These are not normal times, and that was not a normal midterm election. For two years, President Trump has ruled the United States like a personal fief while his would-be subjects have endured war, rising prices and political chaos. Now that Americans have delivered a historic reckoning for Republicans, Democrats must show that they can lead a political realignment.

The opportunity is generational. After decades of polarization, the dam broke in Republican strongholds. From state legislatures to the U.S. Senate, many Democrats who swept into office are younger and come from unconventional political backgrounds. From the center to the left, they didn’t just promise competent governance; they directly challenged a corrupt system and obscene concentrations of power, and they promised to make that system work for the people. For the first time in the Trump decade, the Democrats were the populists. If they can sustain that energy, our Gilded Age can be followed by a progressive era.

The danger is that once in power, Democrats will revert to business as usual. Top-down leadership from party insiders. News conferences at the Capitol with canned talking points. Budget fights that play out in leaks to the political press. Stop-and-start government shutdowns. Petty quarreling between centrists and the left. Performative oversight of Mr. Trump’s renovation projects that feels disconnected from the pain Americans are feeling.

In short, Democratic power in the waning days of the Trump era must look, feel and be different from past incarnations. Governance must be visible, participatory and consequential. If it isn’t, the blue tsunami will recede.

There are blueprints for how to do this. After she was elected to her Phoenix district two years ago at the age of 32, Yassamin Ansari was chosen to be president of the House Democrats freshman class. Instead of following a conventional playbook, she met the energy of the times.

After Immigration and Customs Enforcement started deporting people to El Salvador, she traveled there at a time when many institutions were bending the knee to Mr. Trump or ducking immigration. She has since made over a dozen visits to ICE detention centers in the United States, telling her constituents’ stories and highlighting the moral corruption of for-profit prisons benefiting from the mass incarceration of immigrants. After Republicans blocked the release of the Epstein files, she sat for hours at a table outside of Speaker Mike Johnson’s office under a sign that read: “Mike Johnson is starving families and gutting health care to cover up the Epstein files. Change my mind.”

“People want you to show up directly at the places where the issues are happening,” she told me after last week’s election. That allows you to get attention and connect the dots between a rigged system and the outcomes that have left voters demanding change. “People really want to see you showing, not just telling.”

In New York, Zohran Mamdani was the first Democrat after the second Trump election to model this kind of everything-everywhere-all-at-once playbook. He ran a campaign focused on affordability, showing up in all parts of the city to humanize the cost-of-living crisis. Once in office, he continued this frenetic pace, searching for every lever he could pull to restore confidence that government could, in fact, do something — going after bad landlords, funding child care and even giving parents a night off. His favorability rating in New York City has risen to nearly 70 percent.

Morris Katz, Mr. Mamdani’s 27-year-old chief political strategist, described the transition from campaigning to the mayoralty: “You have to govern at the speed of the modern attention span.” Heeding that lesson is fundamental to not allowing the air to slowly trickle out of the balloon once the Democrats take power.

Mr. Katz’s firm helped Gina Hinojosa break the Republican grip on the Texas governorship. Her campaign cultivated a populist message against the flood of data centers and Flock cameras into Texas, building a coalition that encompassed leftists and libertarians and everyone in between. The worst thing that Democrats could do is trade that newfound populist energy for a familiar insider ethos. “We need to remember that we don’t have the White House,” Mr. Katz warned. “They are the establishment. We are still the outsiders running against them.”

History provides cautionary tales for the incoming Democratic majorities, including the two midterm elections that led most directly to the two Trump presidencies.

In 2010, Republicans rode a populist red wave to a large House majority amid the hangover from the financial crisis and a right-wing backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency. Almost immediately, there was a split between the populist Tea Party and the Republican establishment, which veered between making promises it couldn’t keep about repealing the Obama agenda and negotiating a grand bargain for fiscal reform with the president.

Neither succeeded. Mr. Obama was handily re-elected, and by 2016, establishment Republicans had lost control of their voters, who abandoned them for Mr. Trump.

Fast-forward to 2022. Democrats held a narrow Senate majority despite political headwinds. This owed much to Republicans nominating extremist candidates such as Herschel Walker and Blake Masters, who lost to the Democratic stars Raphael Warnock and Mark Kelly. Yet President Joe Biden chose to interpret the results as a mandate for him, at 80 years old, to run for re-election despite an approval rating in the low 40s. The rest is the history we’re living.

