On the menu today: Happy Fiscal New Year. Make no mistake, my overall assessment is that Democrats are currently on track for a good midterm election year, maybe a great one. Those of us with memories going back to 2006 will recall the kinds of years where your preferred party loses just about everywhere and picks up little or nothing. Still, the Democratic excitement has likely reached the overhyped stage, where all kinds of incumbent Republican senators in deep-red states are supposedly in trouble. There’s good reason to not believe the hype; we’ve seen this sort of narrative before. Read on.
Second-Guessing the Hype
One reason a certain segment of right-of-center media consumers is skeptical of a blue wave this November is that certain left-of-center media voices always tell them there will be a blue wave every November.
In early September 2024, Ed Kilgore wrote over at New York magazine, “The possibility that [GOP Senator Rick] Scott could actually lose this race is manna from heaven for Democrats not just in Florida, but nationally.” The Nation magazine, September 30: “Could Harris Take Florida and North Carolina? The Data Suggests She Can.”
In November, Scott won reelection by a margin of 1.37 million votes, 55.6 percent to 42.7 percent. Trump won Florida by more than 1.4 million votes, 56 percent to 42.9 percent.
This year, you can find polling in Florida that puts Democrat David Jolly ahead of Republican Byron Donalds, and incumbent U.S. Senator Republican Ashley Moody barely ahead of Democrat Angie Nixon. DecisionDeskHQ even put the gubernatorial race in the “toss-up” category. Right on cue, you can find headlines like, “Can David Jolly win Florida’s governor race? Possibly, say handicappers” in the Tampa Bay Times.
But if you look at the aggregate polling, whether you prefer RealClearPolitics or the New York Times, Donalds looks to be in stronger shape, as does Moody (RCP, NYT). Sure, Donalds is a weaker candidate than Ron DeSantis was four years ago, but DeSantis won by more than 1.5 million votes. (If DeSantis’s margin of victory in 2022 were a state, it would be the 40th-largest in the nation. If the Floridians who voted for DeSantis formed their own state, it would be the 26th largest in the nation.) We should expect some reversion to the mean, and remember that the Sunshine State still has far more Republicans than Democrats. As of August 31, Florida has 5.6 million registered Republicans and 4 million registered Democrats. The last time a Democrat won statewide in Florida — Nikki Fried did it in 2018, in the race for commissioner of agriculture and consumer services — the state had 4.7 million registered Republicans and 4.9 million registered Democrats.
In Nebraska, a lot of Democrats seem convinced that the Bernie Sanders-supporting “independent” Dan Osborn is going to knock off incumbent Republican Pete Ricketts. Polling is relatively sparse, and the public polls we’ve seen have the two candidates close. But look back just two years ago, when Osborn was taking on incumbent Republican Deb Fischer, and Osborn’s campaign released a lot of internal polls that showed him ahead. When all the votes were counted, Fischer won, 53.3 percent to 46.7 percent, a margin of more than 62,000 votes. If you want to argue that’s closer than usual for Nebraska, fine, but . . . that’s not that close, and a lesson that you shouldn’t put too much stock in a campaign’s internal polls when they tell the story the campaign wants you to hear. Oh, and last week, an internal poll “from a pro-Osborn super PAC” put Osborn ahead by one percentage point. (“Time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done, or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.”) Finally, note that in Nebraska’s governor’s race, Governor Jim Pillen, a Republican, appears to be well ahead.
It’s a similar story in South Dakota, where “independent” Brian Bengs — who ran as a Democrat in a Senate race just four years ago — is taking on GOP Senator Mike Rounds. Once again, Bengs is releasing internal polls that show a close race. On cue, CNN asks, “Can independent Brian Bengs win a Senate seat in South Dakota?” A new poll out this week has Rounds ahead, 44 percent to 38 percent.
