Nov. 10
The Meteoric Rise of "America First Democrats"
Democrats who said "America First" beat three Republicans Trump had stamped with the phrase on Nov. 3, 2026; the independent who said it in Nebraska lost by six.
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Author's note: One more thing from this year that has nothing to do with strategy. I got my mother onto Substack, and watching her progress has been one of the real joys of the year, because I always knew she was brilliant and now everyone else can see it too. She writes as W. A. Lawrence at Glass Empires, and you should go follow her.
How does a party take the other party's slogan, and what happens to the slogan's owner when it works? That is the question we set out to answer after the midterms, and the answer took forty years of Republican word theft, a century of American campaigns, a small shelf of political science and this month's returns.
The political scientists call the thing a slogan carries "issue ownership." John Petrocik of the University of Missouri set out the theory in 1996: voters associate certain issues with certain parties, and a campaign is a fight over which issues the election is about. Later work found that a party can lose ownership of an issue to the other party. David Holian of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro traced how Bill Clinton neutralized the Republican advantage on crime in the 1990s by changing what the word meant, from punishment to prevention. Stefaan Walgrave's team at the University of Antwerp put the rule in one line: issue ownership is a matter of reputation, and reputations are kept or lost by what the owner does.
Republicans have been the better thieves for forty years, and anyone who has followed American politics knows it. Their method takes a Democratic word and changes what it means, so the word stays attached to Democrats as a liability. Lee Atwater did it to "liberal" for George H.W. Bush in 1988. Bush told a crowd in Oxford, Ohio, that September: "I'm going to keep on using it, because that is what he said he is," and Michael Dukakis spent the fall avoiding his own party's word. Bush went from a 12-point deficit in July to a 10-point win, and Democrats dropped "liberal" for "progressive" and have never picked it back up.
Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute published the method in March 2021 when he wrote on Twitter that his side had "decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans." The term was "critical race theory," and that same month a Leger poll for The Atlantic found that 71 percent of Americans had never heard of it and 48 percent wanted it out of schools. The pattern is the same in every case: the words were descriptions of Democrats, and Republicans made the descriptions hurt.
Democrats started the counter-move on the words Republicans own before 2026, and the people doing it were never only progressives. Pete Buttigieg, then mayor of South Bend, Indiana, told the Iowa Democratic Party's Hall of Fame forum on June 9, 2019: "Freedom doesn't belong to the Republican Party, and neither does patriotism." The 2024 Democratic convention was built on that word, with "freedom" in block letters behind the speakers.
James Talarico, the Presbyterian seminarian and former middle school teacher who ran for Senate in Texas on what he called a "politics of love," took the word "Christian" back from the party that had held it since Reagan, calling Texas's Ten Commandments classroom law "deeply un-Christian", and on Nov. 3, 2026, he beat Ken Paxton to become the first Democrat elected statewide in Texas in more than 30 years, winning counties Republicans carried in 2024, Tarrant and Denton among them. The difference between the two parties' thefts is the article. Republicans steal descriptions and poison them. The Democrats who won this year stole promises and kept them, and "America First" is the biggest promise the other side had.
The phrase has belonged to both parties before, and the history is the proof of the theory. Sarah Churchwell, the University of London historian whose book Behold, America traces the phrase, found that Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, used it in 1915 to argue for neutrality in World War I, that both presidential candidates ran on it in 1916, and that Warren Harding ran on it in 1920 and Calvin Coolidge in 1924. Wilson won in 1916 on the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War" and asked Congress to declare it five months later.
Harding, a Republican, then stood before the Ohio Society in New York on Jan. 6, 1920, and promised "To safeguard America first, To stabilize America first, To prosper America first". He won 60.3 percent of the popular vote, the largest share of any candidate in a century. The Democrat broke the promise, and the Republican took the words.
The next owner was the America First Committee, founded in 1940 by Yale law students to keep the United States out of World War II. Brandan Buck of the Cato Institute, writing in its magazine Free Society, describes a committee that drew Republicans, Democrats, union leaders and socialists around one principle: that the path to war was a false path to freedom, and that Congress, which the Constitution gives the war power, had to keep it. The committee reached 800,000 paying members in 450 chapters, then Charles Lindbergh named "the Jews" as war agitators in Des Moines on Sept. 11, 1941, and Pearl Harbor ended it in December. The phrase stayed tied to that speech for 75 years, until Donald Trump took it in 2016; by 2026 he was telling The Atlantic he was "the one that developed 'America First'".
