In the six weeks since our last update, the political environment has trended modestly downward for the Republicans, as the term “endless” became the modifier of choice for the Iran War and the price of gas surged once again (back over $4 on average nationally). Of course, six weeks ago we termed the political environment for the GOP “borderline disastrous,” so with the dip perhaps the GOP is now firmly in “disastrous” territory.

Nothing Trump has done in the second year of his second term has followed remotely the conventional playbook for a president on the cusp of an adverse midterm verdict. They typically seek ways, reflexively and rather desperately, to avoid a potential bloodbath. But Trump seems to be actively asking for a shellacking – seemingly simply uninterested in the midterms, with his flailing America-last war and tariff policies, outright indifference (by his own words) to the economic concerns of the electorate, rejection of GOP-supported housing relief legislation in deference to the unpassable SAVE America Act, and an obsession with building projects, especially the Washington Monument Reflecting Pool.

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By the numbers: Trump’s approval rating dropped two points last week, plummeting to 37% for the first time in The New York Times’s polling aggregation (now at 38% with 59% disapproval). Trump began his second term with a 52% approval rating, but it has declined more or less continuously since. The latest drop came after yet another round of “we’ll bomb them to hell” and “we have a tentative deal” posturing, neither of which occurred. Americans are getting used to the whiplash and are increasingly unhappy with it – even MAGA (according to a recent CNN poll, 45% of Republicans say the war’s toll is “not worth it”).

Trump remains underwater on every single issue (per Real Clear Politics, a GOP-friendly aggregator): on the economy (-25 net approval), inflation (-39!), foreign policy (-19), the Iran War (-25) and even immigration (-9) and crime (-6). That means there is literally no safe topic for Trump to talk about, putting not only him and his surrogates on constant defense, but also every single downballot GOP candidate in a swing election, who are pining for something -- anything -- from Trump that addresses the economy.

The primary season has continued, but the last six weeks’ election news has been more notable for two other consequential shocks, the abrupt departure of Graham Platner from the Maine Senate race and the death of South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham. Maine, of course, is a wildly significant state for the Senate midterms, as a legitimate flip opportunity for the Democrats, and while South Carolina is not truly in play, Graham was not as solid in the Gamecock State as one might think and his TBD successor on the ballot is not a given to romp in November. The most significant primary was Michigan’s, although the general election significance of progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s win has been feverishly overstated, at least according to the polls.

Finally, Democrats continue to dominate special elections; according to Downballot, there have been 118 special elections in the past 20 months, largely local elections to replace members of state legislatures who have resigned or died. In those 118 districts across the country, the Democrats on the ballot have outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 performance in those same districts by +13 percentage points on average. That +13 points swing (please remember that number as you read through the rest of this) is a pretty good proxy for how far blue the electorate has shifted during (and because of) Donald Trump’s second term. That means, in a nutshell, that every Republican who won an election by +15 points or less in 2024 is vulnerable in 2026, and those who won by less than +10 probably enter their reelection campaigns as underdogs.

Our latest odds, and how they have changed since late June, are as follows:

Remember, this is a snapshot, not a prediction. With about three months to go before Election Day, things can change. But if the election were held today, or if race dynamics do not change materially by Election Day, this would be our prediction.

See the chart at the bottom of the page for how we at BTRTN have done in our predictions in past cycles (since 2008 for the Senate, 2010 for the House).

On to the House and Senate updates.

THE HOUSE

The Republicans hold a narrow 220-215 margin in the current House, meaning that the Democrats need only win a net of three seats to regain control of the body. That seems to be a near given at this point.

As we have noted before, the most important variable in assessing potential gains and losses by the respective parties in the House midterms is the generic ballot, a polling question in which voters are asked whether they would vote for a Democratic or Republican representative if the election were held today, without naming names. In the last six weeks, the Democrats lead in the generic ballot has risen from +5.4 percentage points to +6.6, a sizable jump. This, of course, directly reflects the deteriorating political environment for the GOP, and is consistent with other data, including Trump’s declining approval rating.

Our BTRTN House model, which consists of the generic ballot (the most powerful variable) plus other fixed variables (the current make-up of the House; the party in control of the White House and the House; the term of the president) suggests that a +6.6-point lead in the generic ballot would translate to a pickup of +31 seats for the Democrats. That’s not quite of “wave” magnitude, as the opportunity for flips is dampened by the fact that the Democrats already hold 215 seats, and there are fewer seats in play in general (only about 77 by our count, and less than half that number if you don’t count the races rated “likely”).

But we have to adjust that number downward for two very good reasons:

· First for redistricting net losses, which the model could not anticipate or incorporate. The Republicans did well in the now-completed redistricting wars of 2025/26, but not nearly by enough to overcome the disastrous environment in which they are competing. The best estimate of outright GOP flips resulting from the new maps is +8 seats.

· In the past several election cycles’ polling, there has been a persistent underweighting of GOP votes on the final generic ballot compared to the national House vote, on average by about two points, which would translate to 8 seats in the model.

When you put the math together (31-8-8) you come out to a Democratic gain of +15 seats, more than enough to flip the House. This would take them from 215 current seats to 230, holding a commanding 230-205 margin in the House when all is said and done.

That’s a little too precise for my comfort. The most likely range of outcomes is +10 to +20 seats gained by the Democrats. Perhaps most importantly, our model suggests that this translates to a 79% chance of the Democrats taking the House – excellent odds and significantly higher than before (64%).

THE SENATE

The Democrats currently hold 47 seats and thus need a net of +4 to gain control of the Senate with 51 (given the GOP-controlled White House and thus J.D. Vance holding the tie-breaking vote in the Senate). A year ago, the 2026 map looked brutal for them, with only two plausible flip opportunities, in Maine (which Harris won) and North Carolina (which is always razor thin). But with Trump’s steady decline and a slew of remarkably favorable matchups, the map has been expanded to seven GOP seats reasonably in play.

There is a political maxim you are hearing this year that all paths to Senate-control by the Democrats go through Maine. In other words, if the Democrats lose Maine, they cannot flip the Senate. I am not at all certain of that. While the national environment has tended to turn House races into national races, the individual candidates – and thus the match-ups – play a stronger role in Senate races. And Susan Collins is perhaps the strongest GOP candidate among the contested races, while Troy Jackson could very well be the weakest, given the circumstances of his anointment. Therefore, I can envision, without much effort, scenarios in which the Democrats lose Maine but still manage to dlip four other GOP-held seats. Not easy, but plausible.

I will say that the road to Democratic control of the Senate does go through Michigan. The price of admission for the Dems to entertain control thoughts is to successfully defend all of their current seats, and Michigan is easily the riskiest as we sit today.

Control of the Senate will likely, as we see it now, will come down to the fate of these 11 Senate races.

· Four seats the Democrats are defending (Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire). It’s safe to say the Democrats should pick up both Georgia and Minnesota quite handily. In both states the Democratic candidate leads their GOP rival by nearly double digits. Jon Ossoff in Georgia is doing so well that the whisper campaign to tout his 2028 presidential candidacy chops has swelled to a near roar. We still await the Minnesota primary (on August 11) but both candidates, mainstreamer Angie Craig and progressive Peggy Flanagan, are faring well in polling against the likely GOP nominee, former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya. We have both races as Likely Democratic.

Polling has been light in New Hampshire, but in the only semi-recent poll, U.S. Democratic Rep Chris Pappas (who will be nominated in the September primary) is ahead of former Senator John Sununu (the future GOP nominee) by +6 points. This one does not have the feel of a nailbiter, but we have in the Lean Democratic column pending further polling.

Michigan is another story, one of the few battleground races where the Democrats do not have a favorable match-up. Al-Sayed is a progressive in a purple state, and while the progressive wing in the party is thrilled with a win outside of Kamala Harris-dominated venues, it leaves them at least a tad more vulnerable. The GOP is running (again) a very solid candidate, the mainstream (for his time) U.S. Rep Mike Rogers. The polls pitting Rogers against El-Sayed are slightly in Rogers’ favor. (FYI, the numbers show that mainstreamer Haley Stevens would fare, at best, only slightly better than Al-Sayed against Rogers, but even that statement is a bit suspect given the nature of primary polling.) Our view with such limited polling is that our ratings favor the incumbent party, so we are calling this one Toss Up Democratic pending more information.

· Two traditionally competitive seats held by Republicans (Maine and North Carolina). North Carolina has emerged as (easily) the most flippable GOP seat, as popular terming-out Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is solidly ahead (roughly +9 points) of GOP nominee Michael Whatley, the former RNC chair. Clearly a Likely Democratic at this point.

As for Maine, go figure. This is a brutal state to predict: in 2020, Collins trailed Democratic challenger Sarah Gideon by -5 points in the polls but won by +9 points…in a state that Joe Biden won by +10 points! Democratic primary winner Graham Platner finally crossed the one-too-many-revelations red line (with sexual assault accusations) and was forced to stand down, leading to the emergence of veteran Maine politico Troy Jackson to pick up Platner’s progressive mantel and make a go of it. He’s ahead of Collins in the polls by a few points, and that and $1,000 will get you ownership of the Piscataqua River Bridge. This is a true toss-up, to say the least, and sticking with our rule, we have this as Toss Up Republican pending more information.

· Five GOP seats now in play. Even if the Democrats manage to defend successfully their four seats and flip the two traditionally competitive seats, they still need two more to get to 51 and Senate control (or three more if they lose Maine). Those pickups will have to come from among five red states that Trump won by double digits in 2024. But remember the special election results, in which Democrats are outperforming 2024 by +13 points. As of now, the polls in these states all conform that theory – in these states the Democrats are all doing even or better in recent polling.

Ohio. This is as good as match-up as the Democrats could hope for, with former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown challenging incumbent GOP John Husted, who was appointed – not elected – to fill J.D. Vance’s seat in 2025. Trump won the state by +11 in 2024, but Brown is ahead in the polling by +3 on average. Another Toss Up Republican, and more of that to come.

Alaska. Alaska is as quirky as Maine, so this will be another tough one to predict. The Democrats have another proven winner, Mary Peltola, atop the ballot; she won the race to become Alaska’s sole House rep in 2022, but narrowly lost reelection in 2024. She is challenging incumbent GOP Senator Dan Sullivan in a state Trump won by +13, and, in the single poll we have seen in this race – from March! -- she leads by +6. But one poll from months ago is not enough to persuade us to change our rating as yet, which is Toss Up Republican.

Iowa. Another red state in which the Democrats got the most favorable match-up they could have asked for, having nominated the more mainstream candidate, Josh Turek, a former Paralympian. He’ll oppose the Trump-backed, MAGA-based Ashley Hinson, in another state Trump won by +13 in 2024 – and again, sparse polling to date has Turek up by +1 points. Toss Up Republican.

Texas. The GOP primary win by controversy-laced Ken Paxton was an avoidable GOP hot mess that renders the seat vulnerable. Paxton’s sordid past includes fraud accusations and marital infidelity, but Trump’s endorsement good enough for Texas Republican voters to overlook all that. But it’s hardly a good look in a race against telegenic wunderkind (and divinity student) James Talarico in another best-the-Dems-could-have-hoped-for matchup. The same pattern has emerged in Texas: Trump won the state by +14 in 2024, but Talarico is a tad ahead (+3) in the polling. Toss up Republican, though, given Texas’s red history and awaiting more polling.

Nebraska. And control of the Senate could all come down to a single guy in Nebraska who is a member of neither major party. The Democrats are not running a candidate in this state that Trump won by +20; instead, they are banking on independent Dan Osborn. Osborn lost to GOP Senator Deb Fischer by only -6 points in 2024 and will now challenge former Governor and incumbent Senator Pete Ricketts this November. Ricketts was appointed to replace Ben Sasse when Sasse resigned in 2023. While early polling favors Osborn, he has not declared which party he would caucus with if he won, if either – which puts him in a quite a position if all the chips fall a certain way. Likely Republican, for now.

More races could come into play, and some of these could drop off, as we head down the stretch. But as of now, here is a summary, in chart form, of the 11 Senate races that will decide control of the Senate in the midterms, including our BTRTN race ratings. You can see how favorable (though, in general, scant) polling is for the Democrats. Four of them (with asterisks) have moved more in the Democrats’ direction – Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina and Texas. Look at all those toss-ups!

The by and large favorable match-up movements and early polling results for the Democrats have resulted in an increase in our BTRTN odds, from 45% in late June to 48% now. It’s hard to get over that 50% mark given the current state of Maine, Michigan and those four Trump +10 or more red state, but the Democrats are making it close indeed.

As said, much can happen in the next three months in what has been the most jolting presidency of them all. Having said that, there are no clear catalysts on the horizon that seem likely to materially change the election environment. Trump will focus on process rather than message, trying to dampen Democratic votes in any way possible. But try as he might to shove a stick into the election process wheel, that stick may not nearly be big enough to slow down Democratic voting motivation and momentum.

Stay tuned.

*The chart below details our BTRTN track record in predicting Senate and House elections over the last 17 years.

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The midterms’ primary season continues apace and the matchups are now coming into direct focus. There are still many more to come in the next two months, including several that will be extremely consequential to who will control the House and Senate come November.

And yet despite the ongoing cacophony of events, when it comes to the question of the year – will the Democrats flip the Senate and House in the midterms? – what we see is: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). Our latest BTRTN odds have moved marginally in the past six weeks, but the big picture remains as it was: the Democrats are likely to flip the House but fall short in their efforts to flip the Senate. If the political environment is a constantly raging hurricane, the midterms appear to reside in the eye of it.

It might also be time for a useful reminder: the GOP was in deep trouble before Trump decided to invade Iraq and take on his own party. Thus it seems very unlikely that Trump will emerge from the current negotiations – with Iran and with GOP Senators -- with anything that would significantly upgrade his party’s status in advance of the midterms. Gas prices, as they say, rise like a rocket and fall like a feather, and affordability was a huge GOP issue even before the rocket launched. And the SAVE Act continues to have no realistic prospects for passage.

Our latest odds, and how they have changed since last month, are as follows:

Remember, this is a snapshot, not a prediction. We are four-plus months away from Election Day, and much can change. But if the election were held today, or if race dynamics do not change materially by Election Day, this would be our prediction.

Before we update the Senate and House in turn, let’s give a quick summary of the electoral environment, because midterms inevitably represent a referendum on the current Administration’s performance, which defines that environment.

ELECTORAL ENVIRONMENT

We said in May that “it is no exaggeration to say the current environment is borderline disastrous for the GOP.” Nothing has changed to alter that view. The data remains as it was: Trump’s approval/disapproval rating is 38%/58%, a net of -20 points (per The New York Times poll aggregator), just as it was in mid-May. His issue ratings remain underwater across the board (per Real Clear Politics); to pick oout a few important one, Trump is -21 on the war in Iran, worse than the -16 back in mid-May, and, stunningly, he remains -26 on his handling of the economy and an even more shocking -40 on his handling of inflation (29%/69%). The latter, of course, is the single issue most responsible for his return to power just 18 months ago, and the unhappiness is not surprising, since inflation has risen from 2.9% at the end of Biden’s term to 4.2% now, driven by Trump’s own actions with the tariffs and the Iran War. These are truly terrible ratings, the kind of ratings that would send a first-term president seeking reelection packing (and worse than Trump’s own ratings back in 2020 when he lost his reelection bid). The Democrats continue to hold a commanding lead in the generic ballot, now by +5.4, a measure that is particularly relevant to and predictive of the midterms. More on that to come.

Democrats also continue to dominate special elections; there have been 109 special elections in the past 18 months, largely local elections to replace members of state legislatures who have resigned or died. In those 109 districts across the country, those same 109 districts since, the Democrat outperformed Kamala Harris by +13 percentage points, which means every Republican who won an election by +15 points or less in 2024 is now vulnerable.

And a recent Washington Post analysis sheds some insight into the Dems’ frenzied motivation in 2026. They report that “Americans are voting in Democratic primaries and special elections this year in far greater numbers than in previous contests: so far this year, 12.6 million ballots have been cast in Democratic House primaries — versus 8.6 million in GOP ones. In over 90% of Democratic House primaries this year, more ballots were cast than in 2022, when Republicans flipped the House, according to the Post’s review of 990 races across 25 states and three cycles.”

THE HOUSE

Summary of changes since last month: The main change in House prospects for the Democrats this month has less to do with either world events or primary news, but rather from the latest on redistricing. (The GOP may have been handed a gift with the Mamdani-backed primary wins in three New York City districts, but I doubt that “socialism” messaging will be of much help to the GOP come November nationally, try as they might.) The new news is that the apparent final outcome (subject to more court decisions) for 2026 is somewhat better for the Democrats than it looked like last month in the wake of the SCOTUS Callais decision, thus pushing their odds of flipping the House up as well. So the midterm story for the House continues as it was last month: as of now, the redistricting gains made by the GOP will not be enough to offset the gains Democrats will realize by virtue of the unpopularity of Trump and the GOP described above. Since our last report, the outlook has become slightly more positive for the Democrats to flip the House, and our odds have increased accordingly.

To recap the background: Including vacant seats, the Republicans now hold a narrow 220-215 margin in the current House, meaning that the Democrats need only win a net of three seats to regain control of the body.

The full update on the odds: As we have often noted, the key variable to watch that correlated well with midterm performance is the generic ballot, in which pollsters ask a voter whether they would vote for a Democratic or Republican representative if the election were held today, without naming names. The Democrats continue to hold an impressive 5.4-point lead in the generic ballot, 47.2% to 41.8%. Our BTRTN House midterm model suggests that if such a lead holds to the election, it would result in the Democrats picking up +20 to +30 seats. (Our model has been reasonably predictive – see the chart at the end of the article.)

We have to adjust the model output for redistricting gains/losses, and the 2026 endgame is now coming into sharper focus. We are now long past the newly-drawn-more-partisan maps first in Texas and then California, the failed attempt by the Democrats in Virginia, and the successes of the GOP in a number of states, some early on and then others, in the south, enabled by the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v Callais.

But the net of it all is that the GOP has not gained as much as their post-Callais euphoria suggested, at least not in 2026. Notably, both South Carolina and Georgia explicitly decided to forego changing the maps to disenfranchise Black voters, and other southern states were too far along in the primary season to consider new maps in this cycle.

Thus, based on the scorecard below, the GOP appears likely to flip only about 7-8 net seats from the Democrats strictly due to new partisan maps in the 2026 midterms, versus the 10-13 we were looking at last month. Apart from the tepid post-Callais advances in the South (confined to a seat each in Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama), a number of districts that were thought to have swung to the GOP are actually still very much in play, including two of the Texas districts, two in Ohio and one in North Carolina. So it is unlikely the GOP will flip every seat they redistricted to gain advantage.

So, the net of all this is captured on this chart. Using conservative estimates for pickups (D+20) adjusted for redistricting (R+8), the Democrats could come out with a net of +12 seats (from 215 to 227), to gain control at 227 to 208, a full +19 seat cushion. And there is likely more Democratic upside than downside to this math, given that the Dems could pick up more than 20 seats.

Using our other model, this translates to a 64% chance of the Democrats taking the House – quite good odds and likely a bit understated.

THE SENATE

Summary of changes since last month: Four states have held Senate primaries since mid-May and the Democrats netted out slightly ahead in terms of desired matchups. The primaries in Iowa and Georgia were positive in that regard, while both parties nominated startlingly controversial candidates in Maine (for the Democrats) and Texas (for the Republicans). Overall early polling, such as it is, is looking very strong for Democratic candidates. On balance, the Democrats’ odds of flipping the Senate have inched upward modestly, though still under 50%.

To recap the background: Democrats currently have 47 seats and thus need a net of +4 to gain control of the Senate with 51. A year ago, the 2026 map looked brutal for them, with only two plausible flip opportunities, in Maine (which Harris won) and North Carolina (which Trump won but of late is always razor thin). Both states have elected both Republicans and Democrats to the states’ highest offices in the recent past. But the dwindling fortunes of the Trump Administration, plus some strong matchups, have put five more GOP seats in play, thus demonstrably improving the odds of the Democrats to flip the chamber versus a year ago.

The full update on the odds/races: Control of the Senate will likely, as we see it now, come down to the fate of these 11 Senate races. (See the chart at the bottom if you want to have a look at how we have fared in our BTRTN Senate predictions in recent cycles.)

· Four seats the Democrats are defending (Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire). At this stage, it now appears that the only one of these four seats at significant risk is Michigan. Minnesota was ground zero for ICE and the killings in January and the Democrats are well-positioned there; Chris Pappas has emerged as a strong potential nominee to replace the retiring Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire; and Jon Ossoff looks positively commanding in Georgia, with a growing 2028 presidential buzz in the making. He has a huge war chest and will face a more Trumpy opponent, Mike Collins, which is not an asset for the GOP in a purple state. The Democrats are reasonably comfortably ahead in the polls in all three states.

That leaves Michigan, where pro-Palestinian activist Abdul El-Sayed is ahead in the primary polls over the more moderate Democratic candidates Mallory McMorrow and Haley Stevens. The winner will face a very solid GOP candidate, the mainstream U.S. Rep Mike Rogers in this purple state. The polls pitting El-Sayed versus Rogers are about even, though El-Sayed has been performing significantly better than he was, a welcome development for the Democrats.

· Two traditionally competitive seats held by Republicans (Maine and North Carolina). North Carolina has emerged as (easily) the most flippable GOP seat, as popular terming-out Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is solidly ahead in the polls (low double digits) of the newly-crowned GOP nominee Michael Whatley, the former RNC chair. But Maine is a true wildcard. In 2020, the last time Republican Susan Collins ran for reelection (for her fifth term), she won easily despite polls showing her consistently five points behind. Now her opponent will be oyster farmer and ex-Marine populist Graham Platner, the most controversial Senate candidate this side of the Mississippi. A new set of revelations emerged recently about his sordid dating life, adding to his history of offensive social media posts and his now-scrubbed Nazi tattoo. But, for whatever it is worth (not much, I would guess), Platner is ahead of Collins in the polls, even after all the latest revelations.

· Five GOP seats now in play. Even if the Democrats manage to defend successfully their four seats and flip the two traditionally competitive seats, they still need two more to get to 51 and Senate control. Those two will have to come from five red states that Trump won by double digits in 2024. But remember those 2025/26 special election results, in which Democrats are outperforming 2024 by +13 points on average. If the electorate has truly moved that much, these races will be highly competitive — and early polling in each seems to confirm that take.

