By Jeffrey Blehar
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Double, double toil and trouble — the electoral witching
hour draws nigh for the GOP in 2026. We are well past Labor Day weekend —
traditionally the last point at which a party on the electoral back foot is
thought to have any chance of turning its fortunes around before the November
midterm elections — and a roiling cauldron of voter discontent now seems set to
bubble over volcanically onto the Republican Party.
According to all projections, the wages of Donald Trump’s
second term are likely to cost the GOP its narrow House majority. But the
question remains: Will the GOP’s 53–47 Senate majority also fall? A year ago,
the notion would have seemed far-fetched. Now it seems more like a coin flip.
The reason for this primarily boils down to Trump’s
staggering unpopularity across the country and across the board on every issue
voters claim to care about. Some context: According to the RealClearPolitics
polling averages, as of mid-September, President Trump held a 40 percent job
approval rating with a 56 percent disapproval rating, good for an overall minus
16 percent spread. And that appallingly low number begins to break down even
more toxically once the president is assessed on the particulars. He sits at a
minus 24.6 spread on the economy, the single most important issue voters will
be expressing their opinion on in November. On inflation it’s a whopping minus
37.6 percent. On foreign policy (which might encompass anything from the war in
Iran to the trade war on Canada)? A relatively mild minus 20.5 approval. Even
on signature issues such as immigration and crime, Trump sports average
approval ratings of minus 8 and minus 5.4 respectively.
Put bluntly, these are not numbers that suggest a good
November. History is against the GOP anyway: Absent world-historical events
(e.g., the Clinton impeachment in 1998 or the aftermath of 9/11 in 2002),
voters always take their midterm frustrations out on the party in power. And
yet one could argue hopefully that the Democratic Senate candidates will fall
short in November for the same reasons that Republican Senate candidates fell
short in 2022: In an age of increasing political disillusionment, voters angry
with one president and party may nevertheless find the other party’s agenda to
be a step too far.
Still, Republicans are desperately on defense right now:
Democrats need to win at least four seats (without losing any they already
hold) to win control of the upper chamber. They will have six realistic chances
to win those four, and only one potential vulnerability among the seats they’re
defending. These races tend to fall as dominoes — the mood of the nation often
subsumes the mood of a particular state — so the individual odds are not
independent of one another. Will the wave rise high enough to wash away the GOP
Senate?
***
We begin our survey by noting the Republicans’ lack of
serious pickup opportunities in 2026. This year the GOP is playing defense in
so many states it has come to think of as home turf that it’s easy to forget
how many opportunities for his party to make gains were squandered by Trump in
pursuit of his private grudges and obsessions.
The GOP is virtually guaranteed to lose at least one
Senate seat it currently holds: Facing threats from Trump that he would back a
primary challenger, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis dropped his race for
reelection, and his seat is now as good as gone to former Democratic Governor
Roy Cooper. (Trump’s handpicked candidate to replace Tillis, former RNC
Chairman Michael Whatley, currently trails Cooper by eight to ten points on
average.) In a nominally red state — one that voted three times for Trump — Cooper
has run an intelligently low-key race, leaning on his moderate credentials as
governor and attorney general. North Carolina’s two-party vote tends toward
partisan inelasticity — it would be surprising if Cooper exceeded 53 percent of
the vote — but, by the same token, it would be even more surprising if Whatley
reached 50.
In Georgia, insult has been added to injury as Democrat
Jon Ossoff — improbably elected to the Senate in a 2021 runoff as a result of
the temper tantrum Trump threw over losing the 2020 presidential vote in the
state — is strolling through what should have been a tough reelection campaign.
(His race has been made even easier owing to the overzealous MAGA comportment
of Ossoff’s Trump-backed opponent, Representative Mike Collins.) Ossoff looks
set to immediately pivot from reelection in November to exploring a
presidential campaign — savor, then, the bitter irony that he exists solely
because of Trump’s mindless vendetta against reality.
In two other Democratic races for open seats, the
Republicans have gotten the best possible candidates they could have hoped for
— but alas, the timing is off. Former New Hampshire Senator John E. Sununu
might have had decent odds in a different year to reclaim the seat that
retiring Senator Jeanne Shaheen bounced him from in 2008, but not in a Trump
midterm, and not when matched up against acceptably colorless Democratic
Representative Chris Pappas.
Meanwhile, the one potential pickup opportunity that
exists for Republicans is in Michigan, where the egregious terror-apologist
Abdul El-Sayed will likely be held to a close margin against former Republican
Representative Mike Rogers. Several factors militate against optimism, however.
The state’s DNA is fundamentally Democratic; it has not elected a Republican to
the Senate since 1994, and since the days of Rick Snyder, only Donald Trump has
ever managed to crack its statewide code. Trump has no magic touch with voters
there now, though — he currently sports a measly 33 percent approval rating in
the Wolverine State.
It will therefore be up to El-Sayed to disqualify himself
with his own words — and given the antisemitic cast of earlier utterances,
there is at least a chance that he might. Polling currently shows him with a
surprisingly soft lead over Rogers, but a consistent one. This is a state,
however, where the polling in the primary was off by twelve percentage points;
one can envision a scenario in which voters reject El-Sayed even while
disapproving strongly of Trump. (Some kinds of rhetorical thuggery truly distinguish
themselves.) If one is looking for an upside surprise on Election Night, it
could be here.
