Bread, Circuses, and Five Grand

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Caleb Razor at Politico:

President Donald Trump dropped a hot mess of a half-baked midterm promise in lawmakers’ laps last night.

Trump at the GOP’s convention pledged to send $5,000 to every adult in the U.S. if Republicans retain control of Congress in the midterms, Ashley Ahn reports. And while the crowd of thousands of his supporters gathered at Dallas’ American Airlines Center cheered the announcement, GOP fiscal hawks were balking at the effort before Trump even left the stage.
...

If the president followed through on such a plan, it would likely worsen inflation by further boosting consumer spending and supporting higher prices, which are already elevated due to the war in Iran. The dividend could also exacerbate a rise in longer-term borrowing costs for the U.S. government, which have been going up in part on fears the federal debt is growing unsustainable.

The move comes after months of Republicans pleading with Trump to focus his messaging — and fundraising war chest — on helping the party retain control of Capitol Hill come November.

Some House Republicans following the speech told Meredith Lee Hill the effort showed how desperate the president was in the last weeks of midterm campaigning.

“It’s a little late,” one House Republican, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said.

Others may have been relieved that the president was touting a message aimed at affordability concerns at the top of voters’ minds.

...

Sen. Ted Cruz in an exclusive interview with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns after Trump’s speech, said he’d prefer to tie work requirements to the dividends, but added specifics would need to be worked through.

“$1.3 trillion dollars is a massive amount,” Cruz said, referring to his estimate for the plan. But, he said it’s less than if Democrats won back power and spent like “drunken sailors.”

Trump the Saboteur

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

In 2020, Trump's ineptitude cost the GOP control of both Georgia Senate seats, and thus control of the chamber.  He did the same in 2022.

Once again this year, Trump could directly cost the GOP control of the Senate.  

• In North Carolina, he attacked incumbent Thom Tillis, who would have been a heavy favorite for reelection.  Tillis withdrew, and Democrat Roy Cooper is likely to take the open seat.
• In Texas, John Cornyn could have cruised to victory.  Trump endorsed the crooked Ken Paxton, who could lose to Talarico.
• In Georgia, Governor Kemp could have defeated Ossoff.  But there was no way Trump would support someone who did not stand with him on election denialism.  Trump endorsed scandal-ridden Mike Collins, who will probably lose to Ossoff.

Stef Kight and Hans Nichols at Axios:

Zoom out: Trump has repeatedly forced Republicans to grapple with policies that aggravate their constituencies or collide with their own ideological convictions.His plan to import up to 300,000 metric tons of beef tariff-free for 90 days inflamed GOP lawmakers in red states. More than a dozen GOP senators publicly criticized the move, warning it would hurt American cattle ranchers.

Imposing higher tariffs on Canadian goods threatened to bring a trade war to two must-win border states: Maine and Michigan. [Not to mention Ohio and Iowa, too!] 

And his call Monday to target Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier could have outsized economic implications in Kansas, a red state with an increasingly competitive Senate race. Trump ally Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) was forced to break with Trump over the call to boycott. Bombardier is a key employer in Kansas.

Republicans are taking an à la carte approach to data centers, which have suddenly become a political liability. Candidates in both parties have been scrambling to distance themselves from the industry.But Trump isn't brooking any nuance on the issue, calling communities that oppose data centers "backwards and poor." He doubled down four days later.

...

Trump is also restarting hostilities with Iran, dashing any GOP hopes that gas prices will drop before November.

People around Trump know he's self-destructive.  They don't even bother to push back anymore.  Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei at Axios:

For nearly a decade, Republicans acquiesced to nearly every Trump demand and idea — and rationalized it by saying his instincts proved smarter than theirs. Now, many no longer trust those instincts. But they find it just as futile to push back against virtually anything he wants.

• Start a war without an endgame? OK.
• Post a cartoon of you — wielding a hockey stick and sporting a Trump-branded USA jersey — towering over Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, sprawled on the ice, and telling him to "GET UP"? On it.
• Toss together an egocentric, first-ever Republican midterm convention that many endangered candidates don't want? Sounds like a good plan, boss! (Gavels in today in Dallas at 4 p.m. ET, in fact.)
• Oh, you want to speak both nights? Done!
• Make ads featuring you when your popularity is near its all-time low? You came to the right place, sir.
• Make the midterms a referendum on you? Check.
• Spend precious time obsessing about ballroom construction, and gilding and marbleizing the White House? You are the new Caesar Augustus.

 

Redistricting and Realignment in NC

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

 

One reason why the Republican partisan gerrymander of North Carolina's state legislature has steadily weakened over time is because Republicans have simply surrendered most large, fast-growing areas.

