Democrats’ Alaskan Dirty Trick

National Review Online

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

 

Alaska Democrats are engaged in a scurrilous dirty trick to confuse Alaska voters. That’s politics at its worst, but it is not against the law.

 

One of the currently close Senate races that is expected to decide control of the chamber is in Alaska, where two-term Republican incumbent Dan S. Sullivan faces Democratic former Representative Mary Peltola. Sullivan deserves reelection but is currently battling the same undertow facing Republican candidates across the country. Because Alaska’s unique quasi-jungle primary election system sends the top four finishers from the primaries to a single general election, another candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan is in the race, ostensibly as a Republican, but with no other apparent reason to run except to drain the votes of confused voters away from the incumbent.

 

The False Dan Sullivan tried and failed to get on the ballot without identifying middle initials and has a campaign website that is designed to look as much as possible like that of his senatorial opponent. The Alaska courts upheld his state-court lawsuit overturning the Alaska Division of Elections decision to exclude him from the ballot. The final ballot is set to list Senator Sullivan as “Dan S. Sullivan (Registered Republican) Incumbent,” and the False Dan Sullivan as “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.”

 

The False Dan Sullivan scam has some limits. First, given Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, it will only work if some voters pick only a single candidate. If they rank both Dans Sullivan ahead of Peltola, this does nothing more than gum up a few rounds of the works, because the system ultimately throws out the rankings of all but the two candidates with the most remaining votes. Second, Alaska’s voters have had to pay careful attention to their ballots before, when Lisa Murkowski ran as a write-in after losing the Republican primary. Despite concerns from her backers that voters might not remember how to spell Murkowski, she won. Third, fortuitously enough, there is yet a third Dan Sullivan, Daniel A. Sullivan, a former Republican mayor of Anchorage (and son of that city’s longest-serving mayor), who ran for lieutenant governor in 2014, the same year that Senator Dan S. Sullivan was elected. Thus, this is not the first time Alaskans needed to keep their Dans Sullivan straight.

 

Still, this is dirty pool, obviously meant only in bad faith and with the potential that a very close election could turn on voters not knowing for whom they are voting. Republicans are right to cry foul. But the Justice Department has gone one step further, filing a federal lawsuit demanding “an order declaring a certification of an election result prejudiced by Daniel J. Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot unlawful and enjoining defendants from allowing such a certification to occur.”

 

The lawsuit is not, contra some hyperbole in the press, an effort to steal an election. But the suit is meritless for two reasons. First, it is patently premature for a court to issue an order before an election about the certification of results that haven’t been tallied yet. Unless the election is close enough to be decided by votes for the False Dan Sullivan, there is no case or controversy to support a lawsuit in federal court.

 

Second, the suit doesn’t mention any federal law that is violated by any of this. All DOJ cites is 52 U.S.C. § 20501(b)(3), the preamble to the National Voter Registration Act, which states that the purpose of the statute is “to protect the integrity of the electoral process.” Much of the worst mischief in election law litigation in recent decades has come from Democrats and their allies persuading liberal judges to read broad powers of judicial activism into vaguely worded constitutional and statutory provisions promising fair elections. Republicans would live to regret turning this preamble into a freestanding judicial warrant to stop any election or campaign practice that strikes any district judge as dishonest or unfair. Congress never intended any such thing.

 

Democrats for years have urged lawsuits, legislation, and regulations on the premise that voters are easily confused, easily discouraged simpletons who must be protected and coddled. We were told that George W. Bush was elected only as a result of the butterfly ballot, or that Donald Trump was elected by a handful of random Facebook posts and by entries in his own private checkbook, or that campaign ads and political speech should be tightly restricted, or that voters will fall over in a stiff breeze if asked to produce identification and wait on lines without activists bringing them pizza and water. This is all nonsense, and Republicans should not indulge it.

 

If the DOJ’s lawsuit gets some headlines and helps alert voters to Democrats’ shenanigans, it may not be all for the bad. But there are better ways to get headlines than filing dead-end lawsuits.

It’s Time for a Reset in U.S.-Israel Relations

By Richard Goldberg

Monday, October 19, 2026

 

It’s time for a reset in the U.S.-Israel relationship. No, not because Israel did anything wrong. To the contrary, it’s because Israel is so essential to America and too many Americans don’t understand why.

 

For decades, U.S.-Israel ties centered around foreign aid. Washington gives, Jerusalem takes, and American policymakers defend the cost as an investment in a solid ally. That model, however, no longer reflects today’s multifaceted, interest-based alliance.

 

Fundamentally, the United States wants to win the century over the Chinese Communist Party. And we should expect Israel to fully commit to that victory as well. After all, America’s most powerful adversaries are the leading enablers of Israel’s most powerful adversaries.

 

But America will only win the century if it dominates super intelligence, quantum computing, critical supply chains, and defense technology. Israel is one of the world’s most important centers of innovation in every one of these areas — with both a capability and will to align its own strategic investments for the benefit of the United States.

 

Americans should want Israel to invest billions of dollars, both public and private, into SI and quantum research and development in full cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy, national labs, universities, and corporations.

 

Last year, President Trump issued an executive order launching a national Genesis Mission — a new Manhattan Project for SI, quantum, advanced energy, and scientific discovery. This summer, the U.S. welcomed Japan as the Genesis Mission’s first international partner.

 

Israel should be the second to join the mission, bringing its own multiyear investment pledge and offering preferential U.S. access to Israeli innovations. The move would also build on last year’s U.S.-Israel SI and Energy agreement, which envisioned a joint working group to help make America energy and SI dominant with Israel’s help.

 

Notably, Israel’s innovation ecosystem also includes research and commercial activity in advanced chemicals, synthetic materials, critical mineral recovery and refining, and the development of substitutes for scarce raw materials. America’s victory this century will largely depend on whether it can regain control of the periodic table and a wide range of critical supply chains.

 

Israel is already a member of the State Department’s Pax Silica, a diplomatic alliance aimed at building out an American-led ex-China supply chain for critical minerals and more. The U.S. should ask Israel to commit billions more to Pax Silica research, development, and commercialization — once again with American preferential access to Israeli innovation.

 

Finally, the 2026 National Defense Strategy recognizes Israel as a “model ally,” already spending a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than any NATO ally. After the United States, it’s the most innovative country in the world when it comes to defense technology. It battle-tests American platforms and makes them better. It co-develops missile- and laser-defense systems that help keep both countries safe from threats beyond the Middle East.

