Three Weeks Out, Democrats’ Chances of a Legislative Majority Seem to be Growing

Can the Democrats Really Be Doing This Well?

With three weeks until Election Day, those who evaluate the electoral landscape — race raters and prognosticators — are bringing their analyses of various contests in line with the ongoing wave of rosy polls for Democratic candidates. Toward the end of last week, one race rater, Cook Political Report, moved its assessment of 18 House contests toward Democrats. Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, another race rater, changed its assessment of Alaska’s governor and Senate races, which it had rated as “toss-ups,” to “leans Democratic,” and shifted four House races toward Democrats.

TPM also obtained a not-previously-reported memo from Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy that advises hedge funds and institutional investors about what to expect from global elections, among other topics. It upgrades the odds for Democrats in both chambers of Congress. The consultancy now places the odds that Democrats flip the House at 90% (up from 85%) and the odds that they flip the Senate at 60% (up from 55% at the end of September).

It predicts a growing likelihood (40%) of Democrats winning a 20-plus seat majority in Congress, based in part of Democrats’ growing numbers on the generic congressional ballot. That’s a far cry from the outlook for the GOP last spring, amid its post-Callais gerrymandering onslaught. And the memo predicts that Republicans’ last-minute deluge of money is “probably too late” and will not be enough to save them. “Evidence that spending has swayed voters is scant,” it reads.

This is all going on as the Democratic Party’s approval rating remains not-great, though recent polling shows it to be rising. Here at TPM, we have a theory of what’s going on there: Voters are not happy with how Democrats have fought Trump. That does not mean they are happy with Trump — in fact, the Democratic Party’s low approval, per this theory, is an outgrowth of Trump’s low approval. It leaves room for voters to rally behind new Democratic candidates while maintaining their discontent with the party writ large.

But that could, of course, be wrong, and, under other theories, it may speak to weakness in Democratic support that the polls are not otherwise flushing out.

The Eurasia Group memo sees Republicans’ best hope now as the possibility of a massive polling error. “We think that polling misses in 2020 and 2024 mostly resulted from underestimating Republican support, especially among voters without a college degree, when President Donald Trump was on the ballot, and that there is no reason to expect similar bias this year,” it reads. “However, this kind of polling error is impossible to predict in advance, and the possibility that it recurs is a major reason our odds for Democrats are not higher.”

Trump and His DOJ Go All In In Minnesota

This electoral backdrop is essential for understanding the latest travesty in Minnesota, where Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D) house was raided Monday as part of a criminal investigation that “Border Czar” Tom Homan teased a month ago.

• Reports suggest the investigation focuses on immigration paperwork Omar’s father filed on her behalf decades ago.
• The right has been agitating for awhile to denaturalize Omar, with Fox News and the New York Post even publishing explainers on why doing so would be so hard in order to keep their readers’ expectations in check.
• The November election looms over all of this. Some polling has suggested the contest between Peggy Flanagan (D) and Michele Tafoya (R) in Minnesota is close. Trump has, accordingly, been stoking anti-Somali hate in the state, as we noted on Friday. That continued over the weekend, with Trump stating in Ohio: “The Republican Party, we believe that Somalia bandits, third-world gangs, and jihadist sympathizers do not belong in Ohio, they do not belong in America. We got to get them the hell out of here.”
• The DOJ typically has a “blackout” period within 60 days of an election during which it refrains from taking steps in political cases. That was ignored here, with Attorney General Todd Blanche, per the Washington Post, signing off on the raid.
• TPM will have more on this developing story later today.

Tabs

• On 440 days of his second term — more than 70% of them — Trump made some statement undermining the integrity of elections, according to a New York Times tally.
• One of the most consistent voices in pushing back on Russ Vought’s illegal impoundments — going so far as to regularly make clear they are, in fact, illegal — is the Government Accountability Office. Last year, the head of the agency, a role with a 15-year term, retired. Now, Trump is, per the Washington Sun, considering nominating Russ Vought’s deputy for the position, a move in the storied Trumpian tradition of nominating an agency’s greatest antagonist to head it.

Woman of the Hour

It’s Katie Zacharia, Donald Trump’s new press secretary and a promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, per Judd Legum at Popular Information. Pizzagate, of course, held that prominent Democrats and other celebrities harvested babies for pedophilic reasons and, also, to eat them. Zacharia on Truth Social pushed the idea that Clinton advisor John Podesta, one figure Republicans cast as central to the conspiracy theory, was a pedophile and shared such sentiments as “Democrats want to mask and rape your children. That’s their satanic platform” and “The radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals.” While the Pizzagate conspiracy theory had its heyday around the 2016 election, many of Zacharia’s posts were from 2022.

Are We at War?

The Riyadh Airport attack showed the Iran War to be expanding in unpredictable ways over the weekend, while Trump’s deal with Russia to bring down the price of detail faced bipartisan opposition, with Sen. Thom Tillis (R) suggesting it may violate the law.