By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
November 6, 2026
Big moments can be so easy to misread, particularly when elation and exhaustion intermingle.
Democrats in Indiana and across the nation are at such a moment now.
The 2026 election brought them results no one in the party could have dreamed would come so fast and so large.
Here in Indiana, Democrats won statewide races for the first time in almost 15 years. They scooped up a congressional seat in the heavily Republican Fifth District. They ended the Republican supermajority in the Indiana House of Representatives and brought that chamber back close to parity.
Across the nation, Democrats regained control of both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. They registered big gains everywhere and turned once ruby-red states such as Texas, the Carolinas and Kansas blue.
In the aftermath of so much good fortune, it must be tempting for Democrats to think of this huge victory as an endorsement of them and everything they believe in.
It wasn’t and it isn’t.
This election was much more a defeat—an epic, epic defeat—for Republicans than it was a win for Democrats. It was a repudiation of a GOP that for more than a decade has elevated arrogance, ignorance, incompetence and insensitivity into being the hallmarks of their party brand.
Hoosiers and Americans turned away in droves from Republicans because they felt the leaders of the party didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t care who they hurt.
This rejection of the GOP doesn’t mean that those same Hoosiers and Americans have embraced Democrats.
They haven’t, but they have opened a door for Democrats to persuade them.
That is the message Democrats should not misread.
Much as they may want to consider this election’s results as an invitation to remake this state and this country in whatever they wish, they should see this moment as something else.
A chance to demonstrate that a government such as ours can work.
That free people can manage their own affairs and resolve their own differences.
That, as Abraham Lincoln once said in another American time of trial, “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
For more than a half-century, candidates from both parties have made it a practice to run against government, but Republicans elevated this campaign stratagem into a fetish. Even in the aftermath of this election’s debacle, Indiana’s lieutenant governor and king of cluelessness, Micah Beckwith, argued that the voters had agreed with the GOP’s hostility to government, demonstrating in the process a staggering obliviousness to the fact that he is the government those voters just rejected.
This constant anti-government rhetoric began as a foolish indulgence that grew over time into a toxic malignancy in the body politic.
That’s because, in this country, government doesn’t draw its authority from divine sources or some external force.
No, in this country, government draws its authority from the consent of the people.
This means that, when we declare war on our own government in this country, we’re declaring war on ourselves.
The founders of this country understood that, which is why they created a government framework in which people from different parts of the country, of different points of view and with different interests could work through their differences and balance those interests.
Those founders understood that free people were never going to agree on everything, but if they were going to live together in peace, they had to find ways to work through their disagreements.
What was true more than 200 years ago is even more true now.
A large part of what destroyed the modern Republican Party was the Beckwithian belief that, for the GOP to win, someone—or a lot of other someones—had to lose.
And that making that loss as painful as possible was the most important thing.
That is not what this country was or is supposed to be.
No matter how much we may disagree, we all are citizens of the same country, possessed of the same rights and owning the same share of the American Dream as our neighbors and opponents. That’s why we must find a way to make government work.
To make America work.
This is what Democrats should focus on.
Proving that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
