Midsummer Intensity

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

An Ipsos/WP poll shows Democrats with only a slight lead in the congressional generic ballot.

Chris Stirewalt at The Hill:

There is a lot of evidence to support the idea that both parties are unpopular, as that Ipsos/Washington Post poll affirms. And that’s what you’d expect in a nation in which voters increasingly see themselves as independents.

Still, the problem for the GOP is that Democrats and Democratic leaners who loathe their own party are still fired up to vote against Republicans.

Democrats in the Post poll enjoy a 10-point advantage over Republicans on voter enthusiasm, 8 points more than in 2018, when Democrats romped. “And more than 7 in 10 Democrats say it is ‘more important’ to vote in 2026 than in previous midterm elections,” says the Post, “compared with just over half of Republicans.”

Now think back to that tied generic ballot of July 2010. The same poll that boosted morale at the Obama White House showed Republicans with a double-digit lead on voter enthusiasm.

And it goes on from there. In July 2014, Democrats were actually ahead in generic congressional ballot polls, but the enthusiasm edge at the time belonged squarely to Republicans.

The polls in July 2018 turned out to be very predictive of the 8-point stomping Democrats delivered in House votes nationally on their way to the best midterm for their party since the Watergate washout of 1974. No surprise that they had the edge on enthusiasm, too.

Four years later, summertime polls in 2022 started cropping up in July showing Democrats actually in the lead on the generic ballot. And, yet again, the party in power started talking seriously about holding the House. And while the Republicans failed to deliver on their own overhyped promises of a red wave, the ripple was enough to take back the House.

The best evidence for the GOP’s fizzle wasn’t in the generic ballot but, again, in the measurement of enthusiasm. After the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Democrats rallied and closed the gap with Republicans. They might not have been willing to come out to boost a faltering Joe Biden, but Democrats were absolutely willing to come vote against Republicans.

Just more than 100 days before the elections, can Republicans replicate a similar enthusiasm booster for a base dispirited by high prices, the Iran war, very swampy behavior in Washington and a president who’s still trying to settle old scores?

Whenever incumbent parties are losing, they say they want a “choice not a referendum.” That’s what Republicans are saying this time with their “hate election” business. The problem for that plan is that a lot of Democrats already hate their own party, but they definitely hate Trump more.

The Iran War is getting worse, and oil prices are rising again.  The economic outlook might brighten this fall, but for GOP fortunes, any improvement will be too little, too late.  Perceptions bake in by Labor Day.

Trump to Hill Republicans: Meh!

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

ADAM WREN, DASHA BURNS and WILL STEAKIN at POLITICO:

House Republicans are hurtling toward August recess and a 105-day sprint to midterm elections, and President Donald Trump is showing little interest in boosting their prospects.

"Zero," a person close to the president told Playbook when asked about his engagement on the Hill.

Trump "doesn't care about anything beyond SAVE, Iran, and the ballroom,” another White House ally put it.

Republicans are staring down Election Day with a short list of accomplishments to sell, forcing them to reconcile two truths: The president doesn’t appear interested in helping Speaker Mike Johnson ram legislation over the finish line, and one of the only cases they have to make back home is to frame Democrats as communists.

Rep. Lisa McClain (Mich.), the GOP conference chair, who not long ago shared Republicans’ midterm messaging strategy with Playbook, told us she’s whittled that down to something simpler: Democrats are crazy.

“We voted for capitalism,” McCLain told Playbook. “We voted to lower your taxes: every Democrat voted to raise your taxes, and they are crazy. They want communism. They hate this country. They hate what this country stands for. That’s crazy.”

Never mind the president pitching federal stakes in private companies himself, McClain said. “He’s doing that to level the playing field for America.”

Is the White House leaning into their agreed-upon messaging enough? “No,” she said.

“We need to use it, and then when we think we've exhausted it, we need to use it some more,” McCLain said.

Voter Motivation 2026

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

Gregory S. Schneider and Scott Clement at WP:

Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans in the congressional midterm elections by only a slim margin, but Democratic supporters are far more motivated to vote, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

Because of partisan redistricting that favors Republicans this year, analysts estimate that Democrats need to win by three to four percentage points overall to gain a majority in the House. The poll shows Democrats leading Republicans by about that margin, 48 percent to 45 percent.

The blue advantage grows to eight points among those “absolutely certain to vote,” with 53 percent of highly motivated voters supporting Democrats and 45 percent supporting Republicans.

Republicans are not losing by a wide margin among the broader electorate despite President Donald Trump’s deep unpopularity and broad concerns about the economy, the war with Iran and immigration issues.

But their supporters just aren’t as energized to turn up at the polls, the Post-Ipsos poll suggests. If Trump is able to mitigate some top concerns by Election Day — for example, by bringing down the price of gasoline or ending the war with Iran — then his push to draw new congressional districts in red states could be enough to retain the GOP majority in the House.

But the latest news suggests that the GOP's best-case scenario is increasingly unlikely. 