· Ohio. This is as good as match-up as the Democrats could hope for, with former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown challenging incumbent GOP John Husted, who was appointed – not elected – to fill J.D. Vance’s seat in 2025. Trump won the state by +11 in 2024, but the polling in this race is dead even.

· Alaska. The Democrats have another proven winner, Mary Peltola, atop the ballot; she won the race to become Alaska’s sole House rep in 2022, but narrowly lost reelection in 2024. She is challenging incumbent GOP Senator Dan Sullivan in a state Trump won by +13, and, in the single poll we have seen in this race, she leads by +6.

· Iowa. In the recent Iowa primary Democrats got the most favorable match-up they could ask for, having nominated the more mainstream candidate, Josh Turek, a former Paralympian. He’ll oppose the Trump-backed, MAGA-based Ashley Hinson, in another state Trump won by +13 in 2024 – and again, sparse polling to date is dead even.

· Texas. Texas Republicans backed Trump-backed Ken Paxton in the primary over incumbent Senator John Cornyn, and Paxton won, instantly jeopardizing the seat. Paxton has his own sordid past, full of fraud accusations and marital infidelity, and thus he is the most controversial Senate candidate west of the Mississippi. He will be facing the telegenic wunderkind James Talarico in another best-the-Dems-could-have-hoped for post-primary matchup. And note the pattern: Trump won Texas by +14 in 2024, but the polling in this race is even yet again.

· Nebraska. The Democrats are not running a candidate in this state that Trump won by +20; instead, they are banking on Independent Dan Osborn. Osborn lost to GOP Senator Deb Fischer by only -6 points in 2024 and will now challenge former Governor and incumbent Senator Pete Ricketts this November. Ricketts was appointed to replace Ben Sasse when Sasse resigned in 2023. While early polling favors Osborn, he has not declared which party he would caucus with if he won, if either -- and that decision could decide control of the Senate.

Here is a summary, in chart form, of the 11 Senate races that will decide control of the Senate in the midterms, including our BTRTN race ratings. You can see how favorable early polling is for the Democrats, but bear in mind the polling in some races is sparse (and in Maine in particular, hard to have any confidence in). Four of them (with asterisks) have moved more in the Democrats’ direction in our ratings since May – North Carolina (from D Toss-up to D Lean), and Iowa, Texas and Nebraska (all R Likely to R Lean). Four others await ticket-clarifying primaries in August and September, with Michigan in particular of interest.

The by and large favorable match-up movements and early polling results for the Democrats have resulted in an increase in our BTRTN odds, from 41% in mid-May to 45% now.

Much can happen in the next four-plus months of course in what has been the most jolting and unpredictable presidency of them all. Having said that, there are no clear catalysts on the horizon that seem likely to materially change the election environment, though Trump will certainly try everything to do just that – as well as tampering with the election itself.

Stay tuned.

*The chart below details our BTRTN track record in predicting Senate and House elections over the last 15 years.

I now realize that the dust is never going to settle, so I might as well take the plunge now, six months out, and (gamely) unveil our first cut at the BTRTN odds of the Democrats gaining control over each of the House and the Senate in the November 2026 midterms. And here they are:

While this is the first time we have run models, it is clear that the odds of the Democrats winning the Senate have improved significantly in the last year, from near-zero (given a very poor 2026 Senate map) to something quite conceivable, while those of taking the House, in the wake of Florida, Virginia and Callais, have dropped from nearly a given to something no better than “more likely than not.” But nevertheless, the likely outcome in our view is still a split verdict, with the Democrats successfully flipping the House but falling short in the Senate.

Remember, this is a snapshot, not a prediction. We are nearly six months away from Election Day, and much can change (including the very meaning of Election Day itself, as the Supreme Court mulls the fate of whether to count ballots received after Election Day). But if the election were held today, or if race dynamics do not change materially in the next six months, this would be our prediction.

Before we take a look at each of the House and Senate in turn, let’s give a quick summary of the electoral environment, because midterms inevitably represent a referendum on the current Administration’s performance, which defines that environment.

ELECTORAL ENVIRONMENT

It is no exaggeration to say the current environment is borderline disastrous for the GOP. It’s bad enough that the GOP might lose both the House and Senate even with sizable structural advantages in both due to the Senate map and significant GOP redistricting pick-ups in the House.

We measure the “electoral environment” using two different types of data: polling and actual voting data. We’ll look at polling data first.

Donald Trump’s approval rating stands at 38% (per The New York Times polling aggregator), a level in line with those of Joe Biden near the end of his term in 2024; Jimmy Carter at the time of his losing reelection campaign in 1980; and five points below Trump himself in 2020 as he faced (and ultimately failed to achieve) reelection. This is a level at which Americans repudiate and reject their leaders. Indeed, no president since WWII has been re-elected with an approval rating less than 48%, which is a full ten points higher than Trump’s current level. Trump is not running for reelection, of course, but the point is that a -20-point net approval rating is a terrible place to be, for him and his party, closing in on the midterms.

The Trump Administration is also “underwater” on approval ratings for how it is handling key issues – on every single issue. Even immigration, which previously was Trump’s only net positive issue, has gone “upside down” from a modest net +5 (a year ago, just after his Inauguration) to a net -5 in the aftermath of the ICE killings in Minneapolis in January. More crucially for the midterms, the view of Trump’s handling of the economy has dropped to a net -23, and that of inflation – the issue on which he was elected – has cratered to a stunning net -41, reflecting only 28% approval and 69% disapproval. The War in Iran is a net negative (-16) and 77% of Americans blame Trump for the rise in gas prices engendered by the war, including 82% of Independents and a majority of Republicans (55%), per a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.

But if you don’t believe polling figures, how about actual votes? There have been 104 special elections in the past 18 months, largely local elections to replace members of state legislatures who have resigned or died. In those 104 districts across the country, Trump and Harris split the vote, 49% each, on Election Day in November 2024. But in special elections in those same 104 districts since, the Democrat won on average by a 56% to 43% margin, a +13-point swing to the Democrats since the 2024 presential election. That +13 swing to the left looms large over the midterms; it means every Republican who won an election by +15 points or less in 2024 is now vulnerable in November 2026.

Even worse, though, is how that swing happened. Election analysis from the November 2025 elections (the day the Democrats swept governor and legislature races in Virginia and New Jersey by wide margins) indicates that the vaunted “New Trump Coalition” is essentially dead. All of those young voters (largely young men), Black voters and Latino voters who defected to Trump in 2024 from their traditional Democratic base have returned to backing Democratic candidates. The GOP hopes of a new, permanent Republican coalition – and the logic underpinning some of the redistricting efforts – have been dashed.

On to the House.

THE HOUSE

Including vacant seats, the Republicans hold a narrow 220-215 margin in the current House, meaning that the Democrats need only win a net of three seats to regain control of the body.

There are two factors to consider in 2026: the “regular” electoral dynamics, plus the overlay of the redistricting wars, including the potential impact of the Callais decision. And the simple math is that the GOP, for all of their redistricting successes, has not been able to tilt the field enough in their favor to overcome the impact of the unhappiness with the Trump Administration – though they are making it far closer than it should be.

“Normal” electoral dynamics: To measure the impact of the “normal” electoral dynamics, we turn to our BTRTN House model, which predicts gains and losses of House seats (rather than assessing each individual seat race). The model has been reasonably predictive – extremely so if you toss out one outlier year (*see the table at the end of this article). The strongest variable in the model is the generic ballot, in which pollsters ask a voter whether they would for a Democratic or Republican representative if the election were held today, without naming names.

The Democrats currently hold a whopping 6-point lead in the generic ballot, 48% to 42%, which of course reflects the level of discontent with the Trump Administration demonstrated above. Our model suggests that such a lead, if it holds to the election, would result in the Democrats picking up +20 to +30 seats, far more than needed to flip the House.

Redistricting. Of course, the Trump White House and GOP leadership have long been aware of the headwinds facing them in the 2026 midterms – after all, only four times since the Civil War has the president’s party picked up House seats in the midterms. And that’s why they encouraged Texas to take the unusual step of undertaking redistricting mid-decade, between the traditional census timing, in 2025. That set off a round of enacting new maps for partisan advantage that the GOP thought might “lock in” holding the House in the midterms. But the Democrats abandoned the high road and sought to negate the GOP moves with their own set of redistricting efforts, with mixed success.

Their efforts in California and Virginia (with some help from the courts in Utah) appeared to have nearly offset GOP gains in Texas, Missouri, Ohio and Florida — especially considering that several of the GOP redistricting flips might not hold come Election Day, given both legal challenges and the current weakness the GOP is experiencing among Latino voters in particular, which lessens the odds of them taking a few of the new map districts.

But the more recent news – Virginia and Callais – has clearly given the GOP the upper hand in the redistricting wars.

The Callais ruling essentially eviscerated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protected and enabled minority representation throughout the South for decades. Louisiana, as an example, created two Black-majority districts, which more or less ensured their Black population, which is 1/3 of the state, would have 1/3 representation, two out of the six districts. There are 12 Black-majority districts throughout the South that the GOP will pursue relentlessly with SCOTUS’ blessing of overtly partisan gerrymandering. The only question on the table right now is how many will they pick up in 2026? As of now, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama have moved aggressively to new maps and thus the GOP stands to pick up perhaps +6 seats if the new maps withstand legal challenges. (Florida already made their move just before Callais.)

In Virginia, of course, the voter referendum that enabled a Dem +4 flip was quickly overturned by the state Supreme Court, who ruled that the process the Democrats used disenfranchised early voters, a contention Virginia Democrats are appealing to SCOTUS.

There are many moving pieces to this analysis. More southern states could make moves, although most have already held their primaries. There are legal challenges underway to nearly every new map, including Florida, Missouri and, as stated, Virginia. The Democrats could retain some of the presumed-flipped seats due to the favorable electoral environment. But the scorecard as of now seems to point to a GOP pick up of +10-13 seats, per this chart.

So, the net of all this is captured on this chart. Using conservation estimates for “normal pickups” (D+20) and redistricting (R+13), the Democrats still come out with a net gain of +7 seats, to take control of the House with a 222 to 213 majority. There is likely more Democratic upside than downside to this math, given that the Dems could easily pick up more than 20 seats, and the GOP will struggle to actually win all 13 redistricting flips.

Using our other model, this translates to a 59% chance of the Democrats taking the House – a decent margin, and likely a low-end estimate, but hardly the near-guarantee that a non-redistricted world would have predicted.

THE SENATE

At this point last year, the conventional wisdom (including mine) was that there was little chance for the Democrats to flip the Senate, even with the foundering Trump Administrations’ well-known woes. That’s because of what is referred to as a “bad map.” Only a third of the Senate is up for reelection in any cycle, so the odds are affected materially by which races actually occur. The Democrats currently have 47 seats and thus need a net of +4 to gain control of the Senate with 51. But they have four tough seats to defend and, at the time, appeared to have only two plausible flip opportunities, Maine and North Carolina (neither easy). That math does not work….at best it gets to Dems to only 49 seats.

But things have changed: the fortunes of the Trump Administration have worsened (remember that “Dem +13” special election math) and the matchups are shaping up nicely for the Democrats. Thus, the set of potentially flappable GOP seats has grown from merely two to a plausible seven. So, control of the Senate will likely, as we see it now, come down to the fate of 11 Senate races, as follows:

Four seats the Democrats are defending (Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire). At this stage the view here is that the Democrats are well positioned to successfully defend their own vulnerable seats, with the possible exception of Michigan. Minnesota was ground zero for ICE, as the killings in January as well as the political assassinations in June 2025 have left Minnesota Democrats outraged, and ready to support the candidate who emerges to replace the retiring Tina Smith. New Hampshire rep Chris Pappas, the replacement for the retiring Jeanne Shaheen, is popular and favored to defeat former GOP Senator John Sununu, and Jon Ossoff has a huge war chest in Georgia, and will not have to face the popular Governor Brian Kemp, who is terming out yet chose not to run for the Senate. That leaves Michigan, where a primary in early August could be crucial. Polling indicates that the more mainstream Democratic candidates Mallory McMorrow and Haley Stevens could probably handle GOP candidate Mike Rogers, but if the Democrats nominate Abdul El-Seyed, the noted pro-Palestinian activist who is extremely progressive, the race will become much more iffy.

Two traditionally competitive seats (Maine and North Carolina). These two states may share a traditionally competitive, purple-ish profile, but they are very different in terms of their 2026 Senate outlook. Trump won North Carolina by +3 points in 2024, while Maine went to Harris by +7. North Carolina’s incumbent GOP Senator, two-term incumbent Thom Tillis, is retiring, whereas Maine’s Susan Collins is seeking a sixth term. The challenger in North Carolina is the popular former Governor, the soothing 68-year-old Roy Cooper. But in Maine, the challenger is 41-year-old outsider Graham Platner, who’s dominance in the primary polls forced Mills to drop out, putting the flip challenge in the hands of an oyster famer, harbormaster and ex-solider who has become a progressive darling despite a sordid social media history. But in each race the Democratic challenger appears to lead in the early polling (although Maine polling never seems to work out, especially against Collins). Overall North Carolina is easily the best flip opportunity for the Democrats, but they almost surely need Maine too for any chance of flipping the Senate to blue.

Five GOP seats now in play. If the Democrats manage to defend successfully their four seats and flip the two “must haves,” they still need two more to get to 51 and Senate control. Those two will have to come from five red states that Trump won by double digits in 2024. But remember, “Dem +13” alone puts them in play, apart from reasonably good matchups.

· Ohio. An example of an excellent matchup, with former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown challenging incumbent John Husted, who was appointed – not elected – to fill J.D. Vance’s seat in 2025. Trump won the state by +11 in 2024, but the times, they are a-changin’.

· Alaska. The Democrats have another proven winner, Mary Peltola, atop the ballot; she won the race to become Alaska’s sole House rep in 2022, but narrowly lost reelection in 2024. She is challenging incumbent GOP Senator Dan Sullivan in a state Trump won by +13.

· Iowa. Jodi Ernst unexpectedly retired, giving the Democrats an opening in a state Trump also won by +13. Neither party has a big name in the race, so the national mood will play an outsized role in the election.

· Texas. Lots of focus on the upcoming GOP runoff primary between mainstream incumbent John Cornyn and controversial MAGA state Attorney General Ken Paxton. The conventional thinking is that Democratic challenger James Talarico would have a better chance of beating Paxton, but the polls don’t seem to support that – Talarico is ahead of both by more or less equal (and slim) margins. Trump has decided not to endorse either GOP candidate in a state he won by +14 in 2024.

· Nebraska. The Democrats are not running a serious candidate in this state that Trump won by +20; instead, they are banking on independent Dan Osborn. Osborn lost to GOP Senator Deb Fischer by only -6 points in 2024 and will now challenge former Governor Pete Ricketts this November. Ricketts was appointed to replace Ben Sasse when Sasse resigned in 2023. Osborn has not declared which party he would caucus with if he won, if either, and that decision could decide control of the Senate.

Here is a summary of the 11 Senate races that will decide control of the Senate in the midterms, including our BTRTN race ratings.

When you plug these race ratings into our model and run the simulations, the resultant 41% probability of a Democratic flip of Senate control captures both the progress the Democrats have made – far higher than at any point in 2025 – and yet how far they must go in needing to flip several quite red states. But the leftward swing of the country, the strength of the matchups and the limited polls in place all point to a path, even multiple paths, towards making that a reality.

Again, much can happen in the next six months, of course. Most importantly, the Straits of Hormuz remain double-blockaded, and no negotiated settlement appears to be in sight. The economic implications of it are likely to worsen. And the world will continue to spin in unexpected ways that could deeply influence the midterms. Having said that, there are no clear catalysts on the horizon that seem likely to materially change the election environment, though Trump will certainly try everything to do just that – as well as tampering with the election itself.

Stay tuned.

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*The chart below details our BTRTN track record in predicting House gains in recent elections.

As background, here’s a quick primer on the math for the Democrats to win control of the Senate in November. The GOP controls the Senate right now, 53-47 (Independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King caucus with the Democrats). So the Democrats need to hold all of their seats up for reelection in November, and flip four GOP seats, to gain control with a 51-49 margin. The 51 marker is required because the White House is controlled by the GOP, and thus Vice President J.D. Vance wields the Senate tiebreaker vote.

You may have heard that the Democrats face a “tough map” in their quest for control. That’s all too true:

• The seats they must defend include four “battleground” states (Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire); all are typically close races, and in 2026 three of the Democratic incumbents are retiring, which makes retaining these seats all the more difficult

• There are only two GOP seats that are considered similarly competitive and thus reasonably flippable, Maine and North Carolina. Maine went for Harris in 2024, and Trump won North Carolina by only a point.

• Assuming the Democrats manage to flip those two GOP seats, they must still flip two more GOP seats in states that Trump won handily in 2024; the best potential options are Alaska (which Trump won by +13 points), Iowa (+13), Ohio (+11), Nebraska (+21) and Texas (+14).

But there are at least four reasons the Democrats have become, despite the map, guardedly optimistic about their chances to flip the Senate.

• By every conceivable measure, the Trump Administration is wildly unpopular (Trump himself has a 41% approval/55% disapproval rating, according to the New York Times polling aggregator) and continues to pursue policies disliked by majorities of voters, from the ICE crackdowns, to the tariffs, to the new war in Iran, plus the lack of focus on the economic affordability issues that got Trump elected in the first place (perhaps best exemplified by the sharp rise in gas prices due to the war)

• Even more compelling, Democrats are winning at the ballot box. In special elections in the House and in state legislatures in 2025 and 2026 – over 70 of them -- Democratic candidates have outperformed Trump’s 2024 performance in their districts by an average of +13-point swings. The cherry on top was the excellent electoral performance the Democrats displayed in Virginia, New Jersey, New York and California on Election Day in 2025. That magnitude of swing puts more races in play for the Democrats in both the House and the Senate.

• Democrats are highly motivated. Turnout in all these elections has favored the Democrats by solid margins (such as the March 3 Texas primary, where far more Democrats than Republicans went to the polls in the primary, for the first time since 2020). As one pundit put it, Democrats would “crawl over broken glass” to vote out the GOP in this election cycle. The upcoming No Kings protest on March 28 may shatter protester numbers set in the last No Kings event – 7 million strong.

• Finally, the Democrats have recruited strong candidates to challenge for the Senate seats they need to flip. They represent a mix of veteran “names” and rising stars, and you can’t fault Chuck Schumer for failing to put the Democrats’ best faces forward in the long-shot quest to flip the Senate.

This chart summarizes where the race for Senate control stands based on BTRTN’s current ratings. The path to 51 gets progressively more difficult as you move down the chart, but there is a path. You start with 34 Democratic seats that are not up for reelection; add to them 9 solid blue seats in 2026; then the four seats the Democrats must defend in 2026. There is one potential flip that is looking promising as of now, which gets the Democrats to 48 seats. The rest must come from tougher flips of GOP seats, and you can see that a few are looking more promising than others. That’s the opportunity set. The 11 races with “lean” or “toss up” ratings will be discussed below, in order of their primary date.

NORTH CAROLINA, Primary Date is MARCH 3

The Blue Dream: Popular former governor Roy Cooper turning North Carolina blue; this dream has a good chance of becoming the reality.

The Reality: The North Carolina primary is already completed. Cooper had pretty much cleared the field and thus he cruised to victory for the Democratic nomination, where he will face Michael Whatley, the former RNC chair. Whatley won the GOP primary to succeed Thom Tillis, who abruptly retired last year and has been showing true anti-Trump colors ever since. The combination of a lack of an incumbent and a strong Democratic challenger makes North Carolina the Democrats’ most likely pickup in this purplish state, especially given the toxic electoral environment for the GOP. Cooper leads Whatley in polling by a comfortable margin. Said more ominously, if the Democrats don’t flip here, they won’t flip anywhere.

BTRTN Rating: LEAN DEMOCRAT

(Note: Texas, as you doubtless know, held its primary on March 3^rd as well, with the GOP heading to a run-off on May 26. We’ll take a look at Texas below.)

OHIO, MAY 5 (special election)

The Blue Dream: Popular former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown returns to the Senate, beating incumbent GOP Senator John Husted in Husted’s first attempt to win the seat outright, having been appointed to it in 2025 to replace newly named Vice President J.D. Vance.

The Reality: Brown will face an uphill battle in a state that has steadily evolved from swing red (in the G.W. Bush years) to swing blue (two Obama wins) to solid red of late. Ohio used to be the best predictor of presidential outcomes (from 1912 to 2012, it only failed twice as a bellwether), but Trump has won three straight times there by +9, +8 and +11. Nevertheless, each of those margins – as well as Brown’s -4-pt loss to Bernie Moreno in 2024 -- are less than the magic “Dem +13” swing we’ve seen in 2025/2026 special elections. And Trump, of course, will not be atop the GOP ballot in the 2026 midterms (or, for that matter, ever again). There has been a smattering of Huston-Brown polling in 2025, and that polling has marginally favored Husted. But there has been no polling in 2026, and much has changed in the political environment.

BTRTN Rating: TOSS-UP REPUBLICAN

NEBRASKA, MAY 12 (special election)

The Blue Dream: Independent Dan Osborn upsets incumbent GOP Senator Pete Ricketts, and then chooses to caucus with the Democrats.

The Reality: The primary here means little. Ricketts will almost certainly be the GOP nominee, and the Democrats are not even putting forward a candidate. They are instead pinning their hopes on independent candidate Dan Osborn. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Osborn, a Navy veteran, came reasonably close (-6 points) to defeating Senator Deb Fischer here in 2024. Now Osborn has his sights set on Ricketts, the former governor who was appointed to Ben Sasse’s Senate seat when Sasse resigned in 2023. Importantly, Osborn has not indicated with which party he would caucus (if either) if he won.

BTRTN Rating: LEAN REPUBLICAN

GEORGIA, MAY 19

The Blue Dream: Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff defends his seat, winning the race without a runoff.

The Reality: Of the four competitive seats the Democrats must win, this one (and Minnesota below) are perhaps the safest. Unlike the other three Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire), the Dems are running an incumbent; Ossoff is the only one who did not retire. The GOP’s best shot as a challenger would have been popular governor Brian Kemp, who is terming out, but Kemp decided to pass. Mike Collins, a U.S. rep, leads the GOP field over another rep, Buddy Carter and former Tennessee Volunteers football coach Derek Dooley (his dad, Vince, was a famous Georgia coach). Yes, that’s a weak field, and the winner will have to face Ossoff’s mammoth war chest, $63 million and counting. The three Republicans combined have raised about $12 million. Georgia requires a 50%+1 margin to win on Election Day, so purple Georgia often ends up being decided in a January runoff – but Ossoff just may avoid that fate (he won a runoff in 2020 to win his first team).

