The 2026 midterms may have been a stunning string of victories for the Democratic Party, but it’s important that we also commemorate all the failures. Here’s a baker’s dozen, ranked in reverse order of loserhood:

13. The Schumer-Jeffries Haters

White-hot progressive (or insurgent) rage at the two New Yorkers who head the minority caucuses in Congress was a regular feature of political life in the past two years of Democratic discontent. For years, Schumer has been widely mocked as an inept party messenger and strategist, and who can forget the excited progressives on New York’s primary night in June chanting “You’re Next!” when Hakeem Jeffries appeared on their television screens? Schumer’s getting pretty long in the tooth, and Jeffries may indeed be vulnerable to a primary challenge in his own district. But neither is going to be “purged” from a leadership post following this massive win. It’s probably already dawning on those hoping the democratic socialist “bloc” would form a powerful faction in the House that Jeffries’s majority will dwarf their numbers and also include a ton of new centrists representing districts Trump carried in 2024.

One very happy democratic socialist, though, is Nithya Raman, who is now projected to become the next mayor of America’s second-largest city, Los Angeles. But that means a very big 2026 loser is incumbent Democratic mayor Karen Bass, whose fortunes dropped rapidly when the outbreak of catastrophic wildfires in her city caught her on an overseas junket to Ghana. Raman was a Bass ally on the city council whose candidacy surprised, and then eventually removed, the mayor. More than likely, this is the end of a storied Bass career that flourished in the California legislature and in Congress before she came home to run her city.

At this point, Stevens still professes to be a Democrat despite talk of booting her out of the House Caucus during her final weeks in Congress. But her shocking last-minute endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers against the candidate who defeated her in Michigan’s August Senate primary, Abdul El-Sayed, turned out to be, among other things, a very bad bet. El-Sayed won by 7 percent, more than his lead in some preelection polls, and it’s possible Stevens’s effort to sabotage him actually increased his votes. In any event, her treacherous behavior and the erratic character it exposed have left her with a lot fewer friends and virtually no admirers.

10. Conservative Judicial Activists

A lot of people who otherwise aren’t big fans of Donald Trump have nonetheless supported him because of his success in stacking the federal judiciary–and most crucially the U.S. Supreme Court–with constitutional “originalists” and other products of the conservative legal movement. His power to do so (at least without lots of compromises with Democrats) ended with the destruction of the GOP’s Senate Majority. And the stubborn refusal of Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to retire and give Republicans a chance to choose younger successors will now create a significant drought of SCOTUS appointments, particularly since the size........

© Daily Intelligencer