (so far) in January 2026 with a massive citywide “economic blackout” and rally in Minneapolis. These efforts have typically been coordinated by immigrants’ rights groups and labor movement organizations, including union locals. Many people and organizations participate in both forms of resistance. Examining their respective strengths and weaknesses can inform how these two movements might complement each other to become the basis for a successful resistance movement.
The Power of Popular Identification
The No Kings protests claim to be the largest protests in the history of the United States. Critics argue that the protests amount to little more than a weekend picnic because of their minimal disruption and their lack of specific demands. Defenders argue that it is precisely because of these features that No Kings has been so successful.
To better understand this dynamic, we look to Ernesto Laclau, one of the most prominent theorists of contemporary populism. In his 2005 book On Populist Reason, Laclau argues that politics starts with what he calls a “democratic demand,” a specific demand for a particular thing by a defined group; for example, a group of residents demanding a bus route to their neighborhood. Laclau says when democratic demands are so specific, they don’t stimulate our political imagination. Instead, he argues, building power requires what he calls “popular demands,” which aggregate democratic demands into a larger claim made on behalf of a larger, less defined entity; for example, demanding the city provide better public services to everyone.
Finally, he argues, these demands then become properly populist and turn into an “empty signifier.” These empty signifiers represent collections of demands that have become disconnected from a particular policy. Instead, they serve primarily as a source of identity, like claiming to stand with ordinary people against the “Epstein class.” These claims are not totally empty of content, but also are hard to pin down. For example, many people identify as “workers” when they are business owners or retirees while demonizing immigrant workers as parasites.
Laclau’s concepts help us understand the success and the limits of the No Kings protests. The No Kings protests use empty signifiers—“No Kings Since 1776,” “Fighting Dictatorship Together”—that do not articulate policies or plans of action so much as a form of identity politics. These signs are tendentially empty but still have some content, as revealed by the demographics of protest attendance: research suggests No Kings attendees are overwhelmingly White, college-educated, Democratic voters who are middle-aged or older. No Kings offers a powerful way for this group to express their identity as opponents of MAGA and Trumpism. It’s not a coincidence that both supporters and critics of No Kings have referred to these gatherings as a kind of “group therapy” since they function to boost the morale and sense of agency of a group that feels disempowered.
The Limits of Popular Identification
This form of identity politics flourishes online. It’s not a coincidence that both 50501 and Indivisible, the convening organizations of No Kings, came out of viral posts on social media. These organizations have small staffs and no formal membership requirements; all it takes to join is liking the local Facebook group or resharing their Instagram post. They have shown they can mobilize huge numbers of people, but what binds the movement is largely a shared imaginative identification with relevant empty signifiers rather than a personal relationship to other specific individuals, institutions, or places.
In this, No Kings resembles many recent enormous protests that have ultimately fizzled or otherwise failed, which might serve as a warning about the limits of what large, amorphous groups can accomplish in politics. The warning could be especially applicable for groups organized through social media. As Kettering and Gallup’s Democracy for All Project shows, heavy social media use not only correlates with a sense of one’s own power to create change but also with a lower likelihood of endorsing democratic beliefs, like the idea that every citizen should have the right to vote. What’s more, heavy social media use correlates with increased feelings of social disconnection and loneliness. Connections forged online are both more ephemeral and less satisfying than those needed to deepen and defend democracy.
Democracy and Real People
If No Kings exemplifies Laclau’s empty signifier, we can analyze ICE Out in connection with his idea of democratic and popular demands. ICE Out’s demands are more specific to policies than the demands of No Kings; for example, organizers in Minnesota were directly demanding an end to the three-month-long immigration enforcement Operation Metro Surge. While popular identification plays an important role, these actions also connect more directly to specific individuals and local institutions, as when parents organized patrols around daycare centers to protect staff from immigration raids. Such actions are location-specific and connect individuals to each other. Community members engaged in mutual aid, delivered food to neighbors, and even flew to Texas to help bring home abductees released from detention.
Such practices are defenses of both democracy and vulnerable communities. They are also riskier than attending a No Kings rally, as demonstrated by the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. But they are also intrinsically rewarding. As the author Will McGrath wrote about his experience driving kids to school when it wasn’t safe for their families to, “The reward is watching your city . . . organize in hyperlocal networks of compassion, in acephalous fashion, not because someone told you to, but because tens of thousands of people across a metro region simultaneously and instinctively felt the urge to help their neighbors.” These networks remain rooted in specific actions to support particular people and places. This is their strength but also their limit, making it hard to scale up the strategy to a national level.