BTRTN Rating: LEAN DEMOCRAT

TEXAS, MAY 26

The Blue Dream: Democratic rising star James Talarico completes his stunning rise and defeats MAGA-darling Ken Paxton in November.

The Reality: Talarico did his job to realize the Democratic part of the dream, defeating U.S. rep Jasmine Crocker in the March 3 primary by +7 points. Pre-primary polling (though erratic) seemed to confirm the pundit thinking that the best match-up would feature the soft-touch Talarico against the wildly controversial Paxton. But the other part of the dream is on shakier ground because Paxton unexpectedly finished behind mainstream incumbent Senator John Cornyn. Neither reached the 50% threshold, so the GOP will hold a runoff on May 26 featuring only Cornyn and Paxton. Cornyn is now the favorite, because of the momentum of the win, the likelihood that the now departed Wes Hunt was hurting him more than Paxton, and the possibility that Cornyn may score an endorsement from Trump. If Trump walks away from Paxton, that may enrage MAGA, but Trump does not want to lose the seat and backing Cornyn just may seal the deal for him in May, and the GOP in November.

BTRTN Rating: LEAN REPUBLICAN

IOWA, JUNE 2

The Blue Dream: The Dems take advantage of an unexpected GOP retirement and the brutal GOP electoral environment to pull off a massive upset and flip Iowa in a contest of “no names.”

The Reality: Absent a strong candidate, this will be a very difficult race for the Democrats to flip. Iowa is very similar to Ohio; Obama won the state twice, comfortably, but Trump turned the tables in 2016 and then ran them, winning the state by +9, +8 and +13. The 2016 margin of +13 is equal to the +13 momentum swing the Democrats have enjoyed in 2025/26 special elections – right at the edge of possibility GOP Senator Jodi Ernst won her first term by +8 in 2014, and her second by +7 in 2020, but, like Tillis, she decided unexpectedly not to run again, leaving a crack in the door for Democrats. U.S. Rep Ashley Hinson is the leading GOP field, and she may be stronger candidate than Ernst, who lost a bunch of folks when, in response to a question about Big Beautiful Bill Medicaid cuts, she said: “Well, we are all going to die.” The Dem field seems to be coalescing around state rep Josh Turek, a former Paralympian (another Dem candidate dropped out and endorsed Turek). Head-to-head polling, such as it is, is reasonably tight, with Hinson leading Turek by +3 points. The June primary should nail down the Hinson-Turek matchup.

BTRTN Rating: LEAN REPUBLICAN

MAINE, JUNE 9

The Blue Dream: Popular progressive Graham Platner finally breaks Susan Collins’s grip on quirky Maine.

The Reality: GOP incumbent Susan Collins, seeking her sixth term, is one tough electoral cookie. The last time she ran in 2020, the polls had her Democratic opponent up by +5 points on average – and Collins won by +9. She is routinely excoriated for the many times she has supported the whims of Donald Trump (and is infamous for later expressing great “disappointment” in the outcomes). But there never seems to be any real electoral momentum to defeat her. One reason is that she has been effective in representing Maine’s interests in reversing some of the pain Trump has inflicted on her state, such as, in the early days of Trump II, restoring millions of dollars in research cuts at the flagship University of Maine. Current Democratic Governor Janet Mills, who is terming out, seems to be a terrific potential challenger to Collins, but Mills is having loads of trouble with military vet, harbormaster and oyster farmer Graham Platner. Planter is a progressive who is as authentic as they come and has the eye-poppingly sordid social media history to prove it. But Democratic Mainers seem to love him. Polling – to the extent you can believe it in Maine – has him consistently ahead of Mills and even ahead of Collins at times, though the polling results are all over the map. This one would appear to be a must win for the Dems, but I’m not quite as convinced of that. Read on.

BTRTN Rating: LEAN REPUBLICAN

MICHIGAN, AUGUST 4

The Blue Dream: Once the dream was new Michigan resident Pete Buttigieg atop the ballot, but when he decided not to pull the trigger, the Dems now are counting on one of several contenders to seamlessly fill the seat of retiring incumbent Gary Peters.

The Reality: The Democratic effort in Michigan received a blow when Peters decided to forego a quest for a third term. Michigan is a definitive swing state, among those that have seesawed between Trump and Biden in the last three elections, with the victor of Michigan, always by a narrow margin, taking the presidency as well. Peters won his second term in 2020 by only +2 points. The Democrats now feature a three-way race between U.S. representative Haley Stevens, State Senator Mallory McMorrow (a one-time viral video sensation with her 2022 “we will not let hate win” speech) and Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed (a prominent pro-Palestine activist). Limited polling shows all three within six points of one another – still very close. Former U.S. Rep Mike Rogers heads the GOP field; Rogers lost by less than half a point in the 2024 Senate race to current Michigan Senator Elissa Slotnik. Both Stevens and McMorrow are narrowly ahead of Rogers in polling while Al-Seyed is tied. This is obviously a “must hold” seat for the Democrats.

BTRTN Rating: TOSS-UP DEMOCRAT

MINNESOTA, AUGUST 11

The Blue Dream: There’s not much need for a dream here given the paucity of credible GOP candidates, and the prevailing public mood in Minnesota. If the Democrats don’t win in Minnesota, they will have giant problems everywhere.

The Reality: Minnesota has been at the epicenter of political violence, with the recent ICE killings of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and, prior to that, the assassination of state rep and speaker Melissa Hortman. Hortman had been considering a run to replace Democratic incumbent Tina Smith, who is yet another Senate Democratic who is retiring. Minnesota has not exactly been a swing state, in that Democrats have won presidential, gubernatorial and Senate elections there for more than a decade. But recent Democratic wins have narrowed to uncomfortable margins: Biden by +7 in 2020, Harris by +4 in 2024, and Smith’s 2020 +5 Senate win, and Smith’s retirement might have opened up an opportunity, if not for the violence. Neither party has managed to recruit a big name to head the ticket (Governor Tim Walz, former Senator Al Franken, and U.S. rep Ilhan Omar all declined to run, and given their penchant for controversy, that is probably a good thing). For the Democrats, the race is a classic one pitting progressive Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan and moderate U.S. rep Angie Craig, and primary polling shows Flanagan with a modest lead. The GOP field is, well, kind of pathetic. No one has raised as much as even $1 million (Craig has raised $7 million, Flanagan $3 million), and the best-known names come straight from ESPN: veteran NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya and former NBA player Royce White. The latter lost to Amy Klobuchar in 2024 by 16 points (with Trump on the ballot). Recent polling has both Flanagan and Craig ahead of Tafoya by +5-6 points.

BTRTN Rating: LEAN DEMOCRAT

ALASKA, AUGUST 18

The Blue Dream: A key part of the dream came true when former Democratic U.S. rep Mery Peltola threw her hat in the ring, instantly transforming the race into one with at least a reasonable chance of a blue win.

The Reality: Alaska is a red state; the state has gone for the GOP presidential candidate in every election since LBJ in 1964, and Trump has won the last three times by +15 (in 2016), +10 (2020) and +13 (2024). The incumbent, GOP Senator Dan Sullivan, was first elected in 2014, when he defeated the last Democrat to represent Alaska in the Senate, Noah Begich. He last won in 2020 by +12 points over a non-partisan candidate. Peltola won her House seat in 2022 over Sarah Palin(!) by +10 points but lost to Begich in 2024 by just two points. Alaska’s primary is unusual, a jungle primary featuring candidates from both parties, plus rank choice voting to boot, with the two top candidates, regardless of party, advancing to the November election. So, it is highly likely that Sullivan and Peltola will face off twice, once in August and again in November. Again, there has been little polling, but two January polls both showed Peltola +2 points ahead. Still, it’s a solid red state, so we are a bit cautious to believe those polls as yet.

BTRTN Rating: TOSS-UP REPUBLICAN

NEW HAMPSHIRE, SEPTEMBER 8

The Blue Dream: The seat-retention dream has a solid chance of coming true with a strong candidate replacing another incumbent retiree.

The Reality: New Hampshire has gone with Biden and Harris in the last two elections, by +7 and +3, and retiring Senator Jeanne Shaheen won by +16 in 2020. But Governor Kelly Ayotte is a Republican, and the high-profile GOP Sununu family has had an on-and-off dynastic run in the Granite State: father John (governor from 1983-1989), son John (U.S. Senator from 2003-2009) and son Chris (governor from 2017-2025). Chris Sununu declined to run for the Senate in 2026, but his brother John decided to try to reclaim his former seat and is well ahead in primary polling for the nomination. The Democrats’ nominee will almost certainly be U.S Rep. Chris Pappas, who leads Sununu in head-to-head polling by single digits in recent polling. Another must win for the Democrats.

BTRTN Rating: LEAN DEMOCRAT

At this point it is too early to calculate percentage odds of the Democrats flipping the Senate. But it is clear that between the deteriorating political environment for the GOP, and the addition of Peltola to the Alaska races, the odds, while not great, are rising, and that at least a few paths exist to that end.

Stay tuned!

Remember, nothing you will read here is a “prediction” – it’s more of a “snapshot,” that is, what the House midterms’ outcome might be if the elections were held today (or if the status quo reigns for the next nine months).

Here’s the “too long; didn’t read” version.

• The political environment has gone steadily downhill for the Trump Administration since Inauguration Day, but now, in the aftermath of the ICE killings and the Greenland fiasco, is at a low water mark, which, of course, bodes well for the Democrats in the midterms.

• The GOP efforts to torque the electoral map via off-cycle redistricting to its advantage has not exactly backfired – they may be ahead by a seat or two when all is said and done – but it has fallen far short of their aspirations and, at this juncture, is far from a decisive factor.

• Our BTRTN models show that the Democrats, if the environment persists (or if the elections were held today) would pick up 15+ seats, or more than enough to flip the House.

• The fate of the House largely lies in, at most, about 65 contested races; these races will be the focus of flipping efforts for both parties. There are 21 seats the Democrats will target in particular (some of which are solid gerrymander wins), while the GOP has some redistricting pickups that will partially offset those Democratic gains.

• Many Democrats seem to think that flipping the House would be “nice” but would not change much, given Trump would still control the White House (or what remains of it) and the GOP is the odds-on favorite to keep control of the Senate. We believe control of the House would make (far) more of a difference than that.

• As Art Fleming used to say about Double Jeopardy: “…and the scores could really change!” That is, much lies ahead in the next nine months, of course, not the least of which are the settling of the tickets in the primary process; an important Supreme Court voting rights case; the never-ending daily chaos of the Trump Administration; and the unknown shocks that world and domestic events will bring to bear. So, stay tuned!

If you choose to read on, you’ll find the supporting data and specifics around each of these headlines.

The Setup

The current make-up of the House is 218 Republicans to 214 Democrats, with three vacancies. Thus, Mike Johnson has very little room to maneuver – on any given piece of legislations, he can afford to lose only one vote from his party assuming the Democrats are unanimously lined up against him. The three vacancies are GA 14, which is a GOP seat (Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s), NJ 11, a Democratic seat (Mikie Sherrill’s) and CA 1 (the late GOP rep Doug LeMalfa’s seat). Thus, when these seats are filled via upcoming special elections, the likely make-up by Election Day will be 220 Republicans and 215 Democrats.

Given that make-up, the Democrats will need to flip only three seats in the midterm elections to secure a majority and make Hakeem Jeffries the new Speaker (assuming the Democrats want him in that role).

The Political Environment

One could not ask for more a more conclusive set of data points that document the downward trajectory of the Trump Administration and the Republican Party. There is a surfeit of both polling and actual voting information that supports the widely held belief that Trump and the GOP are struggling mightily.

The polling data is summarized in the chart below, capturing the decline across a myriad of measures that are typically used to track presidential performance.

The general pattern is that Trump opened his presidency “above water,” in the plus column on most measures, including the all-important approval rating and generic ballot. Even on the one negative measure for the GOP, on the direction of the country ( “right track/wrong track”) indicator, Trump was a net -10 points, which compared favorably with where Biden left it (a horrendous 21/70).

But the bloom was quickly off the rose, with severe negatives piling up after Trump’s first 100 days. Trump’s “shock and awe” campaign to erase Biden and implement highly conservative policies in the most draconian fashion was met with a sharply negative response by many, including a swath of those who had supported him on Election Day. After that initial drop, the data more or less held steady through to Election Day in November 2025.

Since then, the political winds have not been kind to the GOP, but mostly due to Trump-led self-inflicted wounds, particularly the non-sensical Greenland play and the ICE killings in Minneapolis. Piled on top of the steady drip of Epstein news, the confusing obsession with foreign policy in general (and with Venezuela in particular) and the lack of any positive economic momentum or much effort (as promised) to reduce inflation, it’s not hard to see why the numbers have all ticked down since then, showing unmistakable signs of further degradation in January. Trump is clearly at the low water mark of Trump II, and he and the GOP have nine months to try to heal the wounds. The Greenland and ICE retreats are indicative of Trump’s awareness of his perilous position. But backing down is not his brand, and the far right is letting him know it, so there is no easy path forward for him.

If the polling data is bad for the GOP, the actual election data has been even worse. It’s one thing to express an adverse polling opinion, but where citizens truly flex their muscles is at the ballot box. Throughout 2025 (and now into 2026) there were dozens of special elections at the state level. These elections were to replace local legislators (such as state senators or assemblypersons) who either died or resigned. The pattern here is equally clear. Down Ballot tracked 67 special elections in 2025 and 2026 and, on average, the Democrats on the ballot outperformed Trump’s 2024 margin in that same district by an average of +14 points.

That 14-point swing to the Democrats in just one year at the local level was right in line with five special elections in the House: two Florida races, FL1 and FL6 that swung (using the same math) by +17 and +20 towards the Dems, and three other 2025 House special elections later in 2025 in Virginia (D+16), Arizona (D+8) and Tennessee (D+13).

The culmination of this trend was Election Day in November 2025, when the Dems swept races for Governor in New Jersey and Virginia by much higher margins than expected; gained a massive legislative majority in the Virginia House of Delegates and added to one in the New Jersey General Assembly; won Prop 50 (the redistricting measure) in California by +28 points and elected a Democratic Socialist to be mayor of New York City. The key point in all of these races is not the winning — all of these were in blue states — but the margin of the win, which confirmed all of the special election trends.

The most recent example of this trend was just last week when the Democrats flipped a deep red seat in the Texas State Senate, winning District 9 by +14 points. This is a district that Trump won by +17 points in 2024, so that represents a +31-point swing from Red to Blue. The magnitude of this victory – which occurred in Texas, and resulted not only far greater swing (+31 versus the average of +14) but also an actual flip – has Democrats giddy that the true range of swing opportunity in the midterms is much higher than +14 points, but more like +31. An environmental shift of that magnitude would not only put a ton more GOP House seats in play, but also make the odds of a Senate flip much more realistic. ( We’re not as convinced about the projectability of a one-time +31 point swing in that Texas race — we need to see more like data points —but it was truly impressive.)

The headline news coming out of most of these 2025 and early 2026 elections is that the surprising coalition Trump was able to put together to win back the presidency in 2024 – attracting historically higher shares of young men, working class voters and voters of color – has disappeared. They tried it, they didn’t like it. And they either stayed home in the 2025/26 elections or scurried back to vote for the Democrats.

So, as Bob Dylan once said, you don’t need a weatherman (or, in this case, a political data analyst) to know which way the wind blows. But just in case you need it, here is the conclusion: it is virtually indisputable that the political environment in the early stages of 2026 is decidedly in favor of the Democrats. This is not terribly surprising from a historical perspective – midterms are typically very challenging for the president’s party, as the proverbial poetry of campaigning leads to the prose of governing. Even in the Trump era, some political norms remain immutable.

Redistricting

We’ll summarize the status of redistricting below, mindful that with ongoing legal challenges to many, not much is definitely “locked in stone.” (Although the Supreme Court just backed the California map, so that one is clearly over and done.)

We created the chart below based on a recent article in The New York Times (and we corroborated elsewhere). “Done” means that the laws now exist in the state, most subject to continued legal reviews and appeals. Other states are in some sort of process but there is no completed legislation at this point, and the Times assigned probabilities of them becoming law based on progress to date, state constitutions obstacles and the like.

The net of it all is that the GOP will almost certainly fall well short of their dreams of fixing a map that would make their continued control of the House a given. This was shattered with California’s swift action. The next high stakes games are in Florida and Virginia and, if anything, the Democrats hold the upper hand with respect to the probabilities. The others, mostly onesies, largely offset one another.

The wild card here is the Supreme Court consideration of Louisiana v Callais, a gerrymandering case the court will almost certainly decide by late June. The Court has chosen to frame the case not on narrow gerrymandering grounds, but rather to reconsider the much larger issue of the Constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the clause that essentially bans gerrymandering on the basis of race. When SCOTUS heard the case in October 2025, the conservative wing of the Court indicated a willingness to throw out Section 2 for good. If they follow through on that, it will threaten any number of Democratic House districts (18, in fact), largely in the South that are drawn to protect Black representation. If the Court rules thusly in June, there might not be enough time for states to act to affect the 2026 midterms, but the longer-term picture is certainly bleaker for the Democrats. They are not without their own arrows, though; many blue states could use the 2030 census redistricting process to claw back the deficit, even if it requires legislative action or state constitution changes. (Or they might even act immediately.) But for now, this is a wild card.

Callais aside, all told, the GOP may end up netting a couple of extra seats and that, of course, will be important but, as things stand now, not decisive. Read on.

2026 House Snapshot

We have our own BTRTN black box that predicts how many seats will change hands in the House elections. The model has been rather good -- not without its hiccups -- and I share with you the track record so you can see for yourself.

The model has done an excellent job in most years, within +/- 4 seats in every recent cycle except two. The 2020 election year was confounding, and there is simply no good explanation for why Joe Biden ran ahead of the Democrats’ House popular vote by an astounding 4.2 million votes (81.3 million to 77.1 million), far more than Trump’s gap with the GOP House popular vote (+1.9 million). In 2022, the Dobbs ruling probably contributed to the Dems overperformance relative to predictions. We were encouraged that the model “bounced back” in 2024 with a quite accurate prediction.

The model considers several important variables, including the president’s party, term and the current mix of the House. But the most important variable is the “generic ballot,” in which voters are asked, without using a candidate’s name, which party the voter would back if congressional elections were held that day.

Right now, as shown above, the Democrats hold a +5-point lead in the generic ballot, according to both Decision Desk and Real Clear Politics. When you plug that figure into our BTRTN model, it points to a whopping +26 seats gain for the Democrats. That figure, while directionally sound, is probably inflated since the model has not completely calibrated for the ever-increasing polarization of our times. Nor does it take into account a modest net loss for the Democrats due to redistricting.

Given all that, a reasonable “snapshot” of the Democrats seat pick-up in the House is in the +15 or slightly higher range, more than enough to flip the House.

And a note to those of you who worry that Trump and company will do everything they can to intimidate voters at the midterm polls or cause them to decide to stay home out of safety concerns. Let me quote election law expert Justin Levitt, commenting on the outcome of a state senate special election in St. Paul, Minnesota, held in the days after the Pretti killing. The Democrat won the race with a stunning 95.3% of the vote, proving, according to Levitt, that Democratic voters “will crawl over broken glass” to get to the polls, showing no fear of ICE even in areas filled with their agents. I have faith that the more Trump does to intimidate Democratic voters, the braver they will become.

Specific Races to Watch

It is, as we continue to say, early. But for those of you who are interested in focusing your energies (and/or dollars) on flipping seats from Red to Blue, here is a rough outlook on what the targets will likely be come November, along with the handful of seats that could go the other way.

You can see there are 21 GOP seats that are either redistricting “gimmes” for the Democrats or tossups that are eminently flippable. (The latter includes Texas 34, is a GOP seat that has actually been jeopardized by the redistricing actions of the Texas legislature.) The 9 top potential GOP pickups are exclusively redistricting gains, apart from Maine’s 2^nd district, which leans slightly red but has been successfully held by centrist Democrat Jared Golden – until he decided to retire at the end of this term.

We noted earlier that there are about 65 competitive races, but those that are not mentioned are rated “likely” holds by BTRTN and other services, which means they are much closer to being non-competitive than flips. But some of these seats were won by the GOP in 2024 by less than 15 points -- and therefore could be in more jeopardy than the current ratings would indicate. All of this will evolve, of course, in the coming months, right up until Election Day.

Does Flipping the House Really Matter?

Many, many Democrats despair that flipping the House will change little, that Trump does what he pleases and, however well-intentioned and mobilized the “Resistance” is, he appears to be unstoppable give the acquiescence of the GOP Congress and the conservative-majority Supreme Court.

But we believe that winning the House would be, if not a gamechanger, a more significant environment-altering event than this view. Of course, the primary benefit would be able to stop the Trump legislative agenda dead in its tracks – no more Big Beautiful Bills, no more reconciliation efforts, far more leverage in the Budget cycle. But in addition to that, Democrats would take over as chairs of the House committees and thus be fully empowered to put the integrity back into oversight, with the ability to launch investigations backed with full subpoena power. This would provide far greater visibility into Trump’s activities, spotlighting potentially unconstitutional or even criminal activity. The House could even debate the merits of impeachment, which may be fraught politically but perhaps viewed as necessary. Control of the House would also enable the ability to pass progressive legislation, or reverse Trump policies, at least in the House. Some of these – notably in health care and perhaps even War Powers – could draw enough GOP votes in a thinly-controlled GOP Senate (if that is the case) to pass Congress, requiring Trump to use his veto power to override the will of the people. All of this would bring significantly more visibility to anti-Trump efforts.

Perhaps most importantly, a victory in the House would be highly motivating to Democratic voters (and the opposite would be devastating). Putting a point on the board would provide huge momentum as we head toward 2028, pushing Trump further into lame-duck irrelevance, and diminish Trump’s standing within his own party, which, while still strong now, is discernably weaker than a year ago.

More to Come

Of course, we are still nine months away. While political trends, in the age of polarization, have become stickier, and more difficult to shift momentum, attitudes toward both parties could shift at any time if events reach a certain magnitude. We have seen that in the last few weeks with the deaths in Minneapolis and Trump’s Greenland Folly (though it should be noted that the overall effect on Trump’s standing was damaging but hardly cataclysmic). We are headed into the primary season now, when every representative who has not retired will have to defend their right to represent their party in November, and their opposition will be set. While House elections have become far more nationally-drive in the last decade, the actual candidates do matter.

