The Surge is your weekly political sanity check: What matters, what might, and what’s just political theater. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter steeling itself for the sheer number of D.C. adults planning to dress as “Jon Husted’s ass” for Halloween.
We’re almost there, reader. There are just 10 days until the midterms. After that, and after several years of litigation in Alaska, we may know who controls the Senate. This week, we look at Democrats’ still-awful favorability numbers and ask how much it matters amidst all this. Regrettably, Wedgewood polling is no longer able to survey this for us. Plus: Mississippi??
Let’s begin with this week’s signature unpleasantness.
What matters now: How far could the Vivek blast radius spread?
This keeps sounding like hyperbole in our head, but we can’t think of anything that tops it: Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad this week is the most odious advertisement we’ve ever seen. It doesn’t hit hard at some element of Democrat Amy Acton’s record. It doesn’t hit hard at some personal shortcoming. It’s not demagoguery stoking some broader prejudice among the electorate. It’s just inexplicable cruelty.
Video from Slate
The ad features Acton’s birth mother, with whom Acton has been estranged since she was 12, calling her daughter a liar. The backstory, which you’re probably familiar with by now, is that Acton had accused her stepfather of molesting her between the ages of 9 and 12. Her stepfather would ultimately be indicted for rape, but the stepfather jumped bond and fled the state with Acton’s birth mother. This is as repulsive as people get, and Ramaswamy chose to feature this sinister person in a campaign ad. That, in turn, is as repulsive as campaigns get.
We are almost certain—not quite 100 percent, regrettably—that this will backfire on Ramaswamy, who apparently wasn’t doing all that great in his race if he chose this path. There’s an element of edgelord-iness among Republican staff and consultants who’ve come up in the Trump era, who’ve seen Trump’s ability to get away with acts of cruelty and believe the power of the dark arts is boundless. But not every candidate is Donald Trump—Ramaswamy, certainly, lacks any trace of charisma—and voters of all stripes generally don’t like ads in which someone is attacked over her history of being sexually abused as a child.
Should this backfire meaningfully, we’re interested in the fallout beyond just Ramaswamy’s own race.
This is, after all, the biggest political news story in the country less than weeks before an election. And if the ad moves numbers against Ramaswamy, how much of that spills over to the state’s all-important Senate race as well?
While the administration—both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance—are standing by Ramaswamy’s airing of the ad, most prominent Ohio Republicans are keeping their distance. Grandfatherly Gov. Mike DeWine said it was “wrong to run this ad” and urged Ramaswamy to take it down. Secretary of State Frank LaRose said he wouldn’t “run an ad like that.” Retired Ohio Republicans, like former Sen. Rob Portman and ex-Rep. Jim Renacci, trashed it. The latter tweeted that “the floor may have just fallen out from under the Republican campaign for Ohio Governor.”
And then there’s Sen. Jon Husted, utilizing all the glute strength he can muster to fend off a challenge from Democratic ex-Sen. Sherrod Brown. While Husted is well cocooned by his handlers at this point, his campaign issued a statement in which Husted said he “would not have run that ad.”
It’s about the only ad that Husted won’t run. While it’s not the most-discussed Senate contest in national media, the Ohio Senate race is right up there with Texas’ as the most expensive in the country, rapidly closing in on half-a-billion dollars spent. It’s pivotal, as most if not all paths to a Democratic Senate majority run through Ohio.
So if Ramaswamy’s ad, aside from nuking his own campaign, were to bring Husted down another point or two? That could cost Husted the race, and Senate Republicans their majority. How karmically just it would be for so much of the blame to fall on Vivek Ramaswamy.
What to keep an eye on: Alaska funny business.
What’s going on in the Alaska Senate race? Beats us. Sure, there are polls showing Democrat Mary Peltola with an edge over GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan. But who knows if those are right? Alaska is a state of 27 people who all spend their day in the woods fighting with bears. No “big-city pollster” knows what these people are thinking.
But let’s presume the race is as close as all indications beyond polling—ad spending, Trump and Vance visits, etc.—suggest. And let’s say that Senate control hinges on Alaska. We feel the need, then, to adequately prepare you for the amount of focus that could be trained on Alaska after Election Day.
First of all, Alaska is a full 900 time zones behind the continental United States, so its counting won’t be done until late. It also has a ranked-choice voting system, meaning that if none of the four candidates on the ballot achieves a majority—likely—the state won’t tabulate final results until Nov. 18.
And then there’s another wrinkle.