In February 2026 the United States, with Israel, went to war with Iran. The 2024 promise, in Trump's words on election night, had been "I'm not going to start a war; I'm going to stop wars." Pew Research Center, the nonpartisan survey organization, found in March 2026 that 59 percent of Americans called the decision wrong, with 61 percent disapproving of Trump's handling of it. By September 2026, Navigator Research, a Democratic polling group, found that about 20 percent of Trump's 2024 voters regretted their vote, and almost half of them named the war as the reason. Arta Moeini, research director at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, told a panel that month that Trump "has shown himself to be at least disingenuous about using the term 'America First.'"
That was the opening, and Democrats took it with Trump's own phrase. Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Senate candidate, told Axios in July 2026: "I'm the most America First candidate in the country, proudly," and said the MAGA version was "to make a show out of America First, only to sell you out." Josh Turek, the Iowa state representative running for Joni Ernst's open seat, said at a forum in May 2026 that "A real America first approach, a real Iowa first approach, is let's take care of our citizens." Annie Andrews, the pediatrician running in South Carolina, sold an "America first!" T-shirt on her campaign site and said Darline Graham had voted "multiple times to continue this war that is directly responsible for the $6 diesel." Dan Osborn, the union leader running as an independent in Nebraska, wrote on X: "We need to be putting America first, not Israel first."
Each of them ran against a Republican Trump had certified with the phrase. Trump called Mike Rogers an "America First Patriot" and said Pete Ricketts "will always put America First"; Sen. Tom Cotton called Ashley Hinson a "staunch America First conservative." Jack Hunter, the former political editor of Rare and the reporter who followed these races for Responsible Statecraft, counted the votes behind the slogan: Hinson voted for the war seven times, Ricketts against ending it 13 times out of 14, Graham against ending it three times.
Then the voters answered. El-Sayed beat Rogers 51.9 percent to 46.1 percent when the Associated Press called the race at 2:27 a.m. on Nov. 4, 2026, after Trump and JD Vance had campaigned against him by name. Turek beat Hinson 50.8 percent to 46.1 percent in a state Trump carried by 13 points in 2024 and became the first Democrat since Barack Obama to win a federal race in Iowa. Andrews became the first Democrat elected to the Senate from South Carolina since 1998 and the first woman. Osborn lost to Ricketts 50.2 percent to 43.9 percent after a campaign in which Ricketts called him a socialist and spent $13.8 million doing it. Democrats flipped seven Republican seats and hold at least 54 in the new Senate.
The obvious objection is that the president's party loses midterms, and that the war and the price of gas and groceries did the work while the slogan had nothing to do with it. The swing does not explain which Republicans lost, and the Republicans who lost to El-Sayed, Turek and Andrews were the ones Trump had stamped "America First" while they voted to keep the war going. Nebraska shows the limit: Osborn got to within six points with the slogan in a state where Republicans have held both Senate seats since 2012, and no further. Osborn's version, "not Israel first," had also stopped being a promise and become a description of someone else, and a description is the kind of word Republicans know how to poison.
A slogan is a promise, and the voters give it to whoever keeps it. Wilson lost the phrase in 1920 because he promised neutrality and delivered a war, and Harding took 60.3 percent with it. Trump lost it in 2026 because he promised no new wars and started one that 59 percent of the country called wrong, and the Democrats who said his words and meant them won three Senate races against Republicans he had certified with the phrase. Republicans spent forty years proving that a party can take the other side's descriptions and make them hurt; Atwater's "liberal" and Rufo's "critical race theory" are the record.
What Buttigieg said in 2019, and what Talarico, El-Sayed, Turek and Andrews proved on Nov. 3, 2026, is the larger finding: a party can take the other side's promises, and the promises are worth more, because a promise kept wins Iowa and a description poisoned only wins the argument. The phrase belongs to the people who end the war. In January 2027, three new senators who said it will get the chance to prove they meant it.
CALL TO ACTION
Who you're contacting and how: your two U.S. senators, by email or phone, or at their state office in person. You could even go to their office during business hours, bring donuts, and tell the staff you're going to talk to them about an issue you care about if the senator isn't there.
Find your senators by clicking on this sentence.
What you're asking for: a yes vote on the next War Powers resolution to end the Iran war when the new Senate is seated in January 2027, and a vote against new foreign military aid, with the money spent on health care at home, which is what El-Sayed promised Michigan voters in July 2026. Read how each senator voted on the war by clicking on this sentence.
Let them know who you are, what you want, and why you care. Offices count identical messages once, so write it in your own words.
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