Oh, and remember, South Dakota is one of those states where early voting started September 18. As of September 25, the South Dakota Secretary of State’s office said it had received 2,525 returned ballots from registered Republicans and 2,247 walk-in early votes from registered Republicans; 1,764 returned ballots from registered Democrats and 1,606 walk-in early votes from registered Democrats; 845 returned ballots from independents or other parties; and 767 walk-in early votes from independents or other parties. Nothing in those numbers screams trouble for Rounds.
Democrats are also convinced that in Kansas, Adam Hamilton has an extremely good shot at knocking off incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall. Indeed, the polling is close. But we’re talking about a state that has, as of June, about 496,000 registered Democrats and about 891,000 registered Republicans. If you assume that the turnout among Republicans, Democrats, and independents is about the same, and you assume that 90 percent of registered Republicans vote for Republicans and the same for Democrats, Hamilton would need the state’s roughly 596,000 independents to split roughly three to one in his favor. That’s an extremely tall order. Hamilton needs either tons of Republicans to stay home, or tons of Republicans to vote for him over Marshall, or for independents to split in his favor at an unbelievable margin.
I can understand why Democrats would talk themselves into believing they have a shot in the South Carolina U.S. Senate race. Appointed incumbent Darline Graham is not well-known to the state’s voters; she had that awful debate moment during the primary, and she did not exactly resoundingly win the primary runoff. But even with all that, Graham hasn’t trailed in a poll since July. I remember in 2020, Quinnipiac polling kept showing Democrat Jaime Harrison tied with Lindsey Graham. Graham went on to win by a comfortable 54 percent to 44 percent. South Carolina is a reliably Republican state until proven otherwise.
The lesson of this is not that all the polls are always wrong, or that every prediction of an upset Democratic win is always wrong. But there’s an extremely familiar narrative of “this Democrat really has a shot in a deep red state!” that rarely pans out; when it does, it’s usually because of a spectacularly flawed Republican candidate, like Roy Moore.
Speaking of spectacularly flawed Republican candidates, Ken Paxton has found a new scapegoat:
Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas, told a group of conservative donors and lobbyists last week that President Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas had hurt Mr. Paxton politically, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times.
The recording, which is muffled at times, captures Mr. Paxton being asked, “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” It is not clear from the audio whom the questioner is referring to.
Mr. Paxton responds: “So to be honest with you, the numbers — when we did that convention — it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”
If Paxton loses, he is going to become a human blame thrower; his defeat will be everyone’s fault but his — John Cornyn, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, President Trump. If he can find a way to blame the Dallas Cowboys, he’ll blame them, too.
A few other very-under-the-radar developments in the 2026 midterms. . . .
Did you know that the last five polls in the Oregon governor’s race have Republican State Senator Christine Drazan either tied or narrowly ahead of the Democratic incumbent? This state hasn’t elected a Republican governor since 1982.
If you’re old enough to remember Bob Dole, you probably think of Kansas as the definitive Republican state. But it has had Democratic governors from 2003 to 2009 (Kathleen Sebelius, the maestro of Healthcare.gov), 2009 to 2011, and since 2019, the current term-limited incumbent, Laura Kelly. This year, Ty Masterson, a Republican who is president of the state senate, is consistently leading Cindy Holscher, a Democratic state senator.
And as noted in the Corner yesterday, the last three polls in the Minnesota U.S. Senate race between Democratic Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan and Republican Michele Tafoya have Flanagan ahead by one percentage point, a tie, and Flanagan ahead by one percentage point.
ADDENDUM: Tuesday’s edition of this newsletter covered the United Kingdom police arresting five men outside of a major joint U.S.–U.K. air base. A day after the arrests, speculation began to focus on a theory that this wasn’t a terrorist attack at all, but garden-variety fuel thieves. As our Andy McCarthy noted yesterday, these five are extremely unlikely to be mere thieves, as Prime Minister Andy Burnham said publicly, “We will say more in due course, but we can confirm our belief that we believe Iran to have played a part.”