DENVER — Happiness risks being a fleeting feeling for Democrats in Donald Trump’s America.

After years of struggling to find a way to defeat and counter the past and present president, the wide-blue wave of last week’s midterms has given Democrats a sense of elation that has long eluded them.

As party faithful gathered in Colorado for a post-midterm “What’s Next” event, the question quickly became what voters were really saying, and whether the results were a sign of Democratic strength, or primarily of the struggles of Trump and his allies.

“Not only did we win, we cleaned their clock, and so as a consequence, people think that we’re not weak, woke and losers anymore,” said Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, who is eying a Democratic run for the White House. “Now, it doesn’t mean that they believe in us and they trust us. They just believe ‘I’m going to give you another chance’ and now we have to demonstrate that we deserve what it is that they gave us.”

Recent history gives Democrats reason for caution. Trump’s first victory in 2016 gave Republicans unified control of Washington. The midterms two years later easily handed Democrats the House, but Republicans added to their Senate majority. And when Democrats won back the White House and full control of Washington in 2020, the pandemic and the fallout from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol shadowed the news of victory.

Now the party is at a turning point it hasn’t seen in decades. It has a chance to change how people see a party that was toxic in parts of the country just two years ago. Cost-of-living woes and the Trump administration’s entanglement in the war with Iran helped make that possible.

The party’s old baggage hasn’t gone away, though. Some of it dates to the Biden era. Some goes back to the state-legislative ground Democrats lost in the 2010 Tea Party wave, during Barack Obama’s first midterm as president. Still, wins up and down the ballot have given Democrats an opening to rebuild relationships with voters that had grown brittle and fractured.

“Democrats started changing what they were speaking about,” said Sandra Jauregui, who won her race last week to become Nevada’s next lieutenant governor. In 2024, Trump became the first Republican since the George W. Bush era to carry the state in a presidential race. “We finally started listening to voters instead of telling them what they should care about.”

Even before the midterms, some Democrats worried that big wins would hide the party’s longer-term problems, which no single election can fix. They also worried that lopsided victories would breed overconfidence. That could hurt the party’s chances of winning back the White House in 2028, and with them any hope of pushing the MAGA movement out of politics and into the history books as they prepare to face someone other than Trump in a presidential campaign.

“Dems are sure to ignore any lessons and assume that people like everything about them only to be devastated in 2028,” a national Republican operative said.

Some of the party’s most standout performances may not carry over to 2028. Last week’s statewide wins in Texas have Democrats imagining the state going blue in a presidential race, which would fundamentally redraw the path to 270 electoral votes and the presidency. But Texas is enormously expensive to compete in, as this year’s Senate race showed. And the next Republican presidential nominee is unlikely to carry the political and public baggage of Ken Paxton, the state’s impeached and acquitted GOP attorney general who lost the Senate race this fall.

Kansas is similar. Democrats have now won the governor’s office in the last three elections there, and voters are sending a moderate from the party to the U.S. Senate for the first time in almost 90 years. But in presidential years, Kansas remains comfortably Republican.

American politics doesn’t happen in a vacuum, either. Democrats are on track to soon be back to their usual fights over messaging, approach and progressive-versus-moderate positioning. But the path forward will also depend on what Republicans do.

In 2008, after heavy losses in the 2006 midterms during George W. Bush’s second term, Republicans effectively pushed the incumbent aside as the party’s undisputed leader.

The GOP could try the same thing with Trump. But that would mean breaking a hold that once looked fragile. A decade ago, the reality television star and real estate mogul upended the Republican establishment and remade the right in his own image. His grip held even after he lost the 2020 election and a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol and threw the transfer of power into chaos. Then he won back the White House in 2024 decisively.

Democrats have their own warning signs. Some of this month’s winners got there by keeping their distance from the party.

Both parties face a trust deficit, which is hardly surprising. The irony for Democrats is that they are being swept into power with help from dissatisfied former Trump voters. They now have a chance to rebuild because of the man they spent so long struggling to beat. The challenge fast approaching is what they can actually deliver to a dissatisfied public.

Amanda Litman, who leads the young progressive focused organization Run for Something, called last week’s results “very much a primal scream in the form of a vote.”

“Enough Democrats were able to talk about the source of that rage in a way that made them a viable outlet for voters to pick,” Litman said. “But I think it is 95% ‘throw the bums out,’ and 5%, ‘OK, let’s try these bums.’“

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