*My Senate prediction is 54 non-Republican seats (53 Democrats and independent Dan Osborn of Nebraska). Osborn has pledged not to caucus with either party.
**Standard Cipher model, as opposed to my calls: 53 D Senate, 236 D House

We will finish with the actual predictions, but let us start with what is known this year:

1. Post-2016 realignment, there are typically fewer Ds than Rs, but Ds are now the higher-education/higher-income party. That means the opposite of what was true during the Obama years: Democrats perform better in midterms than presidential years.

2. Even with #1 in mind, the Senate map would be way more difficult if not almost impossible for Democrats were it not for the national winds at our backs caused by Trump attacking Iran and not leaving in time to avoid higher gas prices and inflation (Harry Enten reported that Trump’s net approval rating on inflation was worse than even Jimmy Carter’s, which is well-deserved since Trump’s policies have helped cause the mess).¹

   1. Gas prices nationally: (not the best screenshot, but the episode is no longer up):

      

3. Unfortunately, the difficult map terrain + Democratic branding issues should limit the night more to a wave than a tsunami (I would call a tsunami 250+ House seats), though I do believe candidate quality will create a tsunami scenario in the Senate with one exception.

   1. Democratic branding issue most partisans are not looking at:

      Bryan Bennett, who writes Walking Through the Data on Substack, published the below statistics on generic D branding in October²:

      

4. This has been a really odd year where polling is stronger than usual for Democrats in more red areas but mediocre compared to what you would expect in blue areas. This could be aftereffects of the realignment, or possibly candidate quality in red states with lesser quality in blue states.

5. Even with the redistricting fiasco, the current maps are still better than they were in the 2010s, where Democrats used to have to lead the generic ballot by 8% in order to take a majority. Now it is only 4% (up from 1 point in 2024 due to mid-decade redistricting).

6. Journalists continually compare this year to 2022, which is flawed. This year is much more like 2018, and, due to D branding issues and disillusioned independents, I expect turnout to be a little lower than 2018 due to more and more people banking votes early and less and less voting on E-Day.

7. Young voters do not really vote in midterms and, outside of TX and a couple of safer states, that still appears to be the case. Meanwhile, 65+ voters have really come around this year and slightly favor Dems (as they were approximately evenly split in the 2024 national exit polls)³. However, Gen X has turned out to be a particularly Republican-leaning generation. How much of the vote they make up will determine a lot of close races. I am particularly studying this group in ME and MI; my two only real worries for the Senate, which is so odd considering the polling and more Democratic nature in these states than in states I consider to be blue (this year only).

With all of the above covered, I have spent weeks debating whether the national environment will control, which has been my go to since 2016, or will candidate quality paint the map? The day before yesterday, I would have posted a map showing MI red and ME red, with every other close contest outside of SC blue. That would have been a pretty shocking map, and I would still use it had Cook Political Report not flipped MI from toss-up to lean blue today. Early vote numbers are a mixed bag in MI, but Nate Silver would likely scold me for looking at early voting numbers (doing it anyways even though he is mostly right); the polling looks amazing in MI.

One of the theories I clung onto recently, while trying to explain the confusing perceived dichotomy between red and blue states, has been that voters who live in states with at least one state legislative chamber and the governor under one party control will blame that party in addition to Trump for their anger at the current situation. That being said, a couple of Democratic candidates for governor are well ahead even though the incumbent same party governor is not as popular. I am not saying I am scrapping this theory, but I believe voters are very clearly blaming Trump for the economic issues, spurred by the prolonged conflict in Iran.

That really leaves us with candidate quality. Were this a tougher year, I doubt candidate quality would benefit Democrats as much as I expect it to. At the same time, were this a tougher year, I would very confidently predict a red Michigan. Democrats took a risk running a left candidate in a purple state. However, the national environment should help and the pro-labor Midwest is more in tune with left economic policy (not socialist but left, though you do have a larger socialist presence there as well from labor organizing).

A lot of readers may be surprised to see me say the above about running a left candidate in a purple state. Was not my whole argument from 2016 until 2024 that candidates from the progressive wing would outperform mainstream wing candidates in purple states and blue-collar districts? Yes, it was, but keep in mind that my calculus, unlike most political nerds, is not based on my personal preference but based on what I believe can win. My personal beliefs, outside of AI and a small handful of issues, would put me somewhere between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. My beliefs have not changed much, which is true among most these days, but what I believe can win did change after reviewing the 2024 election results. All of a sudden, I realized that progressive social issues were not only not populist but are actually anti-populist and hurt us across the country. That does not mean they are wrong, but it means the general public does not agree with the progressive wing on those issues (immigration is one of the main ones that comes to mind and I would argue gun rights, but there are others and you should not blend issues like abortion or gay marriage here since they enjoy higher approval numbers and are therefore safer). However, I will admit that I do feel as though the left/progressive wing of the Democratic Party caught up with me in 2016 and then kept on going. I am not a socialist, and I do worry about what a truly socialist government in America would do to the incentive to work, though I do not ever actually see the socialists winning unless they can conceal it well enough (socialists and progressives still do not make up anything close to a majority of the country).

In 2016, Bernie Sanders, though he did not win the primary, ran the more effective ideological combination for the times, and, unlike modern-day Bernie and the rest of the progressive wing, he performed really well in rural white areas. Why? Because he stuck to bread-and-butter economic issues and took populist stances. That would have prevented Trump in 2016, but now that same wing will likely cost us 2028 because post-2016 Bernie was pressured to include a lot of other ideas, including left social views that damaged the party badly going into 2024.

Part of me wants to keep this to myself, but the most effective candidate ever in this era would be an economic and social populist. Huey Long is one of the only examples that comes to mind, but that candidate would be terrifyingly viable, though I would not like the social views that would come out of that at all. My theory for a long time now has been that we will see the popularity of populism disappear when we encounter stronger economic times that the average person can feel (like the average person feels the gas prices right now but in reverse). At that point, we will see the mainstream Democratic model soar back to popularity, but, until then, I strongly believe the mainstream wing of the Democratic Party offers the least effective combination of the era (center-left to moderate economic views/center-left to moderate social views). Because I simply cannot accept (personal bias) a socially populist candidate, I believe a successful Democratic candidate will borrow from both wings of the party instead of either of the flawed wings: Economic populism/moderate to conservative social views, though Talarico will be a good test of a new approach I will talk about again further down.

Anyone who normally reads me would think I would then throw my hands up in the air and claim we are screwed because neither wing has anything good to offer, which, to be fair, would be in line with at least one Facebook post I made this year. However, I am not the only one making these observations; I can tell because the DSCC worked some magic this year. All that Schumer hate, and he recruited the best class of candidates that I can remember. Our candidates are typically milquetoast and boring. I cannot remember a single exciting Senate candidate in 2024. All came off as mainstream, but I did accurately call two of the important Midwest races though I missed my Bob Casey in PA call by .2%…

This year, the DSCC recruited candidates who offer various forms of what I have been suggesting. Let’s go state by state from here:

AK: Mary Peltola was an excellent local pick and experienced candidate/Congresswoman. She offers a more moderate flavor of economic populism/localized social views. I do not believe Alaska blinked twice about the additional Dan Sullivan on the ballot. People assume the persuadable group of voters is way larger than it actually is; especially in a midterm. (D call)

IA: Josh Turek has turned out to be a great candidate with a great opponent in what I consider to be the most competitive state. What is interesting is he also offers the economic populism/localized moderate social views, and he and Mary both overperform the generic ballot by about 1.5 to 2x better than an Ossoff (center left/center left) but only half as good as a Sand (Iowa governor candidate who should be the party standard bearer after the election, even more so than Talarico) and Osborn, who offer the best combinations for electability in purple to red districts/states. (D call, though it will be closer)

Rob Sand:

TX: Why the Talarico shade? None intended; he is one of our best candidates. Based on my numbers (see below) and based on polling, I would consider him to be in the 2nd-top tier of candidates we are running this year; this second tier includes Hamilton in KS and it is a combination of economic populism (again populism, not socialism) + social views garbed in a love thy neighbor religious framing. It is an interesting approach, and I believe long-term it will work more for Hamilton than Talarico since Talarico has center left as opposed to moderate social views like Hamilton. I am only skeptical of the approach because I believe voters will call out the framing once it is time to take actual votes in Congress. I fully believe Talarico will win, but he is winning in a more purple state than Iowa. Some would argue TX’s 2024 numbers but look at how diverse TX is compared to Iowa. The left loves to complain about white people, but the white vote is 70 to 75% of the participating electorate so some of you “strategists” may need to rethink that line some, unless you care more about emotional outbursts than winning. I am VERY confident about TX for multiple reasons outside of candidate quality: 1) Latino turnout in border counties has been unreal; plenty of legal immigrants support border control but not the ICE antics. 2) TX, GA, and NC, we are seeing really great Democratic turnout. 3) Most importantly: Ken Paxton is, in my opinion, the most unpopular Senate candidate in the country. I underestimated his baggage, which includes being impeached once in 2023 on allegations that included bribery (the Texas Senate acquitted him)⁴…Some of the local Memphis activist politics is a good example of what frustrates me about my own party (see why I do not like my own party sometimes?). (D call, but I do believe Abbott wins governor).

