EDITORIAL: A Mandate is Not a Blank Check

Once again, Americans have done what they do every few years: handed the wheel to the other side and asked it to fix what previous drivers broke. The Associated Press and major networks show Democrats have won the House and the Senate, though a few races are still being finalized as I write this.

For Democrats, it is vindication. For Republicans, it is a rebuke.

For the rest of us, it should be a warning.

Wave elections rarely mean voters have fallen in love with the winner. They usually mean the loser overreached or underdelivered, or both. The Democrat and Republican parties should remember that, because both have a long record of promising much more than they deliver.

Republicans promised relief from high prices, fiscal discipline and an orderly end to the border chaos. Yet deficits grew under unified control, and voters kept paying more at the gas station, grocery store and pharmacy. Whatever one thinks of the party’s immigration agenda, the gap between the rhetoric and the results was wide enough to cost it many seats.

Democrats have their own ledger. They promised to protect democratic norms and to make life more affordable, yet when they last held unified power, much of their agenda stalled or was watered down with other social issues.

Voting rights legislation, immigration reform, grocery prices and housing costs remain unresolved. Voters often heard that the next election would be the decisive one, and, once again, watched as it wasn’t.

Beneath these specific failures lies a deeper problem: we have built a political system that profits from conflict. Primaries reward totality, cable news rewards outrage, and social media contemptuously rewards any opinion. A candidate who says “my opponents are not merely wrong but evil” gets more attention, more clicks and more donations than one who says “let’s find the overlap.” Then, we act surprised when Congress can’t pass a spending bill without a crisis.

Yet history suggests reasons for hope. Divided government, or even a narrow majority, can usually force the negotiation that landslides tend to prevent. Some of the country’s most durable reforms emerged when neither party could simply steamroll the other. Democrats now have a chance to prove they can govern rather than merely oppose. Republicans have a chance to rebuild around practical problem-solving instead of grievance. Neither outcome is guaranteed.

What should we hope for? Not unity, which is neither realistic nor desirable in our current society. We should hope for competence: balanced budgets passed on time, oversight that is serious rather than theatrical, and legislation written to last beyond the next election. We should hope that winners resist the urge to treat narrow margins as sweeping mandates, and that losers accept defeat without delegitimizing the process.

We also expect the “Revenge Politics” we’ve seen over the last decade disappear. When both parties spend all their time prosecuting the other, our other, more important, issues remain unresolved. We are tired of the fighting, namecalling, accusations and investigations that bear no fruit. We hear promises to clean up the corruption. Millions are spent to investigate and hold hearings but, no one is ever punished. We’re tired of the meaningless circus.

Most of all, we hope that voters continue doing what they just did: demanding results rather than blind loyalty. Political parties only change their behavior when it costs them something. Last Tuesday, it did.

We shall see what the next few years bring. While I remain hopeful, I don’t intend to hold my breath. I pray that people with good sense obtain power and that people in power obtain good sense.

The one thing history teaches us is this: We usually get exactly what we truly deserve.

May God Bless and Heal the United States of America.