The New Red Scare

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

Let’s test your political acumen. Imagine that the president’s job approval is below 40 percent; that he’s stuck in an unpopular war he can’t get out of; that gas prices are much higher now than they were when he took office; that public pessimism about the economy is at its worst point since 2023; and, as a cherry on top, that some garish new report of his lascivious corruption arrives every day.

 

Under those circumstances, would you expect his party to be gaining on the generic congressional ballot or falling further behind?

 

The answer is “gaining,” of course.

 

On May 31 the RealClearPolitics tracker had Democrats ahead of Republicans by 7.6 points, teeing up the sort of midterm drubbing for incumbent presidents to which Americans have grown accustomed over the last 40 years. But a funny thing happened on the way to the blue wave: That lead has now shrunk to 4.7 points and the GOP is now polling at its highest level (43.9 percent) this year.

 

Nate Silver’s generic ballot tracker has seen less of a shift, but there’s movement there too. On May 31, Democrats led by 7.1 points; today they lead by 5.9. That’s meaningfully less than the 7.6-point advantage they held at this point in 2018, when they went on to sweep House races.

 

Not only that, the latest evidence suggests the trend toward Republicans is accelerating. On Sunday the Washington Post released a new survey that had Democrats ahead 48-45, one in a series of recent national polls that have put their generic-ballot lead in the range of 2-4 points. If the margin is that narrow on Election Day, the GOP could plausibly retain its House majority with an assist from mid-decade partisan gerrymandering.

 

Americans are disappointed, angry, and … seriously considering voting for the status quo in November anyway. How come?

 

I say this in my best “Church Lady” voice: Could it be socialism?

 

Liberal strategist Jeb Fain fears so. “I don’t think it’s coincidental that we’re seeing evidence of a tightening generic ballot as DSAers have gained traction in primaries and outsized media attention,” he tweeted on Saturday, referring to far-left candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America. “We can allow deranged extremists to take over the Democratic Party, or we can defeat Trump. There’s no doing both.”

 

GOP strategists share his suspicions. “It’s going to be a hate election,” a Republican who works for Trump’s political operation tells Axios. “Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.” A Republican pollster put it this way to the outlet: “Swing voters have a persistent fear the Democrats will just go too far left. So we can make the case that yeah, we suck. But they’re worse.”

 

If you’ve wondered why the president is babbling so much about communism lately, that’s why. Until recently, his autocratic project was an electoral prisoner of its own success: Having faced almost no meaningful resistance during his first 18 months back in office, he lacked a villain to rally Republican voters against. That’s a momentous problem for a figure like Donald Trump, a quintessential “lesser of two evils” politician whom no one in their right mind would support—unless they’re convinced that the alternative is worse.

 

He and his movement desperately need a foil. And now, thanks to the DSA, they have one.

 

I’m not sold on the theory that the new red scare explains the tightening generic ballot, though. At least, not all of it.

 

Questioning the timing.

 

There’s a timing problem here.

 

The first big primary victory for socialists this year came on June 9, when disgraced oysterman Graham Platner trounced his opponent to win the Democratic nomination for Senate in Maine. Two weeks later, three hard-left House candidates endorsed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their primaries. A week after that, on June 30, DSA upstart Melat Kiros unseated longtime Democratic House incumbent Diana DeGette in Colorado.

 

If Democrats’ shrinking generic-ballot lead is due to a popular backlash against socialist victories, we’d expect the trend toward the GOP to have begun after all of those primaries, in July. But that’s not what the polling shows.

 

To begin with, the gaudy lead of 7-plus points that Democrats enjoyed on May 31 was an outlier. For most of this year, the party’s margin over Republicans has floated in the 4.7 to 5.9-point range, a solid but modest lead likely attributable to the left’s lingering “brand problem.” They’re back in that range today in both the RCP and Silver trackers. If June’s socialist triumphs supposedly triggered a groundswell of public opposition, shouldn’t Democrats’ lead now be meaningfully smaller than it’s been for most of 2026?

 

The reason their advantage grew in May is because the bottom briefly fell out for the GOP, with Republicans losing more than 3 points of national support between May 7 and May 31 per RealClearPolitics. That boosted Democrats’ advantage temporarily to “blue wave” proportions, but the trend began to reverse around June 1. By June 17—before all but one of the socialist victories I described above—Republicans had regained nearly all the ground they’d lost and were back to within 4.8 points of Democrats overall.