 

As global demand for munitions puts unprecedented stress on the U.S. defense industrial base, Israel is investing its own money to rebuild its own manufacturing lines for ammunition, tank and artillery shells, and bombs. And as the U.S. military looks for more flexible basing options, Israel provides air and sea possibilities for ongoing and contingency operations.

 

The U.S. defense relationship with Israel is no longer a one-way street. More can be done to drive that message home. Preferential access to Israeli defense technology for American warfighters and continued co-development of missile defense systems should be included on the American side of the economic benefit ledger.

 

Moreover, if Israel agrees to expand its own defense industrial base on its own dime — particularly in the areas where the U.S. defense industrial base will be most stressed in a multifront war with great power competitors — the national security benefits for America would be extraordinary.

 

Since the total economic benefit of Israeli commitments to the United States would more than pay for continued financing of American-made jet aircraft sales to Israel, that financing should continue with two conditions. First, every dollar must be spent inside the United States, supporting American workers and strengthening the American defense industrial base. And second, the U.S. military should have immediate access to all lessons learned from Israeli use in combat.

 

America and Israel remain natural allies because we share some things deeper than a transaction: a common Judeo-Christian moral inheritance, a commitment to democratic government, and a conception of human dignity that stands against the forces seeking to destroy the free world. Radical Islamists want to destroy America and Israel, Christians and Jews.

 

For tens of millions of Americans, that reality is enough. For others, it’s not — which makes the evolving national debate over the U.S.-Israel relationship an opportunity more than a crisis.

 

Moving from a foreign aid paradigm to an interest-based joint venture will deliver massive economic and security return on investment and help guarantee another American century. That’s a U.S.-Israel relationship every American should support.

El-Sayed’s Trouble with Minority Voters

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 12, 2026

 

It seemed to me that, while Mike Rogers delivered an underwhelming performance on last Thursday night’s debate stage, he probably succeeded in his effort to incept concerns in viewers’ minds about Abdul El-Sayed’s judgment and loyalties. The Jewish Insider reinforced that impression when it asked Michigan’s Jewish Democrats how they felt about the conduct of the Democratic Senate candidate.

 

“He’s not really made any accommodations whatsoever” to Michigan’s Jews, said prominent Democratic fundraiser David Kramer, “and the debate was just the latest example.” Kramer added that he’s hearing from his fellow Jewish Michiganders the general belief that El-Sayed is “absolutely showing who he is.” Michigan Democratic Party Central Committee member Joan Lowenstein agreed. Debate watchers “didn’t get anything new about what El-Sayed thinks, or what he was willing to do for Jewish safety,” she said, “not at all.” Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus secretary Zach Nessel (who is the son of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel), agonized over the choice before Michigan Democrats. “It was a sorry excuse not to stand up for our community three years after the Oct. 7 attack,” he said of El-Sayed’s refusal to honor the anniversary of the October 7 massacre. But then, perhaps the candidate’s silence was preferable. “I don’t think anything he would say would have been true to his values and probably would have been inflammatory,” Nessel added.

 

Influential as its individual members may be, Michigan’s Jewish community is small. Although he seems to have thoroughly alienated them, that does not spell defeat for El-Sayed in November. The candidate’s problems with the Wolverine State’s black voters are, however, another matter.

 

Longtime political analyst Ron Brownstein recently recalled a moment just prior to the state’s Democratic primary in which he found himself in a “black church in Detroit” where El-Sayed was “excoriated” from the pulpit. The church’s minister “said he was more concerned about Gaza than Detroit,” Brown observed. That mistrust persists.

 

Kamala Harris has already parachuted into the state to campaign on El-Sayed’s behalf, though her power to persuade Michiganders didn’t amount to much two years ago. Barack Obama will follow suit next week, and the former president has cut a 60-second spot endorsing “Doctor” Sayed. But while Democrats still believe that Obama’s popularity can transfer to other politicians, that has almost never been borne out in electoral results. What’s more, no one should expect the Democratic Party’s heavyweights to paper over the black community’s displeasure with El-Sayed or the constituencies he’s perceived to represent.

 

“They expect us to come get in lockstep and like him,” Detroit-area commentator Adolph Mongo told NewsNation. Mongo believes, NewsNation wrote, “that some Arab American political leaders have not sufficiently supported Black candidates or invested in the Black community.”

 

Writing for The Guardian, longtime columnist Charles Blow detected a similar discontent with El-Sayed among black Michiganders. Attorney Christopher Burtley, the chairman of Michigan’s black leadership advisory council, “says that the overwhelming feeling he detects toward El-Sayed from the Black community in Flint is ‘unfamiliarity,’” Blow reported, adding:

 

Phyllis Sykes, founder and executive director of the International Center of Greater Flint, and Burtley’s cohost at the meeting, chimed in: “People were on the fence. . . . I don’t think he has really been plugged into the African American network or whatever here like I know he has with some of the international populations.” None of that bodes well just a month out from election day. Both Burtley and Sykes are supporters of El-Sayed.

 

Then there’s the Hispanic vote. The New Yorker reported earlier this month that some of the El-Sayed’s allies fretted that he had not formalized his campaign’s outreach to Hispanic voters early enough, and they warn that he talks too much about abolishing ICE at the expense of “cost-of-living issues.”

 

In the August primary, El-Sayed performed strongest both in youngish urban precincts and “majority-Hispanic areas.” Progressive activist groups claim that the primary “saw an increase of 13% to 18% in Latino turnout compared to the 2022 primary,” suggesting the Hispanic vote is “fertile ground” for El-Sayed’s campaign to till. But El-Sayed will soon welcome another progressive celebrity with a conspicuous agenda to the state, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Beyond rallying with the candidate in college towns, AOC will host a “Latinos for Abdul” event in Detroit.

 

Unlike in previous cycles, high-quality polling has been scarce. The Senate race in Michigan is no exception. The last reliable poll of the race, Fox News’ late-September survey, found El-Sayed with a one-point lead over Mike Rogers but still winning with a narrow (50 percent) majority of the vote. And yet, that poll showed El-Sayed earning just 46 percent of white voters, 77 percent of black voters, and 68 percent of the “non-white” vote.

