Is Trump a Secret Asset of the DSCC?

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Jonathan Martin at POLITICO:

As the traditional start of the campaign season draws near, though, Republicans are increasingly worried they may be consumed by a worsening prairie fire.

“He’s in serious trouble in farm country,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told me. “He being Trump — and Trump is us. I’m not very optimistic.”

The triple-whammy of tariffs, expensive diesel and fertilizer and now imported beef has created a crisis for agriculture-state Republicans.

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The culprits are obvious: the exorbitant cost of living, Trump’s deep unpopularity with the political center and the massive enthusiasm gap Democrats enjoy over Republicans.

The fear, GOP officials tell me, is that these sentiments are increasingly becoming locked in with voters; that the grim political environment — caused by spiking gas prices after the ceasefire with Iran collapsed last month — is close to irreversible. Or to borrow from Haley Barbour, that sage of Mississippi: In politics, good gets better and bad gets worse.

For months, the shorthand conversation among political professionals has not been if this will be a difficult election for Republicans but whether it will be 2018 or 2006.

Which is to say: Will 2026 bring a backlash against the party in power, but one largely confined to House losses because of polarization, limiting Democratic strength in Senate races? Or will there be a greater wave that grows high enough to sweep out Republicans thought to be safe, flipping both chambers of Congress in the process?

Once Iran hostilities restarted and it became clear that there would be no Supreme Court vacancy, as there crucially was in 2018, the answer became clear. Republicans would not be able to get off defense and lacked the court fight that would hand them their best opportunity to go on offense.

 WSJ editorial: 

The November midterm elections will be in part a referendum on President Trump’s border taxes, and most polls show them losing. A new poll by Overton Insights and the Texas Public Policy Foundation finds that tariffs are unpopular in the Lone Star State, especially among Hispanics. Houston, Republicans have a tariff problem.

The survey, which was shared with us exclusively and will be released next Wednesday, shows that Texans overall disapprove of his tariffs, 54% to 46%. Texans who didn’t vote in a party primary—generally independents and folks who are less partisan—disapproved of them, 68% to 32%. Hispanics gave them the thumbs down, 69% to 31%.


The latter is especially notable because Mr. Trump won 55% of the state’s Hispanic vote in 2024, no doubt in part owing to frustration with Democrats’ handling of inflation. But Hispanics also strongly oppose the President’s blunderbuss border taxes targeting trade partners like Mexico and Canada, which raise costs for consumers and businesses.

The Texas economy is heavily exposed to tariffs because of its cross-border trade and integrated supply chains with Mexico. Texas traded $303 billion in goods with Mexico and overall exported $299 billion of manufactured products in 2025. The latter include electronics and computers ($71 billion), chemicals ($55 billion) and transportation equipment ($29 billion).

Because Texas is the largest state exporter of goods, it suffers a bigger brunt from retaliatory tariffs, such as those that Canada plans to levy on the U.S. in response to Mr. Trump’s tariff escalation. In case he hasn’t noticed, the tariffs have become an albatross for Republicans in close races across the country, including Texas.

Cabinet Members Trying to Defend Trump

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Megan Messerly, Myah Ward and Alex Gangitano at POLITICO:

Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited New Hampshire last week to tout natural gas pipelines and got hit with questions about $4 gasoline prices. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was in Iowa over the weekend ostensibly to rally farmers and instead had to defend Trump’s decision to import foreign beef, which sparked outcry among cattle ranchers.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in Florida to talk about school nutrition, faced questions about a Pennsylvania measles outbreak and ended up in a protracted fight with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro over whether the virus is responsible for two deaths.

Even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a veteran of Wall Street, is struggling to win over some of his former colleagues, who are skeptical of his “economic D-Day” plan to end the Iran war and downright hostile to his attempt to lower the interest rate the federal government pays on long-term debt.

The Cabinet kerfuffle comes at a time when the president’s envoys are needed most. The midterms are less than three months away, the president’s approval rating is near record-lows and the White House is on a mission to remind voters of all it believes it has accomplished in the last two years, including a spate of tax cuts, improved border security and reductions in violent crime.

Cookery: Polls and Betting Markets

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Reid J. Epstein at NYT:

Three purported polls of the Los Angeles mayor’s race, the Wisconsin primary for governor and the Nevada governor’s race turned out to be entirely fake — a “short-term social experiment,” according to the website that released them. The fakery’s discovery, by The Los Angeles Times, came only after Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles posted approvingly about one of the polls, which showed her ahead.

Another pollster acknowledged that in a survey of Florida’s primary for governor, it had shifted some respondents’ support from the candidate they had said they backed to another candidate because the initial results “did not align with our read of the race.” (None of the polls above were included in The New York Times’s poll trackers or coverage because they did not meet its basic transparency and professionalism standards.)

All of this is happening at the dawn of the 2028 presidential primary season, when dozens of candidates are likely to be defined in part by polls that cement impressions and set narratives that may not be tethered to political reality.

“Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who was a senior aide on Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign for president. “Polls now are not just a way of measuring the horse race. It’s a way for candidates and their allies to influence the horse race.”


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While betting-market odds are often based on the wisdom of crowds and opaque measurements, they are amplified by powerful companies and reported on by legitimate news organizations that in some cases have financial partnerships with the prediction firms. CNN has such an arrangement with Kalshi and regularly shows the prediction market’s betting odds on television. The Wall Street Journal’s parent company has a partnership with Polymarket to display its odds within Journal content.

Voters and donors now see those numbers, which can be manipulated by all manner of polling and news events, and use them as a proxy for how a candidate is faring.

Sean Clegg, a senior adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who is likely to run for president in 2028, said prediction markets had a growing influence on Democratic strategists, donors and primary voters.

