Subscribe now

Why are we doing this again?

When President Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday to “immediately” change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” it seemed like a parody, like he was telling “hold my beer…and charred steak”

But no, it was real, and it begs the question: why is he making such an empty, impotent gesture, practically shouting that America is losing a trade war that he started and escalated for no reason?

Why, for that matter did he hit Canada with 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods this past weekend—about 550 product lines, including dairy, beer and cider, cement, cosmetics, electronics, furniture, plywood, paint, hockey sticks and skates. Why then add threats of tariffs on Canadian autos, auto parts and steel?

Why, Republicans had to wonder, pick this fight when we are 10 weeks away from swing Senate races in border states? You know who does lots of auto business with Canada? Michigan. You know who does lots of other business with Canada? Border states Maine, Alaska and Ohio (it’s a water border, but still). Susan Collins has even gone from concerned to troubled.

All of which captures a common theme in this week’s Political Rehab: why does it always come back to chaos, corruption, and coverup?

This week, and I hit:

• The big Supreme Court ruling on Trump’s mail-in voting executive order, and what he’s actually after

• The pointless self-own of the Canada trade war

• The even more pointless “Economic D-Day”…which amounts to even more of an admission of failure in a war Trump started

• The exploding issue that Republican and Democratic candidates all seemingly agree on now

• And what the $18 billion Meta settlement really means

Plus, we take our weekly look at The Battlefield (which readers here got a sneak preview of in yesterday’s Midterm HQ), Matt Wylie gets encouraged by robots with pants, and we bid farewell to Dolly Parton.

Subscribe now

Toplines for the Week

Didn’t we just leave this party?

Last week, there was a small redshift in the big structural indicators, so we gave a slight weekly win to the GOP.

This week, there was a small redshift in the structural indicators. So…

But a new number from (one which should make the White House throw up in their mouth a little) also gave a really interesting window into the surprising way that voters form opinions, and why Trump is in such horrendously negative territory on a bunch of issues where he hasn’t even done much recently.

Midterm HQ Weekly Dashboard: Week of August 24, 2026

The Structural Picture

Here’s a puzzle: the key fundamentals—presidential approval, generic ballot, consumer sentiment—almost all moved toward Republicans. The race ratings (see next section) all moved toward Democrats. So why did Republicans win the week?

Because race ratings are a slightly lagging indicator. The folks at and look at all the data carefully (and at a very granular level), ensure that there’s enough of a trend to distinguish signal from noise, and then wait until there are multiple confirming indicators before changing race ratings.

Whereas here, I’m giving you a summary look at fundamentals, polls, and other factors every week as they emerge. It’s not that I’m ahead of those outfits—far from it—it’s just that by the time they change race ratings, they’re intentionally reflecting numbers that started moving in the weeks beforehand.

Subscribe now

I’ve been noting the polling in Texas and Iowa for several weeks now and referring to those races as statistical dead heats. Cook made them official “Toss-ups” just in the past week.

The bottom line is, the new factors that affect the midterm picture—and the new numbers that help us see the situation—that arose in the past week were in structural indicators. Those moved in Republicans’ direction (including a pretty substantial improvement in Trump’s standing among Independents of 6.8 points over two weeks). And that’s why it was a slightly better week for the GOP.

What Moved This Week

House: Cook shifts MI-10 and FL-14 from Lean R to Toss Up, and MI-08 from Lean D to Likely D, as a result of primary results that finalized the matchups plus fresh MI/FL polling.

Senate: Cook shifts TX and IA from Lean R to Toss Up. Their own framing is that the overall Senate battle is now a toss-up, with Republicans holding the “slimmest” edge (which is pretty much what prediction markets say too). Also, Darline Graham won her Senate primary in SC, showing that a Trump endorsement in a low-turnout primary (runoff) can still matter…sometimes.

Governors: Cook shifts TX from Solid R to Likely R, and IA from Toss Up to Lean D.

Number That Caught My Eye / Story You May Have Missed

Just like last week, I’m combining two of my usual categories to take a deeper dive on one fascinating topic that arose this week (though I’m going to keep this write-up a little bit shorter than the last one, since I already gave folks an in-depth analysis on Democratic Socialists yesterday titled “Make Peace With Socialists. Then Break Up With the DSA” and I don’t want to cause too much reader overload).

The number that caught my eye came in a new poll result that wrote1 up yesterday:

President Donald Trump’s net approval on border security — his best issue in this tracker for most of the past year and a half — fell to −5, the worst mark we’ve recorded on it and now squarely net-negative. Every one of the 12 issues we test is now underwater, and not one of them improved this month.

And here’s his graphic showing it:

I could see you saying, “ok, it’s kind of noteworthy that Trump lost hold of the one issue where more people were happy than unhappy with him. But what stands out about that?”

Well, here’s a question: at a time when there have been comparatively few headlines about border security, why is Trump suddenly sinking on it? (follow up: when was the last time you heard anything about Trump actions on education, social programs, even crime, all of which have gotten even more negative in the past six months?)

This question gives insight into how people form opinions about public figures, public policy, and political issues. And the answer inverts how it’s often described.

Read more

But what does the ruling actually mean for voters—and is the bigger danger the immediate restriction of voting rights, or the chaos and distrust it could create around the election?

I’m joined by Michaeleen Crowell, former Chief of Staff to Bernie Sanders, former legislative director for John Lewis, and a longtime voting-rights advocate, for a wide-ranging conversation about the stakes for American democracy.

We dig into:

• What the Supreme Court's mail-voting ruling actually does — and doesn't do

• Why the Trump administration's effort could create confusion and post-election chaos

• Whether the Supreme Court has become too powerful — and how Democrats could rein it in

• Why Congress needs to reclaim its constitutional role

• The growing tensions between the Democratic Party, progressives, and the Democratic Socialists of America

• Why Michaeleen says the progressive movement is bringing energy the Democratic Party desperately needs

• Whether the DSA controversy is being exaggerated — and when Democrats should draw a line with its fringe leadership

• What Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign can teach Democrats today

• Why Democrats need to stop fighting a circular firing squad before the 2026 election

• What the party should do after the election to resolve the deeper conflict

• And the bigger question: Can Democrats become the party of change while keeping their coalition together?

Chapters

00:00 — Trump, the Supreme Court & the fight for the 2026 election
04:00 — Why Democrats are the last firewall
06:00 — Michaeleen Crowell joins the conversation
07:00 — What the Supreme Court's mail-voting ruling means
09:00 — Is mail-in voting really a Democratic advantage?
10:00 — Trump's bigger goal: chaos and distrust
11:00 — Could the election become a post-election fight?
13:00 — The problem with Trump's “citizenship lists”
15:00 — The voting paperwork nightmare
17:00 — The Supreme Court's power and “judicial supremacy”
20:00 — How should Democrats rein in the Supreme Court?
22:00 — The MAGA catch-22: win elections, then change the system
24:00 — The fight to protect voting rights
27:00 — Can threats to democracy actually drive turnout?
28:00 — The Democratic Party's fight with its progressive wing
30:00 — The four camps in the DSA debate
31:00 — Michaeleen: “I'm a lifelong Democrat”
33:00 — What Democrats are missing about the progressive movement
35:00 — Why Democrats can't form a circular firing squad
37:00 — Where Michaeleen and I disagree about the DSA
40:00 — Is the DSA actually part of the Democratic Party?
41:00 — Why Democrats need to hold together now
43:00 — What Bernie Sanders supporters still remember from 2016
45:00 — The fight Democrats need to have in 2028
47:00 — Can AOC help define the future of Democratic socialism?
49:00 — What Bernie got right about Democratic politics
52:00 — Accountability, affordability and the demand for change
54:00 — A surprise interruption: Dolly Parton
56:00 — What Democrats need to do next

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video!

This is my Wednesday deep-dive analysis. I really appreciate all of the feedback (mostly positive, but I listen to all of it) on last week’s look at the Supreme Court. I’ve got a lot more coming, including a tool that I think will be very helpful for everyone who cares about making an impact in the elections. So please, consider a paid subscription if you like and support this kind of work!

Subscribe now

There's been a massive surge in American politics in the past six months, but it’s not in campaign wins by Democratic Socialists. It’s in media takes about them.

The DSA are either progressive fighters expressing the true DNA of the Democratic Party, or unhinged Bolsheviks driving a spike into the last firewall against President Donald Trump’s kleptocratic authoritarianism…bright-eyed, Europe-infused, highly-caffeinated new wave activists, or illiberal antisemites who drone on about ending the “carceral state.”

The effect is like the parable of a group of blind men touching different parts of an elephant—side, trunk, or tusk—and then arguing about what the animal is like. There have actually been four types of reaction to the DSA bump, each with a different vantage point, analysis, and agenda shaping the conclusion.

• In one corner there are the Democratic Socialists themselves. They are, of course, motivated to sell the story that they are indeed surging on the strength of their increasingly popular positions (reality: only slightly true).

• Then there are the other-end-of-the-spectrum Cassandras, voices like Jonathan Chait1 and 2, who warn that this is not your father's DSA, but rather an organization overtaken by a radical cabal with a politically poisonous agenda (reality: true, but possible to take too far).

• In another camp are the Warmongers—the media, the Republican party, and the venomous Venn diagram overlap between them, Fox News. They're like Ares in the Greek myth of the Golden Apple of Discord: rushing to the field of battle at Troy to stoke bloodshed on all sides (i.e., mainstream media wants ratings, Republicans want Democratic Party infighting, and Fox News wants both…reality is that there is some intra-party strife, but not an abnormal amount).

• And finally, there are the Peacemakers, which includes voices as disparate as Adam Jentleson of the ,3 The Atlantic’s David Frum (somewhat),4 and of Run for Something.5 Their message boils down to: “Did you notice the giant kleptocratic menace breaking the country that we have to defeat in sixty-nine days? How about we focus on that?” (reality: they are 100% right, but they do tend to gloss over the longer-term problem6).

So what does the whole animal look like? The DSA is gaining a bit of steam (but as hangers-on, not drivers). There is a deadly Trojan Horse lurking inside it. Democrats do need to keep the backbiting contained. And there is a needful reckoning ahead, with a short list of people who can lead it.

In short, there is a cancer on the Democratic Party, but it is contained and treatable. It needs eventual surgery, not emergency chemotherapy.

1) Yes, Progressives Are Doing Better. The DSA, Not So Much.

Media stories about the “rise of the left” tend to conflate who, exactly, is rising. And there’s an important distinction.