 

When Senator Elise Slotkin just barely won her 2024 race, by only 76,000 of the 5.4 million votes cast, according to the exit polling, she did so with the support of 44 percent of white voters (who made up 76 percent of the electorate), 40 percent of Hispanics (6 percent of all voters), and 85 percent of blacks (11 percent). In Fox’s poll, El-Sayed is winning 54 percent of the female vote and 49 percent of self-described independents. Slotkin won 53 percent of women in 2024 and 51 percent of independents.

 

These core constituencies will make or break El-Sayed’s political career. Right now, the candidate has more pathways to victory than Rogers, but not nearly as many as he’d probably like.

 

“If they want to make me the main character in the midterms, I’m not shying away from it,” El-Sayed told the Los Angeles Times in a recent interview. “Run against me. See how well that works out for you.” Given his middling performance in the polls, even as gusty tailwinds boost Democratic prospects almost across the board, Republicans might want to take El-Sayed up on that offer. Rogers needs to transform Michigan’s Senate race from a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency into an up-or-down vote on El-Sayed’s fitness for office.

 

If the polls are right, Michiganders aren’t sold on El-Sayed. It remains to be seen whether Rogers can capitalize on their trepidation.

Democrats Have a Missing Republican Voter Problem

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, October 07, 2026

 

Everywhere you look, the signs indicate that Democrats will have a great night on November 3.

 

Republican candidates in districts and states where Democrats should struggle are scrambling to distance themselves from their party’s unpopular president. Grudgingly, the president has had to steer clear of Republican candidates in competitive races. Instead, he’s energizing the GOP’s base voters in places like Alabama, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. The Republican Party’s national committees are pulling up stakes in states like Georgia and North Carolina — hardly dark-blue bastions — as they “triage” resources while Democrats expand their target list.

 

Then there are the polls. Reputable firms have started seeing a historic Democratic advantage in surveys that test voters’ preference for which party they’d like to see in control of Congress. In Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina, the bottom is falling out for the GOP’s candidates. Electoral forecasters have been shifting close races toward Democrats for weeks, with no reciprocal movement in the GOP’s direction even in states and districts where Democratic primary voters nominated weak candidates.

 

All this suggests that a gigantic blue wave is about to break across the American political landscape. For some Democrats, it’s been a heady experience. “Is everything suddenly possible for Democrats?” the New York magazine headline read. In that dispatch, author Ed Kilgore explores a plausible scenario in which the party emerges from the election with a 47-seat gain in the House and a 54-seat Senate majority. Even if that high-end outcome isn’t the likeliest electoral result, he wrote, the “nature of states that could get caught up in this wave is becoming the stuff of Democratic dreams.”

 

This week, however, an irritating set of variables intruded upon these otherwise intoxicating circumstances. Suddenly, media outlets and pollsters alike have begun to manage the Democratic Party’s expectations.

 

Despite the party’s seemingly rational exuberance, NBC News analyst Natasha Korecki wrote Tuesday that Democrats “may need a gut check on their midterm ambitions.”

 

“We’ve all been here before. A poll-driven media cycle that paints a far rosier picture for one party (Republicans in 2022) or another (Democrats in 2024),” she wrote. While hungry Democratic eyes are drawn toward reach targets in the ruby-red Midwest, they have not yet sealed the deal in the states that will make or break the Democratic Senate majority: Alaska, Texas, Ohio, Maine, and even Michigan, where the party is defending its own turf.

 

Likewise, while polls suggest the Hispanic vote has flipped back to Democrats, “there are still big questions around whether they will turn out for the other side,” Korecki noted. The same could be said of the youth vote, which reliably leans left but is not so reliable when it comes to voting. Notoriously underrated undecided voters may still defer (or merely come home) to the GOP. And, in the contests that matter, Republicans have an “enormous spending advantage” over Democrats.

 

But what about those polls? Professionals in that space have long been frustrated by the rate at which Republican voters decline to participate in polls — a phenomenon that intensifies when the political environment is bad for their party. For example, in his latest Iowa survey — a state that has fooled pollsters before — State Navigate executive director Chaz Nuttycombe warned that the number of rural Iowans who “ignored” his survey is alarming.

 

“We think this could be a Canary in the Cornfields for Iowa polling this year,” he warned. “Will rural areas in Iowa swing 25-35 points leftward of 2024 in the non-IA GOV races?” Nuttycombe asked. “Yes? Polling is probably right. No? Probably not good for pollsters, Bob.”

 

The left-of-center pollster G. Elliott Morris issued a similar admonition on Tuesday to his fellow data analysts. While he did not rule out the possibility that this year’s polling error actually undercounts the Democratic Party’s strength (which is surely possible), “low-effort” poll respondents present a real conundrum. “And if this measure of effort is at all predictive of the voting behavior of people who don’t answer the polls (who can be thought to have an effort of zero), the polls could be off in terms of vote margin by up to 3.5 points favoring one party this November,” he wrote.

 

The New Republic’s Perry Bacon, too, has detected a whiff of euphoric irrationality among his co-partisans. The polls “simply seem too good to be true,” he wrote. He admits that he has no data to back up his apprehension, and that he has deferred to the prejudicial assumption that “too many voters in the South both love Trump and hate Black people” to hand Democrats a historic win. Admittedly, he’s playing down Democratic prospects for the benefit of his “mental health,” which will need all the help it can get. But Bacon has a point about the Democratic Party’s failure to manage the public’s expectations. And if the party falls short of a seismic victory, the press will conclude that Democrats turned off too many persuadable voters. That will be the correct takeaway, of course, but Bacon nevertheless reserves the right to resent it.

 

The polling industry is right to fear the hidden Republican voter who only emerges from the mists on Election Day. “There are many reasons the polls might ultimately be wrong in November, as many state polls were four years ago, but there’s no serious evidence that the polls are systematically missing Republican voters,” New York Times analyst Nate Cohn wrote in July 2020. Twelve months later, the American Association for Public Opinion Research explained why the polls missed so many Republican voters that year.

 

Of course, that was a presidential year defined by the outbreak of a socially destabilizing pandemic — hardly a reliable baseline to measure turnout in a relatively normal midterm election. But the scale of the GOP vote was also slightly underrated ahead of the 2022 midterm, too, even though, as Cohn noted, “Republicans failed to translate their strength into anything like a clear victory.” The same phenomenon marred the 2024 election. “The polls once again understated the depth of support for President-elect Donald Trump, despite the many changes pollsters made after their 2020 and 2016 misses,” NBC’s reporters sighed.

