I was optimistic going into November’s off-year elections. Despite the Trump-led Republican Party’s dominance in 2024 and despite media chatter about a “fundamental realignment of American politics” that followed, I expected things to turn around once voters got another chance to weigh in. My optimism was justified. Not only did Democrats win high-profile races in New York City, New Jersey, Virginia, and California, they also made significant local gains in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi. Beyond all that, as G. Elliott Morris reports, “from 2024 to 2025 Republicans lost the most support—25 points, on average—among the very voters they theorized would remake the GOP into a vast, multi-racial, working-class coalition.”
Morris, a self-described “data-driven reporter,” shared my optimism in the lead up to the election. However, while his hopes rested on the polls, mine were, I confess, less empirically grounded. They arose instead from my study of the twentieth-century Jesuit Bernard Lonergan. But my study also chastens my optimism. Lonergan’s philosophy of history anticipates that, in situations like ours, things will get better before they get worse.
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