By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, October 07, 2026
What if the polls are overestimating Democrats?
The out-party leads the generic congressional ballot by 9
points today in Nate Silver’s tracker, its biggest advantage to date. A new
YouGov survey has Democratic (or Democratic-aligned
independent) Senate candidates ahead in Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas,
enough for 51 seats next year even without possible/likely pickups in
North Carolina, Alaska, and Maine.
It ain’t just the “fake news” polls that are bearish on
the GOP’s chances, either. It’s Republicans themselves. “If the bottom
continues falling out like it has been, this will be worse than 2006,” one
national party strategist told Politico. Another described the electoral landscape
starkly as “fires everywhere.” Follow the money: An outfit that’s confident
it’ll beat expectations wouldn’t be spending hundreds of millions of dollars playing defense in red
states.
Still, one needn’t be a born Eeyore (ahem) to look at all
of that and feel an urge to bed-wet. The numbers for Democrats are so
improbably gaudy that they almost have to be wrong, no? Not so wrong
that Republicans end up holding the House, maybe, but wrong enough that the
Senate might remain under Donald Trump’s thumb for the last two years of his
presidency.
A net Democratic gain of three seats would produce a
50-50 chamber, making J.D. Vance the tie-breaking vote. A net gain of four
would make it 51-49, teeing up John
Fetterman for a big (and increasingly inevitable)
switcheroo. Those are plausible scenarios if the polls are off by even just a
few points.
And the theory of how they might be is straightforward.
All it would take is some small but meaningful percentage of disgruntled Trump
voters who were expected to stay home in November to turn out in the end,
half-heartedly or not. Right now, some of those voters might be telling
pollsters angrily and sincerely that they intend to boycott the election or to vote
Democratic—but in the end will be seduced by partisanship into changing
their minds.
Others might be less-educated “low-engagement” voters who
simply refuse to pick up the phone when pollsters call, creating a problem of “nonresponse bias” that’s led to surveys
underestimating Republican support repeatedly during the Trump era. Especially,
it seems, in Senate races in Michigan, Ohio, and Iowa, where polls a
month out from Election Day dating back to 2018 have overrated Democratic
candidates to the tune of 6 points.
In fact, there is some evidence that rural
Republicans are ducking pollsters again this year. Whether they’re doing so
because they’re disgusted with politics and don’t plan to vote or disgusted
with doomsaying pollsters and do plan to vote—for the GOP—is a key subplot of
the campaign.
For the president and his party, the difference between a
bloodbath that shatters Trump’s legacy and a shocking comeback that shatters
left-wing morale is convincing something like an extra 10 percent of Republican
voters to put aside their disaffection, show up on Election Day, and take one
for the team.
Which brings us back to Texas.
High stakes.
Of all the battlegrounds in play this fall, the
psychological stakes are highest in the one where Democrats haven’t won
statewide in more than 30 years.
Which seems counterintuitive. Why should liberals invest
emotionally in flipping a state where they always lose and which they don’t
need to clinch a Senate majority?
But that question answers itself. Democrats and
Republicans each desperately want to win Texas because of what it represents.
Not only is it the nation’s largest red stronghold, it epitomizes what the
right believes American culture should look like. The left flipping cowboy
country would be like the GOP flipping California. In an endless game of
electoral chess, it amounts to taking your opponent’s queen.
The stakes were further raised there when the president
declined to endorse John Cornyn in this year’s Republican Senate primary before
ultimately backing his opponent, the mega-corrupt Ken Paxton, in the runoff.
That single decision put an otherwise safe seat in play—so much so that
Paxton’s opponent, Democrat James Talarico, has led in the last 13 polls of the state. Trump will own the
outcome of this race completely; fumbling a Senate seat in the capital of Red
America would be the most humiliating electoral defeat he’s ever suffered or
ever will.
