Both Parties Are In A Really Bad Place Heading Into This Midterm

After Tuesday night's Delaware primary, the general election field is now set in all 50 states and the midterm is less than seven weeks away.  But even living in Iowa with multiple battleground races and a saturation of television advertising for the candidates, it doesn't feel like an election is less than seven weeks away.  In my decades of experience with elections, you can feel it in the air for months when the country is itching to get to the polls to vote.  There's an intangible energy and contagious enthusiasm that trickles beyond hard-core partisans and finds its way to Main Street.  Just about every house in the neighborhood has yard signs for their preferred candidate.  Campaigns are active enough that they even find their way to my slum apartment building to knock on doors.

I'm not seeing that in September 2026.  Not any of it.  

And honestly, the clearest unscientific metric I use to determine midterm election enthusiasm is what the lead story on the Sunday morning news shows happens to be in the weeks after Labor Day.  If the lead story is the midterm elections as it was in 2006, 2010, and 2018, the enthusiasm for the election is likely palpable.  If the lead story on "Face the Nation" is the Ebola virus in Africa as it was at this time in 2014, election enthusiasm is probably muted.  Supply and demand have a funny way of finding each other, even if unintentionally, and if there's less demand for election news, there will probably be a diminished supply that breaks through.

So what were the lead stories on "Face the Nation" and "Meet the Press" this Sunday? The media finally got the memo that AI is gonna kill us all.  Obviously, a big story, but it was nonetheless striking that it wasn't until after the third commercial break on "Face the Nation" that anybody had a word to say about the midterm elections.

How has this phenomenon played out in past midterm cycles?  Well, in 2014, when the media spent most of the fall discussing Ebola and the first "caravan" of Central American asylum seekers rather than the elections, turnout was the lowest of any midterm in the 21st century.  Obviously this is a pretty small sample size, but the warning sign is there that lackluster enthusiasm could lead to disappointing turnout.  I'm definitely not expecting 2014-level low turnout, but I'm certainly not expecting to be too impressed by the number of people who show up either.

And honestly, nobody should be surprised by this.  Politics has become emotionally exhausting, and whether it's the Democrats who are rightfully terrified by Trump's authoritarian tactics or Republicans disappointed by his broken promises, there no longer seems to be a reasonable means of controlling our collective destiny by who we elect to govern us.  Republicans who climbed aboard the snake oil wagon of the "I alone can fix it" huckster are disappointed to discover Trump is, shockingly, somehow not the messiah who turns water into wine that they signed up for. And most Democrats don't really believe that putting Hakeem Jeffries in charge of the House of Representatives or Chuck Schumer in charge of the Senate will have any meaningful impact in reining in Trump's authoritarianism.  Independents were already cynical and have been given no reason to be less so by anything going on in this campaign.

It certainly seems as though the downscale-skewing Republican coalition is most likely to be disappointed and demoralized heading into November so it does seem like the GOP is at greatest risk of a turnout collapse and a poor election night showing....with the usual caveat that Trump's dirty tricks arsenal will dramatically escalate in the weeks ahead and likely keep even a worst-case scenario election night for Republicans from looking as bad as it should.  But anybody who needs any further proof of how weak the Democratic opposition's hand is can look at any poll from the past year and a half showing voters more unhappy with the current composition of the Democratic Party than the GOP or the Trump administration.  This is true even in polls showing Trump with approval ratings south of 35%.  

That doesn't bode well for an enthused Democratic base pining to show up at the polls between now and November 3.  Perhaps negative partisanship will awaken some lethargic Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents from their slumber in the next seven weeks, but I expect it to be less than one would expect given the fundamentals.  Democrats are still likely to have a decent night, but it's hard to believe a blistering turnout is forthcoming at the behest of an opposition party with a higher unfavorable rating than Trump.

It all speaks to a uniquely beaten-down voting public terminally unhappy with their lives who see an even darker future on the horizon and no realistic path to ameliorate it with their choices at the ballot box.  Republicans who threw in with a cult-of-personality would-be messiah are instead getting a self-serving crook of unprecedented magnitude whose criminality exceeds my wildest expectations even when I was shouting from rooftops about it two years ago.  And Democrats....haven't really decided what they want.

The faction of Democratic voters that does envision a post-Trump escape hatch to their misery skews younger and is successfully edging the party dramatically to the left, often in the form of unashamedly embracing socialism.  This is to the chagrin of the grizzled pragmatists and independents who think even the establishment Democrats are too far to the left.  All of this is playing out with the backdrop of the Israel and Palestine civil war as a de facto fault line that will quite neatly break down the factions in the years ahead.  The two factions MIGHT be able to successfully unite against a shared enemy in Trump this autumn, but they're gonna absolutely tear each other's eyes out in the fight for the 2028 Presidential nomination that begins next year.

The uncertainty of AI adds another splash of cold water onto both parties' picnics.  Trump's unwavering advocacy of expanding a technology with growing public opposition will increase his party's vulnerability in the years ahead.  But the left-trending Democrats' multi-trillion-dollar safety net expansion promises will hit the brick wall of reality if, or more likely when, the AI revolution dramatically increases public need while dramatically decreasing revenues.  Whichever course we chart in the coming election cycles, the grouchy voters of today may be looked back upon by political parties as a comparatively more innocent time next to the grouchy voters they're gonna find down the road.

Even in the best-case scenario for humanity where a controlled rollout of AI generates less employment disruption than expected and is respected by the governments that possess it to abstain from an end-of-times arms race, it's still hard to imagine a scenario where most people won't feel displaced....aliens among their own species watching from afar as the life they were promised passes them by.  This is especially true of younger people, for whom the diminished value of their labor will exacerbate inequality and leave them fighting for table scraps with their homeowner grandparents sitting on portfolios with enough presence of Nvidia stocks to keep them hanging on to the middle class with their fingernails.

How does either party function in this environment?  For Republicans, the playbook will be as simple as it always is.  Identify the prime sources of financial and cultural friction and use them to pit enough groups against each other to cobble together an aggrieved majority.  In the abstract, this is likely to work for them with the regularity that is has since Nixon, but the complicating factor for the GOP will be a smaller-scale version of what will most bedevil the Democrats.  It's just hard to see how rising public needs have any chance of being met in the era of scarcity that comes in an aging population where deaths outnumber births, retirements outnumber college graduations, nursing home admissions outnumber new job creation, and the value of human capital sinks to new depths.  Republicans will have obligations to fewer demographic groups than will Democrats, but they'll still have to deliver something to somebody to motivate them to vote.

I think the majority of voters intuitively sense most of this in the fall of 2026.  They're probably not as pessimistic as me about the future, but they're acutely aware of their shrinking pool of options in fomenting change in the present.  At this point, I think the best that Democrats can hope for is that there's a critical mass of voters out there motivated to cast a vote of no confidence against a narcissistic madman running an international crime syndicate rather than running the country.  If Democrats need more votes than that to turn seats from red to blue across the country in seven weeks, they might be in some trouble, because people who believe that anybody in government has the ability to improve their lives are gonna as scarce as oysters with pearls in the foreseeable future. 

Stay tuned for my predictions in the Senate and gubernatorial races forthcoming in October.