But, at this point, the current cycle is shaping up to be a very good one for the Democrats. Whether they merely flip the House or enjoy a true Blue Wave that gives them a solid majority and perhaps Senate control as well, remains to be seen. But events would have to take a wildly unpredicted turn for the GOP to rise enough at this point to reverse the blue momentum completely.

The main thing for the Democrats is to avoid complacency and not forget to do the work, raise the funds, and get out the vote. That seems, from this vantage point, to be highly unlikely.

Stay tuned!

Note: If you missed our Senate piece, below is a link to it….we’ll be updating it soon to account for better news for the Democrats since, including the emergence of Alaska as a viable flip opportunity with the popular former U.S. Democrat representative Mary Peltola throwing her hat in the ring.

Last week the Contemporary Era Committee had the excellent sense to agree with our judgment (offered in this space last week) that Jeff Kent was the only Hall-worthy candidate on their ballot. We have our doubts that the BBWAA will do the same.

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Each year we at BTRTN analyze the ballot – in-depth, analytically -- to answer two questions:

1) Which nominees do we predict will be elected in this year’s voting, receiving at least 75% of the vote of the BBWAA?

2) Which nominees deserve to be in the HOF?

The two lists are never identical.

For the first question – our prediction of who will be elected -- we use various statistical models (based on the candidates’ stats and, for those returning to the ballot, how they’ve done in prior years on the ballot) and add in a dose of judgment to come up with an estimate of the percentage of the vote they will receive. Anyone reaching the 75% threshold is predicted to be enshrined.

For the second question – who on the ballot deserves to be in the HOF -- we have developed a methodology to compare nominees to their same-position predecessors to determine their “Hall Worthy-ness.”

A few notes before we get to our answers. First, we do not look at the service that compiles the public ballots of BBWAA as they announce them (some writers make their ballot public, some don’t). It is not very helpful in making predictions even as the actual tallies rise, because the writers who reveal their votes publicly tend to differ quite a bit from their more private counterparts, especially on the more controversial candidates. So one can easily be misled by the public tally, because it is not a statistical sample of the entire BBWAA voting universe. (But we don’t look at it anyway, because that would spoil the fun of a totally blind prediction!)

Finally, it would be wonderful to report that the steroid era is over, but unfortunately that is not the case. Four players on the 2026 ballot are tainted by usage of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs): returnees Andy Pettitte, Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriquez and first-timer Ryan Braun. Our custom is to not consider the Hall-worthiness of the PEDsters, for reasons we have enumerated many times.

(Quick recap: we believe they violated a clear rule of the game, Fay Vincent’s 1991 declaration that the possession, sale, or use of steroids was strictly prohibited. Violations of that policy materially affected the outcomes of games and artificially inflated the users’ statistics, at the expense of their peers who were not users, players like Derek Jeter, Cal Ripken, Jr., Frank Thomas, etc. We have heard every counterargument under the sun, including those who cite baseball’s non-enforcement of the prohibition until 2005; note that the HOF is full of sinners; and that other potential users did not get caught and ended up in the HOF; and so on. We are not moved by these arguments. Our view is that the PED players are, ipso facto, unworthy of enshirenement. They cheated the game, but have been allowed to keep their rings, their awards, their statistics and the millions of dollars they made. Let’s deny them the one honor left for them: Cooperstown.)

Other players on the ballot are, shall we say, problematic as well. Carlos Beltran was embroiled in the Houston Astros cheating scandal, and Omar Vizquel has been accused of various forms of abuse. I discuss both of those candidates in their player write-ups below.

HOW DID WE DO LAST YEAR?

We rather immodestly bill ourselves as “The Best MLB Hall of Fame Predictors.” That may be accurate since, as far as we know, we are the only HOF predictors left since Bill Deane gave it up a few years ago after making predictions for nearly four decades. (Bill did so poorly in his predictions one year that he gave it up.) We’d welcome some competition! Last year was one of our worst years, the worst since 2018.

• We accurately predicted that Ichiro Suzuki would be elected to the Hall of Fame (aren’t we good!) and we also (accurately) did not think he would make it as a unanimous pick (he missed by a single vote). Of course, he and many others should have been unanimous picks. I’ve never quite understood the logic of a player’s chances “improving with time” — isn’t a player worthy, or not? Something I think we’d do better with a two-year period, which gives a voter one chance to see the error of their initial judgment, if they are so inclined.

• The hardest thing to predict is the number of votes a viable first-time candidate will get, and here we ran into our only major problem – we dramatically missed on C.C. Sabathia, who made with Hall of Fame with 87% of the vote, far higher than the 40% that we predicted. We also underestimated the support for first-timer Felix Hernandez (21% versus our prediction of 3%) but managed to nail Dustin Pedroia (a spot-on 12%).

• We did better with the admittedly easier task of predicting the returnees, helped by their track record, though we were surprised by Andy Pettitte’s sudden surge from 14% in 2024 to 28% in 2025.

You can see how we did for each player on the January 2025 ballot on this chart.

Here is our track record that illustrates what a bad year we had. Perhaps the most important measure is the fourth line down, how far off we were among those who ended up with 5% of the vote or more. Recently we have only been off by 4-5 percentage points, but thanks to Sabathia, Hernandez and Pettitte we soared to 6.7, our worst showing since 2018.

WHO WILL BE ELECTED? THIS YEAR’S PREDICTIONS

The chart below shows the complete voting history (in percentages) of all 15 returning players.

You can see which way the wind is blowing for the returnees easily enough:

• The top three 2025 finishers (among the returnees), Carlos Beltran, Andruw Jones and Chase Utley are all on the rise.

• Three of the troubled vets, Alex Rodriguez (PEDs), Manny Ramirez (PEDs) and Omar Vizquel (various abuse charges) are all stalled out. But not Andy Pettitte — you can see why I was surprised by his 2025 jump after six more or less flat years.

• Jimmy Rollins and Bobbie Abreu had some upward movement but are still at low levels. Abreu is running out of time to make sharp upward movement.

• We’ll see if Felix Hernandez and Dustin Pedroia can build on their double-digit first ballot support.

• Mark Buerhle, Frankie Rodriguez and David Wright all have a chance to build on some modest progress to stave off potential elimination, but Torii Hunter may be on his last ballot.

A batch of newcomers have been added to the ballot, of course, but none of them are particularly exciting. The class is led, such as it is, by Ryan Braun (who is PED-tainted) and Cole Hamels, and neither, in our view, are true first-ballot contenders.

The most important thing about the first-timers is that because of their thin quality, it should be a very good year for the returnees. Voters tend to look elsewhere when there are no obvious first-ballot candidates, and that often leads to decent bumps for many of the returnees, especially those who are knocking on the door.

Which brings us to our most important prediction: BTRTN predicts that the BBWAA will elect Carlos Beltran and Andrew Jones to the MLB Hall of Fame.

Here’s the summary chart of this year’s ballot, which has 27 players on it, 15 returnees and 12 new. The chart includes our official BTRTN 2026 Hall of Fame predictions (expressed in the 4th column as a percentage of the total vote), and also which candidates belong in the HOF (the last column). To read our views on all the candidates, after the chart we move on to the next question – who on this ballot deserves to be in the Hall of Fame?

WHO DESERVES TO BE IN THE HALL OF FAME?

The second question we ask annually is this: putting aside what the writers think, who on the ballot do we think is “HOF-worthy”? Drum roll, please: this year we find only four players who, in our view, deserve to make the grade: Andrew Jones, Chase Utley, Bobby Abreu and Frankie Rodriguez. Not a great year!

To arrive at our conclusions, we use the following analytic methodology. We compare each player to Hall of Famers and “just misses” (among those whose careers started after 1950) at his position across a number of key statistics, both traditional (hits, homers, RBI’s and batting average) and non-traditional (OPS+ and WAR). To get a sense of how they were valued “in their time” we also look at their number of All Star selections and times appearing in the Top 10 in the MVP balloting (for pitchers, we use an identical methodology but, of course, with various pitcher stats instead, a set for starting pitchers and a somewhat different set for relief pitchers.)

We show the average statistics by position. So we compare, say, David Wright to third baseman and Bobby Abreu to outfielders. Within each position, we compare the nominee, sticking with Wright in this example, to third basemen who are in these four groups:

• The “top half” of all post-1950 HOF third basemen, using a ranking based on WAR. (This group, for third baseman, includes Mike Schmidt, Eddie Mathews, Adrian Beltre, Wade Boggs and George Brett)

• The “average” of all post-1950 HOF third basemen (all those plus the list below)

• The “lower half” all post-1950 HOF third basemen (Chipper Jones, Brooks Robinson, Scott Rolen and Ron Santo)

• The “next ten,” the ten post-1950 third basemen who have the highest WARs among those who are not in the HOF (Graig Nettles, Buddy Bell, Sal Bando, Ken Boyer, Darrell Evans, Robin Ventura, Ron Cey, Toby Harrah, Matt Williams and Carney Lansford).

The last two groups define the so-called “borderline” candidates. Our general feeling is that to be worthy of the HOF, a candidate should be at least as good and probably materially better, on balance, than the last two groups. Thus, they have to be better than borderline candidates, most of whom are either not in the HOF (the “next ten”) or include at least a few players (though not in the third base group) who should never have been enshrined in the first place, and reside in the “lower half.” (We are not rigid, and you will see, we make exceptions.) We also take into account a player’s postseason performance.

Why do we only compare players to post-1950 players? All statistics have a certain amount of noise, of course, but particularly so for baseball statistics before 1950. Among the major happenings that cause statistics to be less comparable than more recent decades, before 1950 baseball was (mostly) not integrated (we do not include the Negro League stats at this point, which would help a bit, but they are quite incomplete); all the teams were east of the Mississippi; there was the dead-ball era pre-1920; the wildly batting-inflated 1930s and the talent drain of the two World Wars. While we believe we have a solid base of players from the last 75 years to draw from, we occasionally include a few players whose careers started in the 1940’s just to make sure we have a “large enough” comparison group in every given position.

Again, we do not include the PED players in this analysis. Since the use of PEDs obviously influenced their stats, we try to keep the analysis PED-free. (We do touch on Ryan Braun briefly.)

On to the analysis!

Catcher

There is not a single catcher on the ballot this year. Buster Posey will be on next year.

First Base

And, not a single first basemen on the ballot either! Albert Pujols comes on in 2028.

Second Base

Chase Utley and Dustin Pedroia are returning to the ballot and they are joined by Howie Kendrick and Daniel Murphy.

Chase Utley was a power hitting second baseman, and, as the stats show, he is right up there with the greatest second basemen, the top tier HOF’ers at the position. Despite a somewhat shorter career than the greats (thus the lower hit total), he is up there with them in homers, RBI, OPS+ and WAR, and above the HOF averages on all of them. His excellent WAR also reflects the fact that he was a terrific fielder. With six all-star selections, three Top 10 MVPs and 10 postseason homers, I give Utley a thumbs up.

Dustin Pedroia is a very tough call, and last year my Red Sox friends gave me a very hard time about my thumbs down, so I stared at his candidacy again just to be sure. Injuries cut short Pedroia’s career effectively at age 33 (he made two comebacks after that that failed), so he did not have chance to compile the stats, nor was he sublime enough to warrant admission on the basis of the 11 full seasons he put in a the Sox sparkplug (to do that, you have to be more like Sandy Koufax or Ralph Kiner). He was certainly an excellent player and even won an MVP in 2008. But his stats hang more with the “next-10” grouping, the borderline second basemen. For good measure, I checked his postseason stats, and while he was a post-season perennial with great Red Sox teams, he was quite lousy on the big stage, managing only a .687 OPS across 51 games and 234 plate appearances. So, again, with apologies to my Sox friends (and noting that I said “no” on my own Don Mattingly last week), I again come to the conclusion that it’s a thumbs down for Pedroia.

No one could possibly think that either Howie Kendrick or Daniel Murphy are Hall of Famers, but it is interesting that both of them have similar “accumulation” stats as Pedroia, and similar batting averages and OPS+ as well. What clearly separates them from him is the WAR, which reflects that Pedroia was an excellent fielder, while Kendrick was average and Murphy was terrible. It’s worth noting that many will remember Murphy solely for his timely hitting explosion in the 2015 postseason, when he hit seven homers in the NLDS and NLCS (though he was a bust in the World Series that year). But such heroics, while memorable, do not automatically land one in the HOF (just ask Dusty Rhodes or Gene Tenace). So, thumbs down for Kendrick and Murphy as well.

Shortstop

We have two returnees at shortstop, Jimmy Rollins and Omar Vizquel.

Jimmy Rollins was Utley’s keystone partner for many years, but he is not in the same conversation as Utley in terms of the Hall of Fame. His stats fall in a weird zone, better by and large than those of the non-HOF borderline group, but generally below the lower-half HOF group, particularly his OPS+ (which is below the league average for his career) and his WAR. He only managed three All Star selections, though he did win an MVP in 2007. His postseason stats are quite similar to Pedroia’s: 50 games, 215 plate appearances and .673 OPS. The view here is thumbs down on Jimmy.

Omar Vizquel did well in the balloting in his first three years, establishing a voting track record (37%/43%/53%) that seemed well on the way to enshrinement. But after a series of abuse charge (separate incidents involving sexual harassment and domestic violence), Vizquel plummeted in 2022 (24%) and dropped even more the last two years (20% and 18%). It seems unlikely that he will be able to recover in his remaining two years on the ballot. But, regardless, we never considered Vizquel to be HOF-worthy. The only offensive stat he really has going for him, in comparison to the peers, are his 2,877 hits (which he compiled over 24 seasons). But there is no getting around his OPS+ of only 82, which settles the matter on the offensive side. He was an excellent defender, with 11 Gold Gloves, and 129 “runs saved” in his career. But he was no Ozzie Smith or Mark Belanger, who had 239 and 241, respectively (or even a Craig Counsell, who had 127), and his defense could not pull his WAR to HOF standards, not even close. He made only three All-Star teams in those 24 years and was never a Top Ten finisher in the MVP balloting, so, horrific behavior aside, we’ve always had him as a thumbs down.

Third Base

David Wright is back and is the only third-sacker on the ballot this year.

David Wright is another player in the Don Mattingly mold, having had a sustained burst of excellence to start his career, but thereafter was diminished by injuries. His last good season was at age 30 and he was done at 33 (save for a few games at age 35). Apart from batting average and OPS+, his stats are not HOF-worthy per the comparisons with other third basemen in the chart, and his WAR is low, even below that of the “Next 10.” So, a thumbs down to Wright, another fine player who had the second half of his career stolen by injuries, and was not quite brilliant enough in the storied first half to overcome that.

Outfield

We have an absolute slew of outfielders to consider, ten in total, four holdovers and six newcomers.

I admit that I’ve looked at Carlos Beltran from both sides now – in his first few years on the ballot I dismissed him as a cheat and lumped him in with the PED folks, and then last year had a change of heart and decided his transgressions were not worth denial of admission to Cooperstown. Well, I’m flipping again; I read over my arguments from last year and found them wanting. Frankly, I find it difficult to distinguish the Houston cheating scandal from PEDs. Both were conscious, illegal actions taken over an extended period of time that affected the outcomes of games, including World Series titles, and the stats that propelled those outcomes. The cheating was not a one-time bad decision, it was ongoing and extremely calculated and Beltran, a team-leader, was extremely guilty. I stipulate that his stats are HOF-worthy, and he may be a decent guy, but thumbs down to Beltran on baseball’s ultimate honor. Let him settle for not being banned from baseball or having the ‘Stros championship revoked or, for that matter, clawing back any of his salary.

Andruw Jones is an interesting case, with that very pedestrian .254 batting average and relatively low 111 OPS+. His candidacy hinges on those 434 homers and a very impressive 63 WAR that reflects his superlative defensive skills. He had a defensive WAR of 24, which is 22^nd all-time and tops among outfielders by a wide margin. Jones reminds me of Brooks Robinson, who also was not a superlative hitter (Brooks’ OPS+ was 105 for his career – only 5% better than the American League average!). Both players have fine power stats, played superb defense and excelled in the postseason, playing for perennial contenders. For Jones, as for Brooksie before him, that all adds up to a well-earned thumbs up.

Torii Hunter, like Jones, has a “great fielder, solid hitter” profile, but the comparison for HOF purposes does not quite hold. Hunter was a slightly better hitter than Jones, on balance, but light years away from Jones defensively. He did win nine Gold Gloves, but unlike Jones, who won ten, modern defensive stats don’t back up Hunter’s reputation as they do for Jones. Hunter’s defensive WAR is a puny 4, compared with Jones’s 24. Hunter had several excellent defensive years in his 20’s, and the reputation he earned from those years clearly carried him into his 30’s, when he won a number of Gold Gloves without the stats to support them. And that ultimately shows up in his WAR, which, at 51, is well below Jones’ and that of the borderline groups. We give Hunter a thumbs down.

I spent much time last year comparing Bobby Abreu favorably (at least on offense) to Ichiro Suzuki, who missed becoming the first batter to be unanimously selected on the first ballot by a single vote. This chart might help make the case:

Ichiro and Abreu each had long careers, with over 10,000 plate appearances (Ichiro actually had about a season’s worth more plate appearances than Abreu). Abreu got on base more AND hit more for power. He had more runs AND more RBIs. Ichiro, essentially, was a single hitter and did not walk much. Abreu walked a ton and hit for power. It’s not even close: Abreu was the superior offensive player. Ichiro made up for that by stealing more bases (though not by as big a margin as you might have thought) and playing far better defense, and thus they ended up with identical 60 WARs. It seems inconceivable to me that Ichiro had 10 All Star selections and 4 Top 10 MVP vote years, while Abreu’s numbers were 2 and 0, respectively. But Ichiro was a cultural phenomenon and Abreu was vastly underrated. But if Ichiro is a Hall of Famer – and there is no doubt he should be – then how could Abreu not be one as well? Thumbs up for Bobb Abreu.

I only mention Ryan Braun here since I wanted to satisfy my own curiosity whether he would have made the Hall based on his stats. But his candidacy, at a glance, looks pretty borderline, so I’m not going to waste my time figuring it out since these are PED-inflated stats anyway, so why bother.

The rest of the candidates are reasonably similar. Alex Gordon, Shin-Soo Choo, Nick Markakis, Hunter Pence and Matt Kemp did not even make it to the Land of Very Fine Players (my name for those who had WARs in the 40-49 range), so what might I call them? Not only are their stats not in field goal range of the Hall of Famers or the Next 10, they are not even in the same stadium. I think it is just simpler to dispense with them all with a simple thumbs down.

Designated Hitter

Edwin Encarnacion played third based in his early years, and first base later on, but the plurality of his plate appearances came as a DH. So we put him there.

Encarnacion hit a ton of home runs, but apart from that his stats are not near the norm of DH Hall of Famers (Paul Molitor, David Ortiz and Edgar Martinez). They are far more aligned with the non-HOF DH’s (Julio Franco and Mo Vaughn). Plus he was a truly terrible fielder when he was out there, and that dragged down his WAR. I did not have to spend too much time to arrive at a thumbs down conclusion.

Starting Pitchers

We recognize that the sands are shifting for the criteria to evaluate starting pitches for the Hall of Fame. Long gone are the days of complete games and 20-game winners, and Justin Verlander may be the last pitcher to threaten to crack the 300-win club, and at this poiot he is a tremendous long shot with 266 wins at age 42 (he had only 4 wins in 2025). Indeed, Clayton Kershaw may be the last pitcher to make it to even 200 wins. Gerrit Cole is third on the wins list among active pitchers, after Verlander, Max Scherzer, now that Kershaw has retired. But Cole is now 35, and he tread water at 153 wins after missing all of 2025 due to injury.

So our comparisons will change in light of this, and we will deemphasize wins, won/loss percentage and innings pitched in our little chart, and put more focus on ERA+ and WAR, which are only modestly affected by the new requirements for starters (100 pitches, thank you, good for about six innings) as well as All Star Games, Cy Young Awards and postseason records. We might add WHIP in the future, and will reassess once we build up a database of “new era” starters.

This year Mark Buehrle and Felix Hernandez return to the ballot, and they are joined by Hamels and, inexplicably, two rather pedestrian starters, Gio Gonzalez and Rick Porcello.

Mark Buehrle is certainly one of the better 21st century pitchers, a member of the 200-win club. He pitched from 2000-2015, thus might not be a bad person to start with that “new era” starter database. But he pitched 200+ innings for 14 straight years, and hurled 33 complete games, so things have changed even since he hung up his spikes. His stats are remarkably comparable to the “Next 10” group, which means he is a borderline candidate. (Once he leaves the ballot, he will become a member of that group if he has not made the Hall.) So, we have to say thumbs down to Buehrle, for now. But his candidacy will age well, and I suspect his stock will rise in his remaining years on the ballot, and with, if needed, some future Contemporary Era Committee.

Much of what I said about Buehrle goes for Cole Hamels as well. He was behind Buehrle by five years, pitching from 2006-2020. Hamels pitched ~600 fewer innings than Buehrle, had ~60 fewer wins and about half as many complete games (17) as Buehrle even while achieving a better ERA+ and equal WAR. Hamels had much more postseason experience and did fine (7-6 with a 3.41 ERA in 17 starts) if not exceptionally. All in all, it is not quite enough for me to make the leap into a new era standard, but again, his candidacy will likely age well – and for him, if not Buehrle, in the BBWAA time frame. But thumbs down for now.

Felix Hernandez pitched in the same time frame as Hamels (2006-2019) and the two have eerily similar statistics. King Felix has an appreciably lower WAR than Hamels, but he has both a Cy Young and a perfect game to his credit, unlike Hamels. We can simply stop there and declare that the same things we said about Buehrle and Hamels apply to King Felix as well. Including the thumbs down.

Gio Gonzalez is definitely not in the same class as Buehrle, Hamels and Hernandez, and Rick Porcello is not even in Gio Gonzalez’s class. Porcello did pull the neat trick of winning a Cy Young Award (in 2016) but failing to ever make an All Star team (2016 inclusive). It’s an easy thumbs down for both, and you have to wonder why Porcello was even on the ballot, since his ERA was below the league average for his career.

Relief Pitchers

Francisco Rodriguez returns to the ballot as the only reliever.

