The Democrats Didn’t Win. Trump Lost. Here’s the Cannabis Playbook for 2028.
Let me start with the part Democratic strategists won’t want to hear.
You didn’t win because you’re Democrats. You didn’t win because voters fell in love with your ideas. Stop ten people on the street and ask them to name the 2026 Democratic platform. I’ll wait. You’ll get shrugs, maybe a mumble about “democracy,” and one guy who thinks you’re the party that wants to ban gas stoves.
The Associated Press called both chambers of Congress for Democrats after the November 3 midterms. The new Congress gets sworn in on January 3, 2027. It inherits a Republican White House and a president who has promised to veto what he calls “insane” Democratic legislation. Before anybody in Washington starts drafting a victory memo, they should read the exit polls, because the exit polls tell you exactly who won this election. Nobody did. Donald Trump lost it.
CBS News exit polling put Trump’s approval at 38 percent on Election Day, on track for the lowest of any president at a midterm. NBC’s exit poll found about seven in ten voters wanted Congress to act as a check on him. Three in four said they were angry or dissatisfied with the direction of the country. Voters who listed the economy as their top issue, the same group that carried Trump in 2024, broke for Democrats in pre-election polling by 14 points.
The coalition that put Trump back in office in 2024 was not a neoconservative coalition. It was a coalition of people tired of foreign wars, tired of paying more for groceries, tired of being told what to think by people who don’t live like them. A lot of them were young men who smoke weed and listen to podcasts. A lot of them were libertarian-leaning independents who believed “America First” meant America first.
Then February 28 happened. The United States struck Iran. According to AP’s voter survey, about six in ten voters said going to war with Iran was the wrong decision. Fuel prices climbed. The bill ran to tens of billions. On election night, JD Vance himself posted that the real reason Republicans lost was obvious, and he pointed to the Iran war. He cited a pollster who asked party-switchers what would bring them back. They wanted the war over, help with the cost of living, a return to America First, and a fundamental change in America’s relationship with Israel.
That last item deserves a careful sentence, so here it is. A large and growing number of American voters feel that a foreign government has too much influence over U.S. policy. I’m describing a sentiment, not ruling on whether it’s accurate. The sentiment is real and measurable. An NBC poll this year found 67 percent of Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians, up from 18 percent in 2013. Many voters believe Israel pushed the U.S. into the Iran war. AIPAC-linked committees spent roughly $84 million this cycle, and Responsible Statecraft calculated that $55 million of it went to candidates who lost. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed won a Senate seat after calling for an end to military aid to Israel and weathering more than $31 million in spending against him. Trump, on Election Day, announced the U.S. would end annual military aid to Israel after this year. When a president makes that announcement on the day of the vote, he knows which way the wind blows.
So the people who elected Trump watched him govern like the establishment they’d voted against. They felt betrayed, and a lot of them felt othered by a movement that once claimed to speak for them. They didn’t switch because Democrats offered a vision. They switched because they wanted to punish someone.
Here’s the third leg of the stool, and it’s the one I care about most.
For the past three years, you’ve watched a coordinated media push to make cannabis look scarier. Every week brings a new study linking marijuana to some condition, almost always correlational, almost always buried in caveats nobody reads. It’s the old prohibitionist playbook with a new coat of paint: find an association, call it a risk, imply causation, repeat.
And cannabis kept winning anyway.
In Massachusetts, prohibitionists put Question 8 on the ballot to repeal the state’s adult-use market. It was the first time voters anywhere got a chance to undo legalization. They crushed it, roughly 76 to 24 with most of the vote counted. NORML noted the campaign got its money almost entirely from a single out-of-state group. In Idaho, voters rejected HJR 4, a constitutional amendment that would have stripped citizens of the power to legalize by initiative. In Texas, voters elected Gina Hinojosa governor and James Talarico to the Senate, and they ousted Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, the man most responsible for Texas’s war on hemp. Ken Paxton, who sued cities for passing voter-approved decriminalization ordinances, lost his Senate bid. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin now have Democratic trifectas, and Wisconsin Assembly Democratic Leader Greta Neubauer says her party intends to legalize within one to two years.
Gallup has found majority support for legalization for years. NORML puts it at about two thirds of Americans. Republican voters now sit around the halfway mark. The people never moved. Washington just pretended not to hear them.
