The midterm elections ought to be the best of times for Democrats. But they’ve learned nothing from 2024.
Midterms are traditionally a referendum on the party in the White House. That’s usually bad news. People who are angry at the president are much more likely to vote than people who are happy with the job he’s doing.
In modern times, only two presidents — George W. Bush in 2002 and John F. Kennedy in 1962 — grew their party in Congress. Both were foreign policy crisis elections: W after 9/11 and JFK just after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Races for the Senate and for governor often go the same way.
Donald Trump’s party should be cruising for a bruising. Trump’s approval rating in the polling averages is dismal: 41% approve, 56% disapprove. It’s been that way for months. Only 39% approve of his party. Voters who wanted a lower cost of living have been hit by his tariffs, and voters who wanted peace got wars in Venezuela and Iran. Infighting over the likes of Tucker Carlson isn’t helping.
But it’s hard to beat somebody with nobody. In 2018, Trump’s party gained Senate seats and held some key gubernatorial races when Senate Democrats’ treatment of Brett Kavanaugh went overboard and fired up Republicans.
Joe Biden’s party did something similar in 2022 when their voters got angry at the end of Roe v Wade, and independents got spooked by January 6. In 1998, Bill Clinton’s party played to a draw when Republicans overplayed their hands with impeachment.
Democrats may face the same problem. Their favorability, at 36% favorable and 56% unfavorable, is even lower than the GOP’s.
It’s no secret why. Look at Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger. She ran in 2025 — remember 2025? — as a moderate, and beat a weak opponent by 15 points. But in office, she turned hard left.
She’s championed the nation’s most radical gerrymander, aiming to make a purple state 10-1 Democrat in Congress by letting the D.C. suburbs rule the whole state.
She’s pushed to turn Virginia into a sanctuary state for illegal alien criminals, enact green energy mandates, sell out state government to unions, jack up taxes on everything from Amazon to landscapers, hike the minimum wage, block landlords from evicting deadbeats, and put abortion and felon voting in the state constitution.
These are the same ideas Americans rejected from Kamala Harris. No wonder Spanberger’s approval rating is already down to break-even, 13 points lower than the average new Virginia governor at this point.
Voters may be antsy at how ICE is deporting people, but they don’t want to go back to Biden’s open borders. Dems shutting down airport security to try to stop deportation of illegal aliens didn’t work out that well.
Trump may be too much in a bunch of ways, but who wants too little instead?
Democrats seem to think that if they call Trump a fascist and a pedophile enough times, nobody will ask them what they stand for.
That didn’t work for Hillary Clinton, it didn’t work for Kamala, and the bait-and-switch act of running as an old-time Democrat and governing like a Marxist faculty lounge headed by a zombie didn’t work out so well for Biden in the end, either.
New ideas? All they’re offering is new faces like Zohran Mamdani, who combine old, failed economic ideas with ancient hatreds.
Republicans are still in a heap of trouble. But Democrats might still rescue them just by reminding people why they brought back Trump in the first place.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review. X: @BaseballCrank