NE: I really may be guilty of overconfidence in the effect of candidate quality this year, as may bleed out in my writing about it, but I believe Dan Osborn is the closest thing to the prototype of what would work, whereas Sand is a version of it that may be a little less effective but more to my personal liking. What do I mean? Rob Sand is economic populism/avoids social/culture war issues while focusing on anti-corruption anti-two party system sentiments while running as a Democrat. Sand will be the perfect fit for the post-Trump anti-corruption era. Osborn, on the other hand, presents something closer to the perfect candidate: economic populism (sounds like Bernie when talking economics)/ social moderation to a dash of populism). This guy is what Fetterman could have been had he not wandered off in the odd direction he walked off in (like Sinema). Betting markets only give Osborn a 25-35% chance of winning, but Osborn is my 2012 Heidi Heitkamp this year. Like Heitkamp, state fundamentals do not favor Osborn, but polling averages very slightly do. That + his roughly 14-point better *margin* than Kamala Harris’s in Nebraska in 2024 leads me to believe he is going to win and shock the country. He is way more effective at appealing to blue-collar voters than anyone else in the field, but, as a word of caution, blue-collar voters do not vote in as high numbers in midterm elections. He could be a better candidate in presidential years, and this year could be particularly tough since his Republican opponent Ricketts is not as unpopular as Osborn’s last opponent or most of the other Republicans running for Senate this year. Stubbornly sticking to my guns and calling it for the (I) in NE! (I believe he would ultimately work more closely with Ds, although he has pledged not to caucus with either party; hopefully we will be allowed the opportunity to find out).⁵

Dan Osborn:

KS: As of my last prediction article a week or so ago, I still called KS red. Hamilton, a United Methodist minister, is offering an improved version of Talarico in a more difficult terrain. I believe he will win; the title of the article explains it: I believe we will see a series of 2018-level (or slightly improved) blue waves with a regional blue tsunami in the Midwest. Why? Gas prices and fertilizer prices disproportionately affect and hurt those states + the Republicans there are more lean Republican than the solid Republicans that dominate most of the South and rural Western states. This state will be a big deal; again, bigger than TX imo, but most of the attention will be on TX for many good reasons. I almost forgot to mention that Roger Marshall is also a big part of the reason for this; he is the very unpopular R incumbent, who just began running a campaign a few weeks ago. (D call)

Adam Hamilton:

MN: This was one of our states where we picked a more mainstream candidate, though she does have economically populist views. The problem is that Flanagan is associated with a very unpopular Walz administration, but, fortunately, Minnesota has been especially exposed to higher fuel and agricultural costs, so what may have been a R flip should now stay D. (D call)

NH: Center left/center left candidate who would have likely been in trouble were it not for the environment. Not because Pappas is a bad candidate for the state but more because Sununu is such a big and well-regarded name in NH. Sununu picked the wrong environment to run in. (D call).

SC: Another very bad R candidate gives Democrats an oddly close chance to pick this one up, but I do not trust the South outside of GA and NC this year, so I am calling it red still. (R call; same with MS, which I do not believe is worth mentioning).

FL: Wrong state to run a DSA candidate in. FL has become increasingly red; I would not even call this a tossup. Odd stat for this year: We have a MUCH better chance of winning SC or MS than FL... (R Call)

MI: I really struggled on this one. I am still somewhat struggling with this one, but Cook Political Report gave me an out and I am calling it D due to CPR shifting the race from toss-up to lean D. New York Times/Siena had an excellent poll for this state, but I have been skeptical that a lot of the polls from them this year have been outliers. They are one of the best pollsters in the country, but so was Selzer and I was right when I doubted her in 2024. If this were any other year (including if not especially during a presidential election), I would call MI red because of a candidate mismatch. Mike Rogers is a surprisingly good R candidate for MI, but, like Sununu, he likely picked the wrong year to run. To El-Sayed’s credit, he is far from our worst candidates, and his economic populism should do well in MI, which is the right spot to favor while prices are high. However, as I mentioned early, left social views have badly damaged the party brand along with milquetoast economic proposals from the mainstream wing (ie people calling for change while the mainstream wing offers more of the same). I am only calling this state for Democrats because it is a purple state in a blue wave year. In a different year, candidate quality would control (assuming he does not luck out and catch a Paxton type as an opponent) and I would call this state red. This year, I believe the national environment/mood will shield El-Sayed, though I will say I believe this is my second riskiest Senate prediction (third being Osborn; first being Maine). (D call)

ME: Like MI, polling has been good for Troy Jackson, but polling errors have benefitted Collins like no other, and people cannot underestimate the staying power of a member of Congress who understands the importance of constituent services. I would call this race differently on the polling and national environment alone, but what everyone has to remember about midterms is that well over half the vote will be 50+. Add to that fact that Maine is the oldest and one of the whitest states, and you could see why I fear a strong enough crossover to put Collins back into office. Jackson, bless his heart, is our worst candidate this year. He offers economic populism, but that is a big shift from his traditional moderate/moderate stances, meaning I do not think it is genuine. You have to find the candidates that fit, not try to mold them into a district after the fact. National environment and strong Democratic turnout in Maine could prove me wrong, and Collins is depending on working class white women in a midterm, who may or may not have a strong turnout in the midterm. Still, I believe those old folks are going to send her back one last time. (R call)

That brings us to the final Senate map calls:

Note: Keep in mind that candidate-fitness scores are comparative net scores between both candidates in the race (meaning the NH R candidate, for example, is +1 since Pappas is -1). That does not mean Pappas is -1 personally but that, when averaged with Sununu, he becomes a -1. Talarico is in a similar position, and one potential mistake with my candidate fitness scores is that they do not take into account Paxton’s baggage. Were they to do that, Talarico would most definitely be in the positives with his economic populist views.

I explain a lot more on my model in my last article ⁶, but here is the short(er) version: The base model is looking at Nate Silver’s FLIPR model, Cook Political Report, Real Clear Politics, and a handful of other sources. It is more doing what I would traditionally do, which is to look at those sources and then call it from the gut from there in terms of what I think they are missing. Cipher handles that for me, but I wanted the model to do something more interesting so I handled candidate fitness (roughly speaking) this way: I separated out two groups of house districts: 1) the 90 wealthiest districts and 2) everybody else. With the first group, I treat mainstream center left/center left or center/center/etc. as a positive, and I actually treat populism (economic or social) negatively with this group. This is the group that would elect a moderate, even now, but they are also a minority of the population. The second group is treated the opposite: Populism (economic or social) is a +, while moderate to conservative economic views and liberal social views are treated as negatives. Lastly, I add a toughness factor because I believe the angry electorate wants someone tough and not wholesome, though I would be interested to see if this would not apply to the Midwest.

Please see my article last week for a more robust model explanation, but I really did not want to bore everyone with that here; especially with polling and national environment helping Dems so much that the factors do not mean as much. I am hoping that future elections make the candidate fitness model more testable, but I really do believe the national environment has become so positive for Democrats that it won’t allow it to be as testable this year.

Speaking of last week’s article ⁶, I am sharing the graphs below from it again, to illustrate candidate fitness by state/seat matched against the unpopularity of their opponent:

If you look back to my last article, you will see that my candidate fitness and geographical political error additions created variation amongst the various layers of the model. Fast forward to now and it all looks the same. Why? Because polling went further in Democrats direction to where the other factors no longer matter, especially with the weaker D candidates running in bluer states (MI and ME).

So will candidate fit, national environment, or state fundamentals control the day? I would argue the first two both play a major role, but, if I am wrong, the third will control. Look at the map. I am calling Democrats in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Texas, and Ohio, along with independent Dan Osborn in Nebraska. Those are all red states. I thought about posting a bunch of early voting graphs, but those can tend to be highly misleading since Rs are more likely to vote on Election Day. I will say that NC, GA, and TX all look very promising turnout-wise, though the picture is more mixed outside of those states. Also, I expect over half the vote to be 50+ (age), and I am not seeing a lot of new/infrequent voters turning out outside of the three named states. With both parties having branding issues and voters being tugged back and forth between two parties they have not been satisfied with + higher early voting = I believe we are banking a lot of Election Day voters early, which is great, but not as great as bringing in new voters. This year, I believe we will be depending on Rs being dissatisfied and staying home rather than voting Democrat (too polarized and persuasion is dead/etc.), and, again, I believe this especially will be more pronounced in the Midwest.

If you are a Democrat, the scary part is that there are a lot more Rs left to vote than Ds in all of those states. A strong R turnout today will make my Senate predictions very wrong. That being said, I have been bullish this year because polling was very accurate in 2018 and 2022. I believe that is because the midterm electorate is more predictable than it used to be, and I believe the national environment and polarization contribute to that additional ease. Of course, I could be wrong, but I would much rather be a Democrat than a Republican going into a battleground state or district today.

Now to the House. I had really hoped to go district by district, but there are simply too many seats and not enough time in the day until I pick up politics full time again. That being said, the model and the AI that help me build the spreadsheets and quantitative side of it, after MUCH discussion, understood my candidate fitness tests I wanted surprisingly well.

Cipher had a little more fun with the House map, as you can tell with flips in WI-01 and CO-05. Final tally: 238 D House (my call) compared to 236 D House (Cipher call). House districts are heavily gerrymandered, so they are generally not as fun to call/predict as statewide contests. That being said, you will see the competitive districts in the charts above.

