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The midterm elections are now less than three weeks away—and I think we’ve seen more than enough to conclude that, short of a systemic polling error on a scale surpassing anything we have seen before, Republicans are going to get their asses kicked.
Here’s what that means in practical terms: Democrats are almost certainly going to take control of the House of Representatives. They would have accomplished that this year in almost any scenario, but with Donald Trump’s approval in a slow-motion downward spiral, the generic ballot leaning more and more heavily in the direction of the Dems, and external indicators all looking bad for the incumbent party, such an outcome now looks like a lock.
The only question is how big of a blowout it will be. With the current GOP margin of control in the House already so narrow and so many districts uncompetitive, it likely won’t be as large as the swings we saw to the right in 1994 (54 seats) or 2010 (63 seats), or the swing we saw to the left in 2018 (41 seats). But the Dems only need three wins to take the majority, and they will easily get there and quite a bit more. Nate Silver’s “deluxe” prediction model gives a 93.4 percent chance of Democratic control of the House, with the most likely seat split being 239 to 196.
In the Senate, things are more challenging—but not nearly as challenging as they seemed just a couple of months ago. It turns out that public opinion changes when the president initiates a war he can’t win and never made a compelling case for starting; gas and diesel prices surge; inflation rises; and interest rates shoot skyward. According to Silver’s aggregate tracking poll, Trump now sits at 37.5 percent, with his net approval languishing at an astonishing -22.3. (At this point in 2018, he was at -11.6, while Biden at the same point came in with -9.6.) The deluxe model now has the Democrats with just over a 74 percent chance of taking control of the Senate, with the most likely outcome a Dem majority of 52 to 48. Those are good odds, though nowhere near as good as the House. But as recently as last month, Silver’s Senate model had the odds exactly even, so there’s been a big swing in the direction of the Dems.
In other words, the election is the Democrats’ to lose.
Assuming that’s how things play out and the Democrats take control of both houses of Congress, what will that mean for the short- and medium-term future of the country?
The short answer, I’m afraid, is not much.
The political fact of our time is that ours is a populist era. In this era, electoral cycles work like this:
A right-populist figure or party runs against the liberal-centrist “establishment” or “the system”;
This right-populist figure or party wins power;
This right-populist figure or party becomes the new establishment, overreaches, and makes mistakes;
Representatives of the old liberal-centrist establishment run against this new establishment and defeat it;
The old establishment returns to power and misreads its mandate as an endorsement of a return to the old liberal-centrist ways rather than a narrower repudiation of the governing mistakes of the right-wing populists;
This sets up the right-populists to run and win another campaign against the liberal-centrist establishment;
Rinse and repeat.
In sum: Voters are unhappy. They reflexively recoil from whoever is currently running the show—whether the old establishment or the newish counter-establishment. This makes for unstable politics, and anyone who wins has a very narrow time horizon in which to do things before they get booted out of office.
Where that leaves us, I’m afraid, is pretty much where we’ve been for the past decade: Republicans elated and Dems demoralized in November 2016; Republicans shell-shocked and Dems ecstatic in November 2018 and 2020; Republicans thrilled and Dems reeling in 2024. If I were a betting man (I am not), I would put a decent amount of money on Democrats winning back the White House in 2028—and on Republicans winning it back again in 2032.
Some will call it crazy that I’m willing to say anything at all about a presidential election that won’t take place for six years. We don’t even know who will be president after November 2028!
Good point. But here’s the thing: I think there might be something about our world (whispered: it’s the digital networking effects of social media) that is giving our politics its populist shape. That might change. But we don’t know if it will, let alone when, so the responsible thing to do when thinking about the near-term future is to extrapolate from the present that began roughly a decade ago.
I don’t like this. I don’t think it’s good. In fact, I think it’s bad, even dangerous. But I don’t know how to stop it. Neither do I think it can be traced to institutional quirks of the American electoral system that can be fixed by reforms. The patterns I’ve noted here are happening around the democratic world, in both presidential and parliamentary systems. That’s why, however illuminating it can be to examine the continuities and discontinuities between Trump and America’s political past, such work will not give us a roadmap for getting us out of our populist cul-de-sac. Something bigger has placed us here. If we didn’t have Trump, we would have someone else—just as we will eventually have Trump’s successor joining the show.
Lurking behind my prognostication is a wild card that I feel needs mentioning: How Trump responds to a midterm drubbing. Does he accept it like a normal politician, pick himself up off the floor, and promise to keep fighting for the American people? We have no reason to expect that he will.
But that just raises another question: What does Trump do to express his rage and frustration at being a political loser? Does he just rant and rave on Truth Social, vaguely accusing the “Dumbocrats” of cheating? Or does he try to get results reversed and even push Republicans to refuse to seat the new Congress?
In other words, does he precipitate a constitutional crisis that threatens to drive American democracy itself off the road and into a ditch?
The only thing preventing the above scenario from unfolding in the worst possible way is precisely how the election shakes out. If the Dems underperform expectations and end up winning only narrow control of either chamber of Congress, and there is a path to “victory” by cheating, Trump is almost certain to try it, just as he did after his loss in 2020.
The most dramatic scenarios involve Trump listening to the advisors and allies urging him to declare a national-security emergency surrounding the elections, with the pretext that foreign powers have been interfering in the process or have access to voting machines. Versions of this involve Trump invoking the Insurrection Act to quell protests, impose martial law outside polling stations, seize voting machines, or send ICE onto the streets for the purposes of intimidation. Trump has repeatedly refused to rule out the national-security scenario, most recently on October 1. (It should be noted that none of the experts recently interviewed by The New York Times thought such scenarios were “very likely,” and only a few thought they were “moderately likely.”)
There are also plenty of ways in which Trump could pressure state election officials or Congress itself to refuse to certify results, or bog down close races in procedural battles such that several members are unable to sit on January 3. (Again, these scenarios are generally considered unlikely by experts, though the fact that they are under discussion at all shows how bad things have gotten.)
What’s more likely than any of this is that the Democrats’ win is so substantial that cheating won’t work. Trump will probably grudgingly accept the result while “merely” lying about it day and night for the rest of his life—just like he has done with 2020 ever since. Which is yet another reason to think that these midterm elections won’t change much about the fundamental realities of American political life right now.
Damon Linker, a contributing writer at Persuasion, writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.
This article is adapted from one that originally appeared in Notes from the Middleground.
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