How Democrats Can Use Their Coming Majority

By Rahm Emanuel

Nearly every data point suggests that Democrats will ride to victory this November, making it very likely that we’ll take control of the House and possibly the Senate. While we shouldn’t take anything for granted, we need to think through how to maximize our opportunity, both politically and in enacting a substantive agenda.

The reality is that what happens in 2027 will have a direct bearing on the 2028 presidential contest. Democrats in Congress helped secure Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s victories by laying the groundwork in the two years before they won. That lesson should be front and center for congressional leaders today.

When the Democrats who controlled Congress in 1990 sent President George H.W. Bush a bill written explicitly to put the nation’s finances on firmer footing, they hit a master stroke for both the Clinton campaign and the Clinton administration. In addition to spending cuts, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell insisted that the bill include a modest tax hike, directly in contravention of Bush’s pledge at the 1988 Republican National Convention: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” The impact reverberated in ways few fully appreciate.

Mr. Mitchell’s bill united Democrats behind a common cause, demonstrating that our party was committed to protecting ordinary people in a fiscally responsible way.

It divided the GOP—only 19 of the Senate’s 45 Republicans voted for the bill Bush signed, suggesting that the president’s party was in disarray and demoralizing the base. It was in the wake of the conservative base’s anger that Pat Buchanan decided to mount a primary challenge from the right against the sitting president.

The substance of the bill enabled an economic renaissance that defined Mr. Clinton’s eight years. The deficit-reduction package he signed during his first term and the balanced- budget plan he shaped in the second created 22 million new jobs and delivered the first surpluses since the 1960s, and the bottom fifth of earners saw income gains nearly as much as the top fifth for the first time in decades.

Democrats managed a similar maneuver in 2008. Having won control of Congress in 2006, my colleagues and I had to decide whether to send President George W. Bush an omnibus budget bill or to be more surgical, forcing him to veto a bill and highlight the GOP’s wayward priorities. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and I prevailed in getting the House and Senate to send him two bills funding an expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, providing healthcare coverage to 10 million additional children. The president vetoed the bills. Both the substantive and political effects would play out over the course of years.

Ahead of Mr. Obama’s run for the White House, we united Democrats in favor of something the public overwhelmingly supported: health coverage for the children of parents who worked full-time but couldn’t afford insurance. We simultaneously managed to divide the GOP, with more than 60 House and Senate Republicans voting with Democrats to expand CHIP, diminishing enthusiasm for what would become John McCain’s campaign for the White House. After Mr. Obama’s inauguration, Democrats passed the bill a third time, and the CHIP expansion became the foundation and inspiration for what would eventually become the Affordable Care Act.

The question now is whether Democrats will heed the strategic wisdom from these two lessons. Many presume we will use the power from winning the House and possibly the Senate primarily for retribution and vindictiveness. The implication is that we will tie up the White House, and the Trump administration more generally, in an endless series of investigations. Democrats should play against type, defying the expectation that we’ll embrace gotcha politics. No doubt it’s a target-rich environment. But an excessive focus on Trumpian slime will undermine efforts to promote our positive agenda. And it’s what we accomplish that will earn us the sweet taste of victory in November 2028.

My reputation as a street brawler might lead many to presume that I’d lean heavily toward extracting our pound of flesh. When I chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2006 cycle, we worked hard to focus the public’s attention on the corruption surrounding House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. But the situations are different in at least one key respect: Voters today already presume that Mr. Trump is dishonest. They’ve supported him in two presidential elections nevertheless. So, while it’s certainly worthwhile for congressional Democrats to go after waste, fraud and abuse—to take down the crony capitalism that is the hallmark of the current administration— we can’t let ourselves become agents of vengeance.

On this front, the press won't be our friends. Mr. Trump’s misdeeds elicit more clicks and eyeballs than substantive stories about our plans to drive prosperity for the working and middle classes. To that end, we need to be disciplined, focusing on the ways taxpayer dollars have been misspent and enriched and rewarded Mr. Trump’s family and friends. We should avoid issues, like property tax evaluations, where the public justifiably believes that we’re pursuing Mr. Trump for something all well-heeled and well-connected people do, if only because the ensuing debate will distract the electorate from our affirmative agenda.

What is that agenda? It should begin with raising the minimum wage, which hasn’t been changed since 2009. We should pass a ratepayers’ bill of rights. We should fight to lower healthcare costs. We should end the scourge of social media on children. And we should pass an ethics-reform package that cleans up Washington and bans insiders from betting on prediction markets. That should be our focus in 2027: forcing Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress to veto and vote against bills that unite us, divide them and lay the foundation for our electoral and substantive victories in 2028 and beyond. As with the tax hike in 1990 and work on children’s healthcare in 2007, we need to highlight issues that exploit the GOP’s fissures to our strategic advantage.

If proof of dishonesty were enough to beat Mr. Trump, he would never have been elected president twice. We’ve tried that approach again and again, and it too often doesn’t pay off. If we don’t take to heart that there’s a meaningful distinction between dishonesty and corruption, we’ll squander a golden opportunity. Beginning next year, we’ll have the power in Congress to illustrate to the American people that the most important distinction in Washington is between our positive agenda and their crony capitalism. How we handle 2027 and what we choose to highlight will be as important as who we nominate for president in 2028.

Mr. Emanuel, a Democrat, served as a U.S. representative from Illinois (2003-09), White House chief of staff (2009-10), mayor of Chicago (2011-19) and ambassador to Japan (2022-25).