Midterms: Peril for Trump, Senate in Play

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic predicts a "tidal wave" against Trump in this fall's midterms.

I am skeptical of a tidal wave: Gerrymandering will mute the bloodbath Trump deserves, and might save his party in one or both chambers of Congress, but Tomasky has successfully defied the conventional wisdom in the past:

... I've also been right before. In 1998, for example, everybody -- I mean everybody -- was saying that Bill Clinton's Democrats were going to lose umpteen seats in that year's midterms, because the elections took place in the wake of the revelations that Clinton had had a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and all the smart people knew that the voters were going to rise in fury to smite him and the louche Democrats who were defending him. The Republicans, in the majority already, were surely going to pick up another 20, 30 seats.

Not so fast, said I. Because the polls were showing clearly, to anyone who bothered to study them, that the public was more disgusted with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his morality police -- Gingrich's mistress at the time, by the way, is now my and your official American representative to the Holy See in the Vatican -- than with Clinton and his very human, if gross, weaknesses.

I just sniffed the zeitgeist and sensed the conventional wisdom was dead wrong (in the end, the Democrats gained five House seats that year). This year, that same olfactory sense is telling me, dare I write it, that November 3 may be even worse for the Republicans than the conventional wisdom now predicts. There are three groups of voters who matter in this election, and each of them is going to punish Trump severely. [bold added]

Tomasky is, of course, a leftist, so you'll get the obligatory psychological projection and condescension towards voters to the right of Stalin as part of "MAGA-land" -- and you will get to mark your bingo card slot for data centers bad.

That said, I think Tomasky's got a point about each of the three groups he sees in the polls, even if his grasp of their motivations is a little suspect.

Were I to recast what he came up with:

1. Anyone who never liked Trump will feel particularly motivated to show up and vote.
2. Swing voters who believed that Trump could be good for the economy will vote heavily against his party.
3. Racists and other MAGA-adjacent voters will be disenchanted, and so much less likely to turn out than they were for the presidential election.

I think Tomasky is right about (1) and mostly so about (2). He may underestimate Trump's ability to get a tune out of the groups in (3), though.

(The alarming prominence of democratic socialists in the Democratic Party will play right into Trump's hands. That said, I'd be a fan of Trump if I were a "progressive:" Trump is doing some of their dirty work and setting them up to win in 2028.)

The rest of Tomasky's piece consists of (1) his explanation for why he doubts Trump can reframe things in time to save his party, and (2) comments about a few races that wouldn't be as interesting as they are if only a normal person went to the White House back in '24.

Oh, and Tomasky isn't the only one talking about unexpectedly tight races in red states.

-- CAV