As you might expect, we use different statistical categories to evaluate relief pitchers. Saves, of course, is a primary consideration, and we use WHIP as a measure of dominance that varies nicely and in expected ways among our categories. ERA+ and WAR both work for relievers, and we also use innings pitched and innings pitched per game to highlight how the closer job has evolved to strictly a one-inning gig.

Francisco Rodriguez fits nicely with the averages of all the relievers in the Hall of Fame (we exclude Dennis Eckersley from the stats due to his long career as a starter). His WAR is a little low, but in line with the lower half of the group. Without too much effort, I give K. Rod a thumbs up.

‘*****************************************************************************
Again, the honorees will be announced on January 20, 2026. If there are no honorees, they will announce that, too.

Stay tuned.

We will soon unveil our predictions for the annual Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) ballot, which will be announced on January 20, 2026. But today we focus our attention on the not-quite annual selections made by what used to be known as the “Veteran’s Committee,” a group that seeks to redress potential oversights by the BBWAA of worthy players. The Veteran’s Committee has morphed over the years into a set of different committees that consider different eras, rather than the whole pool of no-longer-eligible players.

This year it is the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee, which is defined, for this purpose, as covering players who competed largely in the period beginning in 1980 to the present. The 2025 committee members includes Hall of Famers (Ferguson Jenkins, Jim Kaat, Juan Marichal, Tony Pérez, Ozzie Smith, Alan Trammell, Robin Yount), executives (Mark Attanasio, Arte Moreno, Kim Ng, Doug Melvin, Tony Reagins, Terry Ryan), and media members (Tyler Kepner, Jayson Stark), with Hall Chair Jane Forbes Clark as non-voting Chair. Honorees, if any are selected, will be announced on this coming Sunday, December 7 at 7:30 PM ET.

I am not going to predict who this committee will select for the HOF (as I do with the BBWAA ballot). Instead, I will simply identify which players I think are worthy of enshrinement (which I also do for the BBWAA ballot).

This year the ballot is comprised of eight players. But what is truly on the ballot, yet again (sigh), is the “Steroids Era.” Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Gary Sheffield, who are associated with performance enhancing drug (PED) use, are on the ballot. They are joined by Carlos Delgado, Jeff Kent, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy and Fernando Valenzuela, who competed alongside them without the benefit of PEDs.

I will stipulate that all three of the tainted players are, by virtue of statistics and awards, clearly of Hall of Fame caliber. But the stain of steroid usage was the primary factor in the BBWWA passing on them while they were on the ballot, though each of the three came reasonably close, each maxing out in the mid-60% range in their 10^th and final year on the ballot, about 10 points short of the 75% threshold for induction. Clemens and Bonds each started in the mid-30% range in their first appearance on the ballot in 2013 and rose steadily in their 10-year runs on the ballot; Sheffield started from only 12% but still made it to 64%. Such progress is hardly atypical, but usually if you make it to the 60% range, you surge and reach the threshold in your final year.

My position is simple: none of the three tainted players deserves entry. My rationale is two-fold.

1) Steroids were illegal while these players were users and compiled their stats. Steroids were declared illegal by Commissioner Fay Vincent in 1991. There was no enforcement for such usage until 2005, but that is a different statement. Some players abused steroids, and many others chose not to. The steroids users clearly played the game with a considerable, illegal advantage over those who did not, and that is reflected in their inflated statistics.

2) These players have been honored in every possible way, despite their illegal steroid usage. They have been allowed to keep their many records and numerous awards. They have been allowed to wear their World Series rings. They have not been forced to return any of the massive amounts of money they received for their services. Indeed, none ever missed a game for their usage. There has thus been no punishment for their deeds; it is fair to say, denying them entry into the Hall of Fame is the only remaining honor that could serve that purpose.

There are those who say the Hall of Fame is a sham given their exclusion (and that of other ‘deserving but tainted’ players like Alex Rodriguez, who is still on the BBWWA ballot). I maintain the opposite. Opening the doors of Cooperstown to the PED abusers is a slap to all who made it cleanly, to Ken Griffey, Jr., Derek Jeter, Gregg Maddux, Cal Ripken, Jr., Frank Thomas and the many others who excelled without the benefit of PEDs, all of whom had to compete against their juiced-up foes.

Many disagree with me. So be it.

As for the other five candidates, for them I undertake the far happier task of analyzing their “Hall Worthy-Ness",” to which I apply signficant rigor, as I will describe below.

But here is the answer: my view is that only one of the five are worthy of enshrinement in the MLB Hall of Fame: Jeff Kent. The other four – Delgado, Mattingly, Murphy and Valenzuela all, in my estimation, fall short of the mark.

Again, please note that this is not a prediction of who will be selected. Just an opinion on who is worthy.

To guide my assessments, I compare the statistics for candidates against others who played their positions, typically (but not always) broken into four groups: the “top half” of the HOF’ers at their position (ranked by WAR), the “average” HOF’er at their position, the “lowest” half of HOF’ers at their positions, and the “next ten” best players at their position who have not been selected for the HOF. You will note that at times the “next ten” group outshines the “lowest half” group, which tends to reflect that the Hall includes some notable mistakes, and also has excluded worthy candidates. In fact, it is the latter observation that led to the creation of the “Veteran’s Committee” to begin with.

The statistics I use are a mix of “traditional” ones, including batting average, hits, home runs and RBI, and more “modern” ones, OBS+ (on base plus slugging percentage compared to league averages for the player’s era) and WAR (Wins Above Replacement value, using baseball-reference.com values). For pitchers, I use Wins, Won-Loss Percentage, ERA, ERA+ and WAR. I include both plate appearances and innings pitched so the reader has some sense of the length of career, and also All-Star Game selections, Top 10 MVP vote-getting appearances, and times winning the Cy Young Award (I don’t use Top 10 for the Cy Young because for a number of years there was only one award to cover both leagues). I realize well that pitching standards are changing, and that will begin to influence my use of these categories, espeically for pitchers, but for the current crop who played in more traditional eras, they are still valid measure.

For each of these categories, I am only comparing the nominees to players who competed for all or most of their careers after 1950. Different eras have different issues that make direct comparisons problematic, but pre-1950 baseball had all sorts of them, including the “dead ball” era, the batting-crazy 1930’s, the talent-stripped World War II years, not to mention different rules in the 19^th century and, of course, most of all, the overarching absence of players of color. So, for better comparisons, we’ve confined our analysis to the post-1950’s era.

My standards are usually quite tough. I like to see a player generally achieve a level that, if not quite up to an average HOF player, at least matches (or preferably exceeds) that of the lower half HOF’ers and the “next ten” who were shut out. In addition to career MLB stats, we also consider postseason play or other contributions (such as being a successful manager). For players on the borderline such factors can be important.

On to the position analysis:

FIRST BASE

Neither of the two first basemen under consideration did particularly well in the BBWWA balloting; in fact, neither came close. Don Mattingly peaked in his first year at 28%, while Carlos Delgado did not even garner the 5% threshold required to return to the ballot in his first year.

Don Mattingly is a beloved figure in the game, finally making the World Series this year as a bench coach with the Blue Jays. (He was, in fact, one of my very favorite players; I am a lifelong Yankee die-hard.) He was a phenomenal player for a six-year stretch, arguably the best in the game, from 1984-1989, winning Top 15 MVP votes in five of those years (winning once), averaging a 5.5 WAR and a 147 OPS+, and copping four Gold Gloves to boot. But a bad back robbed him of the second half of his career, as he soldiered on with ever-weakening power and pedestrian stats. (Few people know that he earned Top 20 MVP votes in both 1993 and 1994 and excelled in his first and last postseason appearance in his last year in 1995 – just before Yankee dominance began – but those facts do not really help his candidacy.) Mattingly is utterly revered in Yankee lore, despite his lack of championship pedigree. But Mattingly is simply not a Hall of Fame player, as the chart below demonstrates. His stats do not even meet those of the average of the “next 10” first basemen who missed the Hall. Thumbs down for Donnie Baseball, as difficult as it is for me to write that down.

Carlos Delgado compiled far more impressive stats than Mattingly and seems to hang in there with the average Hall of Fame first baseman in all categories except one: WAR. And that reflects that Delgado, while a prodigious batter, was a bad fielder and terrible baserunner (as the advanced metrics clearly demonstrate), which pulled down his overall win contribution considerably, to an overall WAR of 44. Only about 20% of players with WARs in the 40-49 range are in the HOF – it is the Land of Very Fine Players, where you find Bernie, Matt and Ken Williams, Roy, Devon and Deacon White and many other VFP’s. Some of those 20% in the Hall do not belong there, like Tony Oliva and Johnny Evers, and most are from long, long ago. And I am sorry to day, Delgado does not belong either. A thumbs down for Delgado.

SECOND BASE

Dick Allen topped my list for the most deserving player who was not yet enshrined in the HOF until his long overdue induction last July. Jeff Kent now holds the title, and I hope the committee does the right thing this year. (If they do, Lou Whitaker would be next.) Kent is the all-time leading home run hitter among second basemen, and is second in career RBIs, just behind Charlie Gehringer. He is simply one of the greatest power-hitting second basemen ever and the best in modern times. His power numbers dwarf the best of the HOF second basemen, as does his OPS, and he has more hits and a higher batting average as well. His WAR was dragged down a bit by mediocre fielding and baserunning contributions, but still above the “next ten” group and not far from the HOF group, at 55 (about 60% of the players with a WAR of 50-59 are in the HOF). If he had been a little nicer to sportswriters over the years, he might have done better in the BBWAA voting. But he is unquestionably a Hall of Famer. A thumbs up for Jeff Kent.

OUTFIELD

Dale Murphy is almost the definitive “borderline” candidate, which the chart captures nicely. Basically, his only truly Hall-worthy stat is his 398 home runs, which are identical to that of the average HOF outfielder. But every other stat is inferior to that of the bottom half of the Hall of Fame group. Indeed, he is below even the “next 10 non-HOF group” in all hitting categories except home runs and RBI, although his award collection was better. He, like Mattingly and Delgado, has a WAR below 50 – the “Land of Very Fine Players.”

What was most striking to me is that he is not even in the “next ten” group (Mattingly and Kent both are, though I omitted their stats for the calculation so they would not be compared to themselves). Just to illustrate this, I took one of those ten, Jim Edmonds, and compared him directly to Murphy. Everyone knows that Edmonds was a brilliant outfielder, one of the all-time greats, but did you know he was more productive than Murphy offensively as well (note the OPS+)? And Edmonds is not a HOF’er.

So, I’m afraid, despite those back-to-back MVPs that everyone remembers, I have to give a thumbs down to Dale Murphy.

STARTING PITCHER

Fernando Valenzuela loosely fits the pattern of Mattingly and Murphy. He was one of the best pitchers in MLB for seven years (compiling a 31 WAR), just about the same length of time Mattingly and Murphy reigned supreme But the rest of 17-Fernando’s year career was mediocre, in fact just slightly above a replacement value starter (a WAR of 6). There is a place in the Hall of Fame for those who demonstrate short-term brilliance, but it better be of the Sandy Koufax/Dizzy Dean variety for pitchers or Ralph Kiner for hitters. Fernando falls short of that standard, and the stats show his case is even weaker than Mattingly’s and Murphy’s, Like Murphy he is not even in the “next 10,” but unlike Murphy, not one of his stats is up to even that standard, much less a HOF standard. Thumbs down to Fernando.

We’ll see how it goes on Sunday! And we’ll be back very soon with our BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot assessments.

Stay tuned.

That will be embarrassing to the Trump Administration, yet another electoral repudiation in a year full of them. More to the point, it will be more direct evidence of the American political climate shifting from red to blue. If the Trump Administration does not reverse this trend in the next 11 months, the midterms will be a disaster for the GOP. They will certainly lose the House, and could very well find a way to blow a very favorable Senate map and lose that too (see my article from yesterday on this).

Let’s back up and take it more slowly. The special election tomorrow is for the U.S. House of Representatives’ seat in Tennessee’s 7^th District. This seat has been vacant since GOP rep Mark Green resigned on July 20 of this year. You will recall that Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her resignation from her Georgia seat a few weeks ago, effective in January. A few more of these – and there are rumors out there -- and the Democrats will have flipped the House before the midterms, which would be a true nightmare for Trump and the GOP.

As stated, this is a bright red district, a district Trump won for the third consecutive time in 2024 by his highest margin ever, +22 points. Mark Green, for his part, won handily on the same day by a nearly identical +21 point margin.

The GOP nominee to replace Green is Matt Van Epps, the former commissioner of the Tennessee Department of General Services, who is opposed by the Democratic nominee Aftyn Behn, a state representative. Polling is sparse, but the most recent poll, issued by Emerson yesterday, has Van Epps leading Behn by a mere +2 points. The race is tightening – Behn’s own polling in mid-October had her behind by 8 points, a margin confirmed by another Democratic-sponsored poll in the same time frame.

If the Republican Van Epps manages to win by, say, +5, that would be a swing of +16-17 points versus the winning margins of Trump and Green in 2024. A swing of that magnitude, while shocking, is not really surprising. All throughout 2025, Democrats have been doing far better in special elections than they did on Election Day 2024.

There have been four prior U.S. House special elections in 2025, and, as you can see form the chart below, the average swing from the Trump/Harris margin to the special election margin is +17 points to the Democrats.

The same trend has been true for local special elections as well, which are held to replace representatives to state legislatures who resign or die in office. According to Downballot, who has tracked over 60 of these races in 2025, the average swing is +15 points for the Democratic candidate in the district compared to how Trump fared in those same districts in 2024.

Needless to say, this is a very consistent trend at this point, and Tennessee’s outcome will simply be another data point.

Off-cycle elections are valuable not just for who wins or loses but because of those margins – they indicate which way the wind is blowing for the electorate. All of these outcomes – including Tennessee’s 7^th if it is reasonably close, are signs of a motivated Democratic electorate and a passive GOP, which is reflective of Donald Trump not being on the ballot, and with some erosion of support in his own winning coalition. That coalition included a surprising number of young voters, Latino voters and working class voters, who appear (based on Election Day results) to be scurrying back to the Democrats after giving Trump a chance.

These are the trends that, somehow, the GOP must overcome in the next 11 months if they want to hold on to the House.

Behn may pull off a miracle win. That would be remarkable indeed. The implication for today would be a further narrowing of the GOP majority in the House – down to a single vote, 219-217, assuming Democrats win the special elections upcoming in Texas and New Jersey (seats that they held before being vacated).

But even if Van Epps prevails, assuming by any single-digit margin, it will still be another bad day at the ballot box for the GOP.

Optimism is riding high among Democrats, and why not? Donald Trump, suffering through a miserable November, has seen his approval rating sink to a second-term low of 41% percent, while his disapproval has reached 56% (per the New York Times aggregation). He is a solid net negative on virtually every issue (save crime and Gaza), with terrible ratings on that eternally “most important” issue, the economy (39%/58%) per Real Clear Politics). The Democrats lead in the generic ballot by a whopping 5 points, 46%/41% (per Decision Desk).

If polling doesn’t do it for you, how about actual election results? The Democrats have performed remarkably well in 2025 special elections at the state and federal level, achieving on average a full 15-point swing from Trump’s margin in the contested districts (per Downballot’s tracker). This 2025 electoral run was capped off on Election Day by electrifying wins, by much wider margins than expected, in California (Prop 50), New Jersey (Governor and General Assembly), Pennsylvania (Supreme Court) and Virginia (Governor and House of Delegates).

The good vibes don’t stop there. The Democrats have finally embraced the economy as their core message with a catchword – “affordability” – that they own, thanks to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. This message, also used in New Jersey and Virginia by more centrist Democratic candidates, helped them reclaim voter segments that had moved significantly to Trump in 2024 (young voters, Latino voters, working class voters). And the GOP’s Trump-led gambit into between-census redistricting wars has been neutralized at worst and turned into a stunning victory at best – a GOP backfire that may result in the Democrats ending up with more blue seats than before the machinations began. The odds of the Democrats flipping the House in 2026 have never been higher (albeit pending the outcome of the Louisiana Supreme Court case, though it may be decided too late to affect the 2026 midterms anyway).

The Democrats, of course, still face serious issues: they have no leader, are still wildly unpopular as a party, and are divided in important ways into progressive/centrist camps (see: shutdown). But all in all, they are in a remarkably strong position less than a year from the midterms, strong enough, in fact, to ask whether the Democrats might possibly flip the Senate as well as the House.

Is that possible? You’ve probably read that the Democrats face a “tough map” in the 2026 midterms with respect to the Senate. Indeed, they do. Taking control of the Senate remains a daunting prospect. But as we shall see, it is no longer inconceivable – just hard.

THE SET UP

Currently the GOP holds 53 seats in the Senate to the Democrats’ 47 (including Independents who caucus with the Democrats). This means, of course, that the Democrats must attain a net +4 seats in 2026, thereby achieving a clear majority of 51 seats, to take control of the Senate. The GOP would maintain control if the outcome had the GOP at 50 seats (or more), as they would continue to hold J.D. Vance’s tiebreaking Senate vote with Donald Trump still occupying the White House.

Every two years, roughly a third of the Senate is up for re-election. This year there are 32 seats up for re-election, plus three seats that require special elections: Florida (due to the departure of Marco Rubio to become Secretary of State in 2025), Nebraska (due to the resignation of Ben Sasse in 2023) and Ohio (due to the departure of J.D. Vance for the vice-presidency in 2025).

The starting point for control lies with the incumbents who do not face reelection. There are 34 Democrats and 31 Republicans who will sit it out. But that is where the Democrats’ advantage ends.

The chart clearly shows the challenge for the Democrats. You can add the nine “solid” Democratic-seat races to the 34 not running, getting the Democrats to 43. The first challenge will be to defend all four of their own highly competitive seats. The second challenge will be to flip all three of the GOP highly competitive seats. But even if they manage all that – sweeping all seven difficult races -- that will still only get them to 50 seats. They still must flip one more from the set of four long shot races, all in states that Donald Trump won by double digits just one year ago.

Now, it might be fair to also include long shot potential flips for the GOP, seats Democrats are highly likely to maintain, such as New Jersey, New Mexico and Virginia, but Harris won by only +6 points in 2024. But the 2025 Election results overall would seem to put those seats well out of reach for the GOP, as even GOP strategists would concede. The whole point of this analysis is that the Democrats’ 2025 showing has at least the potential to turn more GOP seats into competitive races — not the opposite.

Let’s break down the 11 races to keep an eye on.

HIGHLY COMPETITIVE DEMOCRATIC-HELD SEATS (4)

The first order of business for the Democrats is to defend successfully the four competitive races involving seats they currently hold – Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire. And the bad news is, in the latter three of those states, the incumbent is retiring. The retirements of Gary Peters (Michigan), Tina Smith (Minnesota) and Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire) automatically make those seats more vulnerable. Having a popular incumbent running for reelection is the best defense to flipping.

Minnesota. Minnesota has not exactly been a swing state, in that Democrats have won presidential, gubernatorial and Senate elections there for ages, since the hey-days of Tim Pawlenty and Norm Coleman 15+ years ago. But recent Democratic wins have narrowed to uncomfortable margins; Biden won the state by +7 in 2020, Harris by +4 in 2024, and Senator Tina Smith won by +5 in 2020. Smith’s retirement opens the door for the GOP to flip the seat. Neither party has managed to recruit a big name to head the ticket. The declared Democratic field includes Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan and U.S. Rep Angie Craig, while the GOP field is full of outsiders, a former Navy Seal (Adam Schwarze), a retired Navy officer (Tom Weiler) and a former NBA player, Royce White, who lost to Amy Klobuchar last year by 16 points (with Trump on the ballot). There is no polling yet, but the Democratic candidates have outraised the Republicans by a 10:1 ratio. This is the most likely to remain in the blue column in 2026 among this group of four competitive seats.

New Hampshire. New Hampshire has also gone with Biden and Harris in the last two elections, by +7 and +3, and Shaheen won by +16 in 2020. But the Governor Kelly Ayotte is a Republican, and the high-profile GOP Sununu family has had an on-and-off dynastic run in the Granite State: father John (governor from 1983-1989), son John (U.S. Senator from 2003-2009) and son Chris (governor from 2017-2025). Chris Sununu declined to run for the Senate in 2026, but his brother John decided to try to reclaim his former seat. He faces competition from former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, who lost a New Hampshire Senate bid to Shaneen in 2014, so the GOP primary holds star power that is lacking in Minnesota. Sununu is leading Brown in the polls. For their part, the Democrats’ leading nominee is U.S Rep. Chris Pappas, who leads Sununu in head-to-head polling by a +4 point margin on average. This state should also stay blue given a continuation of the current environment.

Michigan. Things get tougher in a true swing state. Peters won a second term to the Senate by +2 points in 2020, the same year Joe Biden flipped the state (winning by +3). Trump flipped it back in 2020, winning by +1 point. After Pete Buttigieg (now a Michigan resident) decided to pass on a run to succeed Peters, a tight three-way race has emerged between U.S. representative Haley Stevens, State Senator Mallory McMorrow (a one-time viral video sensation with her 2022 “we will not let hate win” speech) and Wayne County Health Director (and prominent pro-Palestine activist) Abdul El-Sayed. Former U.S. Rep Mike Rogers heads the GOP field; Rogers lost by less than half a point in the 2024 Senate race to current Michigan Senator Elissa Slotnik. Early polling shows a Stevens-Rogers matchup to be very close indeed. This one will keep us up very late on Election Day and may take days to decide.

Georgia. At least in this race Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff is running for reelection. Ossoff won his seat in 2020 in a memorable election, as did fellow Georgia Democratic nominee Rafael Warnock, in runoff races that flipped the Senate to the Dems – on January 5, 2020 (yes, the “day before”). This is also the state that Biden famously won by 11,779 votes (0.2%) in 2020, the number (plus one) that Trump sought in his subsequent call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger. Trump won the state by +2 points in 2024. Ossoff caught a major break when popular GOP Governor Brian Kemp, who is terming out, decided not to challenge Ossoff. Instead, Ossoff will be faced by one of the many faceless local politicians who have or will declare their candidacies. Ossoff has built up a formidable war chest for the task, and between that, his incumbency status, the current anti-Trump environment and the fact that Trump will not be on the ballot, he should carry the day – but it may take a runoff again (if no one achieves a majority win on Election Day.)