And he knows it. The president has held rallies lately in
Texas to try to rescue Paxton (with more soon to come), has poured millions
into the state via his PAC to fund anti-Talarico ads, and, to hear the candidate tell it, has let national operatives
all but take over management of Paxton’s campaign. “Texas is a must win, and
this would be his biggest endorsement fail,” a former White House official said
of Trump to MS NOW. “This one would be a stain on his list.” For
Democrats, flipping Texas would add a supreme insult to the injuries they hope
to inflict on the president’s stature next month.
There’s also a “perfect storm” factor to the race. The
left has never had a juicier opportunity to win the state. If not now, when?
Paxton’s a lousy candidate, by Trump’s
admission. Voters hate the president’s war in Iran and the mayhem it’s
caused in oil markets, by Paxton’s admission. Hispanics, who represent some 40
percent of Texas’ population, are trending Democratic nationally out of
exasperation with the cost of living and the White House’s “deport ’em all”
policies. Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, is viewed by more voters as
having “the right kind of moral values” than his reptilian
opponent, a rare edge for a leftist running in a religious red state.
The stars have aligned for an upset. Both parties know
it. If not now, when?
The stakes in Texas are so high that a close win by
either candidate will almost certainly turn the state into ground zero for
“rigged election” crankery. If Talarico pulls it out, federal goons at Trump’s
behest will descend on blue cities like Austin to interrogate the Democrat’s
“suspicious” margins there. If Paxton ekes out a victory, grassroots leftists
will accuse the state’s hard-right leadership of having tampered with the count
to favor him. Never mind that many Republican officials despise Paxton privately;
at the end of the day, the conspiracy theorists will say, he’s still a member
of their team. And to the modern right, the team is everything.
Just ask state Sen. Angela Paxton, the candidate’s better
half.
Teamwork.
Mrs. Paxton filed for divorce from her husband more than
a year ago citing “biblical grounds,” aka adultery. A few days ago, she cut a
campaign ad for him.
Really.
No, they haven’t reconciled. Watch
the clip and you’ll see that she can’t bring herself to so much as utter
his name. The closest she gets to identifying Ken Paxton is when she refers
obliquely to “the elephant in the room,” leaving it to the viewer to infer from
her own surname what she might be talking about.
Which is an awfully optimistic read on the average
voter’s political awareness, I must say.
But lay that aside. In 10 years of covering the Trump-era
American right, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the logic of vacuous amoral
partisanship expressed as efficiently as Angela Paxton expressed it in her ad.
This is like the Gettysburg Address of loathsome anti-anti-Trumpism:
I’m Texas senator
Angela Paxton. People have asked my thoughts about this election and, turns
out, I have some. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. In a general
election, it’s not as much about the individual players on the team. It’s about
getting the whole team across the finish line. Either we hold every Republican
seat or we hand the future of Texas to the other team. That’s why I’m voting
for the Republican ticket on November 3. Let’s hold the line together.
“The team,” huh? Okay. Let’s talk about the team.
The first thing to say about the “team” is that the
people most eager to appeal to team spirit are unfailingly the most selfish,
least team-oriented figures in the party.
If the president cared about the fortunes of Team GOP, he
wouldn’t have spent the better part of two years irritating voters with one
unpopular policy after another, stuffing his pockets with wads of cash, and
doing everything possible to make clear that he cares more about the fate of
his ballroom than he does about the price of gas. If Ken Paxton cared about the
team, he wouldn’t have spent his career in public service tarnishing the party
by committing impeachable offenses and leching around before deciding to vastly
complicate its electoral strategy by challenging Cornyn for Senate.
Angela Paxton’s own motives for getting involved in this
race weren’t very team-minded, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn. “Allies
envision her running for statewide office in the future—regardless of whether
Mr. Paxton is serving in Washington,” the New York Times reported on Wednesday. “Ms. Paxton
feared staying silent in such a close race could hurt her reputation and open
the door to politically damaging questions about her loyalty to the party,
according to a person familiar with her thinking.”
It was reasonable for her to fear that. The GOP is very
much a party that would hold a grudge against her for not prioritizing its lust
for power over her emotional pain in having to defend a man who cheated on
her, personally. But that’s the sort of team Angela Paxton chose to join
and, really, that’s the team on which she belongs: Vouching for unfit scumbags
to advance one’s own selfish political ambitions has been standard operating
procedure in the Republican Party since 2016.