 

Things may be very different this year. Trump is no longer the force inside the GOP he once was, and a sizable portion of his 2024 voters seem to have soured on the president and his movement. The so-called fundamentals that shape the electoral environment are terrible for the GOP. No Republican should be comfortable staking the party’s prospects on an ill-defined but suspected polling error. It may all be, as the kids say, a cope.

 

Still, the missing Republican problem is real. The pollsters and journalists who warn of it are making admissions against interest. For that reason, they should be taken seriously.

The Persuadable Gen Z Voter No One Wants to Persuade

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

Depending on your political persuasion, the Wall Street Journal’s informal focus group featuring six “Democratic voters,” two of whom expressed irreconcilable objections to Abdul El-Sayed’s candidacy for U.S. Senate in Michigan, might produce one of two reactions: Wow, two out of six Democrats won’t back El-Sayed, or, My God, only two out of six Democrats won’t back El-Sayed.

 

“Being on this panel made me lose all faith in the party,” one of the two dissenters on the panel, 18-year-old Stanford University student Samson Cain, wrote last week.

 

I asked him what he meant by that.

 

“This is not an isolated event but, rather, part of a broader trend,” Cain explained in a Monday interview with National Review. “I feel like the party is going in a very dangerous direction.”

 

“It seemed first of all like the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] in the progressive wing of the party was not just a fringe idea but very popular,” he added. Cain spoke with disdain about the DSA agenda: “abolishing police and prisons, nationalizing essential industries, abolishing the Senate, abolishing the Supreme Court.” To Cain, most participants on that call seemed either supportive of those specific policies or at least enthusiastic about what he called the DSA’s “mission.”

 

“This didn’t make it into the final video, but I found myself having to defend capitalism as an institution,” Cain continued. “We got to a point where there was a discussion not just about reforming capitalism but whether it was the right system.”

 

The university student confessed: “I walked away from this call thinking to myself, ‘Wow, I really don’t agree with these people on just about [anything].’”

 

Democratic partisans will take solace in Cain’s admission that he does not see himself as a rock-solid Democratic voter (his billing by WSJ notwithstanding). “I didn’t exactly consider myself a true Democrat walking in,” he said. Cain says he identifies as a centrist independent and identified himself as such on that call. Yet he conceded that there was no point in this election cycle in which he “seriously considered” voting for Democratic candidates.

 

The Democratic Party would, however, be fooling itself if members conclude that Cain — and young men like him — were never persuadable. He caught the Journal’s eye because of his work with Promise to America, a center-left advocacy organization dedicated to beating back the far left’s influence from within the Democratic milieu. “I have a very fundamental belief in free markets and, you know, a strong national defense,” Cain explained. That those have become “right-of-center” views, in Cain’s words, reflects less on him than on the Democratic Party.

 

When it comes to El-Sayed, Cain told the Journal that his problem was with the company the candidate keeps — in particular, the incendiary streamer Hasan Piker. But Israel did not feature prominently in our discussion of the Michigan candidate’s demerits.

 

“I think you see a huge mischaracterization of how the economy works on the progressive left,” Cain explained. “Just recently, he gave an interview saying he’d rather have one thousand millionaires than one billionaire. Like, sure. Okay. But the reality is, the economy doesn’t work that way. In fact, they feed off each other. And, in fact, the more billionaires you have, the more millionaires you have as well.”

 

When the Journal’s panelists were asked to look ahead to the 2028 presidential nominating contest, Cain emphasized his preference for a candidate with “electability.” He cited Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear as an example of that kind of candidate. If the party goes in a different direction, though, and assuming the GOP does not alienate him further, “there’s quite a good chance that, in 2028, it is, in fact, a Republican that I end up voting for.”

 

Cain does not, however, have many kind words for the GOP. “People don’t feel that they’ve taken the affordability issue seriously,” he said. Say what you will about the DSA, for Cain “it’s very obvious” that the socialist left “is taking the affordability issue very seriously,” even if he opposes the DSA’s approach. By contrast, when it comes to Democratic leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, “you have no idea what they believe other than that they don’t like Trump.”

 

Cain, who recently published a taxonomy of the primary political outlooks among his generational cohort, expressed his concern that Gen Z’s inclination toward “conspiratorial” and “anti-establishment” thinking “paves the way for more dangerous ideologies.” Nothing about that outlook would be alien to the Democratic Party as it was conceived a generation ago. Today, however, Cain’s political outlook — his support for the capitalist enterprise and a strong national defense, and his rejection of radicalism of all stripes — is all but anathema to the center- and far-left alike.

 

“If the Democratic Party could make a concerted effort to get rid of the crazy progressive wing, get rid of the DSA, unequivocally condemn a lot of these policies and ideas, and reform themselves to a more Clintonian 1990s version of the party, that would make me a gettable voter,” he concluded. “But at this point, I feel that we’re going in the exact opposite direction.”

 

Cain conceded that the Democratic Party didn’t actually lose him this year, but that’s partly because it never set out to win him over in the first place. The party that sets out to get Samson Cain may find that he represents more voters than either party seems to understand.

The Three-Party Problem

By Yascha Mounk

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

The smart money in American politics has always bet against the rise of third parties.

 

The reasons are both obvious and numerous. The two-party system has been firmly entrenched for 200 years. America’s electoral system makes it very difficult for candidates who are neither Democrats nor Republicans to gain traction because voters are rightly worried about “wasting” their votes. And while many people are deeply unsatisfied with the current offerings, they don’t necessarily agree on the alternative they would prefer: Just because Jane and Jill might both like the idea of a third party doesn’t mean they will ever agree on the same candidate.

 

That helps explain why third-party candidates usually fail, often helping to elect candidates who are ideologically very different from those third parties in the process. Ralph Nader’s third-party run likely helped put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000. Jill Stein may have rendered the same service to Donald Trump in 2016. Even Ross Perot, the most successful third-party candidate of the past decades, ultimately helped Bill Clinton win the White House in 1992.

