Nationalizing the midterms
==========================

Across two appearances more than a year apart, John Kiriakou returned to the same benchmark for judging a party's ability to fight an election: the 1994 Republican Contract with America.

The charge against the Democrats

In October 2025, during the government shutdown, he told Ted Rall that Democratic messaging was as bad as he had seen it since 1994. He described waiting through that year for the Democrats to say something, to come up with some proposal, some policy, and getting nothing. "And that's how it is again this year," he said. "They don't stand for anything."

The complaint was specific rather than general. Rall had been arguing that the Democrats had failed to run ads on television or social media explaining what the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies would do to people. Kiriakou's contribution was the historical parallel: a party watching an opposing programme land and producing no counter-programme of its own.

The advice to the Speaker

By February 2026, after a State of the Union address he regarded as a wasted opportunity, he applied the same benchmark to the Republicans, and this time named the man who had done it.

Watching Speaker Mike Johnson sit behind the president and nod and clap, Kiriakou said, was watching someone fail to lead his caucus. "If I were Mike Johnson," he said, "I'd have Newt Gingrich living on my couch and I'd be asking him every morning, noon, and night how he pulled off 1994 by nationalizing the midterms."

What the Republicans should be producing instead, in his account, is a real plan for the workplace, a real plan for artificial intelligence, and a real plan for health care, the last of which, he noted, they had had ten years to write. He offered three possible explanations for the absence and did not choose between them: that the donors will not allow it, that the party is too disorganised, or that the president is too scattered.

The shape of the argument

In both instances the criticism is procedural rather than ideological. Kiriakou is not faulting either party for the content of its programme but for not having one, and the 1994 model is invoked as proof that a party in opposition can manufacture a national argument out of a midterm year if it decides to. He treats Gingrich's achievement as a technique, nationalisation, rather than as a politics, and it is the technique he says is missing on both sides.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Ted Rall
- Donald Trump