You will notice that I have not discussed or included TN races in the above. Most of that is to avoid upsetting friends, but I still live in reality where my Facebook page and Substack are not changing election results, and I enjoy calling it like it is.

TN is a red state, yet the activist class, as loud as they are, represent a small % of the actual population/electorate, and they primarily exist in their own bubble. Kind of like my wealthy friends thinking Hillary Clinton was a good candidate choice in ‘16…

While TN-05 and TN-08 should be more competitive than TN-09 because of candidate fit, TN-09 is bluer than both, by roughly three points more than TN-05 by my estimate. Does that mean it is winnable? No, not in my opinion. Cook Political Report has rated it Solid R since the new district lines took effect in May⁷, but if you look at the local activist class, you would think it was a battleground race. Odd because, if it were a battleground district, I would think you would run a rural candidate that could win the rest of the district? If not, what’s next, AOC for Wyoming Senate?

Y’all are cosplaying battleground district, imo, just to set an unqualified congressional candidate up for mayor. All that said, please get out to vote and prove me wrong. I cannot stand Pearson at all, but Taylor is the worst the GOP has to offer.⁸ Believe it or not, I would love to see Taylor lose (If you start seeing Dems pull near 270 House seats tonight, I am wrong and the left activists can rejoice), but I also think it is a bad practice to manage expectations so horribly that we have made a large swath of the activist class believe this is a winnable district. Have fun explaining that one this evening, assuming I am right and Taylor’s admitted unsolicited nude photos⁹ do not matter at all in that deep red district.

Anyways, I will end all of this to stress the three things that will keep me humbled and nervous going into tonight’s results: 1) Potential polling error that favors Rs in red states. This happened in ‘18 and ‘22¹⁰; I applied a weaker polling error in the applicable CIPHER layer, but this scenario assumes a similar polling error to ‘18/’22. If this happens my Senate calls are toast; IA, KS, NE, and maybe even AK all go red. Polling errors in ‘18/’22 actually favored Dems in blue states so the Democrats in ME and arguably MI could benefit, although that would actually work against my Collins call in Maine. NC, GA, NH, MN, OH and TX likely survive the polling error as well. 2) Republicans show up on Election Day; this is not unheard of as Rs typically vote in higher numbers than Ds on Election Day (while Ds dominate early voting even in many red states). So far, the turnout and polling evidence does not suggest this, but I will still worry about it nonetheless. 3) Democratic branding problem being a strong enough factor that a lot of Ds stay home/vote stays older, as midterms usually do. This last one is the part I worry most about. See below, although I could also see an unexpected map where the Midwest goes blue and other battlegrounds (particularly MI and ME) do not go as well. Below is the version only accounting for the ‘18/’22 polling errors:

Of all things to end an election prediction article with, I never expected it to be a Shane Gillis quote, but I really think it drives home my point. Earlier this year, I explained that you have to look at the electorate like you are playing Family Feud⁸. If you suck at Family Feud, it is because you yell “your answers” at the screen instead of thinking to yourself “what would a majority of Americans or the average American say to this question?” You have to look at the electorate through the lens of the average American instead of looking at it through your own bias. No ideological group is a majority in this country, and the average voter is not all that into politics. If you are an ideologue or an activist, you are in a political minority of the population no matter how much you scream (MAGA and the left both practice this art of looking larger by being loud).

Shane Gillis, hosting SNL in October, did a monologue that was almost funny on its own because of the culture shock between the New York audience and a host who thinks a lot more like blue-collar white America. During the monologue, he brushed back his hair two different ways, complaining that his haircut was bad because one way made him look gay while the other made him look like a Nazi, to which he quipped, “You’re either gay or you’re Hitler, and isn’t that where we’re at as a country?”¹¹

Again, not my personal view, but the flaw of both parties in our current era is an inability to look outside our own bubbles. If tonight’s results are not in blue territory to the extent that I predict, it is because both wings of the Democratic Party are out of touch with middle America, where we are depending on for many of our pickups this evening. Do not make the mistake of assuming the inverse if we have a good night as I expect. That is purely attributable to the negative mood of the country towards Trump

Fingers crossed! Of course, I will be doing a post-election review of all of this. Hat tip to my handful of paid subscribers. I never really started this with the intent of making any money off of here; I just needed a platform for my long articles. Y’all currently receive the same content as everyone else, but I hope in time to reward subscribers with my election bets and possibly an earlier release of my articles.

SOURCES & NOTES

¹ Harry Enten, discussion of presidential approval on inflation, CNN transcript (September 17, 2026).

https://prod.transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnc/date/2026-09-17/segment/06

² Bryan Bennett, discussion of Democratic branding, Walking Through the Data (October 2026).

Walking Through the Data

The Polls Agree Democrats Are Winning. They Disagree About Which Voters Are Driving Their Lead.

Four weeks out from the election, Democrats are well-positioned to win the national House popular vote by a healthy margin: FiftyPlusOne’s polling aggregation has Democrats ahead by 7.9 points and Silver Bulletin is modestly higher at an 8.9-point lead…

Read more

a month ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · Bryan Bennett

³ The Washington Post, 2024 presidential election exit-poll demographic results.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/exit-polls-2024-election/

⁴ The Texas Tribune, report on the 2023 impeachment of Ken Paxton (May 27, 2023).

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/27/ken-paxton-impeached-texas-attorney-general/

⁵ Nebraska Examiner, reporting on Dan Osborn’s independence and caucusing position (October 17, 2026).

https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2026/10/17/osborns-independence-continues-to-be-scrutinized-in-nebraska-senate-race/

⁶ John R. Marek, “One Week Out: A Wave Against the Grain” (October 27, 2026).

⁷ Cook Political Report, Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District race rating (2026).

https://www.cookpolitical.com/house/race/485216

⁸ John R. Marek, “Family Feud, and How Both Wings of the Democratic Party Are Doing It Wrong” (July 22, 2026).

⁹ WPLN, reporting on Brent Taylor’s unsolicited nude-photo controversy (2026).

https://wpln.org/post/memphis-congressional-candidate-brent-taylor-wont-say-how-many-times-he-sent-unsolicited-nudes/

¹⁰ Patrick Ruffini, “Midterm Error,” Polling Index (historical election-polling comparisons).

https://x.patrickruffini.com/polling-index/midterm-error/

¹¹ Variety Australia, coverage of Shane Gillis’s 2026 SNL monologue.

https://au.variety.com/2026/tv/news/snl-shane-gillis-bombs-monologue-again-hitler-misogyny-41191/

In the age of polarization, you would not expect many candidates to perform much better than Ossoff (+2) against the generic House ballot; however, look above… candidate quality matters to a much greater extent than I can remember.

The only criticism I have of the charts is that they fail to account for how much of the improvement against the generic House ballot is created by the poor Republican candidate. I think this is especially apparent in the OH governor’s race and the TX Senate race, where neither candidate would likely perform as well on the chart above were it not for their opponent. Paxton would actually have been a better candidate than Cornyn (Cornyn only turns out traditional voters who will already vote) had it not been for his serious amounts of baggage. Talarico, though he is a good candidate, has Paxton’s baggage to thank more than about anything else. Same with Amy Acton, who is running against Ramaswamy. Turek in Iowa has one of the stronger Republican Senate opponents this year, which is part of the explanation as to why he trails Sand.

That does not explain the whole difference, though. Sand was flying under my radar, but I now believe he is the best fit for 2028, and I am sure I will be writing on that a lot after the election. Sand is doing something quite unbelievable in Iowa, especially considering that he does not have the type of extremely weak opponent seen in the TX Senate race or the OH governor’s race. Unlike Osborn, who runs as an independent, Sand is critical of both parties while also running as a Democrat. He is currently the Iowa State Auditor, and his claim to fame is being the prosecutor who busted the largest lottery scandal in history. Like Turek and Osborn, he fits the “prairie populist” label. Though he does not scream “take down the oligarchs” like urban lefties, he fits the common-sense, folksy economic populism that we see in most of our Midwest candidates this year (not MN). Corruption is the number two issue after costs, and it is number two because both parties and independents are complaining about it. Sand may only have two years as governor under his belt by 2028, but I remember us running Obama in a similar fashion, and it all worked out fine. Normally, I really want someone with a lot of federal and national experience, but I believe the Democrats had a really weak bench in both wings before our new candidates came along.

To the screaming activist who hates to hear it, yes, I still believe persuasion is dead (meant to describe the change from 30 to 40% being persuadable in the ‘90s to 5% being persuadable now). However, while we may not be able to change voters’ minds on issues, it appears we can run candidates who cater to them. That + a very good national environment like the one Democrats have this year, minus their branding problems, appears to turn deep-red places unimaginably purple.

All of the above backs up what I have been saying since post-2024: We need to stop running the Ossoff model (economic liberal/social liberal). In blue districts, I want to see our further-left candidates run (economically and socially), but when it comes to purple-to-red districts, we need to run economically populist/socially moderate to conservative candidates. Why not economically populist/socially populist candidates, who would outperform everyone in the country? Because social populism is horrible, though it is partly how MAGA stole the working class from the Democratic Party (combined with a lack of economic populism from Ds; Democrats pushing for more of the same at a time people wanted change).