 

The supposedly smart money is often based on conventional wisdom. But the problem with the conventional wisdom is that it is usually right for a long stretch—before suddenly proving to be disastrously wrong. Take, as an example, the longstanding conviction among political scientists studying the American primary system that party insiders ultimately decide who gets the presidential nomination, a supposed certainty that blinded large parts of the field to Trump’s rise in 2016.

 

When it comes to third parties, we may now be approaching a similar paradigm shift. Both in the United States and around the world, structural conditions once favored a duopoly of incumbent parties. But these structural conditions have since eroded to such an extent that the old certitudes no longer apply. A successful third-party bid is much more likely now than it was in the past.

 

***

 

Throughout the history of France’s Fifth Republic, two political parties dominated the country’s politics: the socialist left and the moderate right. These two movements drew the vast majority of votes, occupied the lion’s share of seats in the National Assembly, and won every single presidential election.

 

Support for these two parties had been eroding steadily for years. In 2002, for example, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right candidate, surprisingly edged out Lionel Jospin, the candidate of the center-left, in the first round of the presidential election (though Jacques Chirac defeated Le Pen in a landslide in the second round). In 2017, lightning struck: Emmanuel Macron founded an upstart centrist movement and rose to power on a wave of discontent with the established parties. His star has faded since then—but the traditional parties have failed to recover: Opinion polls suggest that neither the leader of the traditional left nor the leader of the traditional right has any realistic chance of making the runoff of next year’s presidential elections.

 

Germany is undergoing a similar political metamorphosis. For much of the country’s postwar history, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats split the lion’s share of the vote. Between them, they usually took 70, 80, and at times even 90 percent of the vote. But support for these so-called people’s parties has cratered in recent decades. At the last federal elections, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats received markedly less than 50 percent of the vote, a record low. They have fallen even further in recent polls, to about 33 percent.

 

What is true in France and Germany also holds in scores of other democracies around the world, from Austria to Australia. In all of them, two parties once dominated politics. In all of them, these long-established parties have shrunk or altogether disappeared. The number of countries with effective duopolies is vastly smaller now than it once was.

 

In each of these countries, a similar set of causes has driven the gradual demise of the political duopoly: Voters are unhappy with the direction of their country, making it harder for traditional parties to retain their loyalty. The public sphere is increasingly fragmented, making it harder for a couple of catch-all parties to speak to most voters. Social media favors charisma and authenticity, making it much easier for new political entrants to storm the stage.

 

All of these factors are just as strong in the United States—which helps to explain why popular support for both Democrats and Republicans is rapidly eroding. The easiest way to see how much worse the two main American political parties have become at satisfying their voters is to look at partisan self-identification over time.

 

 

As recently as 20 years ago, the number of Americans who identified with either Democrats or Republicans was about double the number who thought of themselves as independent. Under these circumstances, third-party candidates would have needed to win over a large share of voters with strong partisan identities to be competitive—an all but impossible task.

 

Since then, the number of self-identified Democrats and Republicans has shrunk significantly. There are now nearly as many independents as there are Democrats and Republicans put together, creating more favorable conditions for third-party candidates: If a third party candidate can win over a lot of independents, they can, in principle, be competitive with the support of a small fraction of traditional Democrats or Republicans.

 

Third parties are most likely to gain momentum when voters are deeply unsatisfied with the traditional options on offer. And as it happens, discontent with both traditional options is at or near record levels today. Trump is less popular now than he has been at any prior point in his first or second term: Polling averages show that around 60 percent of Americans disapprove of his performance in office, with only about 37 percent thinking he is doing a good job. Trump’s unpopularity has also dragged down support for the Republican Party as a whole. In a recent NBC poll, only 36 percent of respondents reported viewing  the Republican Party positively, with 49 percent viewing it negatively.

 

In a well-entrenched two-party system, one party falling from grace to such an extent would usually boost the popularity of the other party. For much of the second half of the 20^th century, approval ratings for Democrats and Republicans usually moved in opposite directions. Strikingly, that no longer seems to be the case. Even as independents soured on the Republican Party over the past 18 months, they have not become any more enamored with the Democrats. According to that same NBC poll, only 29 percent of respondents saw the Democratic Party positively, with 50 percent viewing it negatively. Net favorability for Democrats is even worse than it is for Republicans.

 

For now, elections remain a choice between two unpopular options. Though Democrats have a worse image than Republicans, the minds of most voters are unsurprisingly focused on the failings of the man in the White House. This year’s midterms are likely to produce a sizable, perhaps even a huge, blue wave. But Democrats would be fooling themselves if they took this to mean that most Americans have a positive view of the party or will necessarily stay loyal to it over the long run.

 

So long as Trump remains toxically unpopular and there are no realistic alternatives, voters will reluctantly flock to the Democrats. There is absolutely no guarantee that these two conditions will remain true forever.

 

***

 

Both Republicans and Democrats are very unpopular. So why has a third party so far failed to materialize? Why does virtually every representative and senator remain affiliated with one of these two parties? The answers have to do with the nature of the American electoral system.

 

In countries with proportional representation, such as Germany, voters can pick a small political party without feeling that they are wasting their vote. Even if a new environmentalist or pro-business party gets only 7 or 8 percent of the vote, it will still send some representatives to parliament and may even enter government as part of a broader coalition.

 

However, in countries with a majoritarian electoral system, such as the United States, a vote for a smaller party is usually “wasted.” If you vote for the Greens or the Libertarians this November, you almost certainly won’t affect the composition of the House or the Senate since those parties are very unlikely to win a plurality of the vote in any district. Even voters who might prefer the ideological profile of a local third-party candidate are therefore likely to “hold their nose” and instead support the major party candidate they dislike the least. (In addition, electoral rules are set by the incumbent parties, and those are unsurprisingly keen to make it harder for third parties to get off the ground; in many states, there are consequently major obstacles to even getting on the ballot.)

 

This helps explain why countries with a majoritarian electoral system have traditionally tended toward especially entrenched party duopolies. In the United Kingdom, for example, Labour and the Conservatives have for the past century split the lion’s share of the vote between them. Even if you liked other parties better, you opted for one of the two main parties.

 

But despite the structural obstacles to the emergence of third parties in the United Kingdom, that has started to change in recent years. While Labour and the Conservatives often took more than 90 percent of the vote between them in the postwar era, their cumulative vote share fell to 57 percent at the last general election and was as low as 37 percent in polling averages earlier this year—a development that looks strikingly similar to those in Germany and France. (Labour has somewhat recovered since Andy Burnham replaced Keir Starmer as prime minister, but it is too early to tell whether he can convert his honeymoon phase into lasting support.)

