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I have no special insight into what the exact outcome of this year’s midterm elections is going to be. Like everyone else, I’ve been parsing the polling and looking at the all same numbers as the rest of you.
For what it’s worth: it would be absolutely astonishing if Democrats failed to take the House and the latest NY/Sienna poll has the Democrats leading in all seven of the races that will determine control of the Senate. This includes non-negligible edges in both Texas and Kansas, the latter of which hasn’t elected a Democratic Senator since the early 1930s. In Michigan, which has been getting a great deal of attention for obvious reasons, Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed boasts a double digit lead and several key gubernatorial races look to be leaning the same way. Trump’s approval rating, meanwhile, is catastrophically low and has been dropping steadily. Again, if Democrats don’t make considerable gains across the board tonight it will mean major polling companies got things badly wrong.
For other reasons that are less strictly related to polling, however, it’s increasingly seemed to me that Trumpism is out of gas and may soon be on its last legs.
To reiterate something that cannot be repeated enough: Trump has never been particularly popular and, for this reason and others, it was wrongheaded for shocked liberal commentators to throw up their hands and declare the country lost, both in 2016 and 2024. In order to consolidate its hold on the country’s politics more profoundly, the Trump project ultimately needed to mobilize a larger popular coalition — something it has consistently proven unable to do. In his second term especially, in fact, Trump has often seemed quite indifferent to public opinion, and has looked visibly unconcerned when it comes to selling the administration’s direction to voters. (I wrote about this back in April specifically in relation to the US-Israeli attack on Iran, though there are certainly other examples.)
Beyond all this, I’ve been struck by the nature of Trump’s midterm campaigning itself.
