Flake and Mehlman on the Midterms: Divided Government, Congressional Authority, and the Case for Optimism

With the 2026 midterm elections just days away, Engineering Influence sat down in Phoenix with two seasoned observers of Washington: Ambassador Jeff Flake, former U.S. Senator from Arizona, and Bruce Mehlman, founder of Mehlman Consulting and a former Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology under President George W. Bush. Both had addressed the Fall Conference earlier in the day, and the conversation picked up where their presentations left off: what the election is likely to produce, and what a divided government would mean for the 120th Congress.

Reading the map

Both guests agreed with the prevailing view that the House is likely to change hands. The Senate is where the real uncertainty lies. Flake said that until recently he would not have believed this map could produce a Democratic Senate majority, but that candidate quality, economic pressure in farm states, and the president’s standing have put it in play. Mehlman pointed to 2006 as the closest historical parallel: an unpopular war, low presidential approval, and polling, prediction markets, and campaign spending all pointing the same direction. His caution was that states have become far more calcified in the two decades since. In 2018, Republicans lost 41 House seats and still gained two in the Senate. The conventional metrics say one thing; the structure of individual states may say another.

Does divided government mean gridlock?

Here the two offered a more hopeful read than the conventional wisdom. Flake noted that the last two years of unified Republican control have hardly been a model of productivity, given a razor-thin House majority and a Senate still governed by the filibuster. Divided government, he argued, has historically produced significant legislation, and as a fiscal conservative he sees a practical benefit: Republicans tend to act like fiscal conservatives only when someone else wants to spend the money.

Mehlman agreed that aggressive oversight is a certainty, and that it is Congress’s constitutional job. But he also stressed that a new majority cannot simply refuse to fund the government or ignore the debt ceiling. Compromise will be forced. The obstacle, in his view, is less about substance than framing. The president will cut a deal with anyone who agrees he won; Democrats can accept any deal except one perceived as a Trump victory. How a deal reads in the media may matter more than what is in it.

Congress reclaiming its authority

Asked whether Congress might reassert the authority it has ceded to the executive, Flake was candid. He would like nothing more, but he does not expect it in the next two years, given veto math and a Senate that has willingly surrendered its prerogatives on tariffs and war powers. Part of it, he said, is simple avoidance: Congress would rather hand off a decision than be accountable when it goes wrong.

Mehlman added three nuances. The modern world demands a more muscular executive than the framers envisioned; the current Supreme Court has largely blessed an expansive view of presidential power; and the incentives of today’s politics reward performance over productivity. He described the tug-of-war between Article I and Article II as a sine wave on a rising curve, with each peak of presidential power higher than the last, but with institutionalists still capable of pulling some of it back. Both pointed to the 86–11 Senate vote on Russia sanctions as evidence that the old bipartisan foreign policy consensus has not entirely disappeared.

Who will be listened to

The guests identified Senators Chris Coons and Susan Collins as the kind of institutionalists most likely to shape compromise in the next Congress, while noting the irony that members from purple districts, the most likely to work across the aisle, are also the most aggressively targeted by the other party. Both argued that the deeper fix requires reforms to how parties nominate candidates, changes that must happen at the state level and that party organizations resist.

A Gilded Age moment

Mehlman closed with a historian’s perspective. America, he argued, is at a pivot point much like the Gilded Age, running 20th-century rules against 21st-century problems. That era produced the income tax, antitrust law, direct election of senators, and universal high school, which was decried as socialism at the time. The transition was painful for those who lived through it, but the country emerged stronger, fairer, and more competitive. His prediction: America will do it again, and faster. Flake’s response was that he couldn’t have said it better.

And for those wondering about a “Draft Flake 2028” movement: after 18 years in elected office, the Ambassador said that chapter is likely closed, though public service is not.