A big question less than 80 days out from Election Day: Will the midterm elections be a referendum on President Donald Trump or growing socialist power inside the Democratic Party?
The answer will probably be a little of both. Midterm elections are always a referendum on the party controlling the White House, and Democrats have plenty of reason to campaign that way this year.
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Trump’s job approval rating is just 39.2% in a RealClearPolitics average of polls. Drill down to specific issues likely to sway voters in the midterm elections, like the economy, inflation, or Iran, and his numbers are even worse. A Financial Times poll of registered voters found that just 25% approved of the job Trump is doing on inflation ahead of an election that may be decided on affordability.
In 2018, Trump’s average job approval rating stood at 42.5%. Democrats won more than 40 House seats to capture the majority in what was the last true wave election.
Until this year, Democrats hope. But the party has increasingly fallen under the sway of insurgent socialist candidates who have won several competitive primaries this year. While most of them were nominated in safe blue congressional districts, a few will be on the November ballot in battleground states.
One such candidate, Abdul el Sayed, is trailing in the Fox News Michigan Senate race poll. This is a state that hasn’t elected a Republican senator since 1994, a big GOP wave election. But former Rep. Mike Rogers, who only narrowly lost to Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) in 2024, is currently leading with 51% of the vote to el Sayed’s 47% at the same time the Democratic candidate is ahead in the governor’s race. The poll shows a lack of enthusiasm among black voters, a core Democratic constituency that preferred Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in the primary, and more than a fifth of those who disapprove of Trump planning to vote for Rogers.
There were two main things that prevented the 2022 midterm elections under then-President Joe Biden from becoming a red wave. One was that Democrats held their own with voters who only somewhat disapproved of Biden. The other was Republicans nominated several Senate candidates who were not their strongest general-election contenders, a practice dating back to the tea party that denied the GOP Senate majorities in elections where the party was gaining House seats.
In 2010, for example, Republicans gained 63 House seats and the majority in an unmistakable red wave. But it would take another four years for the party to win the Senate. Similarly, Republicans picked up nine seats and control of the House in 2022. But it took the GOP two more years to flip the Senate despite the Democrats’ minuscule majority that, for much of that time period, was dependent on then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote.
If socialists fumble Senate races in Michigan and Maine this year, the latter a race against incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), it will be difficult for Democrats to take the majority.
Republicans may need to use the socialists, who are being opposed by the Democratic establishment in the primaries but then generally supported by them once nominated, to further tarnish their opponents’ already dodgy political brand.
Democrats “thought they’d found a clever dodge: a Democrat in a swing district could say he did not personally favor abolishing prisons or nationalizing large industries. His party simply contained many different opinions,” veteran Republican consultant Alex Castellanos wrote earlier this month. “But voters see something more frightening: the Big Tent is the Democratic Party’s public invitation to socialism. It lays out a welcome mat for communism to enter the Democratic Party’s home. Establishment Democrats know that such views have moved aggressively into their coalition, but they refuse to say they are disqualifying.”
On the other hand, the socialist uprising has made it easier for Democrats who are not at least adjacent to the Democratic Socialists of America to portray themselves, and be described in the media, as centrists, no matter how liberal.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley is only a centrist compared to socialist state Rep. Francesca Hong, whose failed Wisconsin gubernatorial campaign was a bridge too far even for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
“When AOC refuses to endorse the DSA front-runner for Wisconsin governor and calls pandemic-era progressive rhetoric ‘crazy,’ the left is admitting what the data proves,” Republican pollster Brent Buchanan wrote in a memo following the New York congresswoman’s giggling “Woke 1” disavowal, adding, “Democrats spent years telling young voters that abolishing police and canceling Thanksgiving were mainstream positions. Now the most prominent progressive in Congress is running from the brand she helped build. Republicans should not let her rewrite the history. AOC confirmed on the record that the product was defective.”
DEMOCRATS’ CIVIL WAR IS HEATING UP. BYRON YORK SAYS SOCIALISTS ARE WINNING
At the same time, Democrats will be working overtime to tie down-ballot Republicans to Trump, the Iran war, high gas prices, and the scandals of other GOP lawmakers, similar to the playbook that netted them big gains the last time a second-term Republican commander in chief oversaw an unpopular war during a midterm election in 2006.
It’s a proven formula, unless the party favored in November blows winnable elections.
