Midterms

Six months out, Democrats are riding a blue wave to the midterms, but the regime is constructing a very real four-point plan to stop them

There should be nothing more familiar to American voters in the age of Donald J. Trump than predictions of Democrats sailing to victory in an upcoming election, followed by astonishment at what actually happens. This year, that soothsaying is in full swing regarding the midterms, which are now approximately six months away.

Indeed, as of April 28, 2026, the prediction platform Polymarket gives Democrats a 52 percent chance of taking the Senate, Newsweek reports, while its competitor Kalshi puts Republicans at the same number—meaning the midterms are setting the stage for a coin flip on a chamber the GOP currently holds at 53–47.

Add to that, Nate Cohn at the New York Times last week described “a feasible path” to a Democratic Senate, with the party leading in Maine and North Carolina, fielding strong recruits in Ohio and Alaska, and showing signs of life in Iowa and Texas—states Trump won by double digits. The last time Democrats flipped the Senate in a midterm against an unpopular Republican president fighting an unpopular war in the Middle East was 2006, when George W. Bush’s Iraq quagmire and a 38-percent approval rating handed Nevada Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader at the time, a six-seat pickup and control of the chamber.

On the House side, Democrats need three seats to win control. Republicans can lose no more than two. More good news: The Brookings Institution’s tracking shows a generic ballot swing of nearly 8 points in their direction since 2024, more than enough on paper to flip the chamber.

As such, the case for optimism about the U.S. midterms is broad enough to contemplate and too large to dismiss. Since the 2024 election, Democrats have flipped 30 seats previously held by Republicans, the Times reports, while Republicans have flipped zero. The GOP has been losing right and left, even in places the record suggests they shouldn’t.

In Florida last month, for example, a Democratic small-business owner named Emily Gregory took the state house district that contains Mar-a-Lago, a seat Trump had carried by 11 points, and an electrical workers’ union leader named Brian Nathan, also a Democrat, won a state senate seat in West Tampa. In December, Miami elected its first Democratic mayor in nearly 30 years. In March, Boca Raton elected its first in nearly half a century. Earlier this month, a Republican won Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old seat in Georgia by only 12 points—a 25-point leftward shift in a district Trump had carried by 37, which CNN called the largest swing in any House special since Trump took office. The same night, a liberal candidate for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court won by 20 points. Voters in California and, last week, in Virginia approved ballot measures to redraw congressional maps in ways that favor Democrats.

And then there’s attrition. On the Republican side of the ledger, at least 36 House members have announced they aren’t seeking re-election in 2026, the Associated Press reports, compared to 21 Democrats saying the same. That figure breaks the modern record on the red side. CNN reported last month that Republican departures had already surpassed the 34 GOP retirements of the 2018 cycle, citing data from the Brookings Institution going back to 1930. The bottom line? The GOP is shedding incumbents faster than at any point in nearly a century, and at nearly twice the rate of Democrats. These are not small (or unhappy) developments.

Furthermore, the MAHA coalition that helped return Trump to office in 2024 is openly fracturing over a pesticide-liability provision in the farm bill, USA Today reports, with Republican Representatives Nancy Mace, Thomas Massie, Anna Paulina Luna, and Chip Roy openly revolting against their leadership. A MAHA voter in a red hat outside the Supreme Court last week told the same paper she didn’t know how she was voting in November.

Icing on the bye-bye-fascism cake? Trump’s approval has dropped to the low 40s in major polling averages, with a Fox News tally this month showing him at 42 percent “approve” and 58 percent “disapprove.” The Iran war that Trump and his liquor-boy Pete Hegseth started without an exit plan has just passed its two-month mark, and the national average for gas has hit $4.18 a gallon, AAA reports today. That’s up more than a dollar since fighting began on February 28, with California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington at or near $5 a gallon. If a party wants to lose American votes, this is the way.

And yet, American voters are also operating under a special set of circumstances. So all this good news requires some specific context.