The success rate among the relatively few federal, statewide, and state legislative candidates where the Democratic Socialists of America have actually made an official endorsement has been fairly low both this year and across recent elections (see table below).7 Do you see a 2026 surge?

The Brookings Institution found the same pattern: only 29 candidates received a national DSA endorsement this year, and fewer than half won their congressional/statewide primaries, so they lost more than they won even in the bluest seats (Brookings said the the factional battle is "more like a skirmish than a war.")8

But looking at Bernie Sanders-affiliated Our Revolution as a proxy for progressives, Ballotpedia data shows something different. Back in 2018, their endorsed candidates lost 62 primaries and 26 general elections, against only 6 general election wins. Ouch. In 2026 primaries, their endorsed candidates have done way better: advancing 28 times and losing 16 so far.

What can we conclude?

• Progressives are indeed performing a lot better within the Democratic Party than they were eight years ago.9

• DSA members aren’t really all that much more successful. It feels like they’re ascendant because they’ve won some high-profile Congressional primaries, but in the 2018 cycle, left-wing challengers (DSA or not) beat two incumbent members of Congress in primaries. In 2020 it was 3. This cycle, it’s been 4. Not exactly an explosion.

Just as important is the why. Progressives are doing better based in large part on Democratic voters’ frustration, anger, and desire for change. Polling shows that Democrats want candidates who will loudly fight Trump and shake up the status quo10—and it’s a lot easier to claim the change mantle as a progressive (and sometimes intentionally conflate the idea of being a fighter with being more liberal, or being part of the derided “establishment” with being more moderate).11

But that’s not about policy or ideology. As summed it up in his July 7 article, “Democrats want fighters, not socialists.”

The bottom line is that the numbers don’t support the idea that the DSA is rising. Rather, Democratic voters have become more open to what we can call mainstream progressive positions, and they have rewarded progressive candidates for representing change and for their angry opposition to Trump. At the same time, figures like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders have normalized the “Democratic Socialist” label for Democratic voters, so they hear it merely as “very progressive.” There’s no negative sting in it anymore. But they don’t have a special affinity for the DSA, or understand what DSA-branded candidates actually stand for that is all that different.

Which is a good thing from the DSA’s perspective, because what the organization stands for is very different than even a few years ago.

2) The True Story of the DSA: Meet the New Boss

There’s a detailed backstory here, and I’ve included a condensed timeline below—all based on widely-reported sources that you can see and verify—but if you want the TL:DR, here’s a plain English summary:

Unbeknownst even to most members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and under the noses of many reporters who are only too happy to conflate progressives, democratic socialists, and the Democratic Socialists of America (which the DSA itself encourages), a cabal of radical, communist-affiliated activists have taken over leadership of the DSA and driven the adoption of a controversial, extreme platform and political stance that openly praises communist dictatorships, takes the side of Russia in Ukraine, withdraws the U.S. from NATO, aims to abolish all prisons and law enforcement, advocates completely open borders, eliminates our national defense entirely, removes the election of Presidents, adopts an absolutist position against any support for Israel, and advocates for state ownership of industry. People who fail to go along are subject to being purged.

As a result, the DSA is now led by a sect that holds positions that most progressives who affiliate with the Democratic Party would soundly reject, and that was never formally ratified by its broader membership. They no longer endorse AOC, and opposed the Democratic Party’s most recent presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. They are no longer Democrats in any meaningful sense. Indeed, there is strong evidence that they are overcome by communist activists who are using the Democratic Party’s ballot access to introduce their parasitic infection of the DSA into the halls of American government. In fact, the strategy even has a name—the “dirty break”—under which this group will amass enough power through Democrats to be a force in government, and then divorce from the Democrats entirely.

3) What Should We Do About It?

Nothing, for now. The peacemakers are right: Democrats need to put first things first. We have 69 days to go until a midterm election where our entire system of government is under a threat unlike anything we’ve seen before. Even with all of the momentum going our way (see my most recent Midterm HQ, below), the margins are too thin for us to play with by potentially alienating a big swath of our voters.

But why would calling out and breaking with this new, rancid DSA—which counts a formal membership of only 120,000 people—alienate our voters? Because of that haze of confusion about progressives, democratic socialists, and the DSA leadership.

The danger is far greater than in 2016, where as many as 12% of Bernie Sanders primary voters switched over to Trump in the general, and the number of Jill Stein voters exceeded the Trump margin in the key swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In 2016 the kinds of voters who were attracted to Sanders in the primary and Trump in the general were not so much Democrats as true election free agents, with only 35% having voted for Obama in 2012.12 Jill Stein voters were similar, and subsequent voter analysis suggested that if she hadn’t been on the ballot, about half would have simply stayed home rather than vote for Clinton.

But in 2026, “Democratic Socialists” have been so mainstreamed among Democrats that a focused attempt to break with the DSA would fail. The nuance required to explain to progressives that “we only mean this small group of radicals” and not all Democratic Socialists or even all progressives would be buried in the din of midterm political communications, while Fox News would gleefully play the role of war god. All many progressive Democratic voters will hear is more of the same internecine sniping that we’ve seen all year and that the media has elevated.

4) Why Democrats Still Need to Act Soon

The historic model is the ancient Greek city states who had to defeat the Persian menace before fighting amongst themselves. Because after this election, fight we must.

Trump has become so politically toxic that we can still win the midterm battle despite our DSA Achilles Heel. But good gravy, we can’t carry this millstone around our neck in anything but the most advantageous political climate, and we may not have one in 2028. Even if the true number of DSA members is tiny, their political impact as a proof point of everything Republicans want to tar Democrats with is massive.

Look at this recent I&I/TIPP polling13 on the actual planks of the DSA platform (note that the pollster broke each down by ideology, and all were net negative among all groups, even self-described liberals, with Independent voters consistently being the most net negative):

As Politics Editor put it last week:

Over the weekend, DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer went on Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream to tout the group’s “Workers Deserve More” platform. Asked calmly and non-confrontationally about some of the most radical planks—including “replace the Presidency and the Supreme Court” and “abolish prisons”—Romer cheerfully agreed so pithily that she greatly simplified the job of the GOP’s 30-second ad-makers.

Democrats don’t have the time or the bandwidth over the next 69 days for the delicate surgery required to remove this cancerous lesion. Starting November 4, they do.

And the good news is that they don’t have that far to go.

The so-called “establishment” is keeping the big tent wide open. After DSA-aligned (but not formal member) Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Senate primary, the DSCC (run by ultra-establishment Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand) issued a forceful endorsement, despite El-Sayed having called for Schumer's ouster from leadership.

At the same time, progressive leaders have taken steps to move on from “peak woke” and show more flexibility on their most aspirational policy ideas. As ’s Ben Krauss detailed yesterday:

AOC no longer uses pronouns in her social media bio. But this was also the first session of Congress when she did not introduce a resolution supporting the Green New Deal. Abdul El-Sayed and Peggy Flanagan, two of the Left’s favored Senate candidates, aren’t using the word Latinx. But they also don’t advocate for decriminalizing border crossings — which was once a defining left-wing immigration position. Climate policy was the central organizing issue on the Left in 2020, but it is largely absent inside the faction today — even the DSA House candidates running in deep blue districts hardly mention it.

AOC has even started the conceptual separation from the national DSA. On ABC's This Week on August 9, Jonathan Karl asked if she's still a DSA member. Her answer: "Of the New York City chapter, yes…it's kind of like your local union chapter."

All that remains, post-election, is for progressive leaders like AOC, Sanders, and Zohran Mamdani to pull the favored move of daters in a doomed relationship: break up with them before they break up with you. After all, if the communist cabal is using Democrats before a “dirty break” maneuver, why not make a clean break first? Especially since the DSA needs AOC more than AOC needs the DSA.

So dump them: publicly, convincingly, and deftly.

It will work better coming from a trusted progressive voice than a clearly centrist one, like the thinktank Third Way which recently undertook a $15 million anti-DSA messaging program…and it runs less of a risk of acting like broad chemotherapy rather than a targeted excision.

There’s even a model for how to pull it off. When the incendiary, anti-America comments of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright came to light in 2008, Barack Obama gave the perfect political response in a timeless speech in Philadelphia. He achieved the Solomon-like compromise of denouncing what Wright had said while not completely disowning the man, and explaining the context for his anger and frustration.14 AOC has the intelligence and oratorical chops to do something similar—not to mention the vested personal interest if she indeed has interest in running for Senate or President.

So that’s the plan. Hang on ‘til the midterms. Fight like hell, and fight together. Keep the big tent, but remove the cancer. And move on to 2028.

Share

2

The Next Move

Democratic Socialists vs. Social Democrats

Read more

a month ago · 187 likes · 116 comments · Garry Kasparov

5

Amanda Litman

The Democratic Party civil war makes me want to throw my phone into the sea

Read more

24 days ago · 96 likes · 31 comments · Amanda Litman

Subscribe now

But first, I appeared on Bloomberg News on their outstanding Balance of Power politics show on Thursday, alongside Republican Main Street Partnership President & Chief Executive Officer Sarah Chamberlain. We talked about the breaking news of big ratings switches in key Senate races, a key White House aide leaving, the potential for problems with Congress (or even increased risk of a shutdown), and the Clarity Act. You can see the 8 minute clip on YouTube here:

Now, for this week’s Political Rehab

This week, Matt and I break down Jon Ossoff’s remarkably effective political move: one line about Natalie Harp sent Google searches for her soaring 5,000%, triggered an immediate MAGA backlash and turned a little-known Trump aide into a national story. If Ossoff wanted attention, MAGA gave him more than he could have bought.

Then it’s Mickey versus Donald as Disney sues the administration—and suddenly the company that once paid Trump to go away looks ready for a fight.

On the USS Lincoln, sailors are reporting food shortages, broken plumbing, hygiene problems and collapsing morale after a grueling deployment. Trump says they have not been deployed nearly long enough. Pete Hegseth dismisses the reports. For an administration that talks constantly about supporting the military, this is an ugly story with nowhere to hide.

And in Florida, Democratic socialist Angie Nixon crushes Alex Vindman despite being massively outraised. Socialist surge? Protest vote? Primary voters sending the establishment a giant middle finger? Either way, somebody in Democratic politics needs a drink.

