On the menu today: With less than three weeks until Election Day, just about every indicator for the Republicans in the midterms is flashing red warning signs. But when you look at the state of the country and the world . . . is it really all that surprising that a majority of the electorate is likely to want to see changes? Read on.
The GOP’s Rough National Outlook
If you buy the polls, things look dire for the Republicans as the midterms approach. Tons of GOP ads haven’t moved the numbers in Texas, and James Talarico keeps enjoying a small lead over Ken Paxton in that state’s Senate race. The real Dan Sullivan is hanging on by a thread in his Senate reelection bid in Alaska. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed consistently leads Mike Rogers. And in the House, the generic ballot numbers consistently look terrible for Republicans.
Even if you don’t buy the polls, there are a lot of ominous indicators.
Look at President Trump’s schedule this month. He’s holding rallies in Kansas, Kentucky, Georgia, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska, Ohio, Tennessee, Nebraska, Alabama, Texas, and Oklahoma. Those are mostly usually heavily Republican-leaning red states that don’t usually have competitive races.
If Republicans thought Trump holding a rally in a Republican-leaning corner of Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, or New Hampshire would do some good, he would be there. He’s not, which indicates he wouldn’t be of much use for GOP candidates in those purple-to-blue-ish states. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a president appearing in friendly seats when his job approval rating is low nationally; that’s how a president can be helpful in these circumstances. Back in 2006, President George W. Bush made campaign appearances for candidates in Georgia, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. But as you may recall, it still turned into a lousy year for Republicans, and some of the candidates that Bush appeared with, like Representative Don Sherwood and Senator George Allen, lost their bids for reelection.
Republicans did not begin this cycle expecting to need to spend at least $288 million in the Texas Senate race, nor $15 million to help Pete Ricketts keep his seat in Nebraska.
It’s not just where Republican-aligned groups are spending their money; it’s where they’ve chosen to stop spending money. Last week, “The leading House Republican super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, all but ceded the first Republican-held seat of the election this week, moving money out of a district in Nebraska where Representative Don Bacon is retiring.”
This week, the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) “decided to cancel all remaining advertising booked for Representative Thomas H. Kean Jr. of New Jersey and Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa.” Kean’s chances of a reelection victory are disappearing, much like the representative himself.
Yesterday, CLF canceled $3 million in ads the group had reserved for future airtime against Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar in Texas’s 28th congressional district. This is one of those redrawn districts that was supposed to help Republicans pick up seats this year.
National groups don’t spend money in places like Texas and Nebraska unless they think they need to, and they don’t abandon incumbents like Kean and Miller-Meeks unless they think there’s no hope and it’s time for triage.
You can find media figures predicting the blue wave won’t materialize. But if the results add up to a coast-to-coast GOP wipeout when all the votes are counted — in California, that can take you deep into Advent — who can be surprised? You can argue that Republicans don’t deserve to get tossed out on their keisters in a midterm wave, considering the likely consequences of electing the Democrats. But you can’t persuasively argue that it would be an unexpected consequence of their governance over the past two years.
Yesterday, the latest inflation report indicated prices had increased 3.7 percent year-over-year.
The electorate is unimpressed with the argument that the inflation rate under Trump is better than the peak of 9.1 percent under Joe Biden in June 2022. In the month Biden left office, the inflation rate was 3 percent. Trump has been president for 21 months. In that time, the average inflation rate has been 3 percent. (The inflation rate for October 2025 is missing because a 43-day federal government shutdown stopped Bureau of Labor Statistics data collection.) In the final 21 months of Biden’s presidency, the average inflation rate was . . . 3.2 percent. No American consumer is going to feel any difference between those two averages.
Trump unilaterally enacted tariffs that made goods more expensive. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York analyzed the numbers earlier this month:
Goods price inflation was back near its slightly negative pre-COVID average for most of 2024 and began to edge up late that year, before the new tariffs were introduced. It then picked up through 2025. Our estimates attribute this increase to the tariffs: by February 2026, tariffs had contributed 2.9 percentage points to goods price inflation, and without them goods prices would have fallen slightly. . .
We estimate that about a quarter of a tariff increase is passed through to consumer goods prices. Importantly, tariffs also raise the prices of goods that are not directly taxed: goods made in the U.S. account for about a third of the total effect. This indirect effect takes longer to materialize than the direct effect on imported goods, so the full effect of a tariff takes about a year to appear. [Emphasis added.]
Prices rose about 6.8 percent from December 2024 to September 2026. Average hourly earnings are up roughly 5 percent over the same stretch. If wages aren’t rising as fast as prices are, people are going to be deeply unhappy. That will cancel out any enthusiasm about a booming stock market.
