How Are We Doing With the Midterms Seven Weeks Out?
Look, I can’t tell you that everything is going to be OK for us patriots in the midterms. I think it will, but I’m not sure. Nobody knows for sure. What I do know is what the correlation of forces, to my mind, indicates. It indicates another 2022, a year when we Republicans were going to clean up against an unpopular, semi-conscious president. And we did OK. Not great. OK. And it looks to me, from where I sit, from who I’ve talked to, from what I’ve seen, and yeah, from my gut, that that’s the high-water mark for the Democrats. They might do OK. They might get the House by a few seats, and they might cut our lead in the Senate. That’s just my perspective, though. I’ve talked to well-placed optimists and doomers (one who, you know, says we lose the House and 50-50 in the Senate if we are lucky). But I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows.
Let’s look at the big themes, then get down to specific cases. What do the Democrats have going for them? History, for one. History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The party in power, especially in a second term, tends to struggle in the midterms. People get tired of the status quo. The problems add up, the friction and the fog of war slow the progress, and people get bored. That gives Democrats another advantage: excitement and intensity. And boy, are they ever excited and intense about taking us out. They can’t wait to crawl out of their old folks’ homes, cat-overrun condos, moms’ basements, Hollywood mansions, university dorms, and perverted communes to vote out those wicked patriotic Americans of the Republican Party. They would crawl over broken glass to vote against us or at least hire illegal aliens to do the crawling over broken glass that American Democrats won’t do. Every single one of them is going to vote, probably several times.
That intensity leads to their third advantage: the polls. Negative polling can demoralize Republican voters. But to the extent the polls are not actively bent to support the Democrats (which some of them manifestly are), Democrat intensity skews the polls because Democrats actually answer them. Anecdotes are evidence of nothing but anecdotes, but I like to informally poll fellow Republicans about whether they ever respond to political polling. I never do. And they tell me they never do. I don’t know who the Republicans answering these polls are, but I haven't met one.
The polling is terrible for us if you take it at face value. It has us losing in places we have no business losing. But I just can’t make myself believe it. The polls don’t fit the fundamentals, and they’re too darn convenient for the opposition. Is that wishful thinking? It may be, but it’s wishful thinking based on polling’s track record of failure. Remember the famous 2024 Ann Selzer Iowa poll that had Kamala three points up on Trump? Trump ended up beating her by something like 13 points. And just a couple of weeks ago, Hasan Piker’s Hamas-diddling puppet Abdul in Michigan was supposed to win by double digits over his moderate (sic) Democrat opponent, but he ended up barely squeaking........