In The Battlefield, Alaska flashes another Republican warning sign, Trump-endorsed candidates keep losing, a Democrat wins in a district Trump carried by 18 points, and GOP campaigns face an ugly question: when does loyalty to Trump become a liability? Republicans finally get a slightly better week in the numbers, but the trapdoor underneath them is still very much open.

Plus, a Dose of Hope for everyone who prefers coffee to cardio: researchers say coffee drinkers may have less body fat and more muscle, and scientists are testing a pill designed to mimic some of the benefits of exercise.

And because apparently regular robots were not enough, scientists are now building microscopic light-powered robots that can swim through liquid, hunt bacteria and potentially deliver drugs with remarkable precision.

It’s PTI meets The Daily Show for politics: fast, sharp, funny, and built for people who want to understand the madness without becoming part of it.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Share

Get more from Matt Robison in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

politics editor Bill Scher joins me to break down the document tearing the Democratic Party apart.

Also, we hit why the polls have been so darn wrong...again. Bill published a column this week on the new CBS News/YouGov poll, and its finding is the thread running through this whole conversation: liberals and moderates agree on far more than anyone admits. Majorities will raise their own taxes for healthcare, education, food assistance, even housing. They agree the wealthy don't pay their fair share. And then you say the word "socialism" and the coalition falls apart.

Which brings us full circle back to the DSA, and the intriguing idea that the fight consuming the Democratic Party right now may be a battle over branding that both sides have an incentive to keep going.\

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video!

Here’s the weekly Midterm HQ report: all the most important numbers, news, and analysis in one place. If you like this, articles like yesterday’s “Trump Is Breaking the Constitution. The Supreme Court Is Breaking the Republic” or my weekly shows including the Tuesday live stream with people like and or the Friday Political Rehab show, please consider subscribing, or showing your support with a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

Toplines for the Week

Republicans finally won a week! Trump seemed to find a floor on his approval ratings for now (whether there’s a hidden staircase to the basement remains to be seen).

But the bigger (and much scarier for the GOP) thing that came into play this week is the possibility of a political tipping point ahead. It’s looking more and more like individual Republican candidates will be put to the exact same question that Democrats faced in 2010 (which I painfully lived through—and I’ll get into what we learned)…one for which there were no good answers: do they jump ship and try to openly break from their party leader/brand?

Midterm HQ Weekly Dashboard: Week of August 17, 2026

The Structural Picture

This was a mixed week with a slight R tilt. Trump’s net approval seemed to find a (temporary?) floor, and his net approval among independents seemed to find that floor and bounce:

Of course, that could be a dead cat bounce…but the key point is that per ’s chart below, Trump’s net approval has been pretty stable for three weeks now, and after a July bump, is back to its previous May low point.

Could he/the GOP rally? Not impossible, but Trump is in such deeply negative territory that he would need a political miracle to cut the approval gap in half even to -10, and that would only wind the approval clock back to a year ago when he was in his post “liberation Day” slump.

It’s also worth noting that the RCP and Silver Bulletin generic ballot averages have now converged to within a tenth of a point of each other (D+6.7 vs. D+6.8), adding weight to the notion that the “true” number is awfully close to 2018’s landslide territory (RCP final polling average +7.5).

Still…an improvement is an improvement. So the past week was overall a touch better for Republicans than Democrats.

What Moved This Week

House: Charlie Cook shifted three Republican-held seats from Solid Republican to Likely Republican: OH-10 (Mike Turner), OH-15 (Mike Carey), and CO-03 (Jeff Hurd). Wake me up when they get to Lean. But there’s some interesting reasoning on why he made the change, see below.

Senate: no Cook changes. Larry Sabato moved Florida from Likely Republican to Safe Republican after Angie Nixon’s primary win. Don’t shoot the messenger: he’s just working from the data that says a far-left progressive won’t do as well in this kind of political terrain. This doesn’t measurably change the Senate map, but it does give Republicans another DSA poster child to highlight.

Governors: no Cook changes. But we’re getting enough polls to get an initial look at where big governor’s races stand. Dems won’t mind these positive margins from RCP:

Number That Caught My Eye/Story You May Have Missed

This week I’m combining two of my standard categories to talk about a bigger emerging story: the possibility that the Republican Party will soon hit a tipping point that will force its candidates into a painful, Princess Bride-esque choice between two goblets filled with poison.

I feel their pain. As a Congressional chief of staff to a member of Congress running for the U.S. Senate in 2010, we faced this kind of no-way-out dilemma. Brutal.

Let’s look at what happened recently and where that lands Republicans…

Read more

Rarely has television nailed political truth so well as the first episode of The West Wing’s seventh season, in which communications pros explain how to avoid “accepting the premise.” It’s a trap that political operatives know well: reporters’ questions often harbor inherent assumptions that are easy to miss and deserve to be challenged. Failure to notice them—i.e., accepting the premise—leads down a road to logical doom.

In recent months, there’s been a gusher of media stories about President Donald Trump defying the Supreme Court. A Washington Post story last week titled “Trump refuses to back down as Supreme Court blocks major policies” is a good example:

The president is seeking ways around rulings on tariffs, birthright citizenship and the Fed. Experts say the moves don’t signal outright defiance, but they push the court’s limits. Over the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has made it clear that he will not take Supreme Court decisions as the final word on some of his most cherished priorities.

Political figures from both parties have chimed in with alarm about Trump’s attempts to defy the highest court.1 Here’s Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) from an earlier story in 2025: “The courts obviously are . . . the branch of our government that calls balls and strikes….the judiciary is the one that resolves some of the differences that often occur between executive and legislative branches.”

So…did you spot the hidden premise?

The Judicial Supremacy Fallacy

Don’t be too hard on yourself if you didn’t—it’s something that’s so drummed into us from middle school onward that we never think of it.

The premise is something most of us take as a given:

The Supreme Court has the final say on what is constitutional and what is not.

But that is not actually in the Constitution. Most of us even learned that somewhere along the way too. The principle of “judicial review”—the idea that federal judges determine whether laws are unconstitutional—was only established via the Supreme Court’s decision in Marbury v. Madison in 1803, fifteen years after the Constitution was officially ratified.

In other words, federal courts’ ability to bless or disallow laws is a power that the Supreme Court inferred in the text of the Constitution and then arrogated to themselves. Yet, there is at least strong historic support for the idea that many of the framers supported judicial review—and it has become a deeply embedded and valuable feature of our system. But that’s not the end of the story.

Because what most of us didn’t learn in school was that even after Marbury v. Madison, the idea that the Supreme Court had the final word on constitutional questions—so-called “judicial supremacy”—was neither asserted by justices nor accepted by other branches of government. With good reason, since the framers did not believe in it. As James Madison said in 1788, giving final ownership of what was constitutional to the courts “makes the Judiciary Department paramount in fact to the Legislature, which was never intended and can never be proper.”2

This was a further power that the Supreme Court handed to themselves. And they did it not in the hazy, formative years of the republic when there was ongoing experimentation with our brand new form of self-government, but more than 150 years later in Cooper v. Aaron in 1958.

The upshot, as legal historian Larry Kramer, later dean of Stanford Law School, wrote in “The People v. Judicial Activism,”3 is that:

Broad acceptance of judicial supremacy is of surprisingly recent vintage, a development that really only began in the 1960s and did not come to fruition until the 1980s.

Hence, the whole idea—accepted by our current Senate Majority Leader and most Americans who have even a blurry recollection of civics class—that the Supreme Court is the final referee on constitutional disputes is not some bedrock principle woven into the fabric of our country by white-wigged forebears sweating in a Philadelphia hall. It’s about as old as Ellen DeGeneres.

Of course, just because a principle of American government is new doesn’t mean it’s bad. In this case though, our self-induced fog about judicial supremacy is coming with a growing cost.

The Hand You Hold

Like many Democrats, liberals, even moderate Republicans, I grew up thinking of the Supreme Court’s final say-so as a good thing, because Supreme Court decisions were so often tied to victories in righteous struggles.

The same Cooper v. Aaron in which the Supreme Court handed itself ultimate authority over the Constitution was a ruling that denied the school board of Little Rock, Arkansas in its attempts to delay racial desegregation. We would not have marriage for gay Americans (or for Americans of different races for that matter), nondiscrimination in the workplace for trans Americans, or even the right to remain silent when arrested for all Americans without broad acceptance of the notion that the Supreme Court has the final word on what the Constitution decrees.

But judicial supremacy is both inherently problematic in concept (as many prominent legal scholars have written4) and increasingly noxious in practice.

The conceptual problem, as Columbia University legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron wrote in the Yale Law Journal,5 is that: “judicial review is democratically illegitimate...[and] inappropriate as a mode of final decision making in a free and democratic society.” While noting the overwhelming importance of protecting individual rights against prejudiced majorities, he points out that there is a more democratic alternative that, in theory, can produce just as desirable results:

In countries that do not allow legislation to be invalidated in this way, the people themselves can decide finally, by ordinary legislative procedures, whether they want to permit abortion, affirmative action, school vouchers, or gay marriage. They can decide among themselves whether to have laws punishing the public expression of racial hatred or restricting candidates’ spending in elections. If they disagree about any of these matters, they can elect representatives to deliberate and settle the issue by voting in the legislature.

This foundational issue should resonate with liberals. The instinct that the Supreme Court’s last word is the protector of the individual rights of oppressed minorities is a relatively recent phenomenon. Historically, its rulings have cut both ways. Here is the great emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, reacting to the deplorable decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in his first inaugural address:6

“if the policy of the Government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

And the judicial supremacy status quo should be equally odious to conservatives. If you believe in originalism, strict constructionism, or any other “ism” that has at its core a belief that what we are allowed to do in our country is explicitly written out in the Constitution, the idea that the appointed Supreme Court gets the final say should be a nonstarter—especially if you also believe, as many conservatives do, that power should be kept closest to the people via their elected representatives wherever possible.

Indeed, the basic conservative complaint about the Roe v. Wade decision for decades was that it was built on an inferred right to privacy that Justice William O. Douglas had originally found (earlier, in Griswold) within what he called the "penumbras, formed by emanations" of rights enumerated in the Constitution. The fact that judicial supremacy is itself an inferred power—found nowhere in the text, emanating from the Constitution's structure like Athena from the head of Zeus—and that today's conservatives reject the Roe inference while treating the supremacy inference as an article of faith is the essence of legal irony.