HIGHLY COMPETITIVE GOP-HELD SEATS (3)

The next task for the Democrats – a considerably more difficult one – will be to flip all three of the most vulnerable GOP seats, in Maine, North Carolina and Ohio. The good news for the Democrats is that they have recruited three name-brand candidates for the challenges. Good news, that is, if you are a fan of older, centrist candidates.

Maine. The Democrats once again face the Herculean task of unseating the indominable Susan Collins, who be running for a sixth term. She won going away in 2020, by +9 points, in a race where the polls got it way wrong (they had her behind by five points). She has found trouble in her support of Brett Kavanaugh in his SCOTUS bid, and for backing Trump on numerous issues, but no one dances on the wire better than Collins, who fought for her state successfully in various funding battles with Trump in the past year, something a Democrat could not have done. Her success is confounding in a state Biden won by +9 in 2020 and Harris by +7 in 2024. In the primary, the Democrats will choose between Governor Janet Mills (who is terming out and is 78 years old) and Grant Platner, a controversial, young (41) and populist oyster farmer, harbormaster and Marine veteran who served in Iraq. Platner got himself into trouble with the discovery of wildly offensive comments on Reddit over a decade ago, and a tattoo reminiscent of Nazi imagery. Polling has been all over the place, with Platner well ahead in some polls, but more recent polls show an even race. Platner is narrowly ahead of Collins in head-to-head, whereas Collins is besting Mills by a slim margin. Whew!

North Carolina. The Democrats might have a better chance in North Carolina, where the mainstream GOP Senator Thom Tillis unexpectedly decided not to run for reelection. Former popular Democratic Governor Roy Cooper (age 68) thus has a clear opening to flip the seat. He will have to deal with a reddish-purple electorate who have voted for Trump three times, in 2016 (by +4), in 2020 (+1) and 2024 (+3) and have elected two GOP Senators. The leading candidates to head the GOP ticket are Michael Whatley, the former RNC chair, and author and lawyer Don Brown. Polling has Cooper ahead of both by healthy margins. This is easily the Democrats’ most likely pickup.

Ohio (special election). Ohio’s offers promise to the Democrats as well. The current GOP Senator, Jon Husted, was appointed in 2025 to replace J.D. Vance when Vance became Vice President, thus Husted is a relatively fragile incumbent. The special election is required to ensure an elected representative is in the seat. The Democrats are countering with long-time Senator Sherrod Brown (age 73), who Bernie Moreno defeated in 2024 by +4 points. Ohio has drifted from swing state to red state status over the past decade, with Trump winning the state by +8 in 2020 and +11 in 2024. Polling is sparse thus far, but the most recent polls show pretty much a dead heat between Moreno and Brown.

LONG SHOT DEM FLIPS OF GOP-HELD SEATS (4)

Let’s say the Democrats have run the table thus far – they successfully defend their four competitive seats and manage to flip all three competitive GOP seats. That would be an amazing performance, but it would, as said, still leave them one short of 51 and Senate control. They need to flip one more.

Of the 18 other GOP seats that will be on the 2026 ballot, 14 of them are totally solid red. But the Democrats can at least dream about flipping the other four. Again, it comes down to the context of the stunning 2025 electoral performance of the Democrats. They have proven they can translate their anger to turnout to stunning margins of victory.

Furthermore, midterm turnout skews toward more educated voters, and educated voters, these days, are largely Democrats. On top of that, the GOP will not have Trump on the ballot in 2026 (or ever again) and thus will be less motivated to turn out for their down ballot candidates. And the voter segments that put Trump over the top in 2024 – higher percentages of young voters, working class voters and non-white voters – all appeared to have flipped back to the Democrats in 2025.

With that context, let’s look at the possibilities for a 51^st seat.

Iowa. Iowa has not been a swing state since 2004, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry by less than a point in the Hawkeye State. Since then, Obama won handily twice (by +10 and +6) and then Trump won convincingly three straight times (by +9, +8 and +13), without nary a minute of drama in any of those five races. Similarly, longtime Democratic Senator Tom Harkin won his last race by a whopping +25 points in 2008, but Republican Jodi Ernst won her first term in the 2014 red wave by a decisive +8 points (and again in 2020 by +7). But Ernst, like Tillis, surprised many by choosing not to run again in 2026, and therefore left the seat at least a bit vulnerable. While the recent GOP margins cited above seem quite solid, they are far from the massive +20-+40 point margins that you find in red states further west. Given the potential magnitude augured by the 2025 Democratic electoral swings, it may be reasonable to bring Iowa back into the “flappable” conversation. Especially with two wide open races, and no “big names” on either side. U.S. Rep Ashley Hinson is the leading GOP candidates, while there are five declared Democratic candidates and none have ever held a national office.

Texas. Texas is complicated and thus defies a pithy one-paragraph summary, so buckle up. For years, Democrats have been laser-focused on compelling demographic trends that was widely believed to turn Texas from red to purple. But the mass defection of Latino voters to Trump in 2024 poured cold water on those hopes. (As Mike Tyson memorably said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”) But the swing back of Hispanic voters in the 2025 elections has rekindled hope in this theory. Longtime GOP Senator (and establishment leader) John Cornyn is up for reelection in 2026, and many from both parties are challenging him. In his own party, controversial, arch-conservative Attorney General Ken Paxton has the support of Texas’s strong MAGA base (though Trump himself has withheld an endorsement so far). Complicating the GOP race is U.S. Rep Wes Hunt, who entered the race attempting to bridge the establishment and MAGA wings of the party. Polling shows a very close race, and even the aggregators disagree on who is ahead (RCP and Decision Desk averages have Paxton ahead by +3-6 points, whereas 270toWin has Cornyn slightly ahead by +2 points). The rough percentages are 30-35% for each of the two leaders, with Hunt in the 20% range.

The Democratic side features (thus far) a high-profile battle between two declared candidates: former NFL linebacker and U.S. Rep Colin Allred, who lost to Texas’s other Senator, Ted Cruz, by -8 points in 2024, and newcomer James Talarico, a young, telegenic state representative who rose to prominence in the Texas redistricting battle last summer. Well-known U.S. Rep Jasmine Crockett may also throw her hat into the ring., and former candidate Beto O’Rourke, who lost to Ted Cruz by just -3 points in 2018, has yet to rule out a run. Four-way polling shows all four are viable candidates, with Crockett out ahead and Allred trailing, but there is a long way to go to settle this.

Polling does confirm one thing, though – the Democrats have a much better chance to beat the far-right wing Paxton than the more mainstream incumbent Cornyn.

Nebraska (special election). The Democrats are backing an independent candidate, Dan Osborn. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Osborn, a Navy veteran, came reasonably close (-6 points) to defeating Senator Deb Fischer here in 2024. Now Osborn has his sights set on Pete Ricketts, the former GOP governor who was appointed to Ben Sasse’s Senate seat when Sasse resigned in 2023. As in 2024, the Democrats will not offer a candidate, pinning their hopes on Osborn, though Osborn has not indicated with which party he would caucus (if either) if he won.

Kentucky. Kentucky does not really belong on this list unless popular Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, who is terming out, changes his mind and decides to run for the Senate. But Beshear has been adamant so far and that makes sense – he does not need to risk a Senate loss that would dent his presumed presidential aspirations in 2028. The final date to file for the race is January 9, 2026, and if Beshear is not a candidate at that point, we will remove Kentucky from this list.

When you rack it all up, you can see the path to Democratic control of the Senate in 2026 is strewn with obstacles. There is cause for optimism in defending the four blue seats, although Sununu will be a formidable challenger in New Hampshire, and Georgia will likely go to a runoff. Beyond that, one could conceive, given the current environment, the Democrats flipping North Carolina and perhaps even Ohio, but defeating Susan Collins in Maine will be tough. And, even if the Democrats defend their four seats and flip the three more vulnerable GOP seats, they will still have to find a winner from among the long shots. That would be extraordinary, but there is cause for some modicum of hope in Iowa, Texas and Nebraska, if not Kentucky.

But a path exists, and if the political environment continues its current trajectory, one can envision a late night on Election Day before control of the Senate is determined.

Stay tuned.

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The top races are as follows: the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia; in those same states, the entire General Assembly (New Jersey) and House of Delegates (Virginia) are on the ballot; Proposition 50 in California, the redistricting measure crucial to Democratic hopes to flip the House in 2026; and the New York City mayoral election, a quiet race in a sleepy small town featuring some dull local politicos (not!).

There are, of course, many other races as well, including a special election in Texas to replace a deceased U.S. member of the House of Representative; in Pennsylvania to determine whether to retain three State Supreme Court justices; and mayoral races in Seattle, Minneapolis and Detroit. But we focus on those top six because, collectively, they might offer the broadest clues about the forces at work that will set the stage for the run up to the midterms over the next year – with potential repercussions for 2028 as well.

Before we plunge in to give a brief profile of each, let us set the stage by reviewing the context in which the ballots will be cast.

THE POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT

It is impossible to offer a pithy summary of the Trump Administration; the sheer volume of activity has indeed been breathtaking, a daily assault on the senses and sensibilities of the electorate, whether you support Trump or not. Suffice to say that no president since Roosevelt has attempted to reshape so much, so fast, across both domestic and foreign policy. That Trump would undertake such an ambitious – to wildly understate it – agenda is remarkable enough, but the fact is, he is doing so in the absence of any particular crisis that he inherited from Joe Biden. Indeed, Biden (with Covid) and Barack Obama (in the throes of the 2008-9 recession) took the oath of office under far more dire and turbulent circumstances, and the other 21^st century president, George W. Bush, had an enormous crisis (9/11) thrust upon him in his first year. Neither Trump One nor Trump Two inherited anything remotely approaching the magnitude of those challenges, yet it is Trump who is leading a frenzied quest to disrupt.

Trump also hardly enjoyed a mandate for change. He won the electoral vote over Kamala Harris by a comfortable but not dramatic margin, and he failed to attain 50% of the popular vote.

The “shock and awe” campaign has not paused for a breath even once in 10 months, as Trump reshaped the domestic agenda to focus on immigration, crime, tariffs, downsizing the Federal government and a “retribution” offensive against law firms, media entities, universities and individuals who either opposed him or failed to align themselves with his policies. But his disruption of the global order has if anything been even more ambitious, as he seeks to reframe traditional alliances that have succeeded in avoiding nuclear disaster and World War III for 80+ years now.

Of course, to fill in the gaps, or create diversions, he has renamed various monuments or departments, opined on various cultural issues like Pete Rose’s Hall of Fame candidacy, and generally sought to dominate the news cycle, day after day. And other “stuff” happens and Trump must deal with it all, attempting to spin random events like the Epstein file saga, the Charlie Kirk assassination and the current government shutdown.

Through it all, the overarching theme of his presidency has been to dramatically expand the power of the executive branch in ways his predecessors, who since Nixon and Ford have tried to do the same, never could have imagined. In so doing he often picks the most extreme method of executing his policies, often pushing hard enough to turn potential policy wins, such as immigration, into execution losses, by, say, deporting innocent people without due process.

The question I have been focused on is not what is he doing and why, but rather, is the American public buying what he is selling? It’s easy to get lost in the swarm of news, much of it shocking, and assume that Trump is riding some self-reinforcing wave of popularity as he incites the next tempest. But what does the data actually say about that?

In a nutshell, there is an utterly consistent set of information – some based on polling, others on actual election outcomes – that suggests that America is quite unhappy with the Trump Administration. And if these sentiments continue, will reject the GOP at the ballot box in 2025, 2026 (to the extent possible given structural midterm dynamics) and 2028.

Here is that data:

Trump’s approval rating (on average) stands at 43%, with 55% disapproval, and thus his net approval is -12 percentage points, according to the New York Times poll aggregator. This is a reversal from the start of his administration, when his approval rating was 52%, a net +9 (the only time in either Trump term that he was above the 50% mark). If you don’t like the Times, perhaps you might believe the conservative poll aggregator Real Clear Politics, which currently has Trump’s approval numbers at a similar level: 44/53/-9.

The fall was swift – his approval rating dropped down to the low 40% range by May and has remained there. If Trump were up for reelection in 2028, and his approval rating was 43%, he would lose, just as he did in 2020 (when it was also 43%, just before Election Day). No post-WWII president has won reelection with an approval rating under 48% (and no president has lost a reelection campaign with an approval rating at or above that mark).

Ratings of Trump’s management of key issues are similarly underwater, according to a late September NYT/Siena poll (and this data is corroborated by many other polls). This includes his management of the economy (44% approval, 53% disapproval, -9 points net), immigration (-6), trade with other countries (-9), managing the federal government (-10) and the Russia/Ukraine war (-20). The only two issues where Trump records a net positive are crime (barely, at +1) and Israel/Hamas (+13, according to Emerson). The Isreal/Hamas rating is a flip, good news for Trump, but the cease fire/hostage release deal that caused the flip has had no impact on Trump’s overall approval rating.

Other data is aligned as well: only 32% of voters believe that Trump’s economic policies have made their personal financial situation “better,” while 45% believe that Trump’s policies have made it “worse.” Consumer Confidence, according to the Conference Board, is at an index of 94, below the 100 index standard, below the 100-120 index range during Biden’s time in office, and well below the 120-140 range during Trump’s first term (at least until it plunged in his last year with the impact of Covid). Democrats lead in the “generic ballot” by +3 points, a measure that correlates highly with the number of seats that are flipped in the midterms (ignorning redistricting, a +3 generic ballot lead, if it held, would translate into roughly a +10 to +15 pickup for the Democrats in the House in the 2026 midterms, more than enough to flip the body from red to blue control).

And there is “overreach” data as well: the majority of American’s believe the Trump administration has “gone too far” in pressuring media organizations that cover Trump unfavorably (59% “gone too far” to 33% “not far enough” or “about right”). Majorities also feel Trump’s policies have “gone too far” in sending the National Guard into cities (53/43), on immigration (51/47), pressuring corporations to make specific business decisions (50/37) and pressuring universities to adopt new policies (a 49/43 plurality).

Furthermore, majorities of voters oppose the Big Beautiful Bill, favor the ACA (Obamacare) and more are blaming Republicans and Trump for the shutdown than the Democrats (though neither party is exactly faring well in this mess).

Finally, on the overall measure of whether Americans think the country is on the “right track” or the “wrong track,” the verdict is also clear: 56% “wrong track” to 38% “right track.”

All of this data paints a conclusive picture that the current political environment is hostile to the GOP. But if survey data is not your cup of tea, then we can look at actual voting in 2025 special elections.

2025 SPECIAL ELECTIONS

“Special elections” are those that are held on an ad hoc basis when a representative has died or resigned and must be replaced. There have been four such elections held in the U.S. House of Representative in 2025, two in Florida in April (when Matt Gaetz and Mike Waltz resigned to join the Trump Administration for short, ill-fated stints) and two more in September in Virginia and Arizona. In each instance, the Democrat in the special election significantly outperformed the Democrat in the original election in November 2024.

Gaetz and Waltz won their districts by +32 and +34 pts. in November 2024, respectively, but just five months later, their successor nominees won the same races by only +14 and +15 pts., a swing of +17 and +20 pts. to the Democratic candidates. There were similar margin swings toward the Democrats in Virginia’s 11^th district and Arizona’s 7^th, from D+34 to D+50 in the former, and D+26 to D+34 in the latter.

Special elections occur to replace legislators in state elections as well. A service called “Downballot” tracks all of the state level special elections. According to them there have been 42 such special elections this year, in districts that on average mirrored the 2024 national presidential election in going for Trump by a 50% to 48% margin over Kamala Harris. But in the 42 races in these same districts, the Democrats beat the Republican by, on average, a 56% to 43% margin, a +13 point margin and a +15 point difference versus the Trump/Harris vote the prior November.

We can’t conclude from these special elections, at either the national or state level, that the sole reason for the Democrats’ strong showing is due to a repudiation of Trump. Turnout is an important factor: off-year (and off-off-year) election voters tend to be more educated than voters in presidential elections, and, more than ever, Democrats tend to be more highly educated than Republicans. But that fact will also be in play in the midterms.

In addition to that, the Republican Party has almost completely become the party of Trump, and Republican voters tend to lose motivation when Trump himself is not on the ballot. Democrats, on the other hand, are clearly highly motivated right now, and the 2025 special election results reflect that – as do the nearly 7 million people who turned out for the latest “No Kings” protests across the nation. An interesting comparison is to note that at the height of the Vietnam War protests, the largest single day of protests drew “only” an estimated 2 million protesters.

Finally, none of this is particularly unusual. Off-cycle elections are usually difficult for the party in power. It is simply far easier to bash the administration while out of power than to try to successfully execute your agenda while in power, and the fact is that most presidents lose seats in the midterms.

All of these facts consistently support a view that the current electoral environment is relatively hostile to Trump and the Republican candidates.

THE NOVEMBER 2025 ELECTIONS

The Democrats are favored to win all six of the spotlighted November 2025 elections not because of a favorable electoral environment, though that should help, but simply because all six are being held in blue states. What may not matter too much, ultimately, is not whether Democrats win (although it will matter a LOT if they don’t win one or more of these races ) but rather by “how much.” Margin is a crucial indicator, especially when compared to prior elections, of the trend of the national mood.

Let’s review each of the six critical elections in turn, with a focus on who is running (or what is on the ballot), who looks likely to win, and what is the deeper significance of the election.

Virginia Governor. Incumbent GOP Governor Glenn Youngkin is termed out, and thus the race to replace him pits two new candidates, former U.S. representative Abigail Spanberger (D) versus current Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears (R). Spanberger has had to weather a downballot scandal involving Democratic Attorney General candidate Jay Jones, who in 2022 wrote texts to a friend fantasizing that a GOP political opponent “gets two bullets in the head.” Jones has apologized but stayed in the race, and all Democrats on the ballot have been forced to spend time disavowing him, including Spanberger.

Virginia is also particularly affected by the shutdown, since so many government employees live in Northern Virginia DC suburbs. Another factor in the race was the surprise announcement that the Viriginia legislature has actively joined the gerrymandering wars and is seeking to enact a new map that could swing 2-3 House districts from red to blue. (Another factor in Spanberger’s favor is fundraising – she has outraised Earle-Sears by roughly a 2:1 margin, $65 million to $35 million.)

Despite all the roiling, Spanberger has held quite a consistent lead in the race. She has led Earle-Sears in every single poll in 2025 and continues to lead on average by +9 in recent polls, not only showing no erosion, but slightly expanding her lead.

The significance of this race (and the House of Delegates battle discussed below) is to shed light on a simple question: is Virginia becoming a swing state? Biden beat Trump by +10 points in 2020, the latest in a long line of presidential wins in this traditional blue state. But Youngkin’s win in 2021 (by +2 points), and Harris’s single-digit win in 2024 (+6 points) signal an alarming trend for Democrats. A convincing Spanberger win will help allay those fears.

BTRTN: Our rating is “Likely D,” and we predict that Spanberger will win by a comfortable margin, in line with the polls.

Virginia House of Delegates. All 100 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates are up for election (the state Senate is not). The current make-up of the House of Delegates is 51/49 favoring the Democrats. While it would be foolish to view the outcome as a “bellwether” for the midterms in 2026 (so much can happen in a year’s time), nevertheless there is some evidence to back that view. Back in 2021, the GOP picked up +7 seats in the House of Delegates, and a year later the GOP picked up +9 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Two years later, in 2023, it was the Democrats who picked up +3 seats in the House of Delegates, and in 2024 the Democrats picked up +2 seats in the U.S. House. So, you can see why there will be so many eyes on the outcome of this pitched battle.

BTRTN: We believe the Democrats will hold on to the House of Delegates and could pick up a healthy number of seats, as many as five. There were five races that the GOP won by +2 points or less in 2023, a margin easily “flippaple” given the polling margin of the gubernatorial race and the national mood described above.

New Jersey Governor. The race dynamics in New Jersey are very similar to Virginia, and both the gubernatorial and legislative outlook are similar. Governor Phil Murphy is terming out, so the ballot here will also not feature the incumbent. The Republican nominee, Jack Ciatterelli, was on the losing side to Murphy in 2021. He’s back and will now face U.S representative Mikie Sherrill. Current polling shows that the New Jersey race is a tad tighter than in Virginia, with Sherrill up by about +4 points on average. There was some indications that the race was tightening, but that no longer seems to be the case. (Note that Sherrill appears to have a slight edge in fundraising.)

As in Virginia, there are concerns among Democrats that New Jersey could become a swing state. Biden beat Trump by a healthy +16 points in 2020, but Harris topped Trump by a mere +6 points in 2024. Murphy beat Ciatterelli by only +3 points in 2021, so the fear is a legitimate one. As in Virginia, a solid Sherrill win could assuage those fears.

BTRTN: Our rating is “Lean D,” and we predict that Sherrill will win by a margin in line with the polls.

New Jersey General Assembly. As in Virginia, all seats – 80 of them in New Jersey, where it is called the General Assembly – are on the ballot (but again, not the state Senate). And once again, there is the same surface evidence that this race can be a bellwether for the midterms. In 2021, Republicans picked up +6 seats in New Jersey, and that was followed, as noted, by a +9 pickup in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022. In 2023, New Jersey Democratics picked up +6 seats, followed by a +2 by the Democrats in the House in 2024. The Democrats currently hold the General Assembly by a healthy margin, 52/28, so substantial future gains may be limited, there is only one GOP seat that was won by less than two points in 2023.

BTRTN: We believe the Democrats will maintain their solid hold on the Senate and perhaps pick up one seat.

California Proposition 50. California’s Prop 50 redistricting ballot was hatched in direct response to the gerrymandering actions in Texas which resulted in a potential +5 seat pickup for the GOP in the House in 2028. Texas’s action was unusual because redistricting usually occurs only after the once-a-decade census. Their between-census action required only a passed bill and the Governor’s signature; California’s needs the additional step of voter approval, which takes the form of this proposition.

The significance of this race is not to “assess the mood of the electorate,” but rather the outcome’s direct impact on the 2026 midterms in the House. If the California proposition passes muster on Election Day, then the new congressional map will completely offset that of Texas, with the very real potential to flip +5 seats from red to blue. Indeed, since two of the newly formed Texas districts could be competitive races, the Democrats could come out ahead in the faceoff between our two most populous states. (Obviously, other states have joined the gerrymandering wars as well, and the Supreme Court has a huge case in front of it on the viability of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that could affect radically the maps, but that’s a subject for another day).

Polling is quite conclusive, with every poll since August showing the “yeses” having a +13 to +24 point advantage over the “noes,” and the Republicans do not appear to be putting up much of a fight at this point.