With all that said, let’s run through the states in order of my personal calls, which, by the way, is funny because I go through all of this trouble to create an election model just to end up making personal calls against it…

You will notice the different columns in the second graph. “Geo Error” applies a historical geographic polling-error adjustment to the polling averages, using data from 2018 and 2022, with more weight given to 2018. I added this to the model because of a crazy pattern we have seen: Polling errors have tended to go in the direction of the states’ underlying partisanship, benefiting Rs in Republican states and Democrats in Democratic states. If I am wrong and the national environment and underlying state partisanship matter more than candidate fit, we should see MI go blue comfortably and ME flip as well, while we may struggle more in some of the red states (IA, NE, KS, AK, TX). If I am right and candidate fit/opponent popularity matters more in these close races, then we will see something closer to what I am calling.

NC (D): I feel the safest about North Carolina because of polling + a high % of educated voters + voter anger over redistricting + the national environment + their turnout, which appears to be beating the rest of the country so far.

GA (D): Turnout looks decent here as well, and the polling is undeniable. More on this below, but Ossoff is fortunate that his state is as blue as it is. He only outperforms the generic House ballot by 2 points in Georgia, but Georgia is way more blue than it used to be, and we are in a great national environment for Democrats.

NH (D): Any other year, this would have been a closer race because of how well-known the Sununu name is in NH, but Sununu picked a bad year to run.

MN (D): This should have been an easy race this year in Minnesota, but the MN Democratic-controlled state (at least the governor’s office) is not very popular right now, and, for some reason, Democrats once again thought it was a good idea to nominate someone who is part of an unpopular administration. Fortunately, affordability and costs are the number one issue, and Trump is highly unpopular. Ds should squeak this one out.

OH (D): Same as before. Sherrod Brown winning in 2018 has given me strong confidence that he will also win this year. OH is not showing the unusually good voting patterns we are seeing isolated in NC and TX, but traditional Democratic voters are turning out well there.

TX (D): I really struggled with this one, and Talarico and Hamilton (KS) will be a great test for one version of the ideal candidate moving forward. My thought is that it will work well, but not as well as another approach being tested this year. The traditional Democratic approach is to run an economically moderate/socially conservative candidate in tough states. Nowadays, they tend to run their more mainstream liberal candidates. Talarico’s approach is more like theirs ideologically, but he frames it differently, in more of a love-thy-neighbor approach. My personal opinion is that this is better than running a mainstream D (like Ossoff), but ultimately stands on the same ideological grounding and will suffer the same ideological consequences electorally. If candidate fit were all that mattered, I would think Talarico would fall just short. Fortunately, I believe Democrats will turn TX blue because of what I am seeing in the early voting data, particularly the strong turnout in heavily Latino counties along the border. Some of these areas are showing unusually high participation, even compared with 2018. Too many people are comparing this year to 2022, which was a tougher year for Ds and not a good point of comparison. I do not think Talarico has motivated this turnout as much as Trump, but I cannot take away from him as a candidate. CIPHER, the new name for my election model, has him winning and losing depending on the factor layer, but I believe a combination of his own talents, the national environment, and strong Latino turnout will finally bring a TX win for Democrats.

AK (D): I am unusually confident about the above states, and while my confidence may begin to decline here, I still believe AK will go blue. Last I checked, Dan Sullivan appears to be tied to Trump’s approval rating; still calling this one D.

IA (D): I still believe this will be the closest race in the country. Both parties have strong candidates, and, unfortunately, Turek could bear the brunt of split-ticket voting in Iowa. That being said, my logic here is that if this is the closest race, how could it not benefit from the national environment? If given a coin flip this year, I will bet Democrat (do not exaggerate this comment into believing we will win in many places we will not win this year; party activists get pretty unrealistic this time of year).

MI (D): You may wonder why I have this so far down. Look at the chart above, and you will see the result of Ds running a weak candidate while Rs run a strong candidate. MI should be a slam dunk this year, though, to be fair, we do see an unusual pattern of Rs underperforming in red states and Ds underperforming in blue states, though that is much exaggerated in MI and ME because of candidate choice. I currently still believe MI will go D only because of the national environment and MI being more blue than a state like Iowa, but I also believe he loses in 2032.

NE (I): I tend to like to make one Hail Mary call each year, and I am doing it here even though polling is better for Democrats in Kansas. The Democratic branding problem is real, and Osborn has shown that he can dodge it by running as an independent. He outperformed Kamala Harris by roughly 14 points on margin in NE in 2024, and I predict that, even with the tougher opponent, he wins. Sand/Osborn is my current favorite ticket, as they both appeal to voters we lost to Trump in different ways (Osborn being more blue-collar/pro-labor), while outperforming the generic ballot more than most (Sand is #1).

ME (R): I went over this before, but same thoughts. Susan Collins traditionally way outperforms the polling. Democrats had her beat with Platner, but his personal issues meant he really did have to go, and now we are running a much weaker candidate (he had the sauce that no one else up there seems to have… he was annihilating Collins in the polling before the scandals hit the news).

KS (R): I could really miss this one, but Hamilton has the Talarico approach, and I do not believe this approach works as well as the Sand or Osborn approach because they do not actually change their views and only frame them a different way. That may work at first, but I believe the Talarico approach will end up looking more like the Ossoff approach in polling in future years. Fortunately, my CIPHER model will test performance against the generic ballot to see if we can determine what works best and what does not.

Final thoughts: This year is either going to be controlled by the national environment, which would make my Senate calls wrong and possibly lead to a stronger House majority. Jackson would defeat Collins in ME and El-Sayed would defeat Rogers in MI purely based on blue states being blue + the national environment, while polling errors in red states would potentially cost us IA, AK, and maybe even TX and OH (less likely). My current read is the opposite; polling has shown Democrats doing surprisingly well in red states but surprisingly badly in blue states. Being the status quo/party in power statewide/locally may be blunting the effects of the current national anti-incumbent/anti-party-in-power fervor going on across the country. Of course, we will receive our report card next week, but I believe we are going to see tough/close races across the board because of weak candidates in blue states and strong candidates in red states. On election night, I will have various map predictions based on which factors matter, and I will rank them through the night. See the below Cipher model map to see what the different candidate factor layers create. More on this next time!

KS presents an interesting case, and I really want to test it against NE. Osborn’s running as an independent makes the comparison a little harder, though not by much. Hamilton, the Democratic nominee in KS, is a well-established Methodist minister with several high-profile Republican endorsements, including two former Republican governors.[2]

Hamilton fits the Talarico model better: populist economic views, generally liberal social views, and religious, love-thy-neighbor framing. I would have expected that approach to be weaker than the Osborn model, which combines economic populism with more moderate, and sometimes conservative, positions on social issues.

I would have expected Dan Osborn to perform better relative to the political environment in his state. I’ve also hypothesized that Talarico’s style would work better in the Midwest, with Osborn’s performing better in TX or much of the South.

My thinking is that the wholesome approach of Hamilton and Talarico would be better received in the Midwest, and the scruffy, tough-guy look would work better in TX and much of the South (and likely parts of the Northeast as well).

Please keep in mind that we would be having a very different conversation had Trump known better and pulled out of Iran shortly after attacking. Had that happened, I suspect many of these toss-ups would be going R.[3] Most of the battleground states this year are traditionally quite red, even accounting for the turnout and other structural factors/mid-term advantages I frequently discuss in the Democrats’ favor.

Fortunately for the Democrats, the national mood is very anti-Trump this year, and we are competing in states where Democrats ordinarily wouldn’t be nearly as competitive. That may sound like evidence that persuasion is alive and well, though I think turnout offers a better explanation.

According to Pew Research, among people who voted in both 2018 and 2022, only 3% switched from voting for a Democratic House candidate to a Republican, while just 2% switched in the opposite direction.[4]

Does that mean a wave year is impossible? Of course not. Even if few committed partisans switch sides, about 10% of American adults neither identify with nor lean toward either major party, or decline to say.[5] That doesn’t make all of them persuadable, but it leaves some room for movement. Most importantly, the national mood affects who turns out.

Even in the age of polarization, one party can benefit from a national swing simply because the other party’s voters turn out at a lower rate, without many voters changing sides. Personally, that is the scenario I imagine this year (outside of Maine).

Speaking of Maine, I am still more worried about Democratic chances there and in Michigan than most forecasters and predictors seem to be. Of course, a forecaster can assign Democrats the better odds without treating either race as safe.

Both states are interesting because the Democratic Senate candidates appear to be performing worse than the broader Democratic environment would suggest. In Michigan, for example, an October Marist poll found El-Sayed leading Rogers by only two points among likely voters, compared with a six-point Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot in the same poll. In Maine, a CBS News/YouGov poll found Collins winning about one in five voters who disapprove of Trump.[6]

I suspect candidate strength is part of the explanation. In Maine and Michigan, I consider the Democratic candidates weaker and their Republican opponents stronger in these particular races. I am still convinced that MI is diverse and blue enough to hand Democrats a win. In almost any other cycle, I would predict an R victory between these two candidates. I would not be surprised if El-Sayed serves only one term.

I should feel the same about Maine, but too much has me worried there:

1. Collins appears to retain a personal appeal that Trump does not, including among some voters who otherwise prefer Democrats.

2. Maine is the oldest state in the country and one of the whitest.[7]

3. Polls badly underestimated Collins in 2020. Every published poll showed Sara Gideon ahead, and Collins won by about nine points.[8]

That combination makes me worry that Collins’s personal appeal could be decisive.