The practical problem is more stark: the Supreme Court is now the most broken of our three branches of government. It operates with impunity, answerable to no one, issuing decisions so blatantly political and thick with motivated legal reasoning7 (or a raft of decisions via its “shadow docket”8 that contain no reasoning at all, because why should they have to explain themselves) that the public now views it as a totally partisan entity, one in which they have even lower faith than in the current president.9

It polices its own corruption—meaning it openly allows corruption, especially in the case of Justice Clarence Thomas’ bottomless appetite for lavish gifts from right-wing billionaires and his wife’s deeply conflicted business interests and joysticking the project to subvert the 2020 election.10 That also includes the alleged abuses and conflicts from Samuel Alito11 and John Roberts and their spouses,12 and even the more minor alleged financial improprieties by Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.13

And it is their rulings that have made the executive branch even more broken by giving Donald Trump near-total immunity and the ability to pursue as much graft and personal enrichment as he wants.

The idea at the heart of the operating system of the republic is that the people hold the power. They bequeath it temporarily. Renewal is applied for, and earned through performance. The Supreme Court is the exception, a body that has abused its own power and strayed so far from the will and confidence of the people that it has lost the benefit of the doubt, and is rapidly losing legitimacy. The fact that if an election for the justices were held today they would be drummed out of the judiciary says a lot about how far matters have progressed.

We have become so conditioned to believe that the Supreme Court hands down its rulings from an American Mount Sinai—developed such learned helplessness about our ability to do anything about rulings that amount to overt political power grabs—that every act of the supposedly co-equal branches of government has made us like fans at a World Cup match after a goal, waiting to see if the functionaries in the mystic VAR box will allow it.

We need to remember who’s actually in charge here. We need to stop accepting their premise.

Article One

This is not to say that the President is justified in ignoring court decisions. The executive branch should no more act with impunity than the judicial branch, and it is reprehensible when Trump acts outside the law. Judicial review is, and must remain, a counterweight to an executive that, especially in the current hands, has run amok.

Subscribe now

Nor is this to say that the Democratic Socialists of America are onto something in their platform’s radical call to abolish the Electoral College and have Congress elect the President and Supreme Court.14 That’s constitutional hokum. It creates a concentration of power, not a check. Congress should have a greater say in the Constitution’s meaning, not absolute control over the other branches.

But the Supreme Court needs to be reined in. And we need to break out of the mental cage that only the Court can undo its own corruption and antidemocratic accretion of absolute power.

The way to do it is for Congress to re-assert its right under Article One of the Constitution to organize the Court, and also to have a firm hand in interpreting what the Constitution says.

There are four basic steps to get there— the first two of them necessary triage, the second two a deeper corrective surgery.

Step one is for the Congress to enact staggered 18-year Supreme Court terms, also known as Supreme Court term limits.15 This would mean that each President would get exactly two appointments during his or her term. The regular rotation through active duty on the Court would mean lower-temperature confirmation hearings and no more McConnell shenanigans to subvert the President’s nominating role.16 This reform would not get at the underlying supremacy problem, but it would undo the “buy and hold” strategy of creating a multi-decade block of judicial extremists, and thereby dial back the court’s increasing radicalism and impunity.

Step two is for Congress to clean up the rest of the Court’s practices, and extend the reform to the entire judiciary. Transparency, ethics rules, and shadow docket reform would be must-dos. Again, this does not address the supremacy problem. But it is still critical path. Judicial review is like currency: it only has power if people believe in its value. Restoring faith in the judiciary would help to restore the Supreme Court’s proper place as a check on the other two branches through force of the people’s trust, not fiat.

Step three involves Congress reasserting its role in determining the meaning of the Constitution. But it is worth pausing for caution here,17 because this could take different forms, and a new congressional leadership (one can pray) after the 2026 midterm elections should consult carefully with legal scholars about the right options and the right order of operations. Suffice it to say, Congress has powerful tools at its disposal, including the ability to remove certain laws from federal court jurisdiction entirely.18

Step four is the most important, and the hardest. Congress is the tool, but the power is supplied by the people. Voters need to make this matter. Voters need to care. Since Republicans are currently benefitting overwhelmingly from Supreme Court dysfunction, their voters and their congressional representatives have much less incentive to intervene (note: I am not saying that Republicans are evil or that they don’t care about the long-term well-being of the country, I am merely saying that it is very difficult to get anyone to act against their immediate self-interest, regardless of their principles). So it falls to Democrats to make this a core issue. And since no reform can pass over President Trump’s veto (there is no 2026 blue wave high enough to create a veto-proof congressional majority), we’re talking about 2028 here.

In short, Democratic Party voters must demand of their congressional and presidential candidates in 2028 that Supreme Court reform is a must-do. It will not be easy. There will be plenty of voices pushing for what is euphemistically called “expansion” but really amounts to court packing—a penny-wise, pound-foolish expedient that would help undo the Court’s recent extreme overreach but which would worsen partisan warfare and degrade faith in the judiciary in a way that the term limit plan would not.19 There will also be massive pushback from what remains of the MAGA faction for any action at all.

But ultimately, this is what the Constitution actually calls for. The document is not a guarantee but a challenge. It demands that each generation make our system work. The question now is, will we answer?

This week, we start with the craziest story of recent memory: Trump secretly evacuated Air Force One through a catering container while his own staff flew into a live missile threat as decoys. Then we hit:

• Karoline Leavitt is out as White House Press Secretary after a scandal-plagued tenure.

• AOC walks back "Woke 1.0."

• I make the case that the Supreme Court — not just Trump — is the most broken branch of government.

• Paramount offers to sell CNN to settle a 12-state antitrust suit

Then we hit this week's Battlefield midterm scorecard, and a Dose of Hope on Flock camera surveillance and a New Jersey meteorite carrying the building blocks of life.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 – Cold open: Trump's escape, Leavitt's exit, AOC's walkback, and the Supreme Court fight
01:00 – The Crate Escape: how Trump secretly evacuated Air Force One
02:00 – Matt Wylie defends the Secret Service, questions the intelligence failure
03:00 – "Party of Lincoln to Slinkin'" — was this self-inflicted by the Qatari jet gift?
04:00 – Karoline Leavitt is leaving the White House
05:00 – Leavitt's record of false claims from the podium
06:00 – Treating the press as the enemy, not the adversary
07:00 – AOC says "Woke 1.0 was crazy" — real reckoning or 2028 positioning?
08:00 – The DSA's identity crisis and the Almost Famous comparison
09:00 – Trump pushes the limits of Supreme Court rulings on tariffs, birthright citizenship, and the Fed
10:00 – Robison's counterintuitive take: challenging the premise of judicial review
11:00 – Why the Supreme Court may be the most broken branch of government
13:00 – The originalism irony: Roe v. Wade and judicial review
14:00 – Paramount offers to sell CNN to settle a 12-state antitrust suit
16:00 – Why state attorneys general could be the new check on federal power
17:00 – THE BATTLEFIELD: this week's midterm scorecard
17:00 – Minnesota & Wisconsin primaries: affordability drives turnout
19:00 – Republicans pour $6M into Michigan; Alaska and Iowa in play
21:00 – Trump's vaccine executive order and the affordability distraction
23:00 – The generic ballot shifts toward Democrats
24:00 – Nate Silver's likely-voter model and special election turnout
25:00 – This week's verdict: slight lean Democrat
27:00 – July jobs report: economy sheds 23,000 jobs
28:00 – DOSE OF HOPE: Flock camera surveillance sparks bipartisan backlash
30:00 – DOSE OF HOPE: a New Jersey meteorite, panspermia, and Project Hail Mary
33:00 – Sign-off

Subscribe now

Note: I’m on the road—a short family trip before the school schedule starts—but I didn’t want to totally skip out on writing and shows, especially with just over 80 days to go for Midterm HQ. So I’m keeping this article a little shorter and making it fully free this week. We’ll also do an edition of Political Rehab tomorrow at 12:30 as usual with all of the fast, tight, fun readout on the major news of the week / movement on the political battlefield. If you like what you’re getting here, now would be a great time to share this post and ask some friends to subscribe!

Subscribe now

Share

Toplines for the week

It was a quieter week—what with all of Congress recessed and with the number of race-moving primaries diminishing—but there was still action worth paying attention to…taken together, what we saw in the past week adds confidence to Democrats’ prospects of winning the House and key governorships, and puts a political Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on the real possibility of them taking the Senate.

Midterm HQ Weekly Dashboard: Week of August 10, 2026

The Structural Picture

Mostly flat, but check out how ’s generic ballot is starting to catch up to RCP’s. As I described last week, RCP polling averages can be a bit of a bucking bronco—more statistical ups and downs—but they can sometimes be a leading indicator of a coming trend. And it started to look like a case of the latter this week as Silver Bulletin’s generic ballot kept heading north toward territory that RCP explored last week. Overall, the convergence strongly suggests that we’re somewhere in plus-7 range for Dems, which is very strong. I’ll also note that Nate Silver made the same point I made two weeks ago—that the coming switchover to more polls of Likely Voters (vs. Registered Voters) would probably shift things further toward Dems—though (hat tip) he developed it further on the basis of turnout patterns. So the take-home is: two sets of averages painting the same bright blue picture, with a good prospect that it will shortly get bluer.

On the other hand, Republicans had to be happy that gas prices sank a bit this week. But that probably doesn’t matter a ton for economic perceptions yet. For one thing, Americans are used to a some week-to-week summer bounce. For another, we all know that perceptions of prices are chunky (I was going to write “quantized” and make a physics metaphor and then talk about the fundamental nature of the universe…but I suspect most readers are at max nerd-content capacity already, and I was supposed to be keeping this short)...they notice big changes, not the equivalent of pocket change when they’re paying sixty bucks for a fill-up. So if the first number on the price is a still “4,” there’s a tendency to glaze over. But third and most of all, there’s an active debate about whether Americans’ economic perception cake is pretty much already baked at this point. More on that below.

What Moved This Week

House: Last week, we called the domestic abuse allegations against Ohio’s 7th District Rep. Max Miller a pre-move on the race ratings. This week came the move: Cook switched the district by two full categories from Likely Republican to Toss-Up. Look, the House is already edging up against a 90% likelihood to flip according to Silver Bulletin and prediction markets. So it’s not a game-changer. Still, one more seat in the target zone sure doesn’t hurt.

Senate: No Cook changes this week. Two things worth flagging from polling: Mary Peltola now leads the RCP average in Alaska for the first time. And last week we noted that James Talarico had three consecutive leads in highly credible polls. Now it’s four. On the tougher side, Abdul El-Sayed comes out of a narrow Michigan primary win trailing in the first RCP average. Not a backbreaker, but in line with the prior expectation that he might be a slightly weaker nominee than Rep. Haley Stevens.