In remote Alaska, Democratic dirty tricks are threatening
to derail the reelection of Republican incumbent Dan S. Sullivan in his race
against former Representative Mary Peltola. Sullivan would normally be favored
to win comfortable reelection in this state, where Trump won by a 13-point
margin, but as a semi-anonymous functionary, Sullivan has numbers that have
never been particularly strong, and he has to run for reelection with
two wrinkles he did not face in 2020: the existence of ranked-choice voting,
and a ballot that includes an identically named spoiler candidate. (Yes,
Democrats got a 69-year-old retired teacher also named “Dan Sullivan” onto the
ballot.) Polling in Alaska is essentially a black box, since so many of its
decisive swing voters are both unreachable by pollsters and uninterested in
responding to them. Even though Peltola is currently leading, that may be
illusory.
In Maine, Susan Collins’s battle to retain her title as
the Unvanquishable Senator has carried on with typical New England weirdness.
She has faced a sequence of memorable challengers: first there was trust-fund
kid and credibly accused rapist Graham Platner, now there is working man and
confirmed cousin-lover Troy Jackson (who has two children with his second
cousin). The polls have Jackson leading Collins by two or three points — which,
on the evidence of elections past, is right where she wants him. Collins is a
warrior — one of the last of those deceptively polite New England Republicans
who can smile for the camera while swimming upstream with a knife clasped
between her teeth — and while this race is a pure toss-up, I tend not to doubt
her anymore.
What comes next is less pleasant to acknowledge: the GOP
is at significant risk of losing Senate races in two states that are considered
so much a part of Trump’s “core” heartland that their potential rebellion was
on nobody’s radar back in January of 2025. In the (theoretically) strongly
Republican redoubt of Ohio, appointed Senator Jon Husted is running to fill the
remainder of Vice President JD Vance’s term, and he is beginning to look like
an underdog.
It’s a perfect storm in Ohio, where Trump’s wildly
unpopular economic policies (his approval rating in the state is an anemic 42
percent) have allowed the familiar populist Democratic face of former Senator
Sherrod Brown to seize a significant lead over the largely unknown Husted. This
is one of those races where analysts expect Ohio voters to eventually “come
home” to the Republicans, but with Trump promising to keep his various trade
wars going at all costs, many Ohioans are apparently beginning to feel that
they haven’t much of a home to return to.
The situation is slightly better in Iowa, where Senator
Joni Ernst is retiring, but not because Trump’s policies are any more popular
in a state that has essentially become ground zero for the fallout from the
president’s tariff regime. In the land of agribusiness, diesel now sits at
$5.88 a gallon, steel and aluminum tariffs have raised the cost of doing
business precipitously, and the state’s primary exports (farm products) are
caught up in an unending series of trade wars with China and Canada. The GOP is
lucky to be fielding its best candidate in Representative Ashley Hinson, but
she has barely gotten her polling numbers above 50 percent and will be
receiving no help from Republican Zach Lahn, who is currently on track to
fumble away the governor’s race to the Democrats for the first time in 20
years.
Finally, no discussion of the jeopardy Republicans find
themselves in is complete without mentioning the ongoing debacle in the Texas
Senate race; I have a strong hunch that the most dispiriting news of the night
will emerge from the Lone Star State. For far too long, Republicans have been
far too complacent about the possibility that this most quintessential of “red”
states would ever again vote Democratic on a statewide level. (How quickly they
forget Ted Cruz’s shockingly narrow shave in 2018.)
But now the stars are aligning for potential doom. Texas
GOP primary voters kicked popular incumbent John Cornyn to the curb in favor of
intensely MAGA Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has long been deeply unpopular
statewide for his corruption, track record of unapologetic sexual sleaze, and
reputation for profound sloth. (He was impeached as attorney general by his own
party and survived only by attaching himself to Trump like a barnacle on the
tail fin of a baleen whale.)
It is the sloth that may prove to be his undoing, though,
because beyond Paxton’s manifest moral deficiencies, he has also run a
shockingly lazy, self-entitled campaign — almost as if he expects to be able to
cruise to a November victory by sheer dint of being a Republican. Instead, the
plentifully flawed Democrat James Talarico — who would be unelectable under any
other circumstances — has outworked him, outraised him, and now leads him in
every single poll in this highly suburbanized (and hence rapidly leftward-swinging)
state. Will Texas’s typical Republican lean reassert itself? Talarico is
counting on enough Texans overlooking his own ultraprogressive views to send a
message to Paxton in much the same way Alabamans in 2017 voted less to elect
Doug Jones than to reject Roy Moore. Don’t be surprised if they do.
***
With so many Senate races so close — and with so many X
factors to consider — only a brave man or a fool would attempt to predict the
final result come November 3. (Since your author attempts to be both, he
predicts a 50–50 Senate with Vance as the tiebreaking vote.) But a red harvest
is likely approaching, a bloody cull, and Trump now seems to be preparing for
the worst. After the Republican “midterm convention,” where he publicly
identified the GOP’s fortunes with his own — and offered to bribe every voter
with $5,000 should they return the GOP to power — Laura Ingraham asked him
whether he planned to campaign hard until Election Day.
“No,” Trump responded bluntly. “I’m a little bit tired of
politics.” He then signaled his resignation to a loss, contenting himself with
the thought of being a “blocker” for the last two years of his final term — as
if he hadn’t already been playing that role against his own party for the first
two.
No comments:
Post a Comment