Former Obama Chief of Staff: Democrats Poised for 2006-Style Wave in 2026

Former Obama White House chief of staff and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said on March 30 that Democrats are positioned for a wave election in 2026, drawing parallels to 2006, when he chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the party flipped both chambers of Congress during the Iraq war.

“When one party controls both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, there’s a law of physics that kicks in,” Emanuel said at a Politics and Eggs breakfast at Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics.

Emanuel cited four previous wave election years—1994, 2006, 2010, and 2018—as evidence of a recurring pattern when one party holds both the White House and Congress. He said three conditions that preceded Democratic gains in 2006 are present today: a wartime president, an unpopular Congress, and surging Democratic energy in off-cycle races.

“The thematic structure of this election is set,” he said, claiming that the election would be a referendum on President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress.

Emanuel called the U.S. conflict with Iran “a war of choice and a bad choice” and said political fallout from the war will accelerate heading into November 2025.

Emanuel said what Democrats do in 2027 will shape the party’s standing heading into 2028, pointing to a forthcoming Wall Street Journal column laying out his midterm strategy.

He drew on his post-2006 experience, noting that Democrats used President George W. Bush’s veto of a children’s health insurance bill to sharpen the contrast between the parties ahead of the 2008 election.

Emanuel warned Democrats against repeating what he called the cultural detours that cost the party in 2024—and said the party must offer more than opposition to Trump.

“The American people—when their backs are against the wall—believe Democrats are there to help them,” he said. “We got into whether a school can be named after Abraham Lincoln, who has access to a locker room, defunding the police—nothing that dealt with the American people’s core interests. And when they [needed] us, we didn’t show.”

Emanuel then went on to reference New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, as what should be a “telling sign” to other Democrats.

“Mayor Mamdani did not run on Senator Mamdani’s record,” Emanuel said. “He reappointed a very good police chief. When he was a [state] senator, he said the police department of New York was racist and [to] defund it. When he ran for mayor, I’d like to reappoint her. If you can’t run on those cultural issues in New York City, that should be a lesson on how to centralize and ground ourselves in middle-class values.”

While retaining New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, Mamdani canceled former Mayor Eric Adams’s plan to add 5,000 officers, keeping the New York Police Department budget roughly at current levels rather than expanding it as the prior administration had planned.

Emanuel said some of the key issues for voters include being tough at the border, putting more police on the beat to get kids, guns, and gangs off America’s streets, and investing in the education opportunities of Americans.

“Get to the core of what they expect from us,” he said. “Don’t get caught up in some cultural cul-de-sac that leads nowhere except for running around in a circle like you’re in a cartoon.”

Emanuel has not declared a 2028 presidential candidacy but noted at the event that he has visited Iowa, Mississippi, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and New Hampshire in recent months, with South Carolina next on his schedule—a circuit that tracks closely with early presidential primary states. Asked directly about his plans, he stopped short of a declaration.

“If I think I have what it takes to answer what I think is ailing the greatest country, I’ll jump into the deep end without my water wings,” he said. “If I don’t, I will fight for whoever our party nominates to make sure they make it, to turn this country around and get it pointed in the right direction. I’m tired of watching us tear at each other. I don’t like the mayhem at the border, and I don’t like the mayhem in Minneapolis.”

Emanuel served as chief of staff to then-President Barack Obama before serving as mayor of Chicago. Then-President Joe Biden appointed him U.S. ambassador to Japan.