I still reserve my November 2 post for my final calls, and I fully acknowledge that my weakest positions are Maine, Michigan, Iowa, and Nebraska.

I just explained the first two. In Iowa, I am calling a D win even though betting markets have favored Hinson.[9] In Nebraska, I am way ahead of others in placing Osborn above Maine on my list. I strongly believe he has the right ideological fit for the state at the right time. I also believe running as an independent should provide some benefit because it allows him to distance himself from the Democratic Party’s unpopular national image without abandoning the economic issues that might appeal to some Democratic voters.

I am eerily confident about TX and OH for Democrats, and I say that even though I do not believe Talarico is the perfect fit for Texas. He is much better suited than a typical mainstream Democrat or progressive; I just think he is too soft for TX. That being said, I believe the national mood and the state’s substantial youth and Latino populations may be enough to carry him this year.

Anyway, here is the updated Senate prediction map:

I should point out that my personal calls operate slightly outside my model, and I plan to test both against the election results.

As far as the House goes, I am still calling 236 D, though the experimental Light and Strong versions of my model push that number to 237.

For now, I am using the factor-based method as a placeholder for my personal calls in 17 difficult-to-call House races. By November 2, I hope to study each district more closely, make my own calls, and compare them with the model and forecasters I trust, including but not limited to Silver and Cook.

Three races I am particularly interested in are TX-35, WI-01, and CO-05.

In TX-35, the model calls the race for the Republican, even though Democrats currently hold the seat and betting markets have favored the Democrat.[10]

WI-01 is more interesting because my candidate factors flip it to the Democrat in the published model, even though Silver and Cook both lean Republican.

CO-05 is the longer shot. My experimental Light and Strong versions show Jessica Killin winning; Silver, Cook, and the published model still favor the Republican.[10]

These are exactly the types of disagreements I want to examine after the election.

House maps below:

What is the point of my election model? Primarily, I want to test the importance of candidate fit in the age of polarization. Its effects might be more pronounced in a less polarized environment, though I believe we can see some of them in the polling even now. Again, I do not believe there is some huge group of people being persuaded back and forth on issues or candidates. In close races, though, how well a candidate fits the people they want to represent could make the difference.

I also want to test whether candidate fit can help explain some of those elusive polling errors. I used to think of polling errors as typically going one way or the other, probably because we usually look at national averages. Within the same election, though, polls can miss in opposite directions from race to race.

I doubt candidate fit explains polling errors outright. I still want to see whether it explains part of the difference. I am also using the Senate races discussed above, along with 17 selected House races, to examine different kinds of candidates and compare their performance across regions.

One related experiment examines whether candidate ideology matters differently depending on the district. I have separated House districts using an index based on education and professional occupations, with the 90 highest-ranked districts receiving particular attention.

My suspicion is that more conventional candidates may have an advantage in some highly professionalized districts, and economic populists may do better elsewhere. Social and cultural positions could complicate that relationship further.

This is something I am testing rather than assuming. I don’t believe every populist is a poor fit for a highly professionalized district or every mainstream candidate is a poor fit for a working-class district.

I will do one last election prediction update on November 2, and I hope to make that article less technical and more focused on my final thoughts. So I’m using the end of this article to explain the model and what I hope to test. If you’re not a political science nerd, you may want to call it a day on this article and check back in with me when I publish my final election forecast.

If you’re curious about the somewhat unexplained model I keep referring to, here’s the basic idea: I’m trying to put numbers on how well candidates fit their voters, then test whether those numbers actually improve election predictions.

How My Election Model Works (and What I Hope to Learn)

I am trying to answer two questions. Can a more systematic look at candidate fit make election forecasts better? And do certain kinds of candidates do better in certain places, even within the same party?

For the second question, I have started sorting candidates into rough groups: faith-and-values candidates, labor or economic populists, pragmatic or locally focused candidates, progressives, institutional Republicans, mainstream conservatives, movement conservatives, outsiders, and independent labor candidates. Hamilton and Talarico both land in the faith-and-values group. Osborn is closer to what I would call an independent labor outsider.

These labels are provisional (I am still attaching sources to a lot of them), and none makes a candidate more or less electable on its own. I want to know whether candidates in a given group consistently beat or trail expectations in particular parts of the country.

The House district experiment I mentioned above works the same way. Every district gets ranked on an index built from Census data on college degrees and professional or managerial jobs, and I am watching the top 90 most closely. Those are the most educated, most professionalized districts, which is not necessarily the same thing as the wealthiest.

Neither the candidate groups nor the district rankings feed into the published model. They are separate experiments for now.

The Four Candidate Factors

The published model does something narrower. Other forecasters already account for candidate strength; what I want to test is whether scoring these particular qualities consistently adds anything beyond the polls. I score four things about each candidate, always relative to their opponent, so either party can come out ahead.

1. Presentation and toughness. How does the candidate come across, and does that fit the electorate? A combative candidate might help in one state and hurt in another. I am trying to judge how voters will see them, not whether I personally like them (common theme in my writing where I call who I think the voters would pick in a particular district as opposed to my own personal choice).

2. Economic populism and working-class background. I look for an actual record of fighting for working-class economic interests, or a background that helps a candidate connect with those voters. A record counts for a lot more than campaign promises. Pretty much anyone can call themselves a champion of working families in October, so I try to differentiate that from having a real populist/working class background.

3. Communication style and cultural connection. Does the candidate talk naturally with the people they want to represent? This overlaps with the second factor, so I have tried not to give credit twice for the same thing.

4. Cross-party and independent appeal. Has the candidate actually pulled in voters from outside their party, either through a record of breaking with it or some other credible evidence? Calling yourself bipartisan doesn’t count.

How the Predictions Are Calculated

I start with Nate Silver’s polling, specifically his polls-only margin for each race. Silver has already done an enormous amount of quantitative work, and I see no reason to redo it.

The candidate factors only come into play when that margin is five points or less, and their effect fades as the race gets less close.

Texas, Ohio, and North Carolina also get a separate adjustment because polls there have sometimes underestimated Republicans. That correction is based on polling history, not candidate fit.

In House races, I use the Cook Political Report as a guardrail. The factors can’t flip a race Cook rates as Likely or Solid for one party, and they can’t overturn Silver’s favored candidate when Silver gives that candidate at least a 65% chance of winning.

Prediction markets are a reference point, especially when they disagree with the polling models, but they don’t decide any of my calls.

The idea is to give candidate fit a real but limited say, so my impressions of candidates can’t swamp the polling. And again, my personal calls are separate from the model’s. I plan to grade both.

What Are We Actually Testing?

The big question is whether these factors make the predictions better or just pile on subjectivity.

Polls already pick up some of what I am measuring. If voters like a candidate’s personality or economic message, that should show up in the polling. Giving the candidate another bump for the same thing could make the forecast worse. That is a big reason I’m keeping several versions of the model instead of choosing whichever one I like best.

The main comparison covers 31 races: 14 Senate races and 17 House districts. I have registered nine approaches ahead of the election: eight forecasting methods and one stress test. The forecasts include the published model, the latest working version at the freeze (Nov. 2nd), a version that uses Silver’s fundamentals plus my candidate factors without race polling, three versions that move close races by a fixed amount toward the better-fitting candidate, and the newer Light and Strong versions.

The ninth approach is a deliberate stress test that pushes each close race to the edge of its polling error. It shows how far things could stretch, and I won’t count it as a conventional forecast. (The workbook also has a separate “gated” factors-only diagnostic. It isn’t one of the nine, and I’m keeping it out of the scoring.)

Light and Strong give the candidate factors 1.25 and 1.5 times as much weight as the published model, respectively. Strong also adds a small adjustment when the same poll shows a candidate running ahead of or behind their party—for example, a Senate candidate doing better than their party’s generic-ballot number. I don’t count that evidence twice, and when the comparisons point in different directions, as they did in Iowa, I leave the adjustment out.

I am especially curious whether any of this helps explain why some individual races miss in the opposite direction of the national polling error. Maybe it will. Maybe conventional polling already captures most of what I am after.

What Happens After November 3?

I will freeze the model comparison at 8:00 p.m. Central on November 2 and lock my personal calls at 11:59 p.m. that night. I want every prediction on the record before anyone knows a single result.

After the election, the first question is simple: which approaches picked the most winners? I don’t want to stop there, though. If a model says a candidate wins by ten and they win by one, it got the winner right but missed a lot about the electorate. So wherever there is a comparable number, we will also compare predicted margins with the actual ones.

The races where the approaches disagree interest me most. Did the candidate factors help? Did giving them more weight help or hurt? Did the misses cluster among certain kinds of candidates or in certain regions?

We also have to separate candidate effects from broader polling misses. If polls underestimate Republicans across the board, that doesn’t mean every Republican was a great fit for their state or district. The same goes for Democrats if they beat expectations everywhere. I want to strip out those national and state-level errors before deciding whether the factors added anything.

Down the road, I plan to go back through past elections and keep testing this in future cycles. The district rankings might hold up or might need reworking. The candidate groups might behave differently by region, or the differences might disappear once you account for the national environment. One election won’t prove one model is better than another. There are only so many truly close races, and many move together with the national mood.

