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It is increasingly apparent that a Blue Wave is coming on November 3. President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to an average of 37 percent and may now be as low as 33 percent. His supposedly solid wall of support within his own party is eroding. Even in most deep red states, his approval ratings are underwater. Democrats have an 8-point average in the national preference polls for Congress. Fox News is predicting that the Democrats will win a solid majority in the House, picking up as many as 22 seats. There is at least an even chance Democrats could win the Senate, too.
Are the Democrats prepared for this new opportunity—and the potentially much greater opportunity of reclaiming the White House in 2029? Three questions loom large: First, what can and must be done to repair the damage to democracy and minimize the danger that an aspiring autocrat can once again severely degrade if not destroy American democracy? Second, what will the Democrats do to respond to voters’ concerns about high consumer prices, diminishing job opportunities, decaying infrastructure, and unaffordability of housing and other key components of a middle-class life? And third, what will be the political approach of a new Democratic majority? Will they try to build new coalitions from the center out that win over some Republican members of Congress, or will they meet polarization with polarization by trying to force through legislation with narrow majorities, even if it requires eliminating the Senate filibuster?
Barring a 1932-style electoral landslide that is unimaginable in the current political environment, the winning hand for Democrats will be to widen their base and, wherever possible, seek broader coalitions for policy innovation and reform. Come January of next year, it will be very difficult to pass significant domestic policy legislation that Trump will not veto, but the passage into law in June of a broad new bill to encourage housing affordability (which Trump passively accepted without signing) shows that occasionally partisan interests can converge. That chance will come again soon when the Senate considers the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA). It offers the best opportunity in decades to streamline the paralyzing thicket of permitting and review requirements that prevent us building the energy infrastructure (including renewable energy) we need to grow the economy and make electricity more affordable.
Come 2029 Democrats will also have the opportunity—and the historic imperative—to use their new Congressional power to promote significant reforms to protect and strengthen American democracy. They should use these next two years to stake their case for reforms that can garner bipartisan support.
The key to near-term progress is not to overreach but to push for reforms that can win broad backing from the Congress and the American people. The democracy-supporting philanthropist Rachel Pritzker has recently drawn a telling lesson from the fate of a recent reform bill. In 2021, the “For the People Act”—a sweeping piece of political reform legislation extending and modernizing voting rights and accountability measures—narrowly passed the House on a party-line vote but failed to overcome a Senate filibuster, with not a single Senate Republican supporting it. It had many good provisions, but it failed for lack of bipartisan buy-in. If the Democrats win a trifecta (White House, House, and Senate) in 2028, they will face some pressure to lift the filibuster for voting rights legislation in 2029 to pass such a bill with a narrow partisan majority if necessary. But what can be done by one partisan Congressional majority can be undone by the next.
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In repairing American democracy, the priority should be reforms that can be sustained across swings of the electoral cycle. By contrast, the more narrowly tailored Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 was crafted by a coalition of senators from both parties, and it then won substantial bipartisan support in the Senate to become law. As a result, it will be much more difficult in the future for a hyper-partisan minority to challenge and overturn the results of a presidential election when the Congress meets on January 6 every four years to count the electoral votes.
So, what kinds of reforms might garner at least some support across the partisan divide in both the Congress and the public arena? Below is a possible list. As with the Electoral Count Reform Act, these reforms might pass if Democrats work from the center out to build support from both parties. Each of the reforms addresses the high level of disgust that the American people now feel with political corruption and abuse of power and privilege in Washington. Donald Trump is the worst example of these sins in American history, but Democrats should approach the task with some humility. Presidents like Clinton and Biden have also abused the pardon power, for example, and the two parties are now engaged in an ugly race to the bottom for partisan advantage in gerrymandering.
A Viable Agenda for Democratic Reform
End partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts. Pass a clean bill with only two provisions. The first should ban the use of partisan criteria in drawing Congressional district boundaries (with the hope that the same principle and procedure would be used for state legislative redistricting). The second should ban the redrawing of Congressional districts after the decennial redistricting (following a census), unless ordered by a court. If this legislation passed in 2027, Trump might veto it, but it would lay down a marker for a future administration. It could pass in 2029 and spare the country another disgraceful race to the bottom in the post-2030 redistricting. And it would brand opponents of a clean reform measure as practitioners of the worst and most cynical form of politics.
Ban the president and his immediate family members from profiting from deals with foreign governments and government-linked enterprises while the president is in office. The proliferating grotesque conflicts of interest of President Trump and his family, including cryptocurrency deals with government-linked billionaires from the Gulf kingdoms, constitute a “pattern of a presidency for sale” that compromises our values and our national security. Many Congressional Republicans are privately appalled by this sleaze, and as Trump’s popularity continues to weaken in his final two years, some may become emboldened to support a forward-looking law that imposes a ban on future actions. Were Trump to veto such a bill, it would further damage his hemorrhaging popularity and the Republican brand.
Ban Congressional stock-trading. A bill to ban purchase of stocks by members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children passed the House but failed in the Senate this summer because of a cynical effort by Republicans to insert in the bill a national voter ID provision (which could make it harder for low-income, disproportionately Democratic voters to vote). Once again, Democrats should press for a clean bill, with nothing else attached.