If I were advising the Democratic leadership, and I promise they aren’t asking, I’d hand them five pages. Here they are, compressed.
1. Save hemp before December 11
This is the test, and it comes first because it comes fast. Last November, Trump signed the bill that ended the government shutdown. Buried in it, Section 781 of Public Law 119-37 redefines hemp to count THCA and caps THC at 0.4 milligrams per container. That language wipes out most of the intoxicating hemp market, a multibillion-dollar industry and tens of thousands of jobs, many in red states. Congress pushed the deadline to December 11, 2026.
Here’s the catch. The new Democratic majorities don’t take their seats until January. Any rescue has to pass the current lame-duck Congress and get Trump’s signature. Bills exist: the Lawful Hemp Protection Act would repeal Section 781 outright, and others would buy time or carve out beverages. Democrats in the minority should make hemp the loudest fight of the lame-duck session, force recorded votes, and make every Republican who wants to kill hemp say so on camera. If they lose, they’ve set up the first bill of January. If they win, they’ve proven they can deliver something a farmer in Kentucky and a vape shop owner in Texas both care about.
2. Take cannabis out of the Controlled Substances Act
Schedule III is a halfway house. The April order moved only state-licensed medical marijuana and FDA-approved products. Adult-use cannabis stays in Schedule I, alongside heroin, in 24 states where it’s legal. The DEA hearing on the rest of it is stuck in procedural mud.
Stop waiting on the DEA. The Democratic House passed the MORE Act twice, in 2020 and 2022, to deschedule cannabis. Pass it again in the first hundred days, this time with a Senate that can take it up. Pair it with banking access. If Trump vetoes a bill that two thirds of Americans support, let him own that in 2028. NORML’s Morgan Fox put it well: federal marijuana policy shouldn’t depend on bureaucrats and judges.
3. Push toward full drug reform
Cannabis opens the door. Walk through it. Trump himself signed an executive order this April to speed research on psychedelics like ibogaine for mental illness. That gives you bipartisan cover. Rebuild the scheduling system on written, scientific rules, which the GAO just reported don’t exist. Representative Cohen’s bill to rewrite the Controlled Substances Act gives you a draft. Veterans want psychedelic therapy. Parents of overdose victims want a regulated supply instead of fentanyl roulette. Libertarians want the government out of their bloodstream. That’s a coalition.
4. Stop the wars, and stop writing blank checks
Voters told you plainly. End the Iran war. Stop treating foreign aid as an entitlement no one is allowed to question. You don’t need to become anti-anyone. You need to become pro-American in the most literal sense: spend the money here, put American interests first, and let the voters see you mean it. The candidate who says “no more wars, no more blank checks, fix the cost of living” in 2028 wins a lot of Trump 2024 voters.
5. Decentralize, don’t centralize
This is where I expect Democrats to blow it. The party is already lining up to make AI and data centers the next villain. Democratic winners named data centers, Big Tech, and Elon Musk in their victory speeches. New York has a moratorium on hyperscale data centers. Bernie Sanders and AOC introduced a national moratorium bill.
I’ll be honest with you: the backlash is real and it’s bipartisan. Quinnipiac found 73 percent of voters oppose an AI data center in their community. All six local data center measures decided earlier this year went against development. The anger comes from real places: rising power bills, water use, tax breaks handed to trillion-dollar companies while the town gets a noise complaint.
But the answer to centralized AI owned by five companies isn’t a centralized federal regime run by five agencies. Classic Democrats of the 1980s talked about small business, competition, and breaking up concentration. Do that. End the subsidies and tax abatements for hyperscalers. Make data centers pay full freight for their own power and water so households don’t eat the cost. Then put public money into making compute cheap and available to universities, startups, and individuals. A kid with a laptop and affordable compute is a threat to Big Tech. A kid with a laptop and a federal licensing regime is just a kid. Keep power with the people, and the people will keep power with you.
Put all of that together and you get a platform most Americans would sign: legal weed, no new wars, keep the government out of my body and my wallet, break up concentrated power, help me pay my bills. That’s a libertarian platform. It’s also a winning one.
What doesn’t win: running the 2020 culture-war playbook again. I’m not telling Democrats to abandon anybody. I’m telling them the voters who just handed them Congress didn’t vote for a seminar. They voted against a president. If Democrats treat this as a mandate for their pet causes, they’ll lose those voters as fast as Republicans did. Moderate. Focus on freedom and cost of living. Let people live.