Some of my hypotheses will probably turn out to be wrong. If the factors don’t improve the predictions, I want to know that. If they work in some places and not others, I want to know why. What I am really after is whether there is something about candidate fit that conventional forecasts miss, and if so, whether I can measure it consistently enough to do better next time.

That’s the experiment. We’ll have some answers soon enough.

Footnotes

[1] My October 8 prediction article, Marek’s Take (Oct. 8, 2026).

[2] The National News Desk (Oct. 2, 2026), on former Republican governors Hayden and Graves endorsing Hamilton.

[3] Reuters on Iran; Reuters/Ipsos on Trump’s approval (Sept. 22, 2026). The early-withdrawal scenario is my speculation.

[4] Pew Research Center (July 12, 2023), on 2018–22 voter switching and turnout.

[5] Pew Research Center, Party Affiliation Fact Sheet (2026), on adults who do not identify with or lean toward either party.

[6] Marist Michigan poll (Oct. 21, 2026); CBS News/YouGov Maine poll (Oct. 2, 2026).

[7] Maine State Economist (age); U.S. Census QuickFacts (race).

[8] The Maine Monitor (July 6, 2026), on Collins’s 2020 polling miss.

[9] Kalshi Iowa Senate market. Snapshot Oct. 21, 2026, 11:57 p.m. CT: Hinson 57–58¢, Turek 42–43¢. Prices change.

[10] Cook House ratings (Oct. 16, rechecked Oct. 21); TX-35 market reference. CO-05’s Democratic call is limited to the experimental Light and Strong versions.

Of course, the odds of me calling every part of that correctly are fairly low, which is the joking side of calling forecasting in this era boring, but I would say that I will likely come very close. This year, as expected, Democrats are expecting to easily win the House. The big question is actually the Senate. Were this a more normal election year like 2018, I would expect a Democratic House and Republican Senate because Iowa, Alaska and Texas would be out of reach, and MI and ME would remain particularly scary because of a risky candidate choice in MI and Susan Collins in ME. We would not even be talking about KS and SC, though we would likely still be watching NE as a long shot. Had Trump quickly wrapped up his operation in Iran and pulled out, that is likely where we would be. Instead, he listened to the worst advisors possible (no political sense on this call) and kept us bogged down in a conflict that has brought gas prices and the cost of living up to the point that Trump has the worst presidential approval rating on inflation ever. It is somewhat hilarious to remember the Biden memes and gas pump stickers blaming Biden for the prices, when Biden had very little to do with it outside of stimulus legislation that both he and Trump signed. Unlike with Biden, with Trump you can very clearly point to his Iran and trade policies to explain the increased prices and cost of living. Trump could find 10 more odd cultural issues to hit Democrats on, and it would not matter. These bread-and-butter issues matter way more than any other issue to either side, which is why economic issues — especially prices and affordability — are at the top of voters’ concerns this year, with government ethics and reform second only to the economy... finally waking up, maybe? [1] This could have easily been avoided by listening to Vance or maybe even Rubio, but, instead, Trump thought Hegseth and Stephen Miller were the right people to listen to on foreign policy, and here we are.

Because of Trump’s major political blunder, Democrats are not only all but guaranteed the House, but they are also very likely to win the Senate. This was something I could not see coming months ago. I had a friend who told me Democrats would win the Senate when the Iran war started because it was too late for gas prices to be adjusted. I disagreed with him and still believe that the issue would have waned had Trump pulled out, but my friend turned out to be right because of Trump’s inability to remove himself from the conflict.

Even with the winds at Democrats’ backs and even with the record disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation, the current Senate map still presents some tricky terrain. This should be a monumental year. Trump is polling worse than Carter on inflation (Carter inherited an inflation problem that had already taken hold before he entered office, but yay media and the voters for not explaining/understanding that). [2] The problem is that we have been doing this back and forth for long enough that a surprising number of the public does not like either party. Pew found 59% unfavorable toward Democrats and 58% unfavorable toward Republicans, with 26% viewing both parties unfavorably. Gallup also found a record 45% identifying as independents (to be fair, many of these independents still have a partisan lean). [3] The other part of it for me is the inability to change the voters you are trying to persuade.

Pollster Bryan Bennett’s review of comparable third-quarter polling found Democrats had a 22-point relative brand advantage in 2006 and 17 points in 2018, compared with only 4 points in 2026. Check out the graph included in Bennett’s article; on a good note, Democrats are more popular than they were in 2010 or 2022, but we are worse off than 2014 (I managed a congressional race and oversaw CO’s state senate races that year; it was rough)... [4]

Though Democrats have a branding problem, just about everything else you can imagine is in their favor this year:

Party in power is unquestionably R (White House, both chambers of Congress, and a conservative Supreme Court majority). As discussed earlier, this is a disadvantage when the small number of swing voters still left are extremely anti-status quo/anti-institution.

Since April 2026 (two months after Iran), Trump has recorded the 20 worst presidential polls ever on inflation or the cost of living. There’s also a very quotable Sept. 17 CNN segment where CNN’s Harry Enten says a Marquette reading of −61 was “the worst net approval rating on inflation for any president,” then explicitly answers that it was worse than Carter, Reagan and Biden. [5]

As I have argued in other pieces on this Substack, post-realignment, midterms now favor Democrats, while presidential years favor Republicans. That does not mean that Democrats will always win midterms and Republicans will always win presidential years; it just means they have an advantage. That is why 2022 was not as bad as it could have been for Democrats, and it is also why 2020 was such a narrow win for Democrats. Midterms have a higher concentration of educated and higher-income voters than presidential races, and those voters currently favor Democrats.

Certain populist niche issues happen to be rising up right before the midterms. The data center issue appears to be helping Democrats in Ohio. Whatever it takes to get Brown across the finish line, but Democrats need to be careful opposing something that is likely to revolutionize technology in a way humanity has never seen (AI has already solved decades-old math problems, while new computational tools are accelerating cancer-treatment and vaccine research); it won’t be a good long-term bet at all. [6]

So, if you notice, I am a little late with my first (of three) prediction posts before the election, which I usually do a month out. I really struggled at first with how to grasp this year because I knew that neither party was popular to a much larger extent than I can remember, yet polling and every other factor looked so great for Democrats that it was difficult not to just claim a Democratic wave and be done.

I could not settle, though, and after staring at data and trying to understand where the electorate has shifted and where it is at, I finally decided that I would use the tools we have at our disposal now and build an election model. With the help of the model and various other data points, I am confident enough to say that I believe Democrats will win 52 Senate seats and 236 House seats (range: D 228-242). The model’s factor-adjusted call shows 53 D Senate seats and 236 House seats; I disagree with my own model on Maine. So, here is my opinion on the important Senate races. The model would rank them in this order by likelihood of a D win (NC > GA > NH > MI > AK > TX = OH > ME > IA); I would rank them in the order below:

NC: Popular moderate who somewhat defies the typical candidate mold I call for, and he has been polling well ahead the entire race. NC does tend to have a D bias in its presidential polling, but I have not even checked its midterm polling because Cooper is too far ahead.

GA: Ossoff is being looked at for president because he is a D winning in Georgia. I personally do not know enough about him to have an opinion yet, but I would already urge caution because he has been extremely lucky. He ran in 2020 when Republicans had everything imaginable against them. He dodged 2022 and 2024 with his six-year term, and now he is almost certain to win due to all of the above.

NH: I struggled with this one for a minute because the Sununu family is such an institution in NH, but the polling has me convinced that we are safe here. My only concern about ranking this state so high for Ds is that it is the second- or third-oldest state.

OH: I am being a little cocky about OH, but Sherrod Brown also won in 2018, and the conditions are much better this year. I also think Sherrod Brown has an uncanny ability to satisfy the left while also being mainstream enough. His very pro-labor background should help.

AK: I am a little surprised to put this one here, but the polling for Peltola and the negative favorability ratings of Sullivan have convinced me that she can win it this year, and, even with the weird staffer stories surfacing, which I do not put much into, I believe she is a great candidate for AK voters, though we would not be talking about this state or any below it were it not for the current environment.

MI: While I could see myself having to move NH down in the next update, I could also see myself moving MI up next update. I worry about how some MAGA voters will react to an Arab American candidate on the ballot. I hope I am wrong, it doesn’t matter, and El-Sayed sails to victory; however, I worry that racism could play a role, which is why I rank MI this low and worry about it, even though the polling and my own model say otherwise and would throw it two more spots up.

TX: I am surprised I am not ranking this one higher (see below), but some of the polling has been shaky recently, and I have been worried for Talarico ever since they questioned whether he would eat BBQ (brisket, to be accurate). Hearing that caused me to listen to a speech from him, and I immediately declared we were toast, as he came off way too wholesome/weak for TX (much better for the Midwest to be wholesome). This actually inspired a part of my model that breaks from the data I rely on. More on that at the end, but I actually feel really good about TX and could see myself putting it further up later because some of the Latino and young voters Democrats lost to Trump in 2024 are moving back this cycle. [7] That’s about it. Working-class white people and a lot of Republicans may be upset with Trump, but, because of the Democratic branding problem and polarization making persuasion almost impossible, they may not vote, and they are not voting for our people.