The @NCGOP is now so organizationally weak in metro counties that it could not… https://t.co/TfMdYd20A6 pic.twitter.com/6VgmRAZbAe

— Carolina Forward (@ForwardCarolina) September 8, 2026

Trump's Auto-Focus

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

 Annie KarniReid J. Epstein and Luke Broadwater at NYT:

In the White House Rose Garden last week, President Trump gathered some of the most politically endangered House Republicans for a dinner where he promised to make himself the face of the party’s uphill battle to keep control of Congress.

He was with them “100 percent — all the way until November,” Mr. Trump told the roughly two dozen lawmakers as they dined on prime aged beef burgers at tables adorned with bouquets of yellow roses. The president said he would travel to 35 key districts “to see if we can get everyone elected.”

The scene encapsulated the box that G.O.P. lawmakers have found themselves in as they stare down a bleak political environment.

They cannot afford to snub Mr. Trump, needing help from his enormous financial reserves and strong turnout from his base to win their campaigns. But they also do not want the election to be a referendum on the president, whose popularity is at a record low. And so far, he has shown little appetite for focusing on anyone’s political needs besides his own.

Two months before the midterm elections, Mr. Trump and the Republicans who have long tied their political fortunes to him appear to be at cross purposes as the party struggles to keep the House and Senate in G.O.P. hands.

As Republicans work to distance themselves from the president’s unpopular decisions, Mr. Trump is headlining a splashy convention in Dallas this week and has said that voters should “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” As the candidates work to show they are focused on the concerns of everyday Americans, the president is spending much of his time in Washington focused on the construction of a White House ballroom, a 250-foot arch and a golf course on a public park alongside the Potomac River. And as they brace for the final costly weeks of their campaigns, he has yet to dole out hardly any of the nearly $1 billion he says his political action committee has raised.

Zac Anderson and Joey Garrison at USA TODAY:

President Donald Trump has a solution for his party’s midterm woes as Republicans struggle to match Democrats’ election enthusiasm and face major headwinds to keep control of Congress ‒ more Trump.

Enter “Trumpapalooza,” the party’s first-ever midterm convention and the president's clearest attempt yet to inject himself squarely at the center of the election and position himself as the party's savior.

Never mind that Trump’s low approval rating has been an anchor weighing on the GOP, with the potential to drag down midterm candidates. The president and his advisers have suggested he’s the only one who can bring the MAGA faithful to the polls in large enough numbers to avoid a midterm catastrophe for Republicans.

“This is a turnout race,” Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters said in an interview with USA TODAY. “We need the president front and center.”

That strategy will be on display over two days in Dallas beginning Sept. 9 as Trump gathers his party for the final post-Labor Day push toward the Nov. 3 election. Trump is set to attend both days and deliver the headline speech on the first night. The event – dubbed “Trumpapalooza” by Gruters – is part of the president’s bid to further nationalize the election and wrap it around his own political brand, a tactic some Republicans question.

The convention risks tying Republican candidates more tightly to Trump at a time when some in the party believe they need distance from the president amid polls showing voters disapprove of his performance on everything from tariffs to the Iran war and inflation.

“One of the problems that the party is having right now is the president’s approval rating is not good,” said longtime GOP strategist Charlie Black. “So the more candidates can get the voters to focus on them and the issues that they’re promoting, and less on the president, the better in most states and most districts.”

World War G in September

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

The 2026 movie Pressure dramatizes the clash of Allied meteorologists in the run-up to D-Day.  The Americans relied on analog forecasting, looking for past weather maps that matched current conditions, and assuming that the weather would play out the same way.  The British were more alert to differences that the analog maps did not capture. Like the American forecasters in 1944, the Republicans assumed that the patterns of 2024 would remain in place in 2026.  They did not count on the extent to which Trump's actions alienated Hispanics and other voters.

They had similar problems in previous elections.

Andrew Howard and Aaron Pellish at POLITICO:

Republicans are growing increasingly worried their mid-decade gerrymandering push isn’t going to save their House majority.

The norm-breaking plan hatched by the White House last summer to draw new maps to protect the party from an unfavorable midterm environment is not on track to bear the fruits they hoped it would. Two months out from Election Day, Republicans are sweating races they thought they would win comfortably when they redrew district boundaries, according to conversations with a dozen Republican strategists on Friday.

...

Republicans redrew maps in eight states — Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama — while Democrats only pulled off a gerrymander in California. (They got another seat from a Utah court decision but had their Virginia gerrymander blocked in court.) In a less hostile political environment, that could have netted the GOP more than a dozen seats.

But they’re not all looking so solid. Texas Republicans are growing increasingly worried that newly drawn Latino-heavy seats Trump carried by double digits in 2024 are looking shaky, and the five-seat net they’d hoped out of the state looks increasingly unrealistic by the day.“The Texas redistricting effort will for sure yield a two-seat gain, and more than likely yield a three-seat gain,” said Alfredo Rodriguez, a Dallas-based Republican strategist. “Picking up five seats will be difficult considering the environment and headwinds Republicans face this cycle.”In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis looks very much alive in a tough seat redrawn by the GOP to take him out.

