When Texas politics shifted from Democratic to Republican in the 1980s, an older, wiser cousin first introduced me to the Pendulum Theory of American Politics. Historically, in my opinion, Americans have instinctively voted to prevent too much power from concentrating on one side or the other to protect their liberty.
However, a more direct explanation for political swings relates to real or perceived government responsibility for the economy, which immediately affects the daily lives of many voters who live paycheck to paycheck. Thus. In this election, affordability drove voter shifts among lower-income, minority, and younger voters; those in agricultural states; and even moderate voters facing budget squeezes from inflation.
Economic changes move more slowly than federal elections every two years, shifting responsibility for good or bad times to the next administration and fueling frequent pendulum swings. Affordability, as a political issue, will continue to carry over from election to election and administration to administration because its effects are cumulative. Reducing the inflation rate back to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent annual inflation does not reduce prices, i.e. affordability, back to the price levels before inflation caused prices to rise; it just slows the rate at which prices continue to rise!
America’s high federal spending is the major cause of chronic inflation is the dirty little political secret that neither party will talk about because they cannot solve it alone. It will ultimately cause civil unrest, as it did in 2026 in France, with rioters in the streets demanding more spending, which the government cannot provide. Before that, the French took to the streets in 2023 when the government tried to change the retirement age from 62 to 64.
The Republicans might have lost fewer votes in 2026 if they had pushed the Democrats to join them in immigration reform rather than create the conflicts in the streets by rounding up illegal persons under the existing controversial laws, resulting in civil unrest and citizen deaths.
America’s future prosperity depends on the government solving three major problems that require bipartisan action and whose remedies are too politically contentious for a single party to solve alone. These include:
- Reigning in our ever expanding $40 trillion debt, which is already restricting our government’s activities
- Reforming our Social Security System, which runs out of money in 2032
- Revising our immigration system to settle as many as 30 million immigrants whose status is subject to question
Major pendulum swings that created split governmental responsibilities between a president and an opposing Congress create opportunities for the two political parties to solve problems for the good of the people. In the 1980s, twenty-five years of prosperity followed when Republican President Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill worked together to overcome the malaise economy that developed during the 1970s and caused President Jimmy Carter to lose a second term in 1980 to Reagan. In the late 1990s, Democratic President Bill Clinton worked with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich to create four years of balanced federal budgets!
This occasion is one of those few opportunities, like those during the Reagan and Clinton years, for leaders of both parties to work together to solve major problems. President Trump and incoming House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries should not let these next two years pass by focusing on partisan issues.
If they do not come together, they may go down in ignominy like President Buchanan and the political Class of 1860!
TW3
November 5, 2026
John Whitmore Jenkins
