Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.
For Republican prospects in 2026, the economy is a problem:
Republican operatives and lawmakers are increasingly anxious about how inflation could affect the GOP in the 2026 midterms, and want President Trump to take more aggressive steps to address rising prices.
Why it matters: GOP insiders and lawmakers believe the cost of drugs and consumer items — and how the White House deals with Trump's tariffs potentially turbocharging prices and creating shortages — will be key to whether the GOP keeps control of Congress next year.
Zoom in: Republicans on Capitol Hill and beyond praise Trump's recent focus on crime, but many are alarmed by internal polls and focus groups showing persistent — and increasing — concerns about prices.
Katherine Hamilton and Alison Sider:
For the American middle class, it has been a summer of cooling confidence.
Consumer sentiment dropped nearly 6% in August, after trending up in June and July, according to a closely watched index from the University of Michigan. Pessimism about the job market increased, with more people surveyed saying they expect their income to decline, according to polling done by think tank the Conference Board.
The middle class—generally considered to include households making roughly $53,000 to $161,000 a year—is playing an outsize role in that waning optimism. After months of tracking high-income earners’ increasing confidence about the economy, households making between $50,000 and $100,000 made an abrupt about-face in June. They now more closely resemble low-income earners’ gloomier views, according to surveys done by Morning Consult, a data-intelligence firm.
“There was a period of time, briefly, where the middle-income consumer looked like they were being dragged up by all that was going well in the world,” said John Leer, chief economist at Morning Consult. “Then things fell off a cliff.”
But....
At Politico, Lisa Kashinsky, Elena Schneider and Nicholas Wu write that Democrats are "hamstrung by constitutional restrictions or independent commissions in some states, while Republicans are generally free of those legal barriers and have leadership trifectas in Indiana, Florida, Missouri and Ohio, promising state lawmakers fewer restrictions to draw Democratic rivals out of their seats. Florida’s constitution has language restricting partisan gerrymandering, though its conservative-majority state Supreme Court recently upheld a GOP redraw."
Nate Cohn at NYT: "[If] the new maps are enacted in all of these states, Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by two or three percentage points to be favored to retake the House, according to projections based on recent congressional and presidential election results."