 

War, Oil, and the Economy: Ominous News

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

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

Aaron BoxermanYan Zhuang and Hari Raj at NYT:

U.S. and Iranian forces edged closer to wider war over the weekend after the killing of two American service members in Jordan during an Iranian missile barrage.

They were the first U.S. soldiers killed by hostile fire since a truce with Iran unraveled in recent weeks, bringing the death toll to 16 among U.S. military personnel since the war began in February. Another service member is still missing after Iran on Friday bombarded a military base in Jordan where U.S. forces were stationed.

The deaths of the soldiers capped a week of spiraling attacks that chipped away at what remained of the deal that President Trump agreed to with Iran last month and that was supposed to end the war. Sensitive infrastructure targets like bridges and water facilities have come under fire in Iran and in U.S.-allied countries on the other side of the Persian Gulf

Even as the United States and Iran expanded the scope and intensity of the attacks in the region, there was little sign that diplomatic efforts to end the fighting were gaining traction.

The U.S. military said early on Sunday that it had struck Iranian military coastal surveillance and air defense facilities, as well as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps forces responsible for striking U.S. forces in Jordan.

On Sunday, Iran launched strikes on Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan, all Middle East countries where the United States maintains a significant military presence. In recent days, critical infrastructure has increasingly come under fire; the Kuwaiti government said on Saturday that an oil facility, as well as a power and water treatment plant, had been attacked.

In an unusual worldwide warning, the State Department said Sunday that Americans traveling abroad should exercise heightened vigilance as tensions in the Middle East had created the “potential for unforeseen escalation.”

Here’s a montage of Trump saying over the past five months that the war with Iran is about to end and that the Iranians want to make a deal “so badly.” https://t.co/dM82kx29yJ pic.twitter.com/NZL0YhNfxb

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) July 18, 2026

Mike Zapler at Axios:

Just when Republicans thought they'd caught a break on gas prices, the collapse of President Trump's Iran deal is derailing their best chance to change the inflation story before the midterms.

Why it matters: Falling gas prices are one of the most tangible ways to ease voter anger over inflation. Renewed combat — and the threat of escalation — has prices shooting back up.

The big picture: Trump has said repeatedly that gas prices will "drop like a rock" when the war is over. But the war doesn't look like it's ending anytime soon.When the U.S. first launched attacks on Feb. 28, average gas prices nationally were $2.98 a gallon, per AAA. They eclipsed $4.50 in May, gradually dropped to about $3.75 earlier this month, and are now flirting with the $4 mark since combat broke out again.

Zoom in: Surprisingly, Americans typically don't punish politicians for their own economic suffering; instead, they tend to look at how government policies are affecting the country overall.But gas prices are a different story, says Stanford's Jon Krosnick, who's studied how they affect politics.

"It's hard to think about any other economic indicator where the number is literally posted on signs on the streets where everybody's traveling," he told Axios.

Corruption Update, Mid-July

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. Trump is abusing his power to increase his wealth.

Bernard Condon at AP:

America’s first billionaire president may soon be profiting from a new line of business tied to his office: charging access for a first peek at certain posts on his Truth Social platform.

Donald Trump's struggling media company plans to sell Wall Street traders the chance to see posts from “highest-ranking” accounts — including possibly his own — milliseconds before others.

That could mean big money for them, and Trump.

Trump's posts are often important enough to rattle financial markets, sending prices soaring and plunging within seconds. Until this moment, presidential policy announcements were considered sort of public property that should be free and available to all at the same time.

Casey Tolan and Isabelle Chapman at CNN:

President Donald Trump hopped on Truth Social last year to share some “very big and exciting news.” Nvidia, the computer chip manufacturing behemoth, had just announced plans to build AI supercomputers in the United States.

“All necessary permits will be expedited and quickly delivered” to Nvidia and similar companies, Trump vowed in the April 15, 2025 post to his more than nine million followers.

What the president didn’t disclose at the time was that days earlier, he had purchased between $200,000 and $500,000 of the company’s stock.

A CNN investigation found that Trump has promoted more than 20 companies on his Truth Social account days after buying stock in those firms – at times announcing government actions that could benefit the companies he just invested in.

...

Trump’s assets are “held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media. There are no conflicts of interest.”

But unlike many past presidents, Trump has not placed his assets in a blind trust — meaning he can know which stocks his money managers are buying or selling. It’s not clear whether Trump was aware of any of his purchases when he was posting about the companies.

Aaron Blake at CNN:

Trump, through his revocable trust, is the largest shareholder in the Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social. And Trump Media just announced that a new data feed, known as an API, will be for sale next month.

The API gives firms real-time data from the 10 most popular Truth Social accounts — the most popular of which is, of course, Trump’s. Such firms use these feeds to scan for signals and execute trades automatically, before other investors can catch up.

Trump routinely uses his Truth Social account to make major announcements and send signals about his intentions.