And here’s my warning. Gallup found a record 45 percent of Americans identify as independents. Sixty-two percent say the two major parties do such a poor job that a third party is needed. Among independents, it’s around three in four. Those numbers don’t describe a two-party system. They describe two brands with a lot of customers who can’t find the exit.
The 2026 midterms could be the moment the exit appears. Voters just fired one party for ignoring them. If the other party ignores them too, the next move isn’t switching back. It’s leaving. I think we’re closer than ever to a third serious party in America, and cannabis, the issue both parties spent decades underestimating, would sit right at the center of its platform.
Democrats, you got lent a majority. You didn’t earn it. Trump’s betrayal of his own voters, a war nobody wanted, and a country tired of foreign entanglements did the work. Cannabis, which survived three years of reefer-madness-lite and still beat a repeal campaign three to one, showed you where the people already are.
Save hemp. Deschedule cannabis. Stop the wars. Spread power out instead of hoarding it. Do that and 2028 is yours. Do what you usually do, and somebody new will take it from both of you.
- JD Supra, “New Scoreboard, Same Rulebook: What the 2026 Midterms Mean for Cannabis and Hemp”: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/new-scoreboard-same-rulebook-what-the-7056824/
- NORML, “Midterm Results Raise Hopes for Meaningful Statewide Marijuana Policy Reforms in 2027,” Nov. 5, 2026: https://norml.org/news/2026/11/05/midterm-results-raise-hopes-for-meaningful-statewide-marijuana-policy-reforms-in-2027/
- NORML, “Congressional Shake-Up Bolsters Prospects for Future Federal Marijuana Policy Reforms,” Nov. 4, 2026: https://norml.org/blog/2026/11/04/congressional-shake-up-bolsters-prospects-for-future-federal-marijuana-policy-reforms/
- NORML, “Massachusetts Voters Overwhelmingly Reject Ballot Proposal Seeking To Repeal Marijuana Legalization,” Nov. 4, 2026: https://norml.org/blog/2026/11/04/massachusetts-voters-overwhelmingly-reject-ballot-proposal-seeking-to-repeal-marijuana-legalization/
- The National News Desk, “Massachusetts voters reject effort to roll back recreational marijuana”: https://wset.com/news/nation-world/fact-check-team-massachusetts-voters-reject-effort-to-roll-back-recreational-marijuana-legalization-laws
- CBS News exit polls, 2026 midterms: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-exit-polls-midterm-elections-2026/
- GV Wire, “Economy, Trump Loom Large for Voters in Early 2026 Exit Polls” (NBC exit poll), Nov. 3, 2026: https://gvwire.com/2026/11/03/economy-trump-loom-large-for-voters-in-early-2026-exit-polls/
- Emerson College Polling, September 2026 national poll: https://emersoncollegepolling.com/september-2026-national-poll-democrats/
- Al Jazeera, “Could the US midterms further isolate Israel in Washington?” Nov. 5, 2026: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/11/5/could-the-us-midterms-further-isolate-israel-in-washington
- JNS, “AIPAC a wedge issue facing Democrats in midterm races” (NBC poll on sympathies): https://www.jns.org/news/u-s-news/aipac-a-wedge-issue-facing-democrats-in-midterm-races
- The National, “Will Trump’s data centre reckoning boost Democrats in the midterms?” Oct. 7, 2026: https://www.thenationalnews.com/future/technology/2026/10/07/data-centers-trump-democrats-pearson/
- Axios, “The AI boom’s political reckoning,” Oct. 31, 2026: https://www.axios.com/2026/10/31/ai-booms-political-reckoning
- AI Weekly / Tech Policy Press, “Democratic Midterm Winners Target AI, Data Centers, Musk”: https://aiweekly.co/alerts/democratic-midterm-winners-target-ai-data-centers-musk
- Washington Examiner, “Americans identify as independents at record high,” Jan. 12, 2026 (Gallup): https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/?p=4414627
- Fox News, “Trump admin loosens regulations on state-licensed medical marijuana,” Apr. 23, 2026: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-admin-loosens-regulations-state-licensed-medical-marijuana
DO AMERICANS WANT LEGAL CANNABIS, READ ON…