 

These changes are not yet reflected in the composition of the House of Commons. In a majoritarian system with five or six viable political parties, it is often enough to gain 30 percent of the national vote to sweep to a large majority. But by the same token, a new party can gain a majority at astonishing speed if it is able to rise to similar levels of popularity. If the far-right Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, recovers from recent funding scandals and gains 30 percent of the vote at the next election, it could well win an outright majority of MPs.

 

Majoritarian electoral systems, like the one used in the United States, create serious structural obstacles to the rise of third parties. But when voters get sufficiently disillusioned with the traditional duopoly that this system creates, these obstacles aren’t insurmountable, as the case of the United Kingdom shows. Could America be next?

 

***

 

America, unlike the United Kingdom, has a president who is directly elected. This means that voters pay comparatively less attention to parties and legislative elections, and comparatively more attention to personalities and presidential elections. It is therefore unlikely that the rise of new political parties would take the same form as in Britain or most other parts of Europe. I don’t anticipate that longstanding third parties like the Greens or the Libertarians will succeed in upending American politics by winning a succession of congressional races.

 

Instead, the most likely scenario for a third-party breakthrough would resemble some of the close misses of the past: A charismatic and (probably) rich individual would run for president without the backing of either the Democratic or the Republican Party, possibly succeeding in electing a number of senators or representatives on the candidate’s coattails.

 

To beat the odds, this kind of candidate would need to start with high name recognition and have tremendous financial resources at their disposal—in short, a celebrity who is famous for something other than politics. Billionaires are the obvious possibility, since they can finance their own campaigns. But a sports or movie or music star with a base of fervent supporters and a strong network of high-net-worth friends is also an option.   

 

These conditions constrain what a successful third-party bid would look like. But they are hardly insurmountable. In a country as large, rich, and raucous as the United States, there is no paucity of charismatic celebrities with outsized ambitions and access to money.

 

In this respect, Trump proved to be the model. But while he staged a kind of hostile takeover of an existing political party, his spiritual successors may choose to assail the traditional parties from the outside. In part because Trump for now retains a sufficiently large fan club to block the way to any competitor on the populist right, future third-party candidates may choose to challenge the MAGA movement from outside the structure of the Republican Party.

 

Many readers will think that the fading hold of the duopoly is a good thing. Since most Americans now feel disaffected with both Democrats and Republicans, many of them understandably hope for a third party. I should in theory feel the same way: While I don’t have any difficulty choosing between the existing options, I don’t feel especially well represented by either. Surely, I should be giddy with excitement at the prospect of having more choices!

 

But that anticipation may prove to be premature. The views of independents are highly heterogeneous, and many of the people who now long for the day when they have a third option may find themselves deeply disappointed when the day comes. While I personally would love to have a political option that has moderate views on cultural issues and recognizes the danger posed by authoritarian regimes like Russia’s, I fear that it is much more likely that a successful third-party candidate would combine extreme cultural views with deeply isolationist tendencies.

 

And then, of course, there are the perils of celebrity politics. Given the nature of America’s political system, a third party is likely to be led by a charismatic leader with little prior experience in politics. Even if I should find the program on which they run to be congenial, it is far from clear whether the candidate would, should they succeed in entering the White House, enact a principled political alternative to the status quo or simply use the office as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement.

 

Sooner or later, the day of the third-party candidate is likely to be upon us. But when it comes, many who now find that idea to be exciting may be in for a rude awakening.

 

 

The Democrats Face Their Own Early-Voting Paranoia Problem

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

In some states, early voting in the 2026 midterm elections has already begun. Many more will follow as this campaign cycle enters the home stretch. That should be good news for Democrats — not just because the prevailing political environment favors the opposition party but because Democrats have recently voted early in larger numbers than their Republican counterparts. By most accounts, Democratic voters are still expected to swamp the GOP in the early and absentee vote, but perhaps not by the margins the party expects.

 

Politico reported on Thursday that a recent NBC News poll finding, in which fewer Democrats said they plan to vote by mail, has led to an outbreak of anxiety inside the party. As the party’s political professionals understand it, the problem is that many in the Democratic base do not believe that mail-in voting is secure against the prospect of presidential interference. Of course, Politico affirms, that’s Trump’s fault.

 

“That confusion comes as Democrats and voting groups weigh how to reassure voters after Trump’s latest effort to restrict mail voting,” the report read, referring to the president’s efforts to impose restrictions on mail-in voting, which the Supreme Court rejected. Generally, the rules at the state level — where elections are conducted — have not changed since 2024. But Democratic voters don’t believe that. As a result, “Democrats, including state election officials who oversee the process, are also looking for ways to boost confidence in the mail system,” Politico concluded.

 

It’s going to take many confidence-building measures before Democratic voters forget about Trump’s threat to the integrity of their ballots. After all, Democratic lawmakers were sounding the alarm themselves.

 

“Everyone can feel just how afraid Donald Trump and Republicans are of losing the upcoming elections by how hard they are pushing their radical and illegal voter suppression policies,” Chuck Schumer said in an April statement following the president’s March executive order and despite its dubious prospects before the courts. “This Executive Order attacking mail-in voting is just the latest in a series of frantic efforts by Donald Trump to rig elections for Republicans by trying to change the rules.” Even after the highest court in the land scuttled Trump’s initiative, Schumer still warned that the president is out to “hijack the election and poison our democracy.”

 

The rest of his party showed similar contempt for circumspection. Along with Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the president of “desperately trying to rig our elections by making it harder to vote for seniors, Americans with disabilities, members of the military, rural communities and other working families who rely on vote-by-mail.”

 

The fourth-ranking official in the Democratic House caucus’s leadership, Representative Joe Neguse (Colo.), alleged that Trump deliberately sought to “disenfranchise millions of Americans, silencing an untold number of citizens that rely on mail ballots to make their voices heard.”

 

Representative Robert Garcia (Calif.), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, claimed that the administration’s “reckless actions undermine the foundation of our nation’s democracy and violate the basic principle that all citizens have the right to have their vote counted.” Indeed, the White House–envisioned enterprise was “intended to fail,” according to Senator Richard Blumenthal (Conn.).