Governors: No new Cook changes this week. The major action was of course the razor-thin, come-from-behind win in the Wisconsin primary for David Crowley—a moderate and the chief executive of Milwaukee County—over DSA member Francesca Hong, who had been leading in polls by double digits less than a week ago. Her lead was so overwhelming earlier in the race that Crowley had suspended his campaign just over a month back. Then, once other moderates dropped out, he re-entered in order to try to put up some resistance to ending up with a DSA nominee.

Yet in a Marquette Law School poll in the days after Crowley’s re-emergence, Hong led with 38 percent over former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes at 16 percent and Crowley at just 7 percent. National Democrats were pitching a not-so-private fit over a potential general election disaster—something I’ve been noting here for weeks. So this is a surprising result, and a lot of the coverage on Wednesday focused on why the polls were so wrong. But really, it’s not that shocking considering that primary polls are notoriously unreliable (general elections can be too…I’ve personally managed a congressional race where we were down ~10 points a week out and won) and Hong had been catching a ton of bad press in recent weeks. Not to mention that DSA leaders like Senator Bernie Sanders had sort of let her dangle in the wind, unendorsed and unfriended. Either way, it seems like Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief, and even the DSA seems content to not be judged in the general election on the performance of a candidate they considered mid at best.

Number That Caught My Eye: Democrats Cross 50% for the Senate

Polymarket’s odds of Democrats winning the Senate jumped to 53% this week, up from 45% — the first time that prediction market has made Democrats the favorite all cycle.

But why the sudden change? And what does it mean?

Well, since we didn’t have a major primary outcome or news event that could have plausibly moved things, the top culprit is probably releasing his full 2026 midterm forecast (FLIPR) earlier this week, putting Democrats at 57% to win the Senate and 87% to win the House. Silver’s model still carries real weight among the kind of people looking to make bets, and it’s reasonable to think that traders updated toward it, especially in a market as thin as Senate control futures.

That said, there’s some market-based maneuvering (read: gambling) behavior too. If you read the gobbledegook on Prediction News about the sudden Dem Senate spike, it suggests that there may be a few big bets moving the numbers here, rather than the “Wisdom of crowds.”

And that brings up the question of whether it’s worth paying to prediction markets at all. A 2025 Vanderbilt University study found that “Polymarket was superior to polling in predicting the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, particularly in swing states.”1 On the other hand, a separate set of Vanderbilt researchers also looked at over 2,500 political prediction markets across the final five weeks of that campaign and found that Polymarket predictions were “better than chance” only 67% of the time (other betting markets did fare better).2

One key point is that the accuracy of down-ballot and Congressional markets was weaker in part because of thinner trading volume…which is exactly the issue we could have with this Senate prediction. There’s only been just under $4 million wagered on it. By contrast there’s been $275 million wagered on who will be the next Prime Minister of Ethiopia,3 and $1 billion on the Dem presidential nominee in 2028.

The bottom line is that there’s some signal buried in here, and if a broader “crowd” forms to place bets in the coming months, that signal could get stronger. Prediction markets do have some value as an analytical tool. But what we saw this week was most likely a combination of a few bigger bets and a bunch of other people paying attention to Nate Silver—in which case, what really mattered here was Nate Silver, not the market number. Especially since people paying attention (ahem) have been arguing that Dems are the favorites to win the Senate for about four months now.

But hey, Silver’s model has a strong track record, so even hearing an echo of his message is still directionally right.

Story You May Have Missed: Voters Hate This Economy—Is that Baked In?

It was a bad week of economic news for Republicans:

• The economy shed ~23,000 jobs in July

• May and June were revised down by a combined 103,000

• Unemployment rate fell to 4.1%, but mainly because people stopped looking for work — labor force participation is at its lowest point since the pandemic.

• Wage growth slowed to 3.2% year-over-year — below the pace of inflation. That means people feel poorer.

• Prices rose 0.1 percent in July from a month earlier, and 3.4 percent from the previous year on a seasonally adjusted basis, as the Iran War keeps energy prices elevated.

So with voters’ economic perceptions so stunningly negative, the Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment still at close to its lowest level ever, and the real economy faring so poorly, here’s the question: is the economic cake baked at this point? I.E. are voters’ perceptions so set that there’s little chance of changing them in the next 80 or so days?

The short answer is: yes…mostly…probably.

Christopher Way, a political business cycle scholar at Cornell, says: “Research shows that it is economic performance in the first half of an election year that matters. After mid-summer, the economy is 'baked in' as far as the election is concerned. Voters have formed their impression; late swings, whether upwards or downwards, have small effects."

Add to that Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’ influential book Democracy for Realists. Bartels says that the basic finding is that real disposable income growth in the six months before Election Day is one of the single best predictors of an incumbent party’s fortunes, better than unemployment or GDP (and right now that growth is negative).

And one more brick in the wall: we know that economic perceptions are increasingly skewed by party affiliation.4 I mean, check out this CBS chart of the past 35 years:

And more voters are calling themselves Democrats or Democratic-leaning at this point…meaning they’re not going to feel good about a Trump economy no matter what.

So, it’s not a total lock. But a major take-home point from this week’s economic numbers is that we had been approaching the last-ditch moment for Trump and Republicans to change voter views on their economic performance.

Unless something radical, perhaps unprecedented, occurs, we are probably past it.

What to Watch Next Week

Senate Majority PAC just announced new polling showing the Kansas Senate race between GOP Sen. Roger Marshall and his Democratic opponent Adam Hamilton as a toss-up. Trump won Kansas by 16 points in 2024…so that’s surprising, but certainly not impossible in this environment. Still, polling is one thing, spending is another. And SMP has money, but not enough to just splash around anywhere. So watch closely if they spend. If they do, that’s a strong signal that they think this is real, and that we may have yet another close Senate race on our hands.

This came in our latest edition of Political Rehab — our political mashup of PTI and The Daily Show — featuring me (Matt Robison, former Chief of Staff to three Democratic Members of Congress) and Matt Wylie (a longtime Republican campaign strategist.

Our five stories in our weekly Rundown were the same story: Republicans at war with Republicans.

Subscribe now

• Trump's cabinet turned on itself in public — Jeanine Pirro's office dropped every reflecting pool vandalism case, and she and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum are now openly blaming each other. And Trump reportedly exploded at Pete Hegseth over severe missile and interceptor shortages, Hegseth blamed his own deputy, and Trump is threatening prison for whoever leaked it.

• The Max Miller situation and war of words inside the party turned even uglier.

• The online right turned on its own DHS Secretary, Markwayne Mullen, for the sin of saying "legal immigration" out loud.

• Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson convened a cabin meeting in Maine that has MAGA talking openly about a third party and a Carlson 2028 run.

• And Trump demanded the Senate cancel its August recess over the SAVE Act — only for John Thune to walk out the door anyway.

Then in The Battlefield:

• The generic ballot hits Democrats +7.2 — ahead of where they were at this point in 2018

• Abdul El-Sayed's Michigan primary win scrambles the Senate map

• and 61,000 Michigan Democrats voted for a candidate who had dropped out a month earlier.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

Share

Hey everyone—I’ve just had a huge influx of new subscribers this week after collaborating on articles/livestreams with Dan Perry, Ellie Leonard, and Glenn Kirschner—so welcome! This is my weekly Midterm HQ post where I read through all the news, polling, data, and insider analysis to give an honest, plain-English status readout on where we stand in the fight for the midterms.

If you already like what you’re getting here and want to support my work (and see full editions of Midterm HQ and other paywalled posts), you can use this link for a special offer: Worth Knowing at 1/2 off for the next year.

And if you just want to stick with the free version for now, that’s great! I am thrilled that you are here!

Subscribe now

Toplines for the week

If you want to know who had a better week in the midterm fight, the answer is easy: Democrats.

But that’s far from the whole story.

Because there was also a ton of “below the fold” news (gee…remember physical newspapers?) that’s worth considering: two House Republicans in ethics trouble, interesting contested primaries (including Dems’ left vs. center fights and a humiliating Trump loss), and a series of strategic and financial moves that show how both parties are adjusting to a rapidly evolving political and legal landscape.

So while we’ll take the usual weekly pulse below, this week was perhaps most interesting for the deeper maneuvering/lessons learned about American politics in 2026.

Midterm HQ Weekly Dashboard: Week of August 3, 2026

The Structural Picture

I won’t belabor it: this was another clear Dem win week. Last week, every single major midterm indicator went Democrats’ way. This week, it almost happened again, with the exception being a slight upward revision in consumer sentiment (I’m not including the just-over-one-penny decrease in gas prices…you can’t even get a penny anymore. In fact, does the “take a penny, leave a penny” bin still exist?).

Let’s talk about that RealClearPolling generic ballot figure. That is a huge jump for a polling average. And if Dems are truly sitting at +7.2, Republican members of Congress should update their LinkedIn resumes and Mike Johnson should see if that creationist museum he helped found wants him back as their lawyer.1 +7.2 is better than the Dems were on the same relative date in 2018 (when they eventually finished at +7.5 on election day and won 41 seats).

There is some nuance here. I include two different measures of generic ballot because at the Silver Bulletin weights the polls in his average,2 and RealClearPolling doesn’t. Neither approach is totally right or wrong: Silver’s method probably gets closer to the “true” long-term average by filtering out more random statistical noise; RCP will tend to bounce around a lot more because, like your most annoying ex, it has no filter. But it can pick up movement that might be real faster.

So: was there actually a rapid change in voter sentiment this week that shifted the election into Blue Tsunami territory? Or was there a more gentle drift (into territory that definitely still qualifies as a wave)? Most of the time the answer will be the latter. But sometimes these things build up and then the bottom drops out all at once, so you see a polling lurch. The rest of August will be worth monitoring to see if the movement sticks. If it does...yikes.

What Moved this Week

House: No Charlie Cook rating changes this week, but two House Republicans just hit real scandal trouble: Rep. Max Miller (OH-07) is facing an Ethics Committee referral over alleged domestic abuse, and separately, Rep. Chuck Edwards (NC-11) dropped his reelection bid after an Ethics Committee recommendation for censure. Cook rates Miller’s seat as “likely Republican,” but Edwards is only a “lean Republican.” And late-cycle swaps are generally not kind to the party that is trying to pull them off. So this week may represent pre-movement toward more truly gettable seats for Dems.