A lot, but not all, of the national gloom and high gas prices stem from President Trump’s decision to launch a war against Iran, a war that was never put before Congress or the American people. Since the end of February, Trump’s policy has continued to flip back and forth between declaring “a whole civilization will die tonight” and declaring the Iranian mullahs to be “reasonable people” and then furiously discovering that those same mullahs are “extremely duplicitous.” It’s like being led into war by Sybil.
And the administration has not leveled with the public about the cost of the war.
Back on September 18, the Washington Post reported:
More American service members have died in the Middle East during the ongoing Iran war than the Pentagon has disclosed publicly, according to six U.S. officials familiar with the Defense Department’s internal casualty accounting data.
Five of the officials said there have been at least 22 military fatalities — four more than what appears in the Pentagon’s public database, known as the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS.
As of Friday, the Pentagon’s DCAS database lists 18 U.S. military fatalities, including deaths caused by hostile and nonhostile action dating to the start of the Iran conflict.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth responded with high dudgeon: “This is DISGUSTING and FAKE. A complete LIE. Shame on the Washington Post — they’re worse than Iranian state media.”
And then, on October 9, the Pentagon quietly increased the death toll to include three more connected to the operation against Iran and a fourth in the region:
As of Friday, the total troop deaths the administration is connecting to operations against Iran and officially reporting in DCAS stands at 21.
That figure includes two additional noncombat deaths: Maj. Sorffly Davius, 46, an Army National Guard member who died in Kuwait on March 6, and an unidentified Navy suicide that occurred in September, according to a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide additional context on the troop deaths.
The military also acknowledged one additional soldier’s training accident death that it said was not tied to ongoing operations against Iran.
Sgt. Devin A. Seibel, 26, died during a training accident in Iraq in May. His death is now recorded in DCAS under Operation Inherent Resolve, the military’s decade-long named operation against the Islamic State. That service member’s death brings the total number of troops who have died in the Middle East since Feb. 28, the date that operations against Iran began, to 22.
Don’t BS the American people about our servicemen when they are killed, and don’t call the U.S. media “worse than Iranian state media,” particularly not when they have their facts correct.
This administration offers the public a lot of talk about rebuilding our military, while reports of dwindling stockpiles of weapons persist. The administration’s foreign policy consists of a lot of gushing about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and a lot of public blistering contempt for longtime allies.
And then there’s the constant circus that comes with this administration. RFK Jr. and vaccine skepticism and measles outbreaks. The cosplay antics of Kristi Noem. Look, if I had to run the U.S. Department of Labor, I’d probably develop a drinking problem, too, but if that’s the situation, you shouldn’t take the job. The latest scandals around Kimberly Guilfoyle are just the latest reminder that no, President Trump doesn’t always “hire the best people,” and he’s constantly surrounded by grifters and frauds and low-rent sycophants and a motley crew of underqualified hustlers and charlatans.
You get the feeling that quiet, lower-profile, even-keeled competent figures like EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, interior secretary Doug Burgum, and CIA director John Ratcliffe bore the president, and thus his administration doesn’t include as many of those types of people.
No, the record of governance over the past year isn’t a complete failure. There’s an indisputably secure border and a dramatic increase in deporting illegal immigrants who have committed violent felonies. There are tax cuts, and even with the lower tax rates, the U.S. government is taking in $154 billion more in tax revenue than last year, although some of that sum reflects increased tariff revenue. There is the aforementioned booming stock market and the AI investment boom. There’s continuing record oil production and record natural gas production.
But overall, Americans are really upset about the state of the country, driven the most by what they pay when they pump their gas and buy their groceries. And they don’t blame Ilhan Omar or other Democrats, because they haven’t been running things — at least not at the federal level.
Does this mean the Democrats have earned a spot running the U.S. Senate and Congress? Heck no. Abdul El-Sayed wouldn’t just be America’s first Muslim U.S. senator; he’d be America’s first Muslim Brotherhood U.S. senator. Talarico and Troy Jackson and the other Democratic freak show candidates have gargantuan flaws, but they haven’t been running the country for the past two years.
Think of a typical Texas family. In a standard year, a Texas household uses 1,212 gallons of gasoline. (Yes, there’s going to be high variance in this figure.) Back around Election Day 2024, the average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline in Texas was $2.56 per gallon. This morning, the average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline in Texas is $3.83. That means that over the course of a year, the typical Texas household is paying $1,539.24 for the same amount of gasoline as they did two years ago.
You think Vice President JD Vance telling jokes insinuating James Talarico is a closeted homosexual is going to persuade a Texan angry about high gas prices?
At the All-In Summit in September, Vance made his pitch for the midterms: “Give us another chance, or give us another couple of years, to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years.” When you’re asking for another chance, that is a de facto concession that the first chance did not work out the way you had hoped it would.
You can look at the first 21 months of the Trump presidency and declare it a resounding success. But most Americans look at the past two years and come to a starkly different conclusion.
ADDENDUM: As of this morning, more than 5.2 million Americans have cast ballots in the 2026 midterm elections.