IA: This one has been a really tough one for me. I have struggled with it, but, as with all of the races, I have focused in on one key factor: favorability of the R candidate when compared to Trump. That really helped me here and in ME. In IA, you have an interesting situation where the R is elected in the D part of the state and the D is elected in the R part of the state. Fortunately for Democrats, the R is running almost even with Trump in terms of favorability, and do not forget that Iowa voted for Obama both times. I believe this will be the closest race for Senate, and I currently predict we win it and all of the races above.

NE: Throwing this one in here as a wild card due to what I will say about the last state worth mentioning. Dan Osborn, as I have previously written here, is the model candidate for purple and especially red, blue-collar districts. He sounds like Bernie on economics and like Joe Manchin on social issues. Not my personal views, but I would not win in a red state. We need to run candidates who will win, and Dan Osborn has had polls showing him ahead of the R. He outperformed Kamala Harris by roughly 14 points in Nebraska in 2024, and he came up just about 7 points short in a year that was good for Republicans. Seven points in Nebraska in 2024, y’all. [8] Dan Osborn is my Heidi Heitkamp of 2026 (I bet on Heitkamp in 2012 because some polls had her ahead, even though Nate Silver and others used state fundamentals to strongly predict it would go red). [9] This one is my Hail Mary. My gut says Osborn wins, but I’m leaving Nebraska red until at least the next update because the data have been mixed, even if surprisingly favorable. I should also mention he is running as an independent as opposed to a D; remember the Democratic branding problem? It might not be a bad thing that he is running as an I currently.

ME: After reading my 2024 predictions, I am hoping you are not too disappointed to see that the only competitive seat I see Ds losing currently is Maine. That is not because of some perceived local, regional or national polling error; it is because of candidate quality. I originally bet D for ME when I perceived Troy Jackson (more populist type) as being a good replacement for Platner. The claims against Platner were plenty bad enough that he needed to go, but what the stubborn mainstream Dems will not accept is that, outside of the obvious items that forced him to leave the race and the fact that he was cosplaying middle class a little too much, he was the Dan Osborn of ME, and he was the only one who would have truly defeated Collins in a huge fashion (see the polling before the scandals broke; never seen that in ME). After listening to Troy Jackson speak, I started to question my bet, and then I sold it after I looked at Collins’s approval ratings compared to Trump’s in ME. She is still liked: she is the chair of the Appropriations Committee and polls well on bringing funds home to the state, she has six constituent service offices across the state, and she represents the oldest state. I would love to be wrong on this one, as I do think it is her time to go, but none of the other Republicans running have approval numbers like hers. You also have to give her credit for her track record and the polling bias/misses against her historically.

Honorable mentions go to KS and SC, though more so KS, which recently became a toss-up. [10] If I miscalculate the size of the blue wave, you will see both of the above come into play, which would be wild.

So here’s my current Senate map:

Here is how my model and others view the House:

My follow-up piece, before my day-before-the-election piece, will go into more detail on my model and my favorite bets this cycle, but I wanted to finish this up with an explanation of what my model does and some graphics showing the above calls.

The model starts with Nate Silver’s FLIPR forecast, using its polls-only race margin as the baseline. Close races then get a second pass using my four chosen, documented candidate factors that polling models do not directly capture: presentation and fit with the electorate, economic-populist message and working-class biography, populist or culturally resonant presentation, and demonstrated cross-party or independent appeal. The factors are scored symmetrically for either party, with diminishing returns: the first net favorable factor moves a race 2 points, the next 1.5, then 1 and 0.5. They carry full weight in races within 5 points, fade beyond that, and play no role once a race is more than 10 points apart.

The factor-adjusted call also applies fixed historical polling-error corrections against the Democratic margin: 3 points in Texas, 2.5 in Ohio and 1.5 in North Carolina. Cook ratings serve as a cross-check and guardrail rather than a numerical input, and prediction markets appear only in a separate probability check. The candidate factors cannot overturn the baseline when Cook rates that side Likely or Solid, or when FLIPR gives that side at least a 65% chance of winning.

The result is three seat counts kept side by side: the polls-based call, my factor-adjusted call, and an independent probability check blending FLIPR with market prices. Right now all three produce a 53–47 Democratic Senate. My personal call is 52–48 because I override the model in Maine.

If you read my old pieces, I would always knock myself for having to rely on Nate Silver’s quantitative data in order to make my qualitative analysis. The funny part about that is that Silver himself uses Cook Political Report numbers in his own model, so I should probably ease up on myself for that. I have found very quick and useful tricks for keeping my model up to date, and, as mentioned, I visualize Cook Political Report as my R firewall and Nate Silver’s FLIPR as showing me how well Democrats are capable of doing (my own House call is only 2 shy of his currently; his average is also roughly 52 Democratic Senate seats, though I personally get to 52 by overriding my model in Maine).

The interesting thing about the Cook Political Report data is that it showed that Trump has taken the biggest hits in the reddest areas, which will blunt the wave a bit, because those places are so red that it will not change any results (though we are starting to see cracks in that in NE, KS and SC). The problem is that you cannot trade out your voters, and I do believe Democrats will run into an unusual firewall (due to the branding problem and where they are competing) strong enough to prevent more than 242 D House seats or more than 54 D Senate seats.

The reality is that the election is less than 30 days away. Historically, we do not see much movement during that final leg, but, nevertheless, I will do my best to have an update up by October 20th or a little earlier.

Sources / Notes

[1] Pew Research Center, July 23, 2026. Registered voters named economic issues most often (29% net), with cost of living/affordability the largest component (15%); government ethics and reform was the next-highest category at 9%.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/07/23/as-the-2026-midterms-approach-economy-is-front-and-center/

[2] CNN, Sept. 17, 2026, Harry Enten segment; Federal Reserve History, “The Great Inflation.” CNN’s segment compares Trump’s inflation approval with Carter, Reagan and Biden. Federal Reserve History dates the Great Inflation to 1965–1982, well before Carter took office.

https://prod.transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnc/date/2026-09-17/segment/06

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-inflation

[3] Pew Research Center, May 1, 2026: 59% unfavorable toward the Democratic Party, 58% unfavorable toward the Republican Party, and 26% unfavorable toward both. Gallup’s 2025 annual average found a record 45% identifying as independents.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/05/01/americans-continue-to-view-both-the-republican-and-democratic-parties-negatively/

https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx

[4] Bryan Bennett, “How This Year’s Midterm Polling is Different From Past ‘Blue Wave’ Elections in One Very Specific Way.” Bennett calculates Democratic relative brand advantage at +22 in 2006, +17 in 2018 and +4 in Q3 2026.

Walking Through the Data

How This Year’s Midterm Polling is Different From Past “Blue Wave” Elections in One Very Specific Way

A few weeks back, Amy Walter at The Cook Political Report posted on social media that 2026 “feels like déjà vu” if one were to recall the contours of the 2006 midterm elections. She cited similarly low job approval ratings between Donald Trump now and George W. Bush then, similar generic ballot leads for Democrats in both cycles, unpopular Middle Eastern wars in Iran now versus Iraq then…

Read more

a month ago · 17 likes · 2 comments · Bryan Bennett

[5] CNN, Oct. 2 and Sept. 17, 2026. Enten said the 20 worst presidential polls on inflation/cost of living were all Trump’s since April; on Sept. 17 he described a −61 Marquette reading as “the worst net approval rating on inflation for any president” and said it was worse than Carter, Reagan and Biden.

https://prod.transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnc/date/2026-10-02/segment/06

https://prod.transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnc/date/2026-09-17/segment/06

[6] Scientific American, July 14, 2026, on GPT-5.6 Sol proving a more-than-50-year-old math conjecture; AACR Cancer Progress Report 2026 on AI accelerating scientific discovery and drug development, alongside advances in cancer-vaccine research.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chatgpt-just-proved-another-50-year-old-math-conjecture/

https://cancerprogressreport.aacr.org/progress/cpr26-contents/cpr26-envisioning-the-future-of-cancer-research/

[7] CNN, Sept. 15 and Sept. 28, 2026. Enten reported a major deterioration in Trump’s standing among working-class Latinos and a 40-point deterioration in his approval among voters under 30; Democrats’ congressional margin among ages 18–29 had widened to 33 points.

https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnc/date/2026-09-15/segment/04

https://prod.transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnc/date/2026-09-28/segment/06

[8] Nebraska Secretary of State, certified 2024 general-election results. Fischer beat Osborn by about 6.7 points; Trump’s statewide presidential margin was about 20.5 points, putting Osborn roughly 14 points ahead of Harris by margin.

https://sos.nebraska.gov/2024-elections

[9] Cook Political Report, 2012 North Dakota Senate update. Late polling was mixed, including surveys with Heitkamp tied or ahead and others favoring Berg.

https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/senate/north-dakota-senate/north-dakota-senate-update-2012

[10] Cook Political Report Senate race ratings; Kansas moved to Toss Up on Oct. 6, 2026.

https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/senate-race-ratings

Unfortunately, the U.S. is not Norway, and we cannot easily replicate its social safety net without raising much more revenue. The core of me being "left" is that I have always wanted us to have the type of social safety nets that exist in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia. The hard pill to swallow is that even if you adopted wealth taxes as aggressive as those proposed by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, you would cover only a fraction—roughly on the order of 10–15%—of the gap between what Norway collects in taxes and what we do.2 That means anything approaching a Nordic-sized safety net would almost certainly require middle-class taxes and broader taxation.