Senate: Cook made one change this week: Kansas from Solid Republican to Likely Republican. I mean, look…this is Kansas: home of a near-century Senate losing streak for Democrats. So I’m skeptical that this matters…yet. Also notable that James Talarico (D) now leads the Texas Senate race in the RCP polling average by 1 point after coming out ahead in three straight quality polls, including a Fox News RV sample that should have tilted more favorable to Republicans. The biggest headline was, of course, Michigan’s Senate primary resolving, with Abdul El-Sayed beating Rep, Haley Stevens by less than a point. More on that below.

Governors: No Cook rating changes.

Number That Caught My Eye

4%. That’s roughly the share of Michigan Democratic primary voters who voted for Mallory McMorrow—a candidate who dropped out of the race a full month ago.

Think about what that tells us about voters, paid media, and indeed, why we have Donald Trump as president at all.

Below the paywall: why that 4% figure is so revealing. What the big financial moves from each party this week tell us about how they are strategically adapting in real time, and who’s feeling bullish. What did this week’s results mean for the Dem civil war. And what to watch out for next week, especially in the Governor’s race that’s making Democrats most nervous.

Read more

Hey everyone—I’m going to once again have NO PAYWALL on this week’s Midterm HQ. Instead, I want to ask you to please consider a paid subscription. If you value what you’re getting here, I want to make it easy and—in keeping with the dominant election theme—affordable. For a very limited time, use this link to get Worth Knowing for $1/week.

Toplines for the week

We got two sets of valuable new information this week.

1. A pair of analyses from noted election analysts and , both of whom released detailed looks at U.S. House districts. The takeaway? The House map looks worse for Democrats than in 2024 (a bunch of gerrymandering will do that). But Kondik also counterintuitively concluded that, actually, for Dems the map might be almost…promising?!? More on that in the What Moved This Week section below.

2. A first for Midterm HQ: one side romped across all the structural indicators. More on that in The Structural Indicators below.

But the biggest news of the week was what didn’t happen, how that feeds into what I call the Burning Lottery Ticket Principle, and why it’s so bad for Republicans. More on that in the Story You May Have Missed.

Midterm HQ Weekly Dashboard: Week of July 27, 2026

The Structural Picture

Well…this is a first. In the time I’ve been doing Midterm HQ, this is the first week where every major indicator that does the predictive heavy lifting in midterm elections—presidential approval (I also separately track approval among Independents, and you can read more about why here) economic sentiment (I separately include gas prices as the most visible economic indicator for most voters), and the generic ballot—moved in the same direction. Check out the ↗ arrows.

Granted, there’s a little statistical noise in here—sometimes, by random chance, things will all row in the same direction.

But if you step back, this week fits into a clear and consistent story.

Subscribe now

• President Trump hit his second term net approval rating low of -20.2 on May 21.

• Then there were a string of more Republican-favorable polls flowing into the polling averages (some of which come from polling outfits whose outputs tend to skew slightly more Republican) that showed up as a slight recovery in June.

• Then, as more polls emerged in mid-late July, Trump slid back and is currently less than one percentage point above his floor.

Exact same pattern on the generic ballot. Dems’ peak came about a week later than Trump’s trough, on June 1; then they had a small June dip; and now we’re getting a solid July bounce-back. They’re currently about a percentage point under their apex.

One can debate whether something real happened in June, or whether it was just a bunch of Republican-leaning polls in a row.1 That’s actually the exact debate that’s been unfolding among the chattering classes over the past month about whether Democrats lost some of their early-summer momentum (something which ’s Amy Walter wrote about last week).2

The bottom line is, as of this week, Trump is back to his near all-time low, voters are back to their near-historic economic negativity, and Dems are back to their near 2026-cycle all-time high. If there was any loss of momentum, and not just a statistical phantom, as of the end of July it looks awfully small and very temporary.

But that’s not the real reason Dems definitively won the week. The biggest emerging dynamic right now involves a look inside how campaigns actually work (below in Story You May Have Missed)…

What Moved this Week

House: I usually use election analyst Charlie Cook as a baseline for ratings, and there were no Cook rating changes this week (another analyst did make changes, as I’ll discuss below), but as noted above, ’s brand-new Cook Partisan Voting Index (Cook PVI℠) scores for all 435 districts make for fascinating reading.3 The big takeaway: gerrymandering is a bitch: all that Trump-demanded partisan power-grabbing made the median House district about 2 points more Republican than before. But is that all bad news?!? Not necessarily! More on that after a quick Senate and Governor race check-in.

Senate: No rating changes from Cook—Democrats need to win a net of 4 seats to win control of the Senate. If you want to hear more from a stone-cold expert on our chances of doing that, check out my interview with Senate Majority PAC's Lauren French:

I should also note that the one competitive Senate race where there was any polling movement in the past week was in Georgia, where Senator Jon Ossoff now has an average lead of 7.6%, an increase of 2.1%. It’s been a heckuva month for Ossoff: he’s clearly picking up steam in his must-win Senate race, this morning, Sabato's Crystal Ball (the other source of ratings that I tend to use) moved his race from Leans Democrat to Likely Democrat, and he’s also getting a ton of presidential buzz—now second place in prediction markets on likelihood of being the 2028 Dem nominee

Governors: No rating changes. 16 D-leaning, 15 R-leaning, 5 toss-ups.

Number That Caught My Eye

So, as I mentioned above, the Cook PVI analysis says that the median House district has gotten 2 points redder since 2024. That sounds…bad. What’s worse, Sabato’s Crystal Ball analyst found the same exact thing: “The median House seat based on presidential performance, a shorthand way to measure the bias of the overall House map, became roughly 2 points more Republican.”

Is it time for Democrats to spit-take their arugula salads and weep? No! Because Kondik also says that, actually, the 2026 map may be even better for Dems than in the 2018 wave year.4

Whaaa?

Here’s the deal: both things can be true at the same time. Yes, the average House seat has shifted right (because a lot of Dem seats were gerrymandered out of existence), but the number of promising targets for Democrats is actually pretty much the same.

Kondik explains that what he (and Cook) basically do is measure “how a district votes relative to the nation…[we] set the president’s national share of the presidential vote as a midpoint, and then we categorize districts by how similar they are to that midpoint.”

So for example, if the country as a whole voted 50% for Trump in 2024, a district that voted 51% for the Republican would be R+1. A district that voted 46% for a Republican would be D+4. And so forth.

Critically, Kondik lays out a strong historical case for making R+4 a bright line…the level up to which Democrats have a reasonable chance of winning a House district.

SOOOOOO…put it all together and what you get is that in 2026, there are 234 House districts on that map that are R+4-or-bluer and therefore reasonable-probability targets—which is one MORE than the 233 that existed on the 2018 map…the map where Democrats flipped 41 seats. Here’s a quick shot of ’s math, if you want to double-check:

So yes, Republicans erased a lot of opportunities through redistricting. And yes, if Democrats win the House this year, it will almost certainly be with a narrower and more tenuous majority. But the House lane for 2026 is still wide open. And right on cue, Sabato moved five previously R-leaning seats to “toss-up” status this morning: FL-14, NC-1, NC-11, NY-17, and PA-8.

Story You May Have Missed: The Burning Lottery Ticket Principle

I was tempted to break down a piece from my former AlterNet/Raw Story editor John Stoehr about how Americans for Prosperity Action—the Koch-linked super PAC—found that in Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Montana, New Hampshire, and Michigan, a fifth of Republicans “are either saying they may stay home or are weighing voting for Democrats.”5 It’s significant and worth reading.

But instead, I want to talk about the real reason I think this week was a hands-down win for Democrats. It was a story we all missed because it didn’t happen.

Let me back up for a second. Here’s how most campaigns unfold on the inside.

Early on, you take a baseline poll to get a sense of your starting point and how various messaging exchanges between you and your opponent will affect the race. You assume that there will be some natural drift through Election Day (i.e., strongly partisan voters who are a little squishy tend to come home eventually). Altogether, this gives you a pretty good sense of where things will end up if both sides can pay to communicate roughly evenly, and barring any major outside events.

From there, campaign managers look for inflection points that could change the dynamic in the race. Inflection points are high voter-awareness moments like debates, major votes, or other significant news events that you can foresee. If you’re ahead, these are the pitfalls you need to get past. If you’re behind, these are the rare chances to change your fate.

Finally, smart strategists will look at all of the small wins that they hope to aggregate into making a difference; the equivalent of adding grains of sand to a scale every day in hopes that it tips. If you’re an incumbent member of Congress, for example, you aim for positive news stories in a key local paper about constituents you helped or money you brought back to the district. Or it might be organizing wins, local leader endorsements, daily press events. When I was a congressional chief of staff in swing districts, this was a lot of the job: trying to get everything right every day to wring out every ounce of political benefit that you could. Trying to add one more grain.

So what was the story that didn’t happen this past week?

No wins for Republican members of Congress in the form of big new votes on affordability. No major news events from their supposed allies in the White House to address what voters are most upset about: affordability and the Iran War.

So no inflection points. And probably no sand grains either.

If I were a Republican campaign manager, every lost day would be painful. We’re under 100 days to go now until Election Day, and every single one that passes with no major changes is a win for Democrats.

If you picture each day as a potential lottery ticket for the GOP—a chance to change the trajectory they are on in a major, or even a minor, way—the end of that day is like that lottery drawing coming up blank and that now-useless ticket getting lit on fire.

So while nothing horrible happened to Republicans politically in the past seven days, it’s also seven chances to change course that are up in smoke.

To be sure, this isn’t kneel-on-the-football time for Democrats either. We don’t just get to coast. But right now, a week of relative nothing—let alone a week where the structural indicators moved uniformly our way—is a big win.

What to Watch For Next Week

Michigan’s primary, Aug. 4—the Senate nomination and three competitive House primaries (MI-04, MI-07, MI-10) all resolve, and Democrats are watching that Senate primary with trepidation.

Share

This is an update to my article from June 8 titled, “The Coming Substack Collapse” in which I called for one small fix that could at least buy time. Last week, Substack made that fix, and they did an awesome job. This update explains what they did, why it’s great, and yet, why it’s just a stopgap—because there’s still a deep underlying problem that they need to address.

At the risk of spraining a shoulder patting myself on the back, I recently asked Substack to address a serious problem, and within six weeks, they did (alas, I know I wasn’t alone in raising this issue, so hopefully my rotator cuffs will stay intact).