 

It’s hard to blame the rank-and-file Democrats who failed to keep up with court rulings for deferring to warnings their party’s leading representatives repeatedly issued before this year’s vote. That’s essentially what happened to the GOP after Donald Trump went to war with early voting, creating an early-voting deficit among Republican voters that his own party has tried to remedy, with varying degrees of success, despite the president’s refusal to get on board.

 

Democrats now find themselves in a similar position. By repeatedly warning that their ballots were not secure, Democrats were making a political argument against Trump that is set to cause collateral damage to their party’s participation in early balloting. They probably should have seen that coming.

Make American Democracy Great Again

By Jianli Yang

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

The world watched last week’s Trump-Xi summit with the familiar expectation that the leaders of the world’s two most powerful countries might finally unveil a “grand deal.” The same expectation surrounded their Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Busan, South Korea, last November and President Trump’s state visit to China in May. Each time, observers were disappointed: no historic reconciliation, no decisive confrontation, no grand bargain. This week’s summit, with its extraordinary pomp and ceremony, was therefore widely dismissed as a made-for-TV event with few deliverables. I think this misses what actually happened: The grand deal is already taking shape. It is simply not the kind people have been looking for.

 

There is a line in an old Chinese poem: One searches for her a thousand times in the crowd, only suddenly to turn around and find her standing where the lights are dim. We have been searching for a grand deal in communiqués, tariff schedules, and dramatic concessions. But the real deal is emerging through the increasingly frequent interactions between Trump and Xi themselves: a tacit understanding about the nature of their competition and, above all, that neither side currently wants to overturn the table.

 

After seven years of trade conflict, the Busan summit crystallized an uncomfortable reality. Each country possesses tools capable of inflicting serious economic damage on the other. Neither can easily force the other to capitulate, and both would pay dearly for unrestricted economic warfare. The resulting trade truce bought something more important than tariff relief: time.

 

What has followed has been extraordinary diplomatic choreography. Trump visited China in May; four months later, Xi came to Washington. Both received unusually elaborate treatment. More meetings are planned. Behind the pageantry is recognition of a strategic fact: G-2 has become a reality. But it is a realist G-2.

 

Realism begins not with what we wish the other country to be but with what it is: an opponent with the power, interests, ambitions, and capacity to hurt us. Trump and Xi are, in different ways, masters of transactional politics. Neither expects the other to convert. The emerging framework rests on mutual recognition of power and calculations of national interest.

 

That does not make the framework stable. The Chinese saying is blunt: “One mountain cannot accommodate two tigers.” International-relations scholars call the corresponding danger the Thucydides Trap: When a rising power challenges an established one, structural pressures can push them toward war. But Xi has repeatedly insisted that the Thucydides Trap can be overcome.

 

Perhaps. But Xi cannot know that. Trump cannot know it. Nobody can. That uncertainty explains the emphasis on “strategic stability.” What Trump and Xi appear to be constructing is neither friendship nor surrender. Competition continues. Conflicts continue. Each side still seeks advantage. But both have concluded that now is not the time to flip the table. If a showdown can be avoided, avoid it. If it cannot be avoided, postpone it. Meanwhile, accumulate strength. That, I believe, is the Trump-Xi grand deal. It is not a treaty. It is an understanding about how to compete.

 

Xi gave it its most audacious formulation during this visit: The “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and making America great again can “go hand in hand” and even reinforce each other. Let’s call Xi’s objective MCGA — Make China Great Again.

 

Can MAGA and MCGA really reinforce each other? Taken literally, the proposition strains credibility. America wants to restore manufacturing, maintain technological primacy, strengthen its military, and preserve global influence. China wants technological self-sufficiency, industrial dominance, military modernization, greater global influence, and national “rejuvenation.” Their ambitions collide precisely where each matters most.

 

MAGA-plus-MCGA is therefore less geopolitical reality than useful strategic fiction. Both leaders nevertheless have reasons to behave as though it might be true.

 

Trump places American reindustrialization at the center of MAGA. The new U.S.–China Boards of Trade and Investment could allow selected Chinese capital and technology to contribute to American manufacturing.

 

Taiwan presents the harder test. For Xi, “reunification” is inseparable from national rejuvenation. Beijing says Xi urged Washington to adopt the “correct position of opposing ‘Taiwan independence.’” Trump has not publicly accepted that formulation. America traditionally says it does not support Taiwan independence, not that it opposes it. Yet the White House summit account conspicuously omitted Taiwan, while a roughly $14 billion Taiwan arms package has remained unsigned for months.

 

More strikingly, the White House shared that the “United States and China were allies in World War II and fought side by side to win the war” against Japan. This version of history is errant. America’s formal Chinese ally was the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek, not the People’s Republic, which did not exist until 1949. That wartime ROC survives today on Taiwan.

 

Why emphasize such deliberately broad historical language now? One possible interpretation, perhaps the only logical one, is that strategic ambiguity is becoming even more ambiguous — about who are friends and who are adversaries, extending beyond whether America would defend Taiwan toward how Washington places Taiwan, and perhaps Japan, within its larger accommodation with Beijing. This does not prove that the U.S.’s Taiwan policy has changed. But this new friend-or-foe ambiguity has strategic consequences, which help explain the unease in Taipei and Tokyo.

 

There is another foundation beneath the new G-2. Trump and Xi increasingly acknowledge and praise each other’s civilizations. Trump invoked Confucius during his China visit; at the National Archives, he contrasted America’s 250 years with China’s thousands. Xi, in turn, praised America’s distinctive founding spirit.

 

Admirable diplomacy. But something is missing. The leaders can celebrate each other’s civilizations while avoiding the enormous difference between their political systems. And here an apparently unrelated event during Xi’s visit becomes important.

 

The White House had barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. The organizations sued. Other major media organizations stood with them. Then U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump himself, ordered their access restored. The administration complied.

 

Consider how strange this must appear from Beijing. A president appoints a judge. The judge later rules against the president. The president is angry. The ruling nevertheless takes effect.

 

That is constitutional government. But in Xi’s China, the media must “bear the Party’s surname.” In America, the media does not bear Trump’s surname, the Republican Party’s surname, or the Democratic Party’s surname. Presidents can attack journalists; journalists can attack presidents; courts can restrain presidents; and presidents remain presidents.

