Making political predictions is always a fool’s errand—particularly these days, when polls are becoming increasingly unreliable and sometimes even fraudulent. But there are still plenty of signs pointing to a strong Democratic Party victory in Tuesday’s midterms. Democrats appear to be in pole position to recapture the House of Representatives, and have a real chance to gain control of the Senate—something that seemed all but impossible until relatively recently.
We can tell which way the wind is blowing by the fact that Republican super PACs are bailing out of states like North Carolina—which was expected to be a marquee battleground this year but now seems all but lost to the GOP—and moving funds to bolster candidates in even redder states such as Texas and Iowa.
The Trump administration has also noticed how bad things are going, and is flailing accordingly. On Thursday, the White House announced that President Trump was canceling planned rallies in Kansas and Iowa, replacing them with tele-rallies. This news was telling on a number of levels. The very fact that Trump was headed to deep-red states like Kansas and Iowa was a sign of trouble. In more successful years such as 2016 and 2024, he ended his campaigns by going to genuine swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, even making daring jaunts into New York.
Then, on Friday morning, the White House suddenly reversed course and said Trump would be holding the rallies after all. Perhaps Trump was stung by the implication of his previous decision to cancel—it sent the message that Republicans didn’t want to be seen with an unpopular president, and that Trump himself wanted to avoid the stink of being part of a losing campaign—or perhaps this was simply yet another sign of the chaotic, strategy-free nature of Trump’s approach. Not surprisingly, pundits such as Nate Silver and David Wallace-Wells are predicting that we may be watching the beginning of the end of the Trump era.