 

Then, after June’s socialist wins, the GOP suffered another mini-slide when it lost more than a point between June 27 and July 9. Weird, no? Shouldn’t commie-hating voters have begun trending solidly toward Republicans at that point?

 

Weirder still: If the stench from the DSA is causing Americans to recoil from Democrats, why hasn’t support for the party declined at all in generic-ballot surveys over the last month?

 

On June 17, Silver’s tracker had Democrats polling at 48 percent. Today, more than a month later, with the new red scare in full swing, they’re at … 48 percent. At RealClearPolitics, the party has actually gained over the last month. Democrats stood at 47.9 percent on June 17 and are at 48.6 percent today, not far from their best polling of the cycle to date.

 

Even if we concede that socialism is an albatross for the party, it’s likely less of one than Trump is for Republicans. A new CNBC poll asked Americans whether finding out that a candidate belongs to a particular political movement would make them more or less likely to vote for him or her. Discovering that someone is a democratic socialist led to a 32-50 split; discovering that someone is MAGA triggered a 27-57 divide by comparison.

 

There’s an obvious alternate explanation for why the generic ballot is tightening. We can dispense with most of this ideological argle-bargle and look at a simple metric.

 

The cost of gasoline began rising after the U.S. attacked Iran on February 28 and continued to climb until around April 7, when the two sides agreed to a ceasefire. Prices then began to inch downward on hopes that pre-war levels of oil-tanker traffic might resume in the Strait of Hormuz—only to climb higher again in May, to a peak of more than $4.50 per gallon, when Iran refused to relinquish control of the strait.

 

Coincidentally, May was also when Republicans’ generic-ballot polling cratered.

 

As the standoff with Iran dragged on, America and other nations scrambled to bring down prices, tapping oil reserves to fill the gap in supply. China scaled its consumption way back, driving the cost of gasoline down further. And in mid-June the U.S. reached, or seemed to reach, a peace agreement with Tehran that would reopen Hormuz fully, without fees, for at least 60 days. By mid-June, gas prices were below $4 again.

 

Coincidentally, this was the period when Republicans’ generic-ballot polling recovered.

 

It’s not the red scare that’s causing the GOP’s prospects in congressional races to fluctuate, we might conclude. It’s thermostatic public reaction to fuel costs. When gas trends more expensive, a certain number of angry Republican-leaning voters withhold their support. When it trends cheaper, they’re back on the team again. There’s nothing more to it than that.

 

Except that hypothesis isn’t quite airtight either.

 

Soft Republicans.

 

If the generic ballot is simply measuring how optimistic or pessimistic Americans are feeling about gas prices, we’d expect the GOP to be in another nosedive right now.

 

Things haven’t been going great with Iran over the last two weeks, you may have noticed. The president declared the ceasefire required by the peace agreement “over” on July 10; the U.S. has bombed Iran every day since and the Iranians have retaliated, killing three American service members and wounding dozens more. The effect all of that is having on gas prices is precisely what you’d expect.

 

Yet Republicans have gained nearly 2 full points in the RealClearPolitics average over the last 12 days, the opposite of what we’d predict. What gives?

 

One possibility is that there’s some sort of “lag effect” to higher gas prices, where it takes a week or two for trends in the cost of fuel to be reflected in trends in public opinion polling. But I dunno: There didn’t seem to be much lag in May, when prices were rising. Gas hikes aren’t like other news developments that take time to percolate through the electorate; Americans confront them every day when they fill up and form an opinion instantaneously.

 

Which leads us to another possibility: Maybe a “red scare” backlash to socialists’ primary victories in June really is in motion and that’s the thing that’s been lagging in polling, only showing up this month as Americans finally hear about it and grapple with the implications.

 

The oppressive cultishness of Trump’s base makes it easy to forget that many GOP voters remain lukewarm about him. “The poll finds 45 percent of Republican voters approve of Trump strongly compared with 83 percent of Democrats who disapprove strongly,” the Post noted in its new poll. If you’re among the “soft” 55 percent in his party that doesn’t strongly approve of him, your willingness to vote GOP this fall will obviously be more conditional and event-dependent than the average red-cap-wearing zombie’s will.

 

I can absolutely believe that news coverage this month of ascendant “communists” igniting a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party has driven some of those wayward “soft” Republicans to come home to the GOP reluctantly. The president himself began hyping the red scare only very recently, perhaps causing news about June’s primaries to break through belatedly to the sort of casual right-winger who’s heard about the war and gas prices but doesn’t follow politics closely enough to know who Darializa Avila Chevalier is.