One of the four candidates on the ballot is Dan J. Sullivan, not to be confused with Sen. Dan S. Sullivan. The senator sued to get J. Sullivan off the ballot, calling him a frivolous spoiler intended to sow voter confusion, but the Alaska Supreme Court allowed both Dans to stay on. It’s worth noting, too, that Sen. Sullivan is clearly marked as the incumbent on the ballot.
Now the Trump Justice Department is stepping in. It filed a lawsuit this week in Alaska federal court seeking to block the state from certifying “any result that may be impacted by voter confusion” between the Dans “pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.” In other words, the DOJ wants to block certification of the state’s Senate race if Sen. Sullivan … loses. It seems like a stretch to us. It smells like one of those things, though, that could hinge on whether it seems like a stretch to Brett Kavanaugh.
What you can safely and comfortably ignore (for now): Democrats’ unpopularity.
The New York Times released a smashing poll for Democrats this week that, if correct, would deliver them a wave similar to the 2008 election, when Democrats won the House popular vote by 10.6 points. In a subsequent analysis, though, the Times notes one warning sign within the data: “Today’s poll found that just 28 percent of voters said they were satisfied with the Democratic Party, compared with 36 percent who said the same of the Republican Party.”
It’s true that no one likes the dumb Democrats. Especially when surveyed about it: What are you supposed to say when asked by a pollster, “Are you satisfied with the Democratic Party?” Who responds “yes” to such a question?
We just don’t think this is that important in 2026.
One big reason is that much of the collapse in the Democratic Party’s image post-2024 has come from Democratic voters, who are disappointed with the party for blowing the 2024 election and for not doing enough to combat Trump. As the Times notes, “Many of those dissatisfied with the party are, in fact, Democrats themselves—43 percent of Democrats said they were dissatisfied with their own party.”
But guess what the vast majority of those dissatisfied Democrats are going to do in November? Rush to the polls to vote for Democrats, to protest a miserably unpopular Republican president.
For an analogous situation: After that 2008 Democratic wave, no one liked the Republican Party. They had 41 Senate seats and 178 House seats and were generally understood to be bums. They got angry and weird and organized the Tea Party and formed a cult around Fox News television host Glenn Beck. And then, in 2010, they won 63 House seats and six Senate seats—not because voters suddenly liked Republicans, but in protest of Democrats’ governance.
Republicans, of course, went on to lose the 2012 presidential election, and Democrats will have to find a way to improve their image in the next two years to avoid a similar fate. All of the criticisms they’re making of Trump—whether on the cost of living or immigration enforcement—are things they’ll need to develop coherent, winning policies around heading into 2028 amid vicious factional disputes. Not to mention, they’ll need to find the proper messenger for those policies. Anyhow, that’s a mess for later. For now, Democrats don’t need to be liked to win.
Diving deeper yet into the dumpster …
• [Googles “Jim Newell” “Surge” “Wedgewood”… phew …] The Surge never did and never would cite Wedgewood Polls, a fake polling outfit that was busted red-handed this week for making up numbers that may have skewed races, funding decisions, or betting markets. When caught, the outfit then tried to cover it up by deeming itself a “social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem.” Oh, it was just a cheeky term paper, was it? We’ll believe it when a fraud investigation is completed.
• Those who had the misfortune of following the 2014 midterms will remember when Republican candidates lumped a bunch of things in the news together en route to a blowout. It was the “ISIS terrorists are bringing Ebola across the border in caravans” election. Anyway, we thought of that this week while watching this ad from South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, in support of Sen. Darline Graham. In the ad, Scott warns that Graham’s Democratic opponent, Annie Andrews, will “hike taxes to bankroll her transgender agenda.” It’s just silly: The transgender agenda is cheap. It’s the mandatory abortions that will require tax hikes.
• An interesting one to follow in Maryland (go crabs!): A ballot question this November will loosen the state’s constitutional requirements for drawing congressional districts. In other words, it will make it easier for the state legislature to gerrymander away its remaining Republican representative, Rep. Andy Harris, in the next round of redistricting wars. But even in one of the bluest states in the country, in one of the bluest environments this century, it’s looking like an uphill climb: In a recent (non-Wedgewood) poll, the plan only had 25 percent support, with 53 percent opposing it. Then again, maybe Harris, who is unpleasant, will just lose on his own terms.
• All right, fine: Is the Mississippi Senate race a thing? This week, Senate Democrats’ super PAC announced an investment there to boost Democrat Scott Colom against GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, while former Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned with Colom. Trump, meanwhile, will hold a rally for Hyde-Smith in Mississippi on Monday. So is it really in play? Oh, absolutely—Hyde-Smith was only up 4 in a recent Wedgewood poll!