Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. In 2024, the book explains, the Democrats' problems involved reality, not just messaging. Two years later, Republicans own the reality problems, including the Iran quagmire and the resulting economic pain.
President Donald Trump is steeling Republicans for a tough midterm contest.
The president today unveiled a plan to build a massive, $15 billion steel plant in Iowa — a major job creator he cast as an example of his success in reshoring domestic manufacturing as economic anxieties snarl his party’s prospects in the midterms. The plant — the largest in U.S. history — will be built by the Minnesota-based Mesabi Metallics and support more than 6,000 construction jobs and nearly 2,000 manufacturing and mining jobs, adding $95 billion to the U.S. economy, Trump said during a news conference in the Oval Office.
...
The struggle for Trump is that the timelines of factory building — and the jobs they create — rarely align with the country’s biennial election cycle. The Iowa plant isn’t expected to begin producing steel until 2030 — during the first midterm year for Trump’s successor. Other major manufacturing announcements the White House has made, including multiple auto plants in Michigan, aren’t expected to commence production until 2027, 2028 and 2029.
Compare that to the much more reactive time frames during which two of Trump’s other top presidential priorities — heaping restrictive tariffs on countries he claims have treated the U.S. unfairly and launching an unpopular war with Iran he’s been unable to end — have rattled global markets and sent domestic prices soaring.
