“What I want you to do,” US president told a South Carolina rally audience in August, ” is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot” when it’s time to vote in the 2026 midterm election for US House and Senate seats. He repeated the request multiple times in various venues.

Republican candidates likely hope that voters weren’t listening. As of late September, Trump’s approval rating stood at 29 percent according to an American Research Group poll. Republican candidates are distancing themselves from him,  scrubbing references to his endorsements of them from their web sites, and in some cases performatively coming out against him on various issues.

All year we’ve heard predictions of a “blue wave” in the midterms, with Democrats taking majorities in both houses of Congress.

As of this writing, most forecasts I’ve consulted say that there’s a good chance of a Democratic House come January, but that the Republicans will likely hang on to the Senate.

My own forecast is “don’t get your hopes up for substantial change no matter how the midterms turn out.” That’s just not how American government works. Or at least that’s not how American government USUALLY works.

“Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising,” historian Shelby Foote noted in Ken Burns’s 1990 documentary The Civil War.  “Our true genius is for compromise. Our whole government’s founded on it. And, it failed,” leading to southern secession and four years of brutal war.

While the conventional wisdom holds that America is politically “polarized,” its two major political parties have converged over the last few decades.

They’ll quibble over the details, but they pride themselves on compromising where big issues are concerned. Their joint raison d’être is to keep the jalopy of government moving down the same road, in the same direction, no matter the cost.

Seldom a month goes by that we’re not told of negotiations on some “must-pass” bill, saved at the last minute when a handful of members from one party “cross the aisle” to put a little more gas in the jalopy’s tank or a plug in one of the jalopy’s flat tires.

In fact, it’s kind of silly to pretend that the two major parties are separate parties. Since the 1890s, when they seized control of elections with “ballot access” laws to exclude competitors, they’ve effectively become feuding factions of a single political party whose mutual hatred of each other is largely fueled by what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.”

And over the last 50 years or so, the party factions in Congress have painted themselves into the corner of servitude to an increasingly imperial and unbridled presidency. Trump may be the most predatory example, but he’s hardly sui generis. He’s just an extension of a long-term trend.

The Democrats aren’t going to secure veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress … and even if they did, it’s not obvious they’d make any foundational changes to how American government works.

They’d keep spending more and more money.

They’d keep borrowing more and more money to spend.

They’d keep sticking their noses into every corner of our personal lives and our businesses’ operations.

They’d keep kicking the Social Security can down the road toward insolvency.

Sure, they might impeach and remove a president, but the next president and the president after that would continue down the same road with, largely, complete congressional cooperation — and with a free hand to engage in foreign military adventures despite the Constitution’s assignment of war powers to Congress.

The problem isn’t which party controls the House, the Senate, or the White House, or appoints the most Supreme Court justices.

The problem is political government itself. The framers of the US Constitution hoped to bequeath us a system which wouldn’t devolve into tyranny, but that hope was obviously in vain. George III ruled his American colonies with a much lighter touch than we’ve enjoyed from the US government since the revolution.

For all his failings, Abraham Lincoln got it right when he pointed out that “no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

When we go back to the drawing board, as eventually we must, that should be written across the top as our starting point.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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