With the 2026 Midterm voting beginning in a week or so?
‘The Donald’ appears to working HARD to put ‘his’ Republican Party people in a cement box…..
Even in the Midwest , someplace Trump owned 2 years ago…
The Senate map is less complicated than it appears. As with every modern presidential campaign, it runs through the Midwest.
If Democrats flip Republican-held seats in Ohio and Iowa while retaining Michigan, they will almost certainly net the four seats total needed to take control of the Senate for President Donald Trump’s final two years.
As the traditional start of the campaign season draws near, though, Republicans are increasingly worried they may be consumed by a worsening prairie fire.
“He’s in serious trouble in farm country,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told me. “He being Trump — and Trump is us. I’m not very optimistic.”
The triple-whammy of tariffs, expensive diesel and fertilizer and now imported beef has created a crisis for agriculture-state Republicans.
Over some brisket at Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que earlier this month, the pastor of the country’s biggest Methodist congregation said Kansans are at a breaking point.
“Now some of those people are still not willing to say, ‘Hey, we don’t like Trump,’ but they do expect their senator is going to speak up for them,” said Adam Hamilton, the pastor-turned-Democratic nominee against Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.). “What I’m hearing when I go across the state is people saying — and these are Republicans, not Democrats — we can’t have six more years of this, or even two more years of this.”
Hamilton said the only question is: “How many farms are going to go bankrupt?”
Two hundred miles north up I-35, at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Josh Turek echoed Hamilton.
“We’re going through a second farm crisis right now, Farmageddon,” said Turek, the Democratic state lawmaker running against Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) for an open Senate seat.
It’s Iowa that’s more likely to flip — Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932 — and I think the Hawkeye State is the bellwether in this year’s Senate battle.
Should Iowa turn back to Democrats after supporting Trump in all three of his elections, and not electing a Democratic senator since 2008, it would be an unmistakable tell about the sort of voters who also backed Barack Obama twice.
The alarm among Republicans, though, is that the contagion may spread beyond the heartland…..
…
Every wave election brings a late surprise, and if conditions deteriorate, there’s a chance Nebraska, Kansas and even Mississippi could fall.
The culprits are obvious: the exorbitant cost of living, Trump’s deep unpopularity with the political center and the massive enthusiasm gap Democrats enjoy over Republicans.
The fear, GOP officials tell me, is that these sentiments are increasingly becoming locked in with voters; that the grim political environment — caused by spiking gas prices after the ceasefire with Iran collapsed last month — is close to irreversible. Or to borrow from Haley Barbour, that sage of Mississippi: In politics, good gets better and bad gets worse.
For months, the shorthand conversation among political professionals has not been if this will be a difficult election for Republicans but whether it will be 2018 or 2006.
Which is to say: Will 2026 bring a backlash against the party in power, but one largely confined to House losses because of polarization, limiting Democratic strength in Senate races? Or will there be a greater wave that grows high enough to sweep out Republicans thought to be safe, flipping both chambers of Congress in the process?….
…
And as long as the Strait of Hormuz is in dispute, oil prices won’t come down, and voters won’t feel any better. Sometimes politics isn’t complicated….
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.