With less than two weeks until the midterm elections, things look bad for President Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Generic polls show significant movement away from Republicans and toward Democrats since Trump defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris by 50% to 48% two years ago.
Republicans seem doomed to lose their exceedingly narrow House majority, although redistricting by both parties over the past two years has reduced the number of competitive seats and will likely limit their losses.
More surprisingly, in view of the 2024 results, Republicans’ Senate majority seems in jeopardy, as Democrats have been leading in polls in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas, states that Trump carried easily three times.
And Democratic leads in two Southern states that have been seriously contested in each presidential cycle, Georgia and North Carolina, are so solid that Republicans have written them off as irretrievably lost.
Two questions remain unanswered. The first will be settled by the election results, although that could take weeks given Alaska’s ranked choice voting system and California’s breathtakingly slow counting of ballots in contested House races. The second will shape election analysts’ forecasts for at least the next two years.
The first question is whether polls are understating Republican support, as they did in the presidential cycles of 2016, 2020, and 2024. The second is whether the move away from Republicans and toward Democrats will turn out to be a realignment away from the rough partisan parity that has prevailed for more than 30 years.
Starting with the presidential election of 1992 and the congressional election of 1994, Democrats have won the presidency five times and Republicans four, while Republicans have won House majorities 12 times and Democrats five.
Only one presidential nominee, Barack Obama in 2008, has won more than 51% of the popular vote, and neither party has held more than 257 of the House’s 435 seats. Democrats held the 60 Senate seats needed to overcome a filibuster for just seven months, from July 2009 to February 2010; Republicans never reached that threshold.
Democratic majorities of that magnitude are at the high end of, or even a bit beyond, what current polling suggests. The party would be winning over some who had been voting regularly for Trump and Republicans or benefiting from those individuals not voting at all.
And it would be winning just enough support to prevail in a solid majority of what look to be very close races. That is not so surprising, since Senate elections tend to be decided on national issues, and often all the close ones go one way.
But it’s also possible that polls are misleading. In past years, RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende has argued, polls have overstated Democrats’ chances in Republican states and vice versa. This year, the close races are on Republican turf, and if the polls prove to misfire that way again, Democratic gains may turn out to be minimal.
Republicans could hold on to a Senate majority in that case. That means Trump appointees to federal courts, including the Supreme Court, could be confirmed, and impeachment trials would likely go nowhere.
What about the consequences farther out, specifically for 2028? Minimal losses for Republicans might lead to a presidential endorsement and nomination of Vice President JD Vance. The risks of damage from Trump’s personal preoccupations — from tariffs to the triumphal arch — may seem less serious than the risks of outright rebellion against a leader eager to punish anything less than full devotion.
But a “thumping” — George W. Bush’s term for his party’s repudiation in 2006 — could leave many Republicans wondering whether the party needs, after a decade of domination by Trump, to take a different course. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s erudite speeches in February in Munich and this month in Athens, combined with his careful defenses of administration foreign policy, provide an alternative approach that chastened Republicans might prefer.
Democrats can be counted on, however great or minimal their gains, to pepper Trump and those around him with investigations, to stage votes for impeachment, and — if they have a Senate majority — to block confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee or any federal judge at all.
But they also face their own sharp divisions. Their lack of any articulate domestic platform leaves them open to members of the Democratic Socialists of America pushing radical and potentially unpopular measures such as “Medicare for all” — under which workers who like their health insurance can’t keep it. On foreign policy, they will probably try to hobble military operations against Iran and, with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) looking over his shoulder at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), may try to block military cooperation with Israel.
The result of one Senate contest in particular, the race in Michigan, may affect the course forward. There, Democratic nominee Abdul el Sayed has led Republican Mike Rogers in every public poll since late September, but in only one of eight polls by more than 2 percentage points. A polling error would not be shocking in Michigan, and while el Sayed went into the August primary with a 50% to 40% polling lead, he beat the more centrist Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) by only 48.4% to 47.6% in actual votes.
Republican Mike Rogers has led in only three of 29 public polls conducted since the August primary, but el Sayed’s average lead has narrowed from 48% to 44% in August and September to 47% to 46% in October. El Sayed’s perhaps surprising refusal to repudiate the Muslim Brotherhood or to say whether he considers Iran or Israel the greatest threat to the United States has evidently not strengthened his appeal.
A victory for the articulate el Sayed would make him a national leader of “progressive” Democrats. An el Sayed defeat would give Republicans a seat held by Democrats since 1978 and might convince many Democrats and some in the press that Medicare for all at home and opposition to Israel abroad are not a formula for their party’s success.
And what of the prospects for realignment beyond 2028? You could argue that it seems to be on schedule, perhaps overdue. The 1992 presidential and 1994 congressional elections were propelled by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, both baby boomers by the definitions in Strauss and Howe’s Generations.
The seven presidents in the previous 40 years, all with military service in World War II, were born between 1911 and 1924. The five presidents since, three of them born in 1946 and the other two in 1942 and 1961, had no military service except for George W. Bush’s in the Texas Air National Guard.
HAS TRUMP BROKEN HIS MCDONALD’S PROMISE?
Starting in the 1990s, the South became the electoral heartland of the Republican Party, and the Northeast and Pacific coasts became the electoral heartlands of the Democratic Party. Starting in the 1990s and accelerating after Trump’s first run, Democrats have made gains among the affluent and college educated, and Republicans among blue-collar workers and non-college graduates.
Few predicted these trends, established politicians tried to buck them, and many thoughtful citizens haven’t absorbed them yet. I’d like to say I’ll describe what happens next, but having started writing for publication about these things in 1963, I’m not sure I’ll be in a position to do so. Perhaps answers will come from Marco Rubio, born in 1971; JD Vance and Abdul el Sayed, both born in 1984; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, born in 1989.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