“Momentum is everything and poll numbers move prediction markets, which influences strategic voting,” Mr. Clegg said. “The progressive subset of the political class is hyper online, and they are pushing these polling narratives like never before.”

All About Trump

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Michael Scherer, and Ashley Parker at  The Atlantic:

President Trump gathered his top political advisers in the Oval Office early this month to solve a problem of riches: how to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest with fewer than 100 days to go before the midterm elections.

Republican strategists are concerned about Trump’s low approval ratings and voter anxiety about the economy. One person familiar with the Oval Office strategy meeting put it this way: “When the issues that you typically campaign on don’t move voters—or voters are pissed off at you about those issues—the question becomes: What do you campaign on?” Some GOP strategists favor focusing entirely on specific races in an effort to convince voters of the merits of individual candidates and local issues.

But Trump himself has rejected that approach. House and Senate Democrats, the president noted during the meeting, will make their fall campaigns a referendum on him. His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments—the dozens of new stock-market highs, a decline in fentanyl deaths, the “sealed” southern border, the increase in domestic-manufacturing production.

The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”

Lotsa luck with that.  Jason Lange at Reuters:

• Support for US military action against Iran falls to 31%, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows
• Trump job approval stays at 33% for second straight survey, matching record low
• Poll finds 83% of Americans expect war to continue for ​an extended period

 

Iran Quagmire: Predictable and Predicted

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Alexander Ward, Lara Seligman, and  Alex Leary at WSJ report that Trump summoned then-DNI Gabbard to brief him on how the Iran War would go.

Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard outlined assessments from America’s intelligence apparatus. According to people familiar with the meeting, she told Trump that killing Iran’s supreme leader would likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons. Tehran would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market. And it would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East, prompting questions about American resolve and reliability with allies.

The notes of caution echoed warnings Trump was receiving from all corners. Top military leaders told the president that a war would lead to casualties, concerns about the weapons stockpile and readiness problems for an overstretched force, The Wall Street Journal reported.

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Now Trump is relying on sanctions and a perpetual blockade wearing down U.S. forces to crush Iran’s economy, a wait-and-see strategy he argues will send the regime crawling to his feet.

An estimated 3,000 Iranians and 18 U.S. servicemembers have died related to combat operations, and the Pentagon says an additional 756 American troops have been wounded. The war also has damaged U.S. bases, drained oil reserves and shrunk munitions stockpiles. The conflict is weighing down Republican prospects ahead of the midterm elections and sinking Trump’s poll numbers to the lowest of his presidency.

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“This was all predictable and predicted,” said Eric Brewer, a deputy vice president at the Nuclear Threat Initiative who worked in Democratic and Republican administrations. “You can draw a straight line from the fact that the war was launched without any clear political objective to the mishandled diplomacy in trying to end it.”

Independent Senate Candidates

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

Anna Griffin at NYT:

During his brief time in the Idaho House of Representatives, Todd Achilles often stopped to admire a photograph from the state’s 1899 legislative session, and not just because some of the turn-of-the-century hairstyles and beards were “wild,” he said.

In the photo were lawmakers from four distinct parties, along with a handful of unaffiliated candidates.

“That was a period just like now,” Mr. Achilles said. “People were fed up with the party system and looking for something different.”

Today, he’s part of an effort to bring that same kind of something different to Idaho and other parts of the West. Mr. Achilles, an unaffiliated candidate for U.S. Senate, is among a wave of independent challengers to entrenched Republican incumbents or heirs apparent in red states.

In Idaho, where unaffiliated voters outnumber Democrats 2 to 1, Mr. Achilles is the more prominent and moneyed of two independents challenging the incumbent, Jim Risch. Independents also are running for Idaho governor, both of the state’s U.S. House seats and 12 state legislative seats.

Next door in Montana, another independent, Seth Bodnar, is running for the Senate as an independent, as is Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Brian Bengs in South Dakota. Another, Bill Hill, is running for Alaska’s lone House seat. All those candidacies say a lot about the state of the Democratic Party west of the Mississippi, excluding what’s known, affectionately or not, as “the left coast” — California, Oregon and Washington.

Trump's Errors Threaten GOP Senate Seats

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

The beef issue is a classic concentrated-losers/diffuse-gainers situation.  The GOP was in a similar bind in 1986 with oil prices.

Coming soon to a Democratic attack ad near you:

TRUMP: “We'll by Argentinian beef.”

Reporters:' What about the US farmers who are suffering?'

Trump: “Argentina is fighting for its life. Do you understand me? They’re dying.”

He says this as 77 American cattle producers are going out of business in the US per day.…

— ThePatrioticBlonde™🇺🇸 (@ImBreckWorsham) August 23, 2026

Trump has restarted a trade war with Canada.  Bad economics, bad politics.

David Frum at The Atlantic:

More than 30 percent of Ohio’s exports go to Canada, and almost 40 percent of Michigan’s. Both states will this year elect a U.S. senator and fill open governor’s seats. Not only is Trump putting at risk his party’s position in purple Michigan, but suddenly the races in beet-red Ohio look in jeopardy too. These states may turn control of the Senate—and Trump’s chances of facing meaningful accountability next year for his law-breaking and corruption.

Trump’s theory of his trade war, like his theory of his Iran war, is that the bigger bully always wins. Size counts for a lot, but not for everything.

As Trump has declared over and over again, his ultimate goal in this trade war is to add Canada as a 51st state. Why? To make the United States look bigger on the map. For that goal, which excites ultra-MAGA crackpots, Trump is hazarding not only America’s most important trading relationships but very possibly every other political equity he holds, including avoiding investigations and accountability by a Democratic House and Senate after January 2027