BTRTN: We predict that Prop 50 will pass by a resounding margin, likely in the +20-point range.

New York City Mayor. This race features a cast of characters that Damon Runyan would have been proud to have created. The race no longer includes the incumbent Eric Adams, who is so disgraced (with a single-digit approval rating) that he was forced to abandon his reelection campaign. The race will feature the also-disgraced former new York State Governor, Andrew Cuomo, attempting a political comeback that has fallen flat to date; the Republican standard-bearer, Curtis Sliwa, who founded the Guardian Angels, a quasi-vigilante group that patrolled New York City subways a lifetime ago, and who remains one of those indelible New York characters, now patrolling talk radio; and the favorite in so many ways, the youthful Zohran Mamdani, who crushed Cuomo in the Democratic primary with a brilliant campaign, running from the far left (Mamdani is a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist) and focused almost entirely on the issue of affordability.

The significance of this race from an electoral-insight standpoint is probably negligible, featuring a wild set of characters in a city that Kamala Harris won by +38 points. But its impact on future elections will nevertheless be very apparent. Assuming Mamdani wins (and he leads Cuomo by about +15 points as of now, with Sliwa barely cracking double digits), Trump and every GOP campaign will hold him up as the face and future of the Democratic Party. While they are publicly backing Cuomo, GOP insiders are surely rooting for Mamdani at this point -- he is an absolute gift to them for his wildly progressive policies, his youth and his ethnicity. But the Democrats would do well to pay attention to Mamdani’s determined focus on economic affordability and use his campaign (if not his specific policies) as a blueprint for electoral success. All they need is an economic policy platform that will appeal in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin other other swing states, which would likely be a stronger winning strategy than railing against Trump’s threat to democracy.

Of all the races, the NYC Mayor race might hold the most possibility for surprise. Cuomo has narrowed the lead since the summer (though not further recently) and with such a cast of characters, anything is possible. But it is hard to imagine Mamdani losing at this point.

BTRTN: We have this race as “Likely D” and believe Mamdani will win by at least +10 points, and probably more like +15.

***

So, it should be a good night for the Democrats, winning a slew of reasonably high-visibility races, which will provide them with a badly needed shot in the arm. The stakes are high – if they lose any of these races, it will likely be the story of the night. If they somehow lose Prop 50, their prospects for flipping the House in 2026 will drop precipitously. The key here on the New Jersey and Virginia fronts will not only be victory, but margin of victory.

Stay tuned.

We live in a swing district in New York, the 17th District. Over the years we have been represented by such disparate folks as GOP wingnut Nan Hayworth, Democratic stalwart Sean Patrick Maloney and now alleged “moderate” Mike Lawler, a Republican serving in his second term, a man reportedly with gubernatorial aspirations – and likely beyond. Lawler is holding a series of town halls across his district, and we attended the one in our county last night.

The event was raucous, indeed. The crowd was boisterous in its objections to Lawler’s rambling and off-point defenses of the Trump administration, to be sure. The post-event coverage to date has centered on the fact that two women were forcibly ejected from the event, carried out physically by New York State troopers. The coverage has generally not addressed what Lawler actually said to engender such an outpouring of emotion. We will attempt to redress that below.

But first, let’s review the event set-up, and how it contributed to the high tension.

The event started with a show of very tight security. A long list of “rules” for attending the event were posted, and each attendee was required to answer aloud that they would abide by them. These included “no shouting, screaming, yelling or standing” which of course was the Lawler camp’s attempt to prevent a public evisceration of their man. I had brought a pen and a small pad to take notes, and these were confiscated after they turned up in a scanning process. Apparently, they thought I might rush the stage and repeatedly stab Lawler with it. I thought the very visible state troopers with guns were enough of a deterrent, but apparently the Lawler team felt otherwise. Another woman near us on the line tried to clarify if she could use silent hand gestures to express displeasure and was told that no Nazi gestures were allowed. That was an interesting choice of an example to answer her generic question.

The crowd, which filled the 675-seat auditorium to near capacity, was largely comprised of senior citizens, clearly of an anti-Trump/Lawler bent. The Lawler supporters, such as they were, at times politely applauded his responses and managed to ask three questions (out of 16 that I counted), but they were no match for the opposition. The question process itself was managed fairly – anyone who wanted to ask a question was handed a numbered ticket on the way in, and then a lottery-style spinner was on stage for a local politician to randomly pull the numbers. This ensured that there was no monkeying with the questions to tilt them to Lawler supporters, which is exactly what happened on a recent Lawler phone-in event, that had been dominated by Lawler fans, including elected officials who asked softball questions of the congressman in fawning style.

But let’s be clear. While the constituents were certainly loud, this was not an organized disruption. There was never any attempt to shut down the event or to prevent Lawler from speaking. There was chanting when the women were dragged out but at no other time. The event proceeded apace, and only Lawler’s own answers brought forth the objections – that is, they were reactive and not pre-meditated or coordinated. The main problem was the format: specifically, that questioners were not allowed to ask follow-up questions. Thus, there was no way for Lawler’s pat answers to be probed or challenged, and since they were often off-point, redirected or misleading, the crowd was increasingly frustrated. Given that format, the only way for audience members to challenge his dissembling was to shout out corrections or requests for clarifications. And this they did, in abundance.

The questions covered what might be expected – tariffs (again and again), due process, the weaponization of anti-Semitism, the cutting of funding to the arts and science research, not standing up to Trump, the separation of powers, immigration, the anti-boycott act and more. Lawler was his usual slippery and smarmy self, often lecturing the crowd (at times incorrectly), but generally maintaining his cool, in robotic fashion, in the face of the onslaught.

Lawler’s answers were unsurprising. Anyone familiar with GOP talking points (and the crowd certainly was) and also Lawler’s adaptation of them to suit his swing district needs (mixing in occasional righteous indignation with Trump on certain issues, but devoid of any real passion or discussion of any ways his opposition to Trump translated into action) could have guessed his responses.

• On the 2020 election and January 6. Lawler said, as he has many times, that Joe Biden was properly elected president in 2020, and the events of January 6 were terrible, and he was against them. But, when pressed by the audience to answer the second half of the question – why he/we should believe anything Trump says in the wake of his election denial and January 6 — he weakly responded that the people elected Trump in 2024 and, as he accepted Biden’s election in 2020, he was duty bound to abide by the 2024 election outcome as well. The crowd was dissatisfied with this illogical, off-point response, and made that clear. So much for no shouting.

• Due process. Similarly, Lawler said that everyone was entitled to due process, including Abrego Garcia. He attempted to parse Trump’s refusal by saying that the next step was for the courts to issue contempt rulings if Trump did not comply. But he dodged entirely the issue of Trump clearly ignoring the court’s main ruling, that of “facilitating” Abrego Garcia’s return, and why he and Congress were doing nothing to try to get the Trump Administration to follow the law. In response to a shouted-out call for impeachment, Lawler unintentionally drew the biggest laugh of the night. He said that impeachment is just a political tool now and if it were undertaken again, it would result in “unnecessary chaos in government,” which drew belly laughs from the audience, obviously noting the irony of “chaos in government” being the operative mode of the administration Lawler was defending.

• Standing up for the Constitution and against Trump. Lawler chose to interpret this question – a question greeted with resounding cheers — as one regarding government spending. He did not discuss DOGE upsetting Congressional prerogatives, though – rather he rather drily described the various processes that Congress has for determining spending, such as the Budget, and the potential for a rescission bill. This rather ponderous and droning lecture was designed to lull the audience to sleep, and it darn near succeeded.

• Lawler’s accessibility. At that point a Lawler supporter managed to beat the odds and get a question, and lauded Lawler for making himself so accessible. Lawler gave his best “aw shucks” look and said he would keep his answer brief and then proceeded to give the longest humble-brag on record. He touted not only his accessibility, but his bipartisanship, his effectiveness as a congressperson and more. By the end, one might have thought that when we left that night, he was going to walk across the lake next to the school to get to his car. The crowd groaned through most of it. At one point when Lawler declared that he was cited as the “most-bipartisan Republican in the House,” a wag shouted out “Low bar!” (As an aside of my own, I am of the opinion that our representatives should not be congratulated for meeting with their constituents. That is their job, whether you are aligned with an unpopular administration or not. Giving kudos for fulfilling a basic responsibility of holding office seems insane to me.)

• Tariffs. Lawler was clearly uncomfortable defending Trump’s tariffs, and this was when the event began to come apart. He appeared to have decided the best approach to this issue was a long answer that had two themes – a Trumpian rant on how we have been ripped off for decades by other nations, especially China, and, more lawyerly, how Trump’s tariff powers were grounded in rulings by Chief Justice John Marshall hundreds of years ago. While the actual line between congressional and executive authority is blurrier than either Lawler or the protesters would concede, Lawler ignored the fact that Trump authorized his tariffs under the International Emergencies Powers Act of 1977, which was unprecedented and clearly unjustified. Congress could have called him out on that and used their power to constrain him and overturn his decisions. None of this was discussed by Lawler. Lawler was greeted with uproarious laughter when he said that Congress was indeed exercising its oversight powers and would “step in” if Trump failed to secure trade deals within his 90-day tariff period. The laughter gave way to boos at the mere mention of RFK, Jr., and then went straight on to rage and fury with the commotion near the back of the auditorium, when the first woman was being ejected.

As it became clear that she was being forcibly lifted and carried out by the State Troopers, the crowd quickly filled the room with thunderous chants of “Let her stay! Let her stay! Let her stay!” It was grotesque, watching her carried by the arms and legs, horizontally, out of the room by the troopers. Lawler stood on the stage watching this unfold, clearly worried about the optics of an older woman being physically ejected, and the crowd’s outraged response.

It took a fair amount of time for order to be restored, and then the questioning resumed. Lawler was asked about the GOP tactic of weaponizing anti-Semitism, and for the first time he spoke with confidence, taking a hardline stand against elite institutions, Columbia’s response to pro-Palestinian protesters, his own trip to the campus, his own bill-writing efforts, and so on. In short, while this is a complex issue, he embodied the very technique the questioner – herself Jewish – sought to decry.

He was then asked to reconcile his Catholic faith – specifically, as the questioner said, the tenet to “welcome a stranger” — with his hardcore views on immigration. He started, rather oddly, by telling a story about sitting at this father’s deathbed, his father telling him that “to whom much is given, much is required,” exhorting Lawler, his son, to spend his life helping others. Unmoved, a wag in the crowd shouted, “What happened?”

He then moved on to a rather clinical assessment of Trump’s “success” in shutting down the border and the need for a process to deal with the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country, without bothering to note the many times the Republicans had rejected attempts at meaningful reform that involved true compromise on both sides — tougher border security and a pathway to citizenship.

A question on Ukraine was met with a long diversion into middle eastern politics and Iran. Questions about cuts to support of the arts and scientific research were greeted with lectures on the national debt, and numbing sidebars on “multiple revenue streams.” Shouts from the crowd to consider that “taxing the rich” might be a better way to cut the deficit were ignored.

Another woman was ejected, in a very similar way, forcibly, and the crowd responded with equal fervor as the first time. At this point I myself had been given four warnings – a Lawler aide came over to me on four separate occasions and told me if I shouted again, I would be ejected – and one had to wonder about the gender fairness of the ejections. Why were they physically mistreating older women and ignoring similar behavior from the men?

At this point, perhaps Lawler’s aides were thinking the same thing, and they came to eject a man seated near me. The man engaged them with friendly banter, and he was a large man, so they appeared a bit confused as to how to manage his ejection. Ultimately, he walked out surrounded by the troopers, but Lawler, not sensitive to the gender dynamics, then ordered the guards to let him stay.

Another question on tariffs, met by Lawler with another mind-numbing answer, sparked a chant of “blah, blah, blah” from the crowd. There was a question – or statement — about a $2 million donation Elon Musk’s Super PAC had donated to Lawler’s campaign last November, which he uncomfortably danced around. As he answered his final question, about an Anti-Boycott Law, the crowd began filing out, not wishing to hear a Lawler closing statement on “democracy in action” (which is how he had started).

One striking fact was how Lawler kept underestimating the crowd’s knowledge. He pointed out at one point that if Abrego Garcia returned, he would not go home, he would be put in a process that could lead to his immediate deportation. Yes, the crowd responded, but that “process” is called the “due process” that Abrego Garcia (and the others) were denied. And Lawler seemed certain that the crowd would be stunned into silence when he informed them that Barack Obama had deported 8 million undocumented immigrants in his eight years in office – but the impact of the factoid was immediately negated when a number of audience members shouted out “legally!” and “with due process!”

All in all, the vibe of the event resembled more of a protest than an information session. Lawler was not terribly informative, more bobbing and weaving and dissembling than educating. And perhaps that was really the “democracy in action” that he was talking about – unhappy constituents letting him know it.

No one needs or wants a full-blown recap of the events of the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. For a presidency built on shaking the core of what America stands for, domestically and abroad, in as chaotic, destabilizing and disturbing a way possible, let us simply offer a series of words to convey the onslaught, and move on to assess it.

Birthright citizenship. January 6 pardons. DOGE. USAID. The Gulf of America. Canada Mexico tariffs on. Then off. The Riveria of the Mideast. Eric Adams. Measles. Ukraine and the press conference. Greenland. Panama Canal. Columbia University. DEI. Department of Education. SignalGate. Deportations. Abrego Garcia. Due Process. Constitutional Crisis. Harvard. Mega-tariffs. Stock market crash. Soaring bond yields. Tariff exceptions. Stocks rebound. China tariffs. Medicaid cuts. CECOT. Jerome Powell. SignalGate Redux. Pentagon Chaos. Putin bombs Kyiv.

One gets exhausted just reading a single paragraph. Yet those words are, of course, just a subset of a much longer list. And it has only been 100 days. Barring death or a highly unlikely post-midterm impeachment and conviction, there remain over 1,300 more.

The question we have focused on is this: are the American people buying it?

The 100-day verdict seems clear. While Trump retains widespread support in the GOP, his overall support has slipped dramatically. If the election were held today, Trump would almost certainly lose, with Americans now exhibiting a clear case of buyer’s remorse.

Source: Adam Carlson, polling aggregator, “Margin of Error”

In these 100 days, the chart demonstrates that Trump’s net approval rating has dropped from +10 (52/42) to -8 (45/53), a rather dramatic swing. The downward trend, which was modest at first, accelerated in early April with the onset of the most dramatic tariff debacle, and the line continues to trend downward. Many wanted a shakeup from the Joe Biden years, but no one signed up for this chaos presidency on steroids. For those of you who wonder why the approval rating matters, it is a direct measure of Trump’s political capital – the lower it goes, the less relevant he is, especially to swing state/district GOP Senators and congresspersons. Not only do they become ensnared in his poison, but they are less likely to support his legislation – crucial given the slim margins in both chambers.

It is worth a reminder that Biden was still quite popular at this stage of his presidency, with a net approval rating of +13 (53/40). Ironically, Biden was not simply playing it safe, focusing only on reversing the worst of Trump’s excesses and fixing the non-existant Covid vaccine distribution system. He had just passed the “American Rescue Plan” and had laid out a vision for, yes, overhauling America, particularly economically. (Ironically, that very bill ended up costing him dearly, as it contributed in part to the presidency-killing rise in inflation, second only in impact to the Covid supply shortages.) The American public back then was buying what Biden was selling – and that is simply not true now for Trump.

Every other president (since Truman, when these measures were developed) has been more popular than Trump after 100 days.

It takes no particular genius to explain Trump’s low and declining approval rating: it’s a function primarily of his management of the economy (stupid), his supposed strong suit. Analysis after analysis demonstrated that Trump largely won the election on his economic platform of lowering prices and stimulating growth through deregulation. Despite the economy appearing robust by any measure last November — inflation was largely whipped, GDP was growing on the strength of vibrant consumer spending, the stock market was at record highs and employment was historically strong – Trump’s desolate assessment of it rang a bell with enough voters for him to win. Polls before and after the election consistently demonstrated that voters believed the economy was the top issue in the campaign and had more confidence in Trump than Harris to manage it, by roughly a 10-percentage-point margin. And that higher prices was the key — inflation had been lowered but prices themselves were far higher than before the spike that occurred under Biden’s watch.

The tariffs, of course, are undoing all of that, with U.S. and global markets tumbling, consensus forecasts of recession, inflation poised to rise as tariff penalties are passed on to consumers and China withholds supplies in various export categories, and a rise in unemployment nearly certain to follow as businesses slash expenses in the wake of lower demand. This was all due to a choice by Trump to undertake a trade war instead of focusing on prices, picking the one tactic that economists agreed would be the worst possible action to undertake to counter inflation.

The tariff policy miss has been exacerbated by the shifting goals of the plan – is it a long-term play to lure manufacturing back to the U.S., or simply a negotiating tactic to wring fairer terms and better behavior? Even more inexplicable – and damaging – has been the ludicrous execution of the tariffs, with the on again/off again Truth Social announcements, finally settling in (for now) on an array of tariffs that punishes friend and foe alike, and still insanely high for China. Picking a fight with a dictator-for-life country famous for playing the long game is perhaps the stupidest decision of them all. Trump waits in vain for the phone to ring from President Xi Jinping, but he cannot wait much longer with talks of a Halloween with empty shelves and growing farmland discontent.

Trump’s issue ratings demonstrate this. His ratings on both the economy and inflation are in the low 40% range, and declining; in his first term, both were consistently above 50%. Trump clearly “owns” the economy despite his occasional attempts to slough off the tariff-driven bad news on Biden. A recent NY Times/Siena poll dug deeper into economy concerns and found that 50% of voters believed that Trump had made the economy worse, while only 21% thought he had made it better. And apart from the issue ratings are the real world data points of the stock market crash (the S&P 500 is down 8% since the Inaugural) and plummeting consumer confidence – the Conference Board index has dropped from 110 on Biden’s last day to 86 now, an astonishing swing from the Biden era numbers, which started at 89 (in January 2021, in the throes of Covid) and ended at 110.

It is also obvious that economists, CEO’s and market analysts are virtually united in decrying the tariffs — the policy, the goals and the execution. Whatever leverage Trump may have had in negotiations has been lost in his need to show progress quickly; that deadline gives other countries negotiating leverage they will use against him.

Only on immigration does Trump achieve a 50% approval rating. But even on immigration, the cracks are showing. The voting public appears to like the general effort to control immigration just fine, they just don’t like the specifics of how Trump is doing it: they don’t like the deportation of Abrego Garcia to an El Salvadoran prison without due process; watching children as young as two and some with grave illnesses being deported without due process; hearing threats of jailing Americans in CECOT; or having judges jailed in the US for making proper court decisions that are not popular with ICE.

This phenomenon does not apply only to immigration. “Overreach” is too mild a term to describe the extremes to which Trump has gone to execute his agenda. That same NY Times poll reveals many issues on which majorities of voters express discomfort on Trump’s methods: tariffs, eliminating Congressionally enacted programs and, most of all, the idea that he might ignore the Supreme Court, just to name a few. Trump has acted so broadly and carelessly, on such an order of magnitude, setting off so many ticking time bombs, that one imagines him striding across a thin wire over the Grand Canyon without a parachute or a net, oblivious to his imminent free fall into oblivion – a perch all of his own making.

He did manage to recognize and respond to one thing – the bond market, which not only is the underpinning of the global economy but also, perhaps more importantly, of his personal wealth, which largely eschews equity investments. Once Trump was told the whole bond market might go belly-up, he quickly rescinded most of the tariffs, though still leaving levels not seen since Smoot-Hawley (and upping the ones on China.)

Project 2025 may have offered grand strategies to realign the global geopolitical and economic order in the spirit of “America First,” but Trump is not that strategic. He just likes some things, and dislikes others, acts accordingly, and adjusts on the fly. He likes tariffs, always has, you can hear him railing about the trade deficit back in the 1990s, along with disparaging NATO and trashing immigrants. He likes the idea of Gaza as a resort, and of himself as the King of North America, master of a vast domain that includes Canada, Greenland, Panama and likely the rest of it. He likes white men and has been convicted of assault, so it is reflexive for him to try to dismantle DEI. He will always think interest rates are too high and does not see them as a tool against inflation, in the same manner that he disbelieves tariffs will quickly result in higher prices. He has honed his message to match MAGA cravings, and when conservatives help provide him with frameworks and make him look strategic, he has no objections. But he’ll also hawk the very electric cars for Musk that he savaged Biden for subsidizing. There is no real strategic framework, there is simply a guy finally unshackled to do things he has been railing about for decades — right now.

All of this comes at a cost. He wants it all to happen now, however inconsistent with his campaign messages. He wants loyalists to simply carry it all out, without analysis or thought. And those overzealous flunkies not only do what he orders them to do, but also what they think he wants them to do. The result, apart from the overreach, are massive mistakes that point to clear incompetence. There are the many firings that DOGE had to reverse, and exaggerated claims of savings that were quickly exposed. Pete Hegseth has become a walking gaffe-a-thon, his ineptitude, headlined by SignalGate, now being called out by his closest allies. Innocent people being sent to El Salvadoran prisons. Tariffs being put on islands inhabited only by penguins. Harvard being sent the wrong letter. It goes on and on. Trump likes to project the notion that his second Administration is far more disciplined than his first, but that image, which even the mainstream media initially bought, has been shattered.

In all this chaos – at this point “the chaos presidency” has become a cliche – the Democrats have found new life. Chris Murphy began shouting daily from the roof top and gained traction as an important voice, as others with higher visibility (like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer) tried to reconcile. Cory Booker gave a 25-hour speech that broke through. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez toured the country, preaching progressive strength to thousands everywhere they went.

But ultimately, the American people began to raise their voices. Tens of thousands have protested every Saturday, including many at Tesla dealerships. The polls, as noted, began to turn, as we predicted. But even more important is what happened at the ballot box. Politicians ultimately derive their power from the people. All — Trump included – are subject to the same political gravity: if they undertake unpopular policies and execute them poorly, they will lose the people, lose support and lose elections.

Democrats turned out in droves to make two congressional races in Florida far more competitive than they were a mere five months earlier. The GOP’s winning margin in each district, vacated by congressmen joining the Trump administration, was reduced from 30-plus-percentage point wins in November to just under 15 percentage points in April, a rather seismic leap forward by the Democrats. In Wisconsin, a Democratic judge won a potentially majority-altering race for the state supreme court by 10 points, in spite of — or more likely because of — Elon Musk’s personal involvement in the race. These results continue a pattern of Democrats winning off-year elections, demonstrating that the party is indeed energized by Trump II. While these elections occurred 18 months before the midterms, they point to a mood that could easily result in the Dems flipping the House in 2026, perhaps by “blue wave” dimensions. Trump noticed and pulled New York Republican Elaine Stefanik from his nomination of her as U.N. Ambassador to the U.N. so her seat was not put at risk.