Often, those signals actually seem intended to move markets. Witness just how much his posts about the Iran war were timed as markets were opening or closing for the weekend.

And in announcing the new API, Trump Media actually played up how much Truth Social impacts the markets.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” said Kevin McGurn, its interim CEO.

Trump's Election Speech: Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

David E. Sanger and Dustin Volz:

For years, President Trump has offered a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories and baseless charges to support his falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and that America’s election system was hijacked by a combination of outside powers and “deep state” insiders.

But when he declassified a raft of intelligence reports, hastily drafted emails between officials at the F.B.I. and other agencies, and formal “assessments” late Thursday, he was unable to prove his case.

An examination of the more than 270 pages of evidence released by the White House supports the broad conclusions already announced in 2020 and 2021, albeit with some finer details. For example, China considered modest attempts to influence opinion in the United States, and downloaded publicly available voter rolls from several states, but never manipulated a single voting machine or ballot.

Even new assertions, such as a document from the Department of Homeland Security claiming to have found more than 250,000 noncitizens registered in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania, came devoid of supporting evidence and immediately was met with pushback from state officials.

 

The documents are so damning in refuting Trump's own case that I wonder if anyone in the White House actually read them (or understood what they were looking at) https://t.co/8jUP0zVMTp

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 17, 2026

The Economy Will be a Problem for the GOP

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

At WP, Dan Balz and Scott Clement report that Trump's approval rating is stuck at 37%.

Assessments of Trump’s handling of the economy and Iran are worse than his overall ratings, with 33 percent of Americans saying they approve of his economic stewardship and 29 percent approving of his conduct in overseeing the war with Iran. Immigration is a relative strength, with 40 percent approving. That is unchanged from a low point in February but significantly lower than at the beginning of his current term, when 50 percent approved of his immigration actions.

...

Most Americans now doubt their living standards will improve. Asked whether they and their families will “have a good chance of improving your standard of living,” 40 percent said yes and 59 percent said no. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, 65 percent responded positively to a similar question in the long-running General Social Survey.

A new high of 43 percent say they are “not as well off” as when Trump returned to office, a 12-point increase since February and on par with views toward the Biden administration. In 2018, only 13 percent said they were worse off than when Trump began his first term.

Two-thirds of Americans say groceries are unaffordable (66 percent), up from 45 percent before the war began in February. Inflation data doesn’t show a sharp increase in grocery prices, but this might reflect the broader impact of months of higher prices for gas and other items.

A year ago, the Republican-controlled Congress passed, and Trump signed, what they then called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The measure extended tax cuts approved during Trump’s first term and included a variety of other tax and spending measures. Republicans have since begun calling the bill the “working families tax cut,” hoping that rebranding will reshape public opinion about the bill.

The strategy is not working, with 19 percent saying they paid less in taxes due to the measure while 25 percent think they paid more in taxes, according to the Post-Ipsos survey. Another 25 percent say they see no difference, and 30 percent say they are unsure what impact the bill had on their taxes. Even among Republicans, about as many say they saw their taxes increase or did not change as said they paid less in taxes.

David Goldman at CNN:

The largest-ever global oil supply shortage has topped economists’ lists of concerns since the start of the Iran war. But even as the United States and Iran resumed their blockades of the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil surging above $80 a barrel the economy faces a new problem.

Gasoline. That is, the world’s ability to make it.

The hundreds of millions of barrels of oil that exited the Persian Gulf and hit the market over the past few weeks helped add cushion to the world’s supply of oil — but they aren’t good for much of anything on their own. Oil needs to be refined into products and fuels people can use, including asphalt, plastic, heating oil, jet fuel, diesel and gasoline.

But the world’s refining capacity is deeply constrained. That’s in part because the supply chain got messed up during the war. It’s also because Iran attacked dozens of Middle Eastern refineries. And, more recently, Ukraine started blowing up Russian energy facilities.

Layer on extreme temperatures disrupting the cool conditions refineries need for proper distillation, and you’ve got yourself a big problem. Global refineries are processing 8.4 million fewer barrels of crude each day than they were before the war started — making 10% less fuel, according to Natasha Kaneva, head of global commodities research at JPMorgan.

Lisa Friedman and Rebecca F. Elliott at NYT

President Trump’s first naval blockade on Iranian ports in April caused oil prices to rise, but not to the stratospheric levels some feared. And Tehran’s oil exports plunged, depriving Iran of billions in revenue.

The strategy may be harder to pull off a second time without inflicting broader collateral damage to markets.

U.S. oil reserves, which have been steadily drawn down since the start of the war to help combat global shortages, are now at their lowest levels since 1983. Commercial inventories also have been run down. And other oil-producing countries in the region may have a harder time getting their ships out because of the heightened risks.

Another wild card is China. Usually the world’s largest oil importer, China has been helping to keep oil prices at bay by significantly decreasing imports of crude. New data on Tuesday showed that pattern held at least through June. But China might not continue on that path.