For instance, the president of the United States has openly (and obscenely) fantasized about overturning the midterms—telling Reuters in January, per Time magazine, that “we shouldn’t even have an election,” a remark his press secretary Karoline Leavitt later dismissed as a joke. Trump called Virginia’s recent redistricting referendum a “RIGGED ELECTION” on Truth Social last week, CNN reports, after voters there narrowly approved the new congressional map favoring Democrats. This case or that, regardless, the United States president has an established record of lying, cheating, threatening, and inciting insurrections to undo election outcomes he dislikes. One needn’t take this newsletter’s word for it: Americans can simply ask the families of the dead, those people killed during Trump’s attempt to overthrow the national election via the U.S. Capitol riots in 2021.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Trump’s campaign to infuckulate the midterms is already underway. It is being fought on three fronts, with a critical fourth positioned for activation on November 4, the day after America’s midterm votes are cast.

The first front is America’s voter rolls. Since May 2025, as the Brennan Center and countless news outlets have documented, the Department of Justice under the administration’s command has demanded the unredacted voter files of nearly every state, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, and the DOJ has sued dozens of states that refused.

The second front is the maps. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s proposed congressional redraw would shift the state’s delegation from 20–8 (Republican favored) to a target of 24–4, the Associated Press reports. The mumble-headed Floridian governor’s goal is to reshape districts around Orlando and Tampa Bay, overall condensing Democrats into fewer South Florida seats. The move, if it works, would likely cost Democratic Representatives Jared Moskowitz and Debbie Wasserman Schultz their jobs. However, Florida’s constitution, amended by voters in 2010, forbids drawing districts to favor a party in just this way. And yet, the deck is stacked. The provision will be tested in court within days, the Associated Press reports, before a Florida Supreme Court on which DeSantis appointed six of seven sitting justices.

The third front is the courts. In 2006, in an unsigned emergency order titled Purcell v. Gonzalez, the Supreme Court held that federal courts should not change election rules close to an election. The Roberts Court has since extended what scholars now call the “Purcell principle” to lock in Republican-favorable maps and voting rules months before any election, even when lower courts have found those rules likely illegal. For example, last December, the AP reported that the justices used Purcell to leave Texas’s gerrymander in place for the 2026 cycle despite a three-judge panel finding it an illegal, racially motivated redraw. So that explains the flurry of cases populating all these moves. Add to that, however, the Supreme Court is currently considering—and looking likely to proceed with—striking down a major section of the Voting Rights Act, a ruling that could open as many as eight more seats to Republican remapping. These steps are all part of the plan.

And then there’s the process that follows election day. The fourth element in play is to cast Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in the wildly unenviable role of Vice President Mike Pence back in 2021. That is, Trump may demand that the Speaker of the House interfere with seating this fall’s legitimately elected candidates.

Regarding this avenue to interference, the Constitution, in Article I, Section 5, makes the House and Senate “the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” And so, as Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Z. Barabak recently wrote, in the case of a closely divided House, a Speaker willing to refuse to seat duly elected members of the other party could, in theory, pack a committee with loyalists, manufacture a fraud finding, refuse to certify enough seats to keep the gavel, and dare the country to do something about it. Notre Dame election-law scholar Derek Muller has called the scenario unlikely under most margins, “but if it comes down to a single seat,” Muller told Barabak, “all bets are off.” It’s worth noting that Johnson was the lead author of the 2020 Supreme Court brief seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s wins in four states he had indisputably carried. The Speaker of the House is not democracy’s friend.

The good news is that the blue wave is real. The bad news is that the red wall is real, too. Barring even more dramatic moves from the Oval Office—such as the 17-page draft executive order the Washington Post reported in February, which would have declared a national emergency over alleged Chinese election interference and required all 211 million registered voters to re-register in person before November—actual friends of the Republic this autumn must drive a blue margin large enough that no red-led certification fight, no Purcell stay, no legal maneuver can credibly contest the outcome.

Americans looking to rescue a pluralistic society built on liberal ideas must vote and vote in volume. And they must protect the post-count outcomes of the midterms, for what follows will have to survive a Republican-managed process in which the thieves and liars currently pillaging the United States are very interested in enforcing their own self-serving results, no matter what the ballots say.