In brief, in my June 8 article, I showed:

• Why the basic economics of Substack made it vulnerable to rapid, Jenga-like fall-apart

• How the growing integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated writing into Substack was accelerating the risk of collapse

• What Substack could do as a holding action: enact an AI labeling requirement.

To be sure, Substack didn’t implement exactly what I asked for. They actually did something better. In their own words:

We announced a feature that allows readers to scan text published to Substack to see how much of it is estimated to be written by hand or with AI assistance. We also launched tools for publishers, including the ability to run the program—Pangram—on drafts prior to publication, disable scanning on a post-by-post basis, and add a “How I make this” statement explaining their creative process to set expectations for their readers.

This is a “labeling+” approach: readers not only get the “How I make this” disclosure (here’s mine1), but also the ability to implement Ronald Reagan’s old “trust but verify” approach to nuclear arms control.

Of course, this solution is not perfect. My recent livestream guest pointed out exactly why in this note, which contains an ironic twist:

But, as Katie says, that’s ok. If readers are empowered to make judgements based on transparency, and if they’re cool with a certain amount of AI-content (or editing, or ideation, etc.) in their reading, that’s a choice they deserve to be able to make. At least it leaves the vast middle tier of Substack writers on a more even playing field, so they don’t face the double whammy of taking on Substack economics plus a gush of stealth AI-writing. And if there are some misperceptions, faulty AI-scans, or other bumps in the current process, it’s still better than the situation two months ago (and yes, astute readers will notice that the title of this article is making fun of the AI tendency to label every idea people come up with as a “power move” or other sycophantic nonsense).

So a big round of applause for Substack on this.

Unfortunately, the platform is still vulnerable to the larger underlying problem that I outlined in June, raising a real risk that it could essentially disintegrate from the middle. The new AI labeling+ levee will hold back the worst of the flood for a time, but the storm surge is still rising.

Deeper Problem, Bigger Risk

I don’t want to re-visit my entire article—though I absolutely invite people to read it so you can see the full context (it includes a summary table on who is making money from Substack that compiles information in one place in a way that I don’t believe appears anywhere else)—so here’s the money quote about the economics of Substack:

There’s a superstar structure, a contestable market, and a zero-sum attention game. The top tier of “creators” is relatively insulated while the vast middle class is in the trash compactor, vying against the current (and growing number of) monetized publications, the current (and growing number of) free or semi-active publications, and the zillions of other online media options out there (including just asking Gemini or some other free AI to generate answers or ideas for you).

So why is the whole platform particularly vulnerable to bleeding out? Because most of Substack’s revenue comes from the middle class.

Substack relies on the hundreds of thousands of writers who are getting squeezed: it appears based on the information available that something on the order of 75%-80% of their revenue comes from that tier. And those are the writers who are most likely to exit or get replaced by AI.

The new AI-scanning and labeling mechanisms should at least lighten the pressure on the vast middle tier of Substack writers who, as best as anyone can estimate, account for three-quarters of Substack’s revenue. But they’re still in an unsustainable position, earning an average of $7,000 annually (again, based on available data—if anyone has better data that they would like to share, I would love to see it and revise accordingly) .

So that’s the problem, in a nutshell: the amount of work required to produce a monetized Substack that people will pay for is far out of proportion to the likely income. And Substack writers can do math.

The dynamic can hold, for a while anyway. Substack writers who are monetized but outside the top 100—i.e., the middle tier—won’t do that amount of work for $7k, but they will do it as an investment in the potential to grow: the promise that if they put out quality writing and do all the right things that the platform recommends, they have a good chance of building up their paid audience.

But they won’t keep it up forever if that hope slams head-first into real-world evidence, and especially because of the economics of contestable markets—where there are low barriers to entry to the new competitor platforms that are popping up all the time (indeed, Substack has only been around for 9 years and only took off 6 years ago) and a real temptation to try somewhere else.

The rule of thumb for new businesses is that they should expect to start breaking even in 2 to 3 years, and that’s probably a reasonable estimate for the upper bound on when writers would expect to find a real critical mass of audience on a platform. So, how many of the ~50,000 monetized, middle-tier Substacks that account for three-quarters of Substack’s revenue are going to reach that limit soon? And what will happen when they do?

That’s the bottom line: Substack’s business relies on a cadre of writers who are a massive flight risk. To Substack’s credit, they’ve mitigated one of the immediate problems putting pressure on that lifeblood cadre with their labeling+ move. But unless the middle-tier writers start to see and feel the growth path ahead, the sword is still hanging over their—and our—heads.

Can they fix the deeper problem? I have some ideas on that too, which I’ll save for a near-future post—and I’d love to hear yours too.

This is my weekly writeup on the state of the midterm battlefield, where I digest all of the shifting numbers, polling, and inside takes so you don’t have to, and put it all into one honest, easy-to-absorb summary, with some additional analysis and explainers. This week, I’m making the entire post FREE. All I ask is that if you like this, would you please share with someone and ask them to consider subscribing?🙏

Share

Toplines for the week

Some major news in the past week, but does it move the midterm battlefield? That’s open to interpretation.

One could look across the landscape and see a red-tint: growing Dem panic over ascendant left-wingers in the Wisconsin governor/Michigan senate primaries; declining generic ballot advantages for Dems; and a daunting outside money advantage for the GOP.

Or, you could see a wash of blue: the Cook Political Report moving six House races in Democrats’ direction; bonkers fundraising advantages for Dem candidates in all of the most critical congressional races; and a critical polling shift that promises to be the gift that keeps on giving.

It amounts to a muddled weekly dashboard, but one that I still think is fundamentally better for Dems…

Midterm HQ Weekly Dashboard: Week of July 20, 2026

The Structural Picture

This past week was quite a mix of wildly diverging indicators: It felt like the old saw about the guy with his head in the icebox and his feet in the oven, but on average, he feels fine.

Three of the basic structural numbers moved in the Dem’s direction, three shifted toward the GOP.

But look a bit deeper, and the story for Dems is stronger.

Subscribe now

The approval shifts look durable. I’ve been saying for weeks that Trump’s slight recovery on net approval rating was mostly statistical noise (i.e., a bunch of outlier polls) with only a bit of genuine signal. And this week lined up exactly: a new batch of approval polls came in, and Trump’s numbers slipped back down to the shadowy netherworld they’ve inhabited all year. The slide among independents was unabated.

By contrast, the positive movement toward R’s does not appear to be long-lasting. While I wouldn’t totally dismiss the significant recovery in consumer sentiment, make no mistake: this is still near-basement territory historically. With gas prices spiking again, and economists expecting Iran-war elevated fertilizer prices to translate into higher food prices in about 6 weeks, future prospects for voter views on affordability are still dim for Republicans.

As for those sliding generic ballot numbers for Dems, it’s worth interrogating those a little more. I’ll do that below (in the “Story You May Have Missed), and discuss why there’s good reason for Dems to feel that there’s good news ahead.

The News Worth Knowing

The biggest news of the past week was about money: two divergent stories
out of the fundraising reports that came due on July 15.

Story #1: Among candidates, Democrats are lapping their opponents.

Across the ten most competitive Senate seats, Democrats out-raised Republicans in every single one, averaging a bone-crushing 4-to-1 edge. Seven sitting Republican senators got out-raised by their challengers, and some of the disparities were staggering, like Sherrod Brown out-raising sitting Senator Jon Husted by more than 3-to-1. In all, Democratic Senate candidates have out-raised their Republican counterparts by roughly $238 million to date in the 2026 election cycle.

Meanwhile, in House races that Charlie Cook rates as toss-up or Lean Republican, the Democratic challenger outraised the Republican incumbent in 15 out of 17 of them this quarter.1 Yikes.

Alas, there’s also…

Story #2: among party committees and outside groups, Republicans were the ones dealing out haymakers.

Here’s a handy summary table:2

The bottom line: it’s a wash. Dem candidates have more money, especially in the races where it counts (another way of putting it is that wherever actual voters are making choices, Dems are winning the money race). But Republican party committees and affiliated super PACs more than make up the difference, so both sides end up in shouting distance of one another. At another time, I’ll dive into why the money race may not matter as much as people think (if you’re impatient, my piece in Washington Monthly3 two years back is still totally true today). For now, the one wildcard to watch is whether Trump’s MAGA Inc. Super PAC actually does anything with its massive $400 million war chest. History suggests they will sit on the money and dole it out to friends and family members. But if they start putting it into races, that would really augment the GOP money edge.

What Moved this Week

House: Cook shifted six races toward Democrats. California’s 45th and New York’s 19th moved from Lean to Likely Democrat, New Hampshire’s 2nd and Oregon’s 5th moved from Likely to Solid Democrat, and on the Republican side, Kentucky’s open 6th and Texas’s 15th both softened from Solid to Likely Republican and Likely to Lean Republican respectively.

Senate: No race ratings changes this week. But there was a real uptick in activity to try to stop DSA-aligned Abdul El-Sayed’s momentum in Michigan. On the other hand, Maine is sorting itself out, with Troy Jackson all-but locking down the nomination after Graham Platner’s withdrawal and weeks of turmoil. That’s definitely good news for Dems: putting Platner behind them and having a relatively proven replacement puts them back in the pivotal Maine race.

Governors: Nothing really moved, but in one key race, Democrats definitely got more nervous: in Wisconsin, the leading candidate Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez dropped out after firing her campaign manager over a financial reporting shortfall north of $1 million. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley — who’d dropped out of the race a week earlier and endorsed Rodriguez on his way out — jumped back in to try to head off the rise of Francesca Hong, a DSA state legislator who Democrats fear could lose them the governor’s race and the assembly (note: the evidence is that there is indeed a 1-2 point gap in performance for ultra-progressive candidates).

Story You May Have Missed

Check out this sneakily important finding from Elliot Morris yesterday: “Americans who say they are most likely to vote in November are actually more pro-Democratic than registered voters….[and] High-turnout voters are currently 4-points more pro-Democratic, at D+9 (11-point swing since 2024).” Morris stresses that in recent cycles, it’s been the opposite: Democrats did better among registered voters than likely voters.

Why does this matter?

Every election cycle, pollsters make (highly educated) guesses about who is going to show up to vote. For most of the cycle, they show polling results based on registered voters. But somewhere along the way, most of them switch over to poll exclusively among the voters who they think are likely voters.

As of right now, the switch is only partly done. RealClearPolling’s generic ballot average of polls is about half comprised of polls conducted among registered voters. Ditto for Silver Bulletin.

