Government leadersEarthquakes
Making the most of America’s midterm tsunami
Imagine, for a moment, that the US midterm elections had not delivered Democratic wins at a generational scale, but merely a trickle of flipped seats—enough, perhaps, to change control of the House of Representatives but not enough for a Senate majority. Is there any doubt that President Donald Trump would embrace such results as a good-enough validation of his often lawless and brutal administration? Would it not now be doubling down, striving to cast the polls as an imprimatur for its excesses? Instead, American democracy skirted a disabling blow. Yet it would be a grave mistake to take a fu