Trump Is dooming his party to a midterm blowout
It's almost as though he wants Republicans to lose.
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As the 2018 elections approached, President Trump found the perfect issue to reverse the usual pattern in which the president’s party suffers a midterm blowout at the polls.
Acting on the advice of his pollsters and his own infallible political instincts, he warned voters that a “caravan” of murderous immigrants was headed through Central America to the United States, ready to lay waste to our country.
“Every time you see a Caravan,” he tweeted two weeks before the election, “think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws! Remember the Midterms!”
It didn’t work. The election was a rout: Democrats won back control of the House (gaining 41 seats), flipped seven governorships, and netted hundreds of seats in state legislatures.
With midterm campaigning now in full swing, it’s worth remembering what happened eight years ago.
Despite the general chaos emanating from the administration in Trump’s first term, relatively speaking, things in the country at the time were going okay. Inflation was low, the economy was creating jobs, he hadn’t started any new wars, abortion was still legal in much of the country, and almost no one had ever heard the word “coronavirus.”
Yet voters still went to the polls in extraordinary numbers — turnout was higher than in any midterm election in over a century — to give Donald Trump a hearty smack in the face.
The difference between 2018 and 2026 is that not only has Trump become an even more repellent personality, his actions have made everything worse. In fact, it’s hard to imagine what more Trump could do to enrage the electorate and ensure his party’s defeat in November.
It’s enough to make a vulnerable Republican member of Congress ask if Trump wants them to lose. As one GOP operative told Politico, “Everything is made more difficult by the nonsense coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” But if it were just “nonsense,” it wouldn’t be so bad. What Trump has done is much worse.
A comprehensive agenda to alienate voters
The simplest explanation for why the president’s party almost always loses in the midterms is what political scientists call thermostatic politics: Like an old curmudgeon constantly complaining about the temperature, voters are perpetually unhappy with what they have and want to adjust the thermostat. Whoever gets elected president, the next time they get a chance to vote, they say “Ech, I don’t like this, let’s go in the other direction.”
That tendency acts as a midterm election baseline; how intent voters are on reversing direction depends on all kinds of factors, including both the president’s policies and conditions that are out of his control. But the first year-plus of Trump’s term has been extraordinary in all kinds of ways, all of which have been unpopular.
Some of these are more substantive and some less so, but the list of things Trump has done to alienate the electorate is remarkably long. Here are just some of the key factors pushing midterm voters away from the GOP:
Depending on how you look at it, the economy is somewhere from mediocre to bad. Trump’s tariffs have been both an economic and political failure, job growth has been weak, consumer confidence is at an all-time low, and while inflation is not high by historical standards, people are still upset about price levels and repeatedly cite affordability as their highest concern. Meanwhile, Trump mocks the idea that anyone should care about affordability, and insists that the economy is doing fantastic. Which is a great way to make people angry.
He started a pointless war with Iran that has proven to be the most unpopular war in history. If the war itself weren’t bad enough, it has pushed gas prices up by over a dollar a gallon, which will further raise the price of almost everything. Even if the war ended tomorrow, it would likely take months before prices at the pump settled back to where they were before it started — and for now there isn’t much reason to believe the war will end tomorrow.
Trump’s immigration policy has been not only a human disaster but a political one; in addition to the harm it is doing to the economy, most voters — even a quarter of Trump voters — are unhappy with how brutal his crackdown has been.
Instead of trying to unify his party, Trump is lashing out at his Republican critics, exacerbating intra-party tensions and discouraging many in his fragile coalition from going to the polls.
Speaking of petty beefs, Trump has gone to war with Pope Leo, reacting to every implicit criticism the Pope makes with a new round of Truth Social screeds, drawing attention to the conflict and creating more media coverage. But hey, it’s not like Catholics are a significant portion of the electorate. (“You really don’t want to do some unforced errors like this,” said the head of Catholic Vote, a conservative organization that worked to elect Trump.) And when he’s not alienating Catholics, he’s posting AI pictures of himself as Jesus, something so blasphemous that even his most stalwart supporters expressed their displeasure.
And speaking of AI, Trump has positioned himself as the country’s biggest booster of the data center buildout and the best buddy of the tech billionaire class, which serves to make voting against Republicans a good vehicle for the increasingly potent backlash against the tech industry.
Millions of Americans have either lost their health coverage or seen their premiums skyrocket as a result of the Big Beautiful Bill, which Trump continues to tout as a boon to all Americans.
Trump has fashioned a presidency so corrupt and awash in self-dealing that it defies all description, something that plays right into Democrats’ time-for-a-change message.
The administration has utterly sidelined Congress, treating it as barely worth thinking about; he has no real legislative agenda, and no evident desire to come up with one. When voters don’t see Congress doing anything at all, much less anything worthwhile, it makes them more likely to want to throw the bums out and try something new.
How midterms work
Tip O’Neill’s old dictum that “all politics is local” has been turned on its head, and now all politics is national. Constituent service, differences between candidates, and matters of ideology have receded in voters’ calculations; while it doesn’t hurt an incumbent to be good at her job, there’s little she’ll be able to do to stop a wave election.
That’s exactly why Republicans are getting so nervous. Any president has only so many tools he can use to help his party do well in a midterm, beyond just having a successful presidency that makes people pleased with the status quo. He can dole out some federal goodies and campaign for candidates in tight races — but that only helps if he’s popular. And Donald Trump is not.
At the moment, Trump’s approval in poll averages is around 38 percent. At this time eight years ago, it hovered around 40 percent (by election day, when Republicans suffered that sweeping loss, it was about the same).
Trump’s approval on the economy, which was once his strength, is just as low, if not lower; in a new NBC News poll, Americans disapprove of his performance on inflation by 68-32 percent. According to G. Elliott Morris, there is not a single competitive House or Senate seat where his approval is in positive territory.
There is one factor that can limit GOP losses: Because of aggressive gerrymandering, there are fewer swing districts in the House than ever before. There are only 30 districts that Trump won by 10 points or less in 2024; if Democrats won every one of them this year it would represent a spectacular victory, but they would only turn half as many seats as Republicans did in 2010.
Nevertheless, control of the House — which Democrats are now almost certain to take — is vital, and the Senate is in play as well (though to win it, Democrats will have to take every contested race). In addition, there are 36 governor races, as well as hundreds for offices including attorney general, secretary of state, and others, plus thousands of state legislative contests. All of them will be affected by what happens at the national level, not only because people increasingly see even local races through a national lens, but because a voter who goes to the polls to give the finger to Donald Trump is more likely to vote Democratic all the way down the ballot.
Every Republican vote, on the other hand, represents a voter saying “I’m pretty happy with how things are going.” That anyone at all could say that right now is depressing, but Trump almost seems determined to make sure as few people as possible will say it in November. And there are still six and a half months of foreign misadventures, ill-conceived economic policies, and juvenile social media beefs between now and the election.
That’s it for today
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An icicle has a better chance in hell than me voting for a republican in November. There is nothing that would ever let me trust a republican ever again, not while Trump is the ringmaster of this circus sideshow.
Excellent analysis. Trump, along with every elected Republican enabling his corruption, are cementing a simple phrase in voters' minds this November:
OMG
GOP
WTF!