Montgomery and Birmingham
In an interview after the day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping,” Minneapolis’s largest mobilization of resistance to ICE, JaNaé Bates Imari, the codirector of Faith in Minnesota and ISAIAH, discussed the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956. Imari reflected on the ordinary people who sustained the bus boycott on a day-to-day basis: “They were taking responsibility for 381 days . . . to make sure that people could still get their kids from childcare, that they could still get to work, that folks could go and get their groceries—literally having to build the infrastructure as they went along. But they got to lead that.”
The success of these past resistance movements required both hyperlocal networks of compassion and spectacular gatherings that served as moments of polarization and identification. Inclusive populism cannot ignore the social media structures of our information environment, but if political success is to last longer than a viral meme, then the popular identification that flourishes online must find an anchor offline. Networks and political actions can connect participants to specific individuals, common communities, and concrete demands. The defense of democracy in the 21st century may depend on threading this needle.
Benjamin L. McKean is an associate professor of political science at The Ohio State University whose research concerns populism, global justice, and climate change.
This article was originally published as part of From Many, We, a Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that highlights the insights of thought leaders dedicated to the idea of inclusive democracy.
U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth testifies during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on July 21, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Members of the Trump administration appeared before the committee to request supplemental funding amid a recent escalation in the war with Iran.
While President Trump threatens to destroy “ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT” in Iran for every shot they take at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, Americans back home are hoping and praying this folly of a war wraps up yesterday.
Strikes over the weekend brought the death toll for U.S. troops to 18, with 100 more injured; the Strait of Hormuz is essentially closed again, with Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen threatening to block other oil routes; gas prices are up 16 cents from the average a week ago, 88 cents higher than last year and $1.04 higher than the week before the war, per Politico; and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth admitted in a hearing on Tuesday that the conflict had already cost U.S. taxpayers $37.5 billion — as he asked for $67 billion more.
All of this while no one — not Hegseth, not Trump, not Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Vice President JD Vance — can tell voters how or when we plan to exit this war having achieved anything of long-term significance. It’s the very definition of a quagmire.
Meanwhile, Iran and its dangerous proxies are clearly playing the long game, hoping that upcoming American midterm elections force the U.S. to exit the war we started without accomplishing a single one of our stated objectives — a very real possibility.
Trump is posturing, as he’s wont to do, insisting he’s not influenced by the calendar. “I don’t view it as ‘Gee, we’re having an election in a period of time,’ ” he said on Tuesday. “No, the election — I can’t think about that having to do with this. I think people are very impressed.”
Not so, as a majority of Americans now say the war in Iran was the wrong decision, while a belief that the war is worth the economic cost among Trump’s MAGA base has dropped to just over a third — a 13 point drop in two months.
Voters, Republican lawmakers up for reelection, and the Iranian regime — all united in their hope that Trump can be pushed to the exits by the election politics of an unpopular war.
But for once, I hope Trump isn’t bluffing.
We shouldn’t have entered this war, and we most definitely shouldn’t have entered it without a clear strategy. But here we are, and it’s now our job to leave it responsibly.
What does that mean?
Unfortunately, it means admitting we likely can’t make good on a number of the grandiose promises Trump made to justify the war in the first place. It seems we’ve given up on the idea of regime change and liberating the Iranian people, to name two. But we can and should pursue other objectives that would leave the U.S., our allies, and the region better off.
First and foremost, we must leave with verifiable restraints on and multilateral monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program. If it’s unrealistic or costly to retrieve Iran’s buried uranium cache, we must secure a non-conditional non-proliferation agreement — with teeth.
We must leave having guaranteed unfettered access to shipping routes, from the Strait of Hormuz to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Our European, Asian and Gulf allies must be integrated into a joint coalition to protect international shipping lanes from repeated extortion attempts.
And we must leave our regional allies, like Kuwait, protected from retaliatory strikes through binding non-aggression commitments and a long-term off-shore carrier strike group presence to prevent a security vacuum.
This is a far cry from what Trump promised with his ill-advised and ill-prepared blunder of a war — and in the case of Hormuz, it’s merely restoring access we already had before the war. But it’s the least we should accept in our retreat.
As much as we want to get out now, we owe it to our allies, our Gulf partners, our troops — and the Iranian people — to leave this mess of our own making with something to show for it.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
