I said like a week ago that I’m pretty confident the GOP is going to get wrecked in the 2026 midterms. You have to imagine a lot of very improbable things happening to imagine anything else. I’m hearing from many readers questioning whether Democrats will show up after this performance. I think they will, though I think there’s a good chance a number of senators will draw primary challengers, and it would be a good thing if they lose so long as they’re in solidly blue states. But we greatly overestimate the impact of enthusiasm and disappointment measured in these terms. Midterm backlashes come from responses far more organic in the population at large. And they’re often as much against their own party’s leadership as against the incumbent party. I see this not only as a misfire and failure to at least take a chance on preserving some of the machinery of the embattled republic. It was also a missed political opportunity. And here I mean politics not simply through the prism of the 2026 election.
Donald Trump is in the midst of wrecking the national economy. New data came out today showing consumer confidence plummeting back to levels last seen at the height of the inflation spiral in 2022. This new cleanup interview from JD Vance I flagged below (where he suddenly says Elon maybe went a bit too far and government workers are good folk) tells us what we should already know: DOGE is not only unpopular. It’s seeding fear and anger deep into tendrils of the national community little touched by national politics. Trump’s popularity is going down, especially on the economy. There’s every reason to think these trends are going to continue. And that’s awful in itself because that means we’re heading into a period of economic suffering and upheaval with even more immiseration from the DOGE firing squads as they mover methodically from building to building through the apparatus of the state. All these things are unpopular now and those trend lines are going to keep going down.
Even if they didn’t wrest major concessions from the White House, Democrats had an opportunity to focus attention on this rising public anger and make clear they are the ones trying to fight the target of the anger. Not to have done that is a great missed opportunity.