After the 2024 election, one thing most Democrats agreed upon was the need for generational change. The party needed newer, younger faces out front and should no longer defer to establishment figures just because they’d built up a reservoir of good will.

That lesson should apply to the Senate today. Chuck Schumer has been a powerful and effective force in Democratic politics, but it is time for a new leader of the party in the Senate. It is not a rebuke of his tenure to conclude that voters want to see different faces leading a regenerated Democratic Party — people who can communicate outside of Washington, challenge special interests and make Congress more accessible.

Chris Van Hollen, who just announced a bid for majority leader, can certainly make a credible case as a progressive voice who traveled to El Salvador to oppose mass deportations at the beginning of the Trump administration, bucked Democratic leadership on Gaza and promises to take on a corrupt system that has caused Americans to lose faith in their government.

Many of the newly elected Senate Democrats are fresh faces in Washington — people like Annie Andrews in South Carolina, Adam Hamilton in Kansas, Troy Jackson in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. It is no coincidence that they all said the party needed new leadership. It would only breed cynicism to force them — and other newly elected Democrats who distanced themselves from party leadership — to reverse that stance as soon as they get to Washington.

The Democratic Party has an opportunity to show that it has evolved into something different. Why not take it?

How can these new Democratic majorities govern in a manner that meets the moment? Extreme times demand unusual tactics.

First, show at the outset that you’re serious about combating corruption. Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, who co-chaired candidate recruitment for the Democrats, sketched out that kind of agenda for me. Ban members and staff from trading stocks or using prediction markets. Don’t take money from corporate PACs. Ban the pop-up PACs that emerge during the final weeks of an election.

Second, conduct oversight that tells a story about how power enriches the few while prices keep rising. It is necessary, but not sufficient, to spotlight the grift of Mr. Trump and his oligarchs. Connect that corruption to the sectors of our economy that they have exploited to enrich themselves: crypto, defense technologies, prediction markets and artificial intelligence, to name a few.

What did those big law firms, tech companies and media organizations promise or provide in return for Mr. Trump’s favor? How much are people paying for pardons? What is the scale of foreign investment in Mr. Trump’s inner circle? Why are some people getting so rich while so many people can’t afford gas and groceries?

Set up special committees on issues such as corruption and A.I. and use those platforms to elevate the party’s younger and best messengers. As Ms. Ansari did, get out in the country. Go to ICE facilities to expose abuse and to rural communities hit hard by the war in Iran and tariffs. Haul tech oligarchs in front of Congress, but don’t do it in Washington. “If you’re going to do something on A.I.,” Mr. Katz told me, “go in front of a data center and subpoena the tech guys to be there.”

Third, pass popular legislation that responds directly to what Americans care about. With a healthy Senate majority, Democrats should abolish the filibuster so that every bill does not require an excruciating process to reach 60 votes. That would allow a pace of action that meets the enormous needs of the times.

Take direct aim at the affordability crisis. Reverse Medicaid cuts. Raise the minimum wage. Defund the war on Iran. Rescind costly tariffs. Regulate A.I. to prevent job displacement and insist upon safety testing for models. If Mr. Trump vetoes these bills, pass them again and force Republicans to choose between forming veto-proof majorities and siding with a historically unpopular president.

Meanwhile, against the backdrop of a presidential campaign, design more ambitious legislation that demonstrates what Democrats would do with full control of the government. To appropriately tax wealth to reduce inequality and fund public education and health care. To truly get money out of politics and make the kind of corruption we’ve seen illegal. To secure the border without targeting immigrants in our communities. To prohibit a president from going to war without first getting approval from Congress.

The more ambitious the program, the more the party will have to negotiate its own differences between progressives and the center. But the common thread holding this coalition together should be populist. The crisis in America today owes much to the increasing concentration of power in fewer hands: Big Tech, private equity, consolidated media and a coterie of political megadonors. Democrats must show — through their messengers, words and deeds — that they are the party committed to breaking up these concentrations of power and returning it to the people who just voted for it in staggering numbers.

Opportunities for a genuine political realignment don’t come along often. After a decade of Donald Trump, Americans are desperate for change. Democrats must show that they are ready to carry that energy into government, or else the pendulum will swing in a different direction.