 

Or maybe the fact that the far left’s position on Israel is increasingly the Democratic Party’s position has at last begun to penetrate the consciousness of the normie Republican, who remains favorably disposed to the Jewish state and its government (although not as much as in the past). Negative partisanship can be slow to awaken, but once it’s up, it’s up.

 

If all of that is true, then the upcoming Democratic Senate primary in Michigan could be the best thing to ever happen to Republican enthusiasm. Progressive favorite Abdul El-Sayed is a nationalist bogeyman par excellence for the same reasons that Zohran Mamdani is: He’s young, Muslim, far left, and prone to equivocating about terrorism in ways that would curl any right-wing hawk’s hair. But whereas Mamdani’s rise could be dismissed as a product of a very blue city behaving the way very blue cities do, El-Sayed is competing in a Midwestern swing state.

 

Should he win the primary, it will touch a match to the postliberal right’s fears that members of alien tribes—nonwhite, non-Christian, overtly socialist—are an electoral threat nationally, not just in progressive strongholds like Williamsburg. And so, the more credible the red scare becomes, the more we might expect the generic ballot to tighten.

 

I can think of two reasons it might not, though.

 

Conventional war.

 

One is the conflict with Iran, of course, which looks likely to get worse before it gets better.

 

“Iran has adapted to U.S. defenses, firing missiles that travel at extremely high speeds and can maneuver as they streak toward the earth,” the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend. A source told the Post that “the U.S. is planning for a wider war” but worried that the White House doesn’t seem to fully appreciate that our military is saddled with “dwindling stockpiles of air defense and long-range munitions and constraints on the ability to surge more troops and aircraft into the area because of battle damage.”

 

There’s even been chatter about a “vast and costly ground operation in southern Iran” to secure the Strait of Hormuz, from which many casualties would surely result. Barring an unlikely Iranian capitulation due to economic hardship caused by the U.S. naval blockade, it’s hard to imagine any endgame to the conflict for the United States or for the president’s party that doesn’t involve more Americans dying, gas prices rising, and public anger spiking. The red scare won’t blunt that effect entirely in November, if at all.

 

The other X factor is the unusual convention that Republicans are planning for Dallas on September 9 and 10, which doesn’t seem crazy to me in the abstract. The recurring problem for the majority before every midterm election is shaking its base out of its complacency and getting them as fired up to vote as the out-party is, right? Well, here’s the solution—a two-day pageant where the president and his candidates can appeal to GOP voters directly.

 

There will be oodles of red-scare programming on the agenda aimed at ambivalent “soft” Republicans, no doubt.

 

But increasingly the idea looks foolish. By definition, it’s bad advertising to have the president remind swing voters that he’s the face of the party when his approval is already below 40 percent and headed downward as the war spirals. The best use of a convention like this one would be to turn it over to Republican congressional candidates and keep Trump away from it, letting them introduce themselves to voters on their own terms instead of enveloped in a toxic orange miasma. Needless to say, that won’t be happening.

 

What’s really foolish, though, is giving Democrats a reason to unite at a moment when the establishment and the left are at each other’s throats. In Michigan, for instance, the primary between El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens has turned so bitter that there’s a realistic chance the loser’s voters will boycott the general election to some meaningful extent. The best way to ensure that they don’t is for Trump to barge into the middle of their feud in mid-September, muttering about communists and gushing about ICE, to show them who the real enemy is.

 

The GOP convention will do more to motivate Democrats and (temporarily) heal the rifts between them, in all probability, than it will to boost Republican enthusiasm. And maybe that’s the key word in all of this—enthusiasm.

 

Most of the recent generic ballot polling showing a GOP surge has been of registered voters, as is common at this stage of an election cycle. But not every registered voter ultimately turns out, of course; for a clearer forecast of Election Day, you need to focus on likely voters. And Democrats have a big advantage among likely voters right now.

 

The same Washington Post poll released this weekend that found them ahead by 3 points among registered voters saw the lead balloon to 8 among voters who say they’re “absolutely certain to vote.” The share of Democrats who say they’re certain to vote this year exceeds the share of Republicans who say so by a wider margin than the share who said so in the “blue wave” year of 2018, in fact. And Democrats are considerably more likely to say that it’s “more important” to vote in 2026 vis-à-vis previous midterms than Republicans are.

 

The red scare might be scary enough to alter voters’ preferences yet not scary enough to get them off the couch on Election Day, especially with bad news about the war and the economy drowning it out. But, barring a terrorist attack on the country or something similarly terrible, it’s the best bogeyman Trump’s got.