What team?
Another thing: What even is “the team” at this point?
Millions of Republicans joined the team years ago because
they believed in free markets, limited government, and advancing America’s
interests by encouraging Western liberal values abroad. The leadership of Team
GOP no longer supports any of that. The president levies tariffs by whim,
demands government stakes in private companies, wages unauthorized wars, sics
law enforcement on his political enemies, and routinely behaves more
aggressively toward traditional American allies than toward enemies.
And the explicit appeal of Ken Paxton’s Senate candidacy
to his supporters is that, if elected, he’ll continue to let Trump do all of
it.
I never joined that team. Why should I or any other
conservative give a rat’s ass about getting it across the finish line in Texas?
If President Vance were to adopt the progressive economic agenda in toto
in 2029—a not-unthinkable possibility—would team spirit require me to support
that too?
Angela Paxton’s pitch is the political equivalent of
Jerry Seinfeld’s famous bit about sports fandom being a matter of “rooting for laundry.” The
entire roster might be replaced within a few seasons, he observed, but the
fans’ loyalty persists because ultimately they’re cheering for the
franchise—for its uniforms, i.e., laundry—more so than its individual
personnel.
That’s a defensible attitude for a silly pastime. But
apply it to politics and you get anti-anti-Trumpism, the belief that being
governed by any Republican beats being governed by any Democrat because the
Republican laundry is better, however filthy it may have become. Absent that
attitude from enabling partisan fanatics like Angela Paxton, postliberalism
couldn’t have gained traction in the GOP and Ken Paxton winning a Senate
nomination wouldn’t have been possible.
There is no Ken without Angela.
It’s no coincidence, then, that right-wing team spirit is
only ever invoked to extinguish moral qualms about postliberalism, never to
encourage them, even if Team GOP would benefit from that encouragement.
Consider how Trump responded to Karl Rove declaring that he won’t vote for Republican Bo French for Texas railroad
commissioner this year after French complained
that the University of Texas is admitting too many Indian-Americans.
Rove did his party a favor there, morally and
politically. If you want Indian-American voters to feel more comfortable
joining the party, penalizing a candidate who’s bigoted toward them might go a
long way. French losing his race would be a small price to pay for expanding
the Republican tent with nonwhite voters long-term. But that’s not how Trump
saw it, of course: He threw a tantrum aimed at Rove—not at French, the man who
had actually damaged the team—for daring to suggest that voting for a Democrat
is ever justified.
The “team” the president and both Paxtons are playing for
isn’t actually the Republican Party. Partisanship is simply what they’re
selling to immiserated right-wing suckers to try to goose their enthusiasm and
get them to turn out this year, another “lesser of two evils” pitch from a
political movement that’s morally incapable of offering anything else. If
the three were earnest Republican partisans, they would have endorsed John
Cornyn to maximize the GOP’s chances of defeating Talarico.
The team they’re playing for is postliberalism. Given how
comprehensive Ken Paxton’s unfitness for office is, encompassing not just
personal sins like philandering but all manner of abuses of his public office,
the inescapable takeaway from Angela Paxton’s ad is that no amount of
immorality committed by a right-wing candidate can ever disqualify him from
wielding power. That’s an essential pillar of postliberal thought, essential to
the core conviction that power must be wielded immorally to have any
chance of defeating the left.
We can draw a straight line between that logic and Max
Miller’s continued viability in Ohio. And the warm
feelings among MAGA fellow travelers for accused pedophile Andrew Tate. And the sense of impunity
with which Donald Trump has committed his various civic
obscenities.
If you care about Team GOP, which Angela Paxton does not,
vote Democratic this fall. It will take more than one landslide to rid the
party of postliberal degenerates, but a good thrashing next month might
enlighten the right-wing mind going forward to the value of nominating
candidates who aren’t sociopaths and of caring what the public thinks before
starting new wars or levying new tariffs. Make it hurt. Especially in Texas.
No comments:
Post a Comment