And Florida’s new gerrymander isn’t looking bulletproof, either, with Democratic Reps. Darren Soto, Kathy Castor and Jared Moskowitz running hard to hold onto newly red-leaning territory.

10-Point D Lead In Party ID

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Ruth Igielnik and Caroline Soler at NYT:

The share of Americans who associate themselves with the Democratic Party has grown significantly over the past year, according to data from Gallup. The shift, which signals the party’s largest advantage since 2008, is the latest sign of backlash against Republicans and the president ahead of the midterm elections.

The latest data shows Democrats with a 10-percentage-point advantage over Republicans when voters are asked which party they identify with and when independent voters are asked which party they lean toward.

The findings come as President Trump’s approval rating has been below 40 percent for months, and as polls have found that Democrats are competitive across key Senate races in states that went heavily for Mr. Trump in past years. But shifts in party identification do not necessarily translate directly into votes, because independents, including those who lean toward a party, tend to be less politically engaged and less likely to vote.

Republicans and Democrats have seesawed between which party more Americans leaned toward over the last several years. As recently as 2024, Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party held a slight edge over Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

 

Midterm Convention

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

George E. Condon Jr. at National Journal:

One constant in Donald Trump’s 11 years in politics has been his demand for credit for every idea, event, and program. In his telling, no one before him ever was clever enough to conceive of his newest scheme. As he likes to say, “no one’s ever seen" whatever he's currently talking about.

All that is on display again as Republicans, more anxious than excited, plan to gather next week to fulfill the president’s desire to have a midterm convention to showcase his second-term record. When he first proposed it last year, he boasted, “It has never been done before.” He repeated those words in June when he announced the date and location—Sept. 9 and 10 in Dallas.

The only problem is that it has been done before. And it didn’t work out very well, making this an instance when Trump would have been far better served if he had actually talked to Democrats. They’re the only ones with experience at midterm conventions—and the bruises to show for it.

Far from being an idea that sprang from the fertile mind of Trump, midterm conventions were first suggested by Republican National Chairman John Hamilton in the wake of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 24-point shellacking of GOP nominee Alf Landon in 1936, according to Hamilton College professor Philip Klinkner in his 1994 book, The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956-1993. Twenty years later, Sen. Estes Kefauver championed midterm conventions after Dwight Eisenhower’s 15-point thrashing of the Democratic ticket, which included Kefauver as vice presidential nominee.

Both Hamilton and Kefauver failed to sell the idea. But another 20 years on, a reform-minded Democratic Party, stung by its 23-point clobbering by Richard Nixon in 1972, revived the idea, even managing to stage events in Kansas City in 1974, in Memphis in 1978, and in Philadelphia in 1982.

They did not go well.

“Trump doesn't understand what came before. He just doesn't know history,” said Al From, an adviser in the Jimmy Carter White House and a loud voice for moderating the Democratic Party after Ronald Reagan’s two victories. From attended the Democratic midterm convention in 1982, which, he said, along with the editions in 1974 and 1978, “didn’t work out very well.”

That understates how disastrous the gathering was in 1978. In that year, like this one, it was the party that won the most recent presidential election that proposed the gathering—although, in a key difference, the Democrats assembled weeks after the midterms.

Carter gave a speech on the opening night to a tepid reception and then returned to the White House. He was not there on the concluding night when Sen. Edward Kennedy gave one of the most rousing speeches of his career, urging his party to “sail against the wind,” signaling he would be a likely primary opponent to Carter in two years.

It is an item of faith today that Carter was deeply unpopular at the time of that convention. The numbers tell a different story, though. While his approval, as measured by Gallup, was only 39 percent in August 1978, it was at 49 percent by the November election and at 51 percent when the convention started on Dec. 7.

The contrast with Trump’s current unpopularity is sharp. The University of Massachusetts poll conducted in late August showed 64 percent disapproving of his performance and only 32 percent approving. That is slightly worse for the president than other current polls—42 percent approval in Quantus Insights, 36 percent in YouGov/The Economist, and 33 percent in Reuters/Ipsos.

Democrats killed off their midterm conventions in 1985 when new party chairman Paul Kirk declared them “places for mischief” and a waste of party time, money, and energy.

The abiding lesson from the three mini-conventions was that they could prove to be boons to future candidates, but debilitating for incumbents. Jimmy Carter, the loser in the 1978 event, had been the star in the 1974 convention, laying the groundwork for his later campaign. Similarly, Bill Clinton effectively used the meeting in 1978, and Walter Mondale was a star in 1982. Indeed, as The Washington Post put it, Kirk said the conventions mostly just "kick off speculation about presidential contenders when Democrats should be focusing on electing senators, House members and governors."