What next? One might be tempted to say “who knows?” That, of course, is a perfectly reasonable answer. But there are four titanic struggles that are in process and must be resolved soon.

The most important, in our view, is the threat to due process that Trump is undertaking with his various deportation efforts. At this point he is defying the Supreme Court’s directive to “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, but the battle has returned to district courts (at SCOTUS’s behest) and will likely find its way back to SCOTUS soon for a more definitive ruling. At stake, of course, is that if Trump ultimately defies SCOTUS, we are left without the rule of law in our land.

The second is the fate of the tariffs. As said, Trump and Xi are locked in a who-blinks-first battle and the odds are extremely high that Trump will lose this one and soon either contact Xi first or unilaterally reduce the tariffs. The one thing he cannot do is let the standoff continue for weeks on end, for fear of tripping inflation wires even more, setting off a bond yield crisis again, and losing the support of millions who voted for him, including farmers across the land.

The third is Ukraine, where Trump’s claim that he would end the war on his “first day” looks even sillier after 100 of them than it did when he made the campaign promise. Even if one forgives the hyperbole of the statement, Trump badly underestimated his own influence on both Putin, who plays him for the fool, and Zelenskyy, who knows that Putin cannot be trusted and continues to show remarkable spine. If Trump’s only move is to walk away from Ukraine, as he is now threatening, that is a terrible look for him, one he cannot easily explain away, especially if Ukraine falls and Putin engages elsewhere.

Finally, there is the “big, beautiful bill” that the GOP Congress is struggling to put together. They hold all the cards, with majorities in both houses of Congress, but reconciling the needs of arch-conservatives who want big spending cuts, Trump and his tax cuts, moderates who want to avoid Medicaid cuts and a collective desire not to add to the debt, not to mention many other competing interests, will be the GOP’s leadership’s biggest struggle yet. Trump’s declining approval rating will give him less leverage to herd the cats, as his threats don’t really matter to the entrenched MAGA’s on the right or the moderates, neither of whom he can credibly threaten with primary opponents. The moderates, in fact, could easily jump ship on Trump soon, as Biden’s swing reps did, as he becomes increasingly toxic to them in their districts.

The next 100 days will be harder. Shock and awe have worn off. Discinpline is gone. The opposition is rising. The courts have been sturdy and more cases will go to SCOTUS and be decided against him. Issues Trump claimed are easy are proving to be far more complex, and the wins, such as they were, are waning. This is headed in one direction.

Stay tuned.

We now are living amidst the most troubling and destabilizing era since World War II.  Joe Biden is managing two major, interrelated wars at a time when democracy itself remains under assault at our own doorstep, challenges that begin to approach those faced by FDR in simultaneously grappling with the Great Depression and the rise of the Nazi’s. 

We have long forgotten the punishing circumstances that awaited Biden when he entered office. Not only were we in the midst of the Covid crisis, with thousands of Americans dying every day, but the new president was also faced with a direct challenge to the legitimacy of his election, and thus to democracy. He had to cope with a predecessor who refused to accept the free and fair election results and was uncooperative in the transition, instead fomenting an assault on the Capitol in an attempt to halt the pro forma certification process. And that act was just the last and most visible means by which Donald Trump conspired to overturn the election. He managed to convince most of his fellow Republicans that The Big Lie was fact, despite exactly zero evidence and dozens of lost court challenges. 

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It has only gotten harder for Biden. While he and his administration quickly rolled up its sleeves and addressed Covid, left the Big Lie and the insurrection to the courts, and moved to reestablish domestic and global norms and normalcy, the hits never stopped coming.  The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Dobbs decision, countless mass shootings, supply chain shortages and spiking inflation have all posed enormous challenges to Biden.  He has dealt with all of that non-stop, while still proactively reshaping America’s future through the passage of FDR-esque landmark legislation that provided jobs, addressed climate change, put controls on prescription drug prices and much, much more. While he gets very little credit for what he has accomplished, he certainly has carved out a record to run on in 2024. 

And then came October 7, when, instantly, the world was set aflame, and became more dangerous than at any time in the last 80 years.  With the stunning, unfathomably barbaric Hamas attack on Israel, the immediate Israeli retaliatory airstrikes, and the direct threat of a broader Middle East war, Biden suddenly faced a challenge far beyond all others in his most consequential presidency.

The horrifying Hamas attack on Israel was without precedent, at least back to Nazi Germany, in its utter savagery and craven disregard for humanity (not to mention the rules of engagement).  In their butchering of babies and the elderly alike, the hideous assault on clear civilian targets, the taking of Holocaust survivors and children as hostages, and the use of their own civilians as human shields, Hamas plumbed the depths of human depravity.  Not only is Hamas committed to the destruction of Israel, it appears to want to accomplish that fact in the most grisly manner possible. 

It is hard to imagine the need for some to refuse to support a full-throated condemnation of Hamas.  Even Israel’s worst critics, one would think, would denounce the tactics that Hamas used (especially if these attacks were designed, as some speculated, to deliberately draw Israel into an outsized response).  If Hamas could not be condemned for these heinous attacks, without a “but,” then what could ever be condemned? 

And yet, Biden was handed a draft for his initial comments that left room for equivocation.  Aides fearing the consequences of a no-hold’s-barred pro-Israel response offered softer language – which Biden immediately rejected.  He was unsparing in his condemnation of Hamas and his support for Israel in his initial comments days after the attack, and then returned 10 days later with an Oval Office address that developed many of the same themes and expanded on them, explaining the stakes to the over 20 million Americans who tuned in. 

There are a number of takeaways from the Biden response that are worthy of note. 

The first is that Biden -- and Biden alone – is in charge.  His entire presidency is wildly misunderstood from the outside.  His opponents believe he is a doddering old man, shuffling about in a mental haze.  Many Democrats believe that as well, and crave a new candidate in 2024.  Even Biden’s supporters tend to support the old man narrative by comforting themselves that Biden has surrounded himself with highly capable aides who ensure the right things get done even if the old man is well past his prime. 

All of this belies the truth.  This is Biden’s presidency, and he has made the call on every single issue he has confronted, often, as with Israel, against the advice of his aides.  A new book on Biden’s first two years in office, The Last Politician, by Franklin Foer – a must read for everyone who plans to vote in 2024 -- takes you inside the White House to offer a deeply-reported portrait of Biden.  The book reveals a very different Biden from the public caricature, a man who dominates his administration, not a drooling old man at all.  Nor does he emerge as simply as an active and engaged participant, which would be welcome enough, but actually he is a forceful and not-terribly-kind-about-it leader, displaying his Irish temper as he makes his policy and tactical preferences – check that, directives – very clear.  Biden may be 80, but he is not being led around by the nose.  The staff is not telling Biden what to do; they are struggling to keep up with him.  

The second point is the depth and breadth of his experience.  He has seen all sides of every issue, and the opinions he has developed emanate from decades of detailed involvement in almost everything that could possibly come across the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.  Even when facing unprecedented challenges, he digs into his Rolodex for his favorite problem-solvers (case in point: Biden recruited Jeff Zients, once the fixer of the disastrous Obamacare.gov launch, to turn Trump’s non-existent vaccine distribution failure into a rousing Biden success). With respect to Israel, Biden first visited the country just before the 1973 Yom Kippur War – yes, 50 years ago -- as a young congressman.  He has known Benjamin Netanyahu for decades, and is intimately familiar with the history and how the players think.  He doesn’t need to cram a briefing on virtually any topic, and he was more than ready to act fast when the bombs started to land in Israel. 

Which leads to the third point: Biden’s response to the crisis was a sophisticated, overarching strategy of Biden's own design:  to embrace Netanyahu publicly, and in full, in order to maximize his ability to influence him privately – very similar to his approach in May, 2021 when Hamas last bombed Israel.  Biden is juggling many competing and nrealy irreconciliable goals in this morass, including supporting Israel's right to defend itself, freeing the hostages, preventing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, vacating U.S. embassies in dangerous venues, and preparing the U.S. military for the worst.  But most important of all is to contain the war, and prevent it from escalating from Israel versus Hamas to the U.S. (and others) versus Iran (and others).  To achieve as many of those goals as possible requires tempering Israel’s response.  Biden told Netanyahu from the beginning that if this crime had been perpetrated on the U.S., Biden’s own response would have been “swift, decisive and overwhelming.”  And yet, despite those supportive words, Biden is actually trying to persuade Israel to follow a more measured course, to stay within the rules of war, to allow humanitarian aid to get to the Palestinian civilians, for more hostages to be released, to position military personnel and, above all, to remain on the good side of world opinion.  This  is  foreign policy chess at its finest, and the execution of it requires exquisite patience. 

And the fourth point:  the politics.  Over the past few decades the GOP has essentially co-opted support of Israel from the Democrats.  Progressive Democrats (correctly) see Netanyahu as a Trump-clone, and his heavy-handed bid to “reform” the Israeli judiciary by subjugating it to his will has further eroded Democratic support for the once-shining Israeli democracy.  Biden’s embrace of Israel, his motivations notwithstanding, runs against the grain of his own party, but it may be smart politics in an election year, and might win him some support from the middle.  He is clearly distancing himself from the progressives, in particular The Squad, who routinely favor the Palestinians in the struggle, and who voted down the Hamas condemnation resolution because it did not include any mention of the suffering of Palestinian civilians.  But he is already paying a price in plummeting support in the Arab-American community; ultimately, Biden is acting on principle over politics. 

There is no easy out here for Biden, no quick win.  The backlash against Israel will grow with the Gaza body count. The pressure for a pause or ceasefire is already mounting.  The Democratic Party, for all its historic fissures, has been remarkably aligned in the Trump/Biden era, but gigantic tests to that unity have begun.  If this escalates to a regional war, it will define Biden’s presidency and his reelection prospects.  Already, he has become the latest U.S. president to attempt to “pivot” U.S. foreign policy to focus on the Far East, only to get dragged back yet again to the Middle East. 

Regardless of how this latest crisis plays out, U.S. voters of all stripes are too superficial in assessing Biden.  By focusing only on Biden’s chronological age, his shuffling steps and his halting delivery, they do an injustice to the vigor of the man and his mental agility, which are quite impressive by any standard.  Biden’s physical state is evident but it is not an accurate barometer of his ability to govern.  Furthermore, it is hard to imagine how Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Amy Klobuchar (or Dean Phillips, if you have heard of him) might have equaled Biden’s management of this crisis, pulled off the coalition backing Ukraine, or matched or even approached his domestic legislative triumphs.  Obama’s inexperience certainly showed at times, as did Bill Clinton’s.  Biden, not so much.  

The real contrast here is not with past or future Democratic leaders – it is with the current Republicans.  The month began with Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House and ended with someone named Mike Johnson in the role.  Johnson is a mild-mannered, fourth-term election denier, with mega MAGA credentials, a kind of Jim Jordan in pajamas.  In the minority-rule system that the United States has evolved to, it only took a few crazed GOP representatives to take down McCarthy (led by the vile Matt Gaetz), and a similar margin then denied the speakership to name brands on both wings of the modern GOP (that is, the far right and the even further right).  In a stunning display of leader-cide, similar minorities killed off the speaker dreams of Steve Scalise, the heir apparent Majority Leader, Jordan, and Whip Tom Emmer.  That left the GOP to find someone, anyone, with a slim enough resume to have offended no one as yet, and they found that person in Johnson.  (Even Susan Collins, the Republican Senator from Maine, admitted that she had to Google him.)  It is hard to imagine this man sitting in the chair once occupied by the likes of Sam Rayburn, Tip O’Neill and Nancy Pelosi, among many other seasoned pols of both parties.  Shameful.  As for the other GOP leaders, Mitch McConnell’s health issues go way beyond Biden’s, and Trump, facing 91 felony counts, is simply a stain than seemingly cannot be erased, desperately seeking a return to the Oval Office for the sole purpose of ridding himself of the charges one way or another. 

The GOP appears to be hell-bent on creating a platform (of a kind, since they don’t have a real one) that is designed to hand the Democrats the House on a silver platter, as well as blowing a real chance to take the Senate, or, of course, defeat Biden.  Instead, they are doubling down on the MAGA issues that lost them the 2018, 2020 and 2022 election cycles.  Banning abortions and ignoring gun violence and climate change are not winning messages for the majority of Americans.  Trump, Johnson, Gaetz, Tommy Tuberville, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos will be the MAGA images lashed to the 18 GOP congresspersons running in districts won by Biden in 2020, and to the would-be-flippers of vulnerable Democratic Senate seats.  Their constituents will also hear about Dobbs 24/7.  That will be a tough set of realities for those non-MAGA GOP candidates to overcome.

Trump himself, of course, is hardly the ideal candidate to topple Biden.  While a Biden-Trump rematch will be close, a Biden-Haley match-up would be much tougher for Biden. 

Biden essentially promised a return to normal times, when politics were more likely to inhabit the inner sections of the newspaper rather than the front pages.  But, as John Lennon once said, “life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”  Biden is now astride a planet on fire, and while he is far more prepared than anyone else for that challenge, he will be pummeled simply because we are far from normal times, and he is old.  But he deserves better, and certainly, at this stage, deserves reelection, especially considering the alternative. 

Stay tuned. 

AUGUST 2023

Has there ever been a less visible or newsworthy president than Joe Biden, at least in the modern media era?

It’s a great question to ponder as Biden seeks reelection by an American public from whom he has largely been kept hidden. 

We probably do not have to “prove” the premise that Biden is indeed our most invisible president.  But we will offer one data point:  In the month of August The New York Times pushed out a total of 31 “Breaking News” alerts that were, broadly speaking, of a political nature.  Only one of these alerts mentioned Joe Biden by name -- and even that one was not because of an action on his part, but rather when the Supreme Court revived Biden’s policy on “ghost” guns.  Donald Trump garnered eleven mentions, murdered Russian mutineer Yevgheny Prigozhin had two, Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden and Clarence Thomas each had one, and George Santos (actually an aide) and Kevin McCarthy (whom the aide impersonated) shared one.   Such a low share of the political space was unheard of not only in Trump’s times, but it is hard to envision that any recent president would go a month – even August – making such little news.

For the leader of the free world, Biden is pulling off a remarkable feat by hiding in plain sight.  This is, of course, a very conscious strategy, one employed for two excellent reasons. 

The first reason is that Biden, at age 80, is better in concept than he is in the flesh.  Americans surely elected Biden because he represents all sorts of attributes that were sorely lacking in the Trump years:  deep government experience, steady hands, a calm demeanor, a respect for both domestic and global institutions and norms, a “humanity” factor in terms of being warm, likeable and empathetic.  Americans, shattered by the decibel level of the Trump era and the disorientation of the pandemic, craved nothing more than a return to normalcy, where people went about their business and politics intruded in their lives in a predictable manner, even during the inevitable crisis of one kind or another.

All that is Biden, and in a very authentic way.  That is the heart of his appeal.  If Joe Biden were 65 or 70, he would probably be one of our more popular recent presidents by now, with near universal approval among his own party and independents and a grudging respect by some mainstream Republicans.  But he is, in fact, 80, and while relatively hearty for that age, he nonetheless projects neither vitality nor clarity of thought.  He has always been a halting speaker (the remnants of a childhood speech impediment) and a gaffe-machine (the downside of his from-the-heart spontaneity), and even though these have long been part of his political baggage, they make him seem even older than he is.

On top of this, it has not been a good era for octogenarians, who still loom large over the political scene.  Ruth Bader Ginsberg diminished her considerable legacy by lingering too long on the Supreme Court, dying when the GOP controlled both the White House and the Senate.  Both Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell have displayed moments suggestive of a steep decline of capability.  Democrats fear nothing more than Biden suffering such an event, particularly in public.  If Biden were unable to run for a second term, the Democrats would be faced with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, and, whatever her true capabilities, the optics of Harris’s short-lived presidential candidacy and her Vice Presidency to date have not been good.  If a Biden withdrawal happened early enough for challengers to emerge – a window that is rapidly closing – it is not at all clear who an electable alternative might be.   For most Democrats, the only thing worse than a Biden candidacy is…anything else.

The second big reason for Biden to remain in the shadows is that the actual headliners are themselves making an excellent case for a Biden second term.  Look at those who dominated the August headlines.  There was Trump, with his fourth indictment, a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential results in the state of Georgia.  There were the slate of contender-pretenders that the Republicans offered up in a Trump-free debate, from the dystopian sneering of Ron DeSantis, to the smug mania of Trump-wannabee Vivek Ramaswamy, to the shallow, nice-guy vagueness of Tim Scott and so on.  (The best line I heard was that the debate was “a bunch of single-digit candidates tearing other single-digit candidates apart” – referencing that no one attacked either frontrunner Trump or, more surprisingly, the second place DeSantis.)

There was the death of Prigozhin, almost surely on the untraceable orders of Vladimir Putin.  Tack on pathetic Rudy Guiliani, caught-with-his-fingers-in-a-giant cookie-jar Clarence Thomas, and the comic George Santos.  There was Kevin McCarthy and talk of a Biden impeachment inquiry, a gift to the 2024 Biden campaign.  What better set of headlines could Biden want than his various rivals continually veering off in an orgy of incredibly bad behavior?  With the vision-less GOP groping its way through a not-dead-yet Trump revival and the world order being so visibly threatened by Putin, Biden’s strengths are once again being perfectly displayed by the words and actions of his enemies.  Why try to change the channel to focus on the man himself, when your opposition is essentially engaged in politically-suicidal messaging?  That would make no sense.

But while the upsides of hiding Biden are reasonably clear, there is a major downside as well. 

The President of the United States has a unique platform, a massive one, the “bully pulpit” as Teddy Roosevelt famously described it.  Biden cannot simply count on his rivals’ self-immolation alone – he certainly needs to tell his story.  He has a record of achievement that he wants to run on and a complex economic situation to explain, and taking a back seat to his opponents forfeits the opportunity to make the case.  Sure Biden has made some speeches – notably a rather bold attempt (given the risks) to brand the current economic environment with the term “Bidenomics.”   (This is risky because American’s are not happy with the state of the economy, likely because of the lagging effect of high inflation on consumer interest rates and the disproportionate impact on the “have nots” who are living payckeck to pacyhceck.)  But that is far from adequate to make the necessary points.  Even if Biden were a Great Communicator, it would be very tough to break through the gusher of news emanating daily from the indictments.  Given his lack of commitment to being visible, it is simply impossible.  Biden’s surrogates are also on the hustings, but – apart from being unpopular themselves (Kamala Harris, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are even less popular than Biden) – there is no substitute for the bully pulpit. 

Barack Obama was often critiqued for not successfully selling his achievements; he often gave the impression that he was above that.  Joe Biden surely knows better and knows well the lessons of that era, but his communications calculus is very different.  And net/net, he is probably right to err on the side of being less visible.

After all, Donald Trump is his likely opponent, and while all these indictments are a plus for the nomination, they are certainly a minus for the general election.  Because of the polarization of our nation, elections truly are won and lost on the margins, and the “environmental” factors probably favor Biden at this juncture.  Biden wants to minimize the “age” issue, so staying out of sight makes sense.  He wants the Trump indictments spectacle (motions, testimony, live TV from Georgia) to be breaking news 24/7.  He wants Putin to play the very public thug.  He thinks the economic story is moving his way.  And he knows that, with the abortion issue, he is holding the high card when it comes to motivating his base and driving turnout.

Don’t expect Joe Biden to emerge from hiding anytime soon.  Back in olden times -- before Biden was even born -- it was de rigueur for incumbent presidents to employ a “Rose Garden” reelection strategy.  That is, the president was viewed as being too busy tending to the nation’s business to be out on the campaign trail, too focused on his duties to stray far from the Oval Office, with the Rose Garden situated right outside.  But both Roosevelts, with their bully pulpit mentality and Fireside Chat communications gifts, raised the visibility of presidents, and the media age made further demands on the public nature of the job.  The public presidency was exploited naturally and to advantage by the smooth talking and camera-friendly John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (and even, memorably, by George W. Bush in the early days after 9/11).

Joe Biden ran in 2020 largely from his basement in Delaware, able to use the Covid crisis to both model good pandemic behavior and keep a low-profile for political advantage.  We can expect in 2024 that he will campaign with another version of hiding in plain sight, resurrecting some form of a Rose Garden strategy.

Stay tuned.

KEY METRICS

Joe Biden’s approval rating slipped a point in August from 42% to 41%.  This represents the 24th straight month that Biden has been within the 39-45% range.  The ratings of Biden’s performance on the issues was generally unchanged.  The "Bidenometer" dropped somewhat from 40 to 35, driven by a dip in the Dow and consumer confidence and a rise in gas prices.  Second quarter GDP was also downwardly revised from 2.4% to 2.0%.  But the +35 level still means the economy is in far better shape than the one he inherited from Trump .

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BIDENOMETER

The Bidenometer is a BTRTN proprietary economic measure that was designed to provide an objective answer to the legendary economically-driven question at the heart of the 1980 Reagan campaign:  “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”  We reset the Bidenometer at this Inaugural to zero, so that we better demonstrate whether the economy performs better (a positive number) or worse (a negative number) under Biden than what he inherited from the Trump Administration.

The Bidenometer measure is comprised of five indicative data points:  the unemployment rate, Consumer Confidence, the price of gasoline, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average and the U.S. GDP.  The measure is calculated by averaging the percentage change in each measure from the inaugural to the present time.

The +41 for July, 2023 means that, on average, the five measures are 35% higher than they were when Biden was inaugurated (see the chart below).  With a Bidenometer of +35, the economy is performing markedly better under Biden compared to its condition when Trump left office.  Unemployment is much lower, consumer confidence is higher, the Dow is higher and the GDP is stronger.  On the flip side, gas prices are higher, as is overall inflation, of which gas prices are a primary component.

Using January 20, 2021 as a baseline measure of zero, under Clinton the measure ended at +55.  It declined from +55 to +8 under Bush, who presided over the Great Recession at the end of his term, then rose from +8 to +33 under Obama’s recovery.  Under Trump, it fell again, from +33 to 0, driven by the shock of COVID-19 and Trump’s mismanagement of it.  Now we have seen it move upward from 0 to +35 under Biden.