So the upshot is twofold. First, as more pollsters swap over to focus on likely voters, and since Democrats are currently doing better among likely voters, we will very likely see polling results (including averages) begin to shift in Democrats’ direction. This loops us back to the generic ballot results I mentioned earlier, and why I don’t think Democrats should be too fussed by a little bit of recent slippage. There’s a good chance that by September, the generic ballot will look even better.

Second, and more important, there’s the actual results. I don’t agree with politicians (or talking heads) who say “polls are meaningless.” That’s not true: polls are a meaningful measure of where a race stands at a given time. And back when I managed campaigns, they were critical for making strategic decisions on how to communicate and spend campaign dollars.

But it is definitely true that polls don’t matter. All that matters is the actual results. And if the voters who are most likely to vote have shown (in multiple ways) that they favor democrats, that’s the most important indicator you can get with about 100 days to go.

And that’s why, after all of the mixed indications of the week, I said this week was a win for Democrats.

What to Watch For Next Week

With Troy Jackson set to be formally nominated at Saturday’s convention, does he emerge with a real polling lead over Susan Collins as initial poll results come out (only one major poll so far, and it shows Jackson +3)—or does Maine remain a jump ball even with the nominee question finally settled?

Toplines for the week

Most of the past week’s political oxygen was consumed by the sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham (which I covered in an emergency livestream with and ), two new ICE shootings, the mounting exchange of fire in the Iran war, and the Schrödinger's Cat health status of Senator Mitch McConnell: all with murky long term political implications. But there was one clear, sharp signal from among the midterm indicators: analyst Charlie Cook shifting five governors’ races, with important net movement in Democrats’ direction.

Midterm HQ Weekly Dashboard: Week of July 13, 2026

The Structural Picture

Drip, drip, drip. Remember when I told you last week that Trump’s approval rating among Independents was on an epic, steady slide into the abyss (and why that mattered)? Here we go again with another half a point down the slope this week…

Still, it wasn’t all bad for Republicans. The White House got a bit of good news in that inflation was 0.4% lower than the previous month. That’s real, but relative—inflation is still rising (at an uncomfortable 3.5%), just not as fast as the month before.

Politically though, this is a nothingburger. Remember this important rule of thumb: voters don’t think in terms of rates, they think in terms of bills. Who cares about abstract percentages when they know darn well how much they pay at the grocery store, the gas station, on their electric bill, and to the landlord? They see the impact in their bank account when their paycheck doesn’t keep up with their costs.

For a better view on how voters feel about prices, here’s a chart of real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Clearly, after a year of negative real wage growth (-0.1%), June’s jump must have felt a bit better. And that supports the notion that some of the 1.5 point bounce-back in Trump’s overall net approval from all-time lows six weeks ago has a sliver of signal in it amidst the wash of statistical noise.

But with gas prices now rising again, impacts in food prices from fertilizer shipping disruptions still poised to hit, and Independents already puckering up like they just shotgunned sourballs, it would be surprising to see any major recovery in consumer sentiment when those new numbers arrive on Friday, or anytime soon.

Bottom line, one could make like a MAGA Diogenes and search fruitlessly through the data for a truly good news Republican number from the past week, or the past month.

That doesn’t mean the structural numbers were a slam dunk for Dems either. But one thing definitely was…

The News Worth Knowing

Actually, let me amend that to two things: one good indicator, and one interesting number that tells us a lot about how people will vote.

Read more

My livestream yesterday with The Atlantic’s Gal Beckerman was supposed to be about the central question of the past 18 months: when, and how, do we resist when corrupt, abusive, repressive leaders come to power?

But while Gal and I were discussing what we could learn from Diogenes, Mandela, and Navalny, people in the live chat mostly wanted to talk about President Donald Trump’s Thursday night address to the nation.

Was that off-topic? Not at all. It was savvy Substackers making an apt connection between Trump’s plans and the broader question of how and when to fight powerful forces doing immoral things.

Consider what we know about Trump’s planned speech:

Reuters:

[Trump’s address will be] about ​newly declassified intelligence on investigations into U.S. elections…Propelled by Trump’s ​repeated claims that U.S. elections are “rigged,” the administration has for over a year sought to increase federal oversight of election administration and ⁠reshape the way Americans vote...

Associated Press:

Thursday’s address seems poised to…amplify election lies before an audience of millions in an effort to boost Republican prospects before midterms that threaten to hobble Trump for the remainder of his term…On Monday, when asked about the speech, Trump repeated baseless claims of voter fraud...

CNN:

Since retaking office last year, Trump has instructed his administration to use the vast resources of US spy agencies to either cast doubt on American elections or question the notion that foreign powers have meddled in them. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s now-former director of national intelligence…was present in Fulton County, Georgia, in January as FBI agents executed a search warrant related to the 2020 election — an extraordinary move for a spy chief. Bill Pulte, the housing agency executive who replaced Gabbard on an acting basis, “may find out some things about the rigged elections … I think he wants to do it very much,” Trump told reporters last month.

This ain’t exactly one of those “magic eye” images where you have to cross your eyes to make a bunch of dots cohere into a picture. It’s obvious what’s about to happen: Trump is hell-bent on building up his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged as a predicate for actually rigging the 2026 election. He’s planning to use his Thursday speech to turn his Big Lie into his Biggest Lie.

Subscribe now

So the question that had everyone talking yesterday is: are the networks going to go along with it?

The game plan? Obvious.

Trump’s monomaniacal obsession with being seen as holding total power—and personally deciding who underneath him holds a sliver of that power—is clear in his political origin story on The Apprentice, where his entire role was to look rich and say “you’re fired” to hapless underlings.

His push to manifest it in the midterms started with those bogus investigations in Georgia and Arizona (that found absolutely nothing1), continued with his district-rigging gerrymandering push (which I wrote about in Newsweek2), and recently landed in his Sauron-like obsession with the “SAVE Act” (also Newsweek3). So great was his fixation on the SAVE Act (which could disenfranchise millions of American citizens) in fact that he tried to hold hostage an actual good, bipartisan bill on affordability that could politically help his own party.

And now, like Babe Ruth pointing to the bleachers4, he’s calling his shot for Thursday night. We know what he’s planning to do. We know that the damage of his original Big Lie was a deadly insurrection. And we know that already he’s:

• threatened election workers with prosecution,5

• tried to remove American citizens from voter rolls,

• told the Postal Service not to deliver ballots to certain voters,6

• and likely planned to deploy his deadly ICE paramilitary7 to polling places, since yesterday, a new court filing revealed that there may be thousands of hidden documents detailing those plans.8

In other words, the Thursday speech is a prelude to a power grab, intended to pull the wool over the public’s eyes just enough to help get away with it. So the question is, will the media play along?

The next media move? Not so easy.

Let’s give a little grace and say that the next move for the major networks is not totally clear-cut. There’s a long history of major media giving air time to presidents basically upon request. And there is a war (back) on—Americans do deserve an update from their president on that, and Trump has vaguely pointed to saying something on the subject.

But media companies have every right to refuse to put this on the air, and they should do just that.

For one thing, they’ve told presidents “no” before, and under much foggier circumstances: in 2014, the major broadcast networks declined to air President Barack Obama’s 10-minute prime-time address on executive actions regarding immigration, claiming that they found the speech "overtly political.”9 So what would they call this one?

For another, Trump is simply a manifest liar (, the former Washington Post fact checker, caught him doing it 30,573 times in his first term) who has long exhausted benefit of the doubt, especially on this topic where courts, the Department of Justice, investigative reporters, and the U.S. Congress have repeatedly debunked his claims about the 2020 election.

And finally, there’s the absence of a viable alternative. Tom Jones of the Poynter Institute suggests that the networks could add facts and context after the speech, or cut in if he starts lying.10 Worthy ideas, but neither one worked in the presidential debates, and neither would work here: a Trump election lie would be halfway around the world while the media fact check was still getting its pants on, and a midsentence cut-in would lend controversy-amplification to whatever point he was making.

So the remaining choice is hard, but clear. Hard in that Trump has been actively extorting media in myriad ways both obvious (ABC Stephanopoulos lawsuit, last week’s subpoenas to reporters over Air Force One stories) and tacit (Brendan Carr threats, Paramount merger/CBS News intimations). So there’s a potential price to be paid.

But clear in that, as Gal Beckerman showed, resisting abusive governments requires piercing their veil of lies and interrupting the cycle of fear, intimidation, and control of information that fuels them. It requires the integrity to refuse to go along.

Toplines for the week

This is the first time at Midterm HQ where the assessment feels a bit counterintuitive. Major race raters didn’t move a single race this week. There weren’t any huge polling average shifts. No individual data points screamed “look at me!” And the dominant political news of the week was the collapse of Graham Platner’s campaign in Maine…not exactly a feelgood for the left.

So why was this a good week for Democrats? Because if you look closely, Dems’ Senate map got definitively bigger, and it’s on the cusp of getting definitively better. Combined with other signals, this was a duck week: placid on the surface, lots of churn underneath.

Midterm HQ Weekly Dashboard: Week of July 6, 2026

The Structural Picture

The big indicators paint the same basic picture: a really solid, but not yet spectacular, political environment for Democrats.

A few takeaways:

• Don’t sweat the Trump approval: Just like with last week, both Nate Silver and RealClearPolitics averages show that the slight uptick for Trump in recent weeks is probably statistical noise based on a few Republican-leaning polls.

• That gas price number: it came before Trump announced that his fake truce with Iran was no longer in effect (so…if this was not a ceasefire,1 and now there is not a not-ceasefire, does that mean by the transitive property of double negatives that we now have a ceasefire?!? The bottom line is, don’t use no double negatives). I’ve already pointed out that Trump was (ominously, for him) getting almost no benefit from the rapid decline in gas prices. It’s not like the likely price hike we’re about to see will crush him…but it also can’t be good.

• Independents’ day: this is the big one. Quietly, slowly, independent voters have been boa constrictoring (another grammar rule: don’t verb nouns) their way around Trump’s neck all year. Take a look at this helpful graph2 from Economist/YouGov:

Trump is down 15 points from the start of the year, 30 points from the start of his term. But what does that really mean? Twenty years ago, the argument would have been that Independents are a good approximation of swing voters, hence this means he’s failing to persuade them and losing the swing vote. But today, a steady decline among Independents means something else, and it’s probably worse for the GOP.

Read more