Protect the Federal Reserve. Under current law, members (governors) of the Federal Reserve Board serve 14-year, non-renewable terms, and may only be removed by the president “for cause,” which the Supreme Court has interpreted to mean “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” But this is now under challenge by President Trump, who is seeking to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook for politically opportunistic reasons. As America’s central bank, the Fed is arguably the most important independent agency in the Federal Government. It thus needs robust protection from political interference. Its autonomy could be strengthened if Congress passed a law giving Fed governors the same security of tenure enjoyed by the U.S. Comptroller General (the government’s supreme auditor), who can only be removed from a 15-year-term through impeachment or by a joint resolution of Congress.
Secure the tenure of Inspectors General. Soon after taking office in 2025, President Trump summarily fired at least 17 inspectors general of Cabinet departments and federal agencies, whose job it is under federal law “to prevent and detect waste, fraud, and abuse.” Controlling corruption and abuse of power requires greater protection for their tenure in office, and ideally more neutral means of appointment. The U.S. Comptroller General is appointed by the president from a short list of nominees submitted by an imaginatively constructed bipartisan commission (composed mainly of members of Congress) and can only be removed from office for cause by Congress, through the means described above. It may be wise to adopt similar appointment procedures and protections for the 37 inspectors general that are currently appointed by the president.
Protect the career civil service. The creation in the late 19th century of a professional and politically neutral federal civil service was one of the great steps forward for good governance and the rule of law in the United States. Now it is under unprecedented assault in modern times by the Trump Administration, which has prepared a new regulation (“Schedule Policy/Career”) to enable it to politicize large swaths of the career civil service. According to Democracy Forward, “Schedule P/C” would convert thousands, potentially tens of thousands, of “career federal jobs into positions that lack any protections and whose incumbents can effectively be fired for any reason at all.” The way to avert this descent into a new political spoils system is to pass, as soon as possible in the new Congress, the Saving the Civil Service Act, a bipartisan bill that would prohibit this kind of wholesale reclassification of merit-based, career civil service jobs.
These are modest but meaningful steps that Democrats should push, in partnership with principled Republicans, to secure our democracy and really drain the swamp in Washington. But we can go further. For quite some time, I have believed that we should forget about constitutional amendments and just focus on legislation to restore and protect democracy. But after the low point we have reached under President Trump, we may now be at a moment that could permit limited constitutional amendments to constrain future presidential overreach.
In thinking about this high-stakes terrain, it is crucial to bear in mind political realities. A constitutional amendment can only be sent to the state legislatures for consideration if it is adopted by a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress. This imposes a high bar for bipartisan consensus (but does not require presidential approval). So, there is no chance of advancing a constitutional amendment that one party sees as depriving it of a political advantage. Hence, eliminating the Electoral College is simply off the table: a waste of time. But there is at least one constitutional amendment that might garner two-thirds support in the Congress in 2029 for a simple reason: Sobered by the abuses of Donald Trump, Democrats want to protect democracy for the longer run. And, if there is a Democrat in the White House, Republicans will have a new incentive to constrain a president of the opposing party.
Which is why my final proposal is:
7. A constitutional amendment to constrain presidential pardons. At a minimum, such an amendment should forbid the president from pardoning himself or his immediate family members. I would favor the creation of a bipartisan independent commission (perhaps to be appointed in equal numbers by the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate) to approve all proposed presidential pardons.
Finally, the political climate in 2029 may be favorable for more ambitious institutional and even constitutional innovations to control political corruption and possible future presidential abuse of power in the United States. Today, the United States ranks only 29th in the world in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Since 2016, its rank has fallen by 11 places. The experience of two Trump presidencies has taught us that strong independent institutions, with clear authorities and mandates and insulation from political control, are needed to control political corruption.
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There is no one formula, but the least corrupt democracies, such as Sweden, Denmark, and New Zealand, have two types of provisions that may be instructive. One is a standing professional and independent prosecutorial authority, such as the Serious Fraud Office in New Zealand, to investigate serious instances of corruption and bribery. Recent experience suggests the value and indeed imperative of a body that cannot be ordered to back off by a president or a group of congressional cronies. The White House and the Congress cannot be relied on to investigate themselves, and so long as the Attorney General is a political appointee, there will always be questions if not constraints about the independence of the Justice Department when it pertains to the president and his appointees. The second (as in Sweden) is an office of Ombudsman, appointed by the parliament, to receive and investigate citizen complaints and ensure that high government officials comply with the law.
The corruption of the Gilded Age produced a wave of institutional innovations and reforms to improve the quality of government, including (as noted above) a meritocratic civil service in 1883, the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the Federal Reserve System in 1913. Now we are living through a second Gilded Age, with unprecedented presidential corruption and abuse of power. If the Democrats win back the presidency in 2028, they should privilege reforms to ensure that a future president can never again so easily corrupt and threaten our constitutional system. What’s more, they may find surprising allies among the Republican ranks.
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, both at Stanford University.
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