How disgusted are voters with both parties? I'm calling the 2026 midterms "The Bile Election" because it's not just a "hold your nose and vote" election. Voter attitudes are so rancid that this is going to be a "take two Dramamine and stay close to a toilet" election.
Unless pollsters have been on LSD for the last six months, it's going to be a pretty good night for Democrats. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has been measuring the windows in the Speaker's office for new drapes since April.
Election forecasts have shifted from a "Blue Wave" to a "Blue Tsunami." How much of that is wishful thinking, we'll have to see, but historically, it's not unexpected for a party holding the White House and Congress to suffer huge defeats in the off-year election.
I'm not going to interrupt anyone's fever dream and predict how bad it's going to be. All I'll say is, if the polls don't reflect reality this time, a lot of Democratic jumpers are going to fall off tall buildings.
It's a dead certainty that Democrats will take the wrong lesson from the election results. They will see it as a mandate to do all kinds of crazy stuff right after they impeach Donald Trump. That's bad for them. They are currently less popular than the IRS and ICE. "Just 29% of registered voters have a positive opinion of the Democratic Party vs. 38% who view the Republican Party positively, according to a pre-election NBC News poll," reports Axios.
Meanwhile, the IRS has a 37% favorable rating, while ICE sports a 36% favorable rating.
Soon-to-be Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and the entire Democratic Party leadership claim impeachment isn't on their minds and that the first 100 days will be dedicated to enacting an "affordability agenda." But the rank and file are so consumed with Trump hatred that they're not going to let the president off the hook.
This is going to be an election that will measure the level of hate for Trump among Democrats against the Republicans' desire to keep the Democrats from power. It's really no contest. Hate wins every time as a motivator to get people to the polls.
But the party that year had a net-positive party image of 4 points in NBC polling. Today, it's 23 points underwater.
Two years later in 2008 — with anti-Bush and anti-war backlash still running hot — Democrats harnessed Barack Obama's talents and calls for "change" to win back the White House.
But a midterm blowout in 2026, if it materializes, will offer no guarantee the party will find an equally talented standard-bearer in 2028.
What they're saying: "It's not great for the Democrats ... for 2028," Bill McInturff, one of the pollsters who conducted the NBC survey, said of the Democratic Party's lousy image.
In 2016, pollster Nate Silver gave Hillary Clinton a 71% chance of winning. This year, he's giving the Democrats a 95% chance of winning the House and an 80% chance of winning the Senate. Kalshi, which correctly predicted Trump's victory in 2024, gives the Democrats a 73% chance of winning both houses of Congress.
I'm surprised Silver isn't hedging his bets. Republicans have overperformed in the two presidential elections in the Trump era. Averaging the two Trump-era presidential elections gives an error of roughly 2 to 3 percentage points in Democrats' favor nationally, meaning Republicans were underestimated by about that amount. State-level errors were often larger, particularly in some Midwest battleground states.
Off-year elections are a different story, however. In 2018, there was no clear national partisan bias; errors went both ways across states. In 2022, it was the Democratic vote that was underestimated.
I'm still not convinced that the Democrats can take the Senate. Given how tight some of those races are, we probably won't know who has won the Senate for several days, if not weeks.
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Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats desperately try to stop it.
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