 

This is not peripheral to the competition with China. It is part of what America is competing with. Talking about competition. Nowhere is that more consequential than in artificial intelligence.

 

Trump and Xi deserve credit for establishing a dialogue on “super intelligence” and a bilateral communication channel for AI incidents. Advanced AI can enable cyberattacks, manipulate information, affect weapons and critical infrastructure, and increasingly act with degrees of autonomy its creators may not fully anticipate. Its benefits will not respect national borders. Neither will its dangers.

 

Yet Washington and Beijing remain obsessed with one question: Who will win? The harder question is: What does winning mean?

 

Suppose America develops the world’s most powerful AI and dominates compute and robotics but concludes along the way that defeating China requires adopting China’s methods of surveillance, information control, centralized data collection, and political management. Would that constitute an American victory? If America must become more like China to defeat China, China has achieved something remarkable without firing a shot.

 

This is why freedom should not be the sentimental appendix to American strategy. It is part of the strategy. And it points to the weakness of the Trump-Xi grand deal: It is highly personalized. Particularly on the American side, it is difficult to imagine this arrangement emerging so rapidly and dramatically under another president.

 

But Trump and Xi will eventually leave the stage. What survives them?

 

Realism is indispensable. America should recognize Chinese power, negotiate where interests overlap, deter where they conflict, and avoid turning every disagreement into an ideological crusade. But realism works until it does not. Leaders change. Interests change. Relative power changes. Miscalculations happen. America therefore needs something beneath realism, not instead of it, but underneath it.

 

American democracy itself is unquestionably troubled. The information revolution has amplified polarization, rewarded outrage, fragmented the public sphere, and weakened institutional trust. AI may intensify these problems. No serious defender of democracy should pretend otherwise.

 

But the answer to malfunctioning democracy is not less constitutionalism. It is better constitutionalism. This is where a third acronym belongs beside MAGA and MCGA: MADGA — Make American Democracy Great Again.

 

I do not mean another crusade to remake China in America’s image. MADGA means something more conservative: repairing and preserving the constitutional inheritance that made American power possible, independent courts, a free press, political competition, peaceful transfers of power, federalism, private enterprise, protection for dissent, and the capacity to discover mistakes and correct them.

 

Authoritarian systems can move faster because they suppress friction. Democracies often appear disorderly because they institutionalize it. But friction is not necessarily weakness. In engineering, friction prevents machines from spinning out of control. In politics, constitutional friction can prevent a powerful country from making an enormous mistake that nobody is permitted to identify.

 

That becomes more important in the age of AI. A superintelligent authoritarian state may become extraordinarily efficient. It may also become extraordinarily efficient at being wrong.

 

America’s advantage should therefore not consist merely of better chips, larger data centers, stronger armies, or more capable AI. It should include a system in which enormous power remains subject to law, competing institutions, independent scrutiny, and citizens who retain the right to say no.

 

That is not idealism. It is national strategy. MAGA and MCGA may coexist for a time. The realist G-2 Trump and Xi are constructing may even help prevent two nuclear superpowers from stumbling into catastrophe. But America should enter it knowing what it seeks to preserve.

 

Something happened during Xi’s visit that was much smaller than a G-2 summit and, in another sense, much larger. A president tried to exclude journalists he despised. Other journalists stood with them. They went to court. A judge appointed by that president ruled against him. And the journalists walked back through the White House gates. Xi may regard that as evidence of American disorder. Americans should recognize it as evidence of American strength.

 

Trump and Xi may be right that MAGA and MCGA need not lead to war. But America should add one condition to its grand bargain, a condition imposed not on China, but on itself: In competing with China, America must remain America. MAGA needs to be committed to the democratic ideals that are at the core of what the country is all about.

Red Harvest

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.

Who Wants to Get Rid of Billionaires?

By John Fund

Sunday, September 20, 2026

 

The Golden State is trying to impoverish itself. This November, Californians will be voting on Proposition 40, which would impose a (supposedly) one-time 5 percent wealth tax on any resident whose net worth exceeds $1 billion.

 

Rarely have a ballot proposal’s shortcomings been so visible. At least six billionaires left the state before the end of 2025 to avoid the tax, which would apply to anyone who has lived in California at any time after January 1, 2026. These are Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google; Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir; famed Hollywood director Steven Spielberg; Don Hankey of the Hankey Group; and Craft Ventures founder David Sacks. A study by economists at the Hoover Institution found that these six tax refugees alone have already removed “$536 billion, or nearly 30 percent of aggregate billionaire wealth, from the tax base.” And because these individuals will no longer pay any income tax in California, the wealth tax is expected to lose almost $25 billion in net revenue in present value terms.

 

There are roughly 200 billionaires in California. Many of them believe that, if Proposition 40 passes, the retroactive application of its 5 percent levy will be struck down as unconstitutional. It’s likely, however, that many more will head for the exit to avoid any of its future implications. The latest poll on the proposition was conducted between September 4 and 10 by the Public Policy Institute of California. Disturbingly, it found that Proposition 40 enjoys majority support, with 52 percent of respondents in favor. There is a precedent for it. A measure that added a 1 percent surcharge on taxable income over $1 million was passed in 2004, and two measures subsequently raised rates on high-income earners.

 

And yet, Proposition 40 is such an awful idea that even many of the state’s leading Democrats — including Governor Gavin Newsom — oppose it, as do some reliably leftist labor unions such as the California Teachers Association. Sponsoring the measure, however, is SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, whose leader, Dave Regan, one of the masterminds behind the proposal, might have been using thuggish tactics to build support for it. SEIU International authorized independent investigations into allegations of extortion against Regan. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Regan is alleged to have “violated the SEIU Constitution by threatening and defaming certain union leaders as part of his campaign to secure endorsements for the Billionaire Tax.”

 

Joel Pollak, the opinion editor of the California Post, says, “Regan has been using Proposition 40 as his power play among the union elites. But even the unions have had enough. Union leaders don’t like being bossed around by Dave Regan any more than business owners or health clinics do.”

 

The vote this November will have profound consequences. It may just decide whether California can still be viewed as a desirable place to do business and accumulate assets. It will also send a clear signal about whether the state is under the thrall of thuggish special interest groups such as Regan’s union. If that’s the case, it won’t be just billionaires fleeing. It might also accelerate the departure of the state’s middle class.