Regular readers here know that the only political prediction I make is that I still won’t be making political predictions, especially when it comes to midterm elections 58 weeks away.
I’m certainly no Bob Ross. However, from time to time, I do relish painting the evolving picture of a confusing political landscape by drawing on a variety of resources, including my own political experiences since 1968.
Confusion is especially true if you consume the wishful coverage of mainstream media these days, who desperately want to find even the skimpiest of data to show a looming Trump doomsday on Nov. 3 next year.
Midterm elections are usually interim verdicts at the halfway point of a sitting president’s term. In the last 20 midterms since 1948, the president’s party suffered congressional losses in 18. (National unity after 9/11 protected the GOP the next year and GOP over-reach on Monica Lewinski saved Bill Clinton in 1998.)
Few midterm outcomes are as disastrous as the 2010 voter verdict on Barack Obama when Democrats lost an historic 63 House seats, the worst in 60 years. Average losses usually run in the high 20's range.
With voters’ standard preference for a divided Washington, you’d normally expect Republicans to lose their slim controls of one or both houses next fall. That would cause a predictable paralysis of President Trump’s government reform agenda for his final two years in office.
That possibility explains why you’ve seen his White House in recent months pushing numerous red states to redraw districts to lean more GOP. Prime example is Texas, which aims to gain up to five Republican seats next year. Trump and aides also have been hands-on recruiting quality candidates, valuable lessons from term one.
The threat to congressional control also explains why Trump has pushed the Federal Reserve so hard to lower interest rates and spur the economy, which it finally did this past week.
He’ll likely maintain pressure in coming months for even more rate reductions. They take time to impact borrowing for mortgages and business expansions, new hiring, and consumer confidence and spending, which accounts for upwards of 70 percent of GDP.
Next year the GOP must keep 22 of the 33 Senate seats up for election. You might think that’s big trouble. Karl Rove points out otherwise:
The Senate map favors the GOP. Twenty of 22 Republican-held seats up next year are in red states, where the party should win if it doesn’t nominate scandal-ridden candidates. Two Democratic seats are in states Mr. Trump carried, five in states Kamala Harris took by single digits.
There are more Democratic House members in districts Mr. Trump won (13) than Republicans in districts Ms. Harris carried (three).
A recent study by a nonpartisan data company of the 30 states that register by party found that since 2020 all 30 had a drop in registered Democrats while 22 had increases in Republicans, a jumbo swing of 4.5 million voters.
Another revealing stat: Currently, of the 435 voting House representatives, fully 419 are members of the party whose presidential candidate won that district. This makes fewer races genuinely competitive, which would hurt Democrat swing opportunities this time.
In another intriguing twist this cycle, Democrats appear to be doing everything possible to help their worst nightmare keep GOP congressional control.
With Trump’s job approval remaining underwater, you’d think Democrats would make huge headway leading into next year. But Dem party approval is historically low. And its prominent members are stuck staging cheesy stunts like marathon Senate and House speeches, which only prove they have great bladder control or have donned diapers.
Speaking of diapers, the party has no coherent leadership to extricate it from its self-created mess of the past four interminable years of gaffes, falls, angry nonsense outbursts, and painful pauses indicating Joe Biden’s mind was on permanent break.
Worse, as my colleague Brandon Morse recently pointed out, the leftist junta that caused last fall’s shellacking and still controls the party of Andrew Jackson has proven incapable of admitting its scandalous mistake picking Biden and then willfully covering up his obvious dementia with lies.
Biden never was as sharp as a tack and as president he was a badly-bent nail.
Apologies in America are funny things, but powerful. An invisible force resides within them indicating regret and humility, which almost always commands forgiveness that can erase an outrage in just a few words.
Late-night host Jiminy Kimmel refused to apologize for his outrageous claim about the Charlie Kirk killing. That gave ABC’s Disney ownership cover to launch his slow-motion firing via endless suspension. It was coming anyway with the steady decline of expensive late-night comedy shows that lost their laughs and much of their audiences years ago.
The clique of so-called party leaders – Chuck Schumer (74), Hakeem Jeffries (55), Bernie Sanders (84), and Nancy Pelosi (85) – are all from the coasts. Talk about diversity; the three men are all from Brooklyn.
This weekend, Jeffries and Schumer demanded a meeting with Trump to undercut congressional Republicans in talks over the looming government budget shutdown. Because media is on their side, no one mentioned Democrat votes just blocked an agreement.
None of those elites would recognize the Heartland if the pilot pointed it out on the flight to fundraise at their California ATM.
Speaking of fundraising, Democrats aren’t – or can’t. For understandable reasons, the party’s big donors are not opening their checkbooks after watching noted author Kamala Harris burn through 100-million of their dollars every seven days of her hapless 15-week campaign last year.
The ex-vice president (Secret Service codename “Pioneer”) is offering to talk to media in an attempt to promote her new book, “107 Days.” Hopefully, she's read it.
No Venn diagrams. But Harris takes 320 pages to explain how everybody else screwed up her campaign last year. Amazon has already marked down the book by a third to $20.99.
Jeffries is said to be working on developing a grand political campaign scheme as an alternative to Donald Trump’s blizzard of activities that have touched virtually every policy nook and cranny since Jan. 20.
Jeffries’ ideas are said to focus on affordability, health care, and corruption. Good luck campaigning against corruption so soon after the Biden Family Syndicate's reign. Or talking “affordability” after Bidenomics gifted our nation with the worst inflation since the involuntary retirement of Democrat Jimmy Carter, the last worst president ever.
Notably absent from Jeffries’ plan are positions on immigration and crime, two more volatile areas that Trump has cleverly commandeered to combat after Biden’s notorious derelictions. Can they argue America needs more illegal immigrants and cashless bail works well?
In the midterm background, a cast of ambitious characters is maneuvering for the Democrat Party’s 2028 presidential nomination, when they’ll be free of candidate Donald Trump – but not him or his GOP heirs.
No doubt a senator or two will ultimately announce their desire for the job.
Looking at history, some blue-state governors are prepared to volunteer for the nomination, including JB Pritzker of Illinois, Gavin Newsom of the no-longer Golden State of California, and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro. All are hawkish critics of Trump, which has worked for 10 years but may have an expiry date.
Two of the last four Dem presidents were governors, Carter and Clinton.
Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has taken a different tack, actually working with the Trump administration on Michigan-friendly policies.
Media is also eager to push former bartender Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the presidency. Her political observations are online gold for clicks, almost as good as Harris' musings on the location of computer clouds. Or AOC could offer her qualifications for the world's greatest deliberative body, if Sen. Schumer wears his granny glasses into retirement after 2028.
I suggest we keep an eye on Rahm Emanuel. Wait, wait, hear me out. He is, in my opinion, the wiliest contemporary Democrat pol. Of course, he can't be openly ambitious yet: "I'm not done with public service and I hope public service is not done with me."
Emanuel's sharp eye for issues that resonate with voters made him the actual architect of the party’s 2006 midterm strategy that terminated GOP control of Congress with five new Senate seats and 31 in the House.
He has built an impressive resume – go-to aide for Bill Clinton, House member, Obama White House national political director, then chief of staff, two-term Chicago mayor, and U.S. ambassador to Japan.
He's on the lecture/media circuit now, and you’ll see him helping party candidates next year, which will actually help him more.
On unlikely Democrat forums like Megyn Kelly and Joe Rogan, Emanuel has become an outspoken and well-spoken advocate for what used to be the centrist Democrat politics that thrust Clinton into the White House.
“I am done with the discussion of bathrooms, and we better start having a conversation about the classroom,” he says. “We literally are a superpower. We’re facing off against China with 1.4 billion people, and two-thirds of our children can’t read eighth-grade level.”
This was the centrist track that elected Gov. Bill Clinton in 1992, ending 12 straight years of GOP White House rule. Oh, look! Emanuel was Clinton’s national finance director then.
This kind of contrary pitch could be an effective, refreshing counterpoint to the party’s leftist cabal that lost so badly in 2024, especially if it continues to double down on wild spending and DEI, and that flops in 2026.
Of course, I’m not predicting this. Just observing.