One could argue that we could fix this by eliminating defense spending. Even eliminating the entire defense budget, which obviously isn't a serious proposal, wouldn't come close to closing the gap.3 Addressing healthcare costs and other inefficiencies could definitely help, but the Nordic countries fund their safety nets through broad taxation, including a 25% standard VAT (value added tax) in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, on top of income taxes and social contributions. 4 Their political systems have sustained a bargain in which voters accept broader taxation in exchange for broader benefits.

The very difficult task would be convincing the middle class that they benefit from the increased taxes: you get what you pay for. Yes, most people would likely have to pay more in taxes, but middle-class households would also receive substantial benefits in return—particularly if those taxes replaced costs they already bear privately for things like healthcare, childcare or education.

So not only does the left have to survive all of the structural political hurdles I discussed in my last article, it would also have to face the economic hurdles and convince blue-collar voters that the benefits would outweigh the additional costs.

It is difficult to see Democrats, progressives or anyone else getting past either the structural or economic hurdles. Does that mean we should give up? Of course not, but I believe the reality is that we are not going to create a stronger social safety net easily. It is an uphill, unlikely-to-win battle.

Our country also has a long history of being divided along racial lines in ways that weaken support for redistribution. There is substantial research suggesting that America's racial divisions have historically undercut support for a European-style welfare state.5 I remember reading research back in college arguing that more homogeneous populations were more open to strong safety nets because voters were more likely to perceive the beneficiaries as people like themselves. More recent research still generally finds a relationship between ethnic diversity and reduced support for redistribution, although the effect varies significantly depending on the context.6

We have a hell of an obstacle ahead of us here in the U.S. It is because of those hurdles that I do not believe the progressive utopia/European social safety net is anywhere close without several advances in technology and AI.

Cheap if not free energy, a continuation of the medical breakthroughs from AI that we are already seeing, and massive improvements in manufacturing and transportation could make a progressive future and stronger social safety net far more attainable than politics alone has managed to make it.

Meanwhile, folks are complaining about SpaceXAI in Memphis, which just ranked 28th on the Shelby County Health Department's list of air polluters. Its nearby industrial neighbor, the Valero refinery—right up the road in the same 38109 industrial corridor—ranked No. 2.7 Valero produces gasoline, diesel and jet fuel and is connected to major pipeline infrastructure serving the region.8 Several other major industrial facilities in Shelby County also ranked well above SpaceXAI.

That doesn't settle every question about xAI. Noise and aspects of the emissions accounting remain disputed. But the county's own ranking is a striking fact worth keeping in perspective.

Yes, we should call for guardrails and reasonable regulations over AI, but at the same time we need to embrace and wield this technology as it guides us into the future.

My belief (as can be read in previous articles here) was that, as millennials and younger generations grew older, the political dichotomy in America would become progressives vs. libertarians by 2028 or, more likely, 2032. Were it not for the gigantic technological advances I expect from AI (and MAGA likely continuing to control the Republican Party as opposed to libertarians), I would still deem this theory possible. However, if my previous long-held theory were to hold, progressives appear to have taken a wrong turn, and I am not sure they will perform as well as I originally anticipated. That being said, who makes up each party in the 2030s and how well they will perform is even more difficult to predict based on what I expect to be a major political realignment driven by AI-induced technological advances.

How AI Will Upend the Current Political Alignment

I will confess that I have a certain bias on the AI issue in that I grew up reading fantasy and science fiction. Believe it or not, reading science fiction is a great way to contemplate future technologies, and a lot of the literature out there for many decades has been contemplating AI, its uses, and what we may be about to undergo as a society.

My personal interest in AI was piqued after reading Ray Kurzweil^[1][2], the renowned inventor, computer scientist, and futurist who has worked on AI for more than six decades. AI is not just chatbots, and it is not a recent invention as many of you seem to believe; the field dates to the 1950s, with the term “artificial intelligence” coined for the 1956 Dartmouth workshop.^[3] In his newer book, The Singularity Is Nearer,^[4] Kurzweil does an amazing job explaining the technological changes he believes are coming over the next five to ten years. It takes roughly 22-25 years to raise and educate a human from newborn to the workplace. Kurzweil has long predicted human-level AI by 2029, although passing a Turing-style test is a test of conversational imitation, not literally proof that a machine has become as intelligent as a human in every respect. Expert forecasts have moved earlier, but there is not a scientific consensus around 2029. In a 2023 survey of 2,778 AI researchers, the aggregate forecast put the 50% point for unaided machines outperforming humans in every task at 2047—13 years earlier than the comparable 2022 survey.^[5] Sam Altman recently went further and said, “We are now, like, in the singularity,” although he uses a broader “gentle singularity” concept and researchers disagree about what threshold that term should describe.^[6] If systems become as capable as Kurzweil expects, one of the truly disruptive differences is scalability: a sufficiently capable AI system can be copied and run in parallel thousands of times, unlike thousands of human researchers who each require decades to raise and educate. Kurzweil predicts this kind of scaling will accelerate technology in transportation, medicine, manufacturing, and other fields in ways humanity has never seen before. We grew up laughing at how we never ended up with hoverboards or many of the other items contemplated in The Jetsons or Back to the Future, but we may be about to enter something that is not too far from that.

A lot of my interest in the issue stems from my own dislike of mortality. Kurzweil predicts that around 2029 we could reach what he calls “longevity escape velocity.” Put simply, he believes medical progress could begin adding to remaining life expectancy at least as fast as time is taking it away.^[7] He also writes about nanobots and much more radical life extension as part of his longer-term vision, but those are forecasts, not established science. Even the possibility of major advances in longevity, transportation, medicine, and manufacturing would greatly change politics across the globe. I believe a lot of our current issues, including environmental, may become less central as new technology solves some current problems while presenting new and very different challenges. One of the big complaints with data centers is how much power and water they use. Do you not remember the first computers and how they took up entire rooms and buildings? I expect computing to become smaller and more efficient over time, although that does not guarantee total data-center demand will fall if our appetite for compute grows even faster. Some projects are also moving toward closed-loop or recycled-water cooling systems. In other words, I do not assume the physical footprint of today’s data centers will look the same forever.

Imagine propulsion technology that can take you from New York to London in an hour or less. Humans being able to travel at much faster speeds would bring up all sorts of new immigration issues and imagine what changes when you can take public transportation from Memphis to Nashville in 15 minutes (two cities currently about three hours apart become suburbs of one another). Imagine cures for various forms of cancer and something approaching a fountain-of-youth drug; there goes the human depopulation issue, though then we would eventually have to confront the opposite problem of population pressure. Imagine manufacturing and energy sources advanced enough to the point where humans could have most, if not all, of what they need—and perhaps much of what they want—at little or no marginal cost (Star Trek, right?). There is already serious debate about whether AI will eventually eliminate large categories of work. I think that is plausible, although it is far from a settled fact. I laugh when I hear people ask what they would do if they could not work. 1) This only happens if the tech advances as we expect; 2) if robots end up doing all the work, do not complain: focus on your hobbies, art, and being with your family...some of you try to make a bad thing out of a good thing here.

My overall point is that these technologies are going to be massively disruptive, and the issues humans focus on are going to dramatically change. My old long-term prediction went to 2032 and not beyond that for a reason: I believe 2032 will be the last presidential election under our current norms, if not possibly the first presidential election under the new norms. I imagine there will be interest groups fighting to protect jobs from AI, regulation of new technologies will constantly be an issue, and immigration may become more complicated as people become able to work and commute from places much farther from home. Kurzweil and, admittedly, I would be seen as AI optimists. We see the many good human advancements that can come from new technology. Plenty of intelligent people feel otherwise and point to dangers that are real concerns. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI and a 2024 Nobel laureate, has said AI could be wonderful in areas like health care while also warning about systems becoming smarter than us and getting out of control.^[8] Hinton and Kurzweil are both vastly more qualified on AI than a poli sci/law major like me, and I think both would acknowledge that this technology comes with enormous risk. However, we all need to accept that the potential benefits (and, to be fair, profits) are so ridiculous with AI that nothing is going to stop it from moving forward, and people opposed to it remind me of folks (think the Amish) who were and are opposed to previous technological breakthroughs. A good old friend of mine had a smart coworker tell him to go watch an old movie from the ’90s called The Net, which portrays many of the early ’90s fears of the internet. We took a lot of risks during and after the Industrial Revolution, and we took many during and after the release of the World Wide Web as well. Fighting against the development of either would look pretty odd and backwards now, which is why I believe the left needs to position itself correctly on the issue; calling for reasonable regulation is fine (overregulation would not be), but completely opposing its development is misguided and ultimately futile. Not to mention, I think losing the AI race to China would be disastrous and, no, an authoritarian government is not going to be deterred by civil disobedience.

Let me give you a great local example: xAI. First off, I will confess that I was a fan of Elon Musk when he first popped up on my radar. I was not too aware of him at the time, but I did really like the technology he was and is involved with through his companies. It was not until Musk’s 2020 social media comment about Bolivia—“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”—that I was no longer a fan.^[9] Of course, I was not a fan of his politics with Trump either, as I have written about previously here.

That being said, Fred Smith was a Republican, and I did not want FedEx to leave because of it. Hell, the airport is routinely described locally as Memphis’ No. 1 polluter. That is too broad as a scientific ranking, but the shorthand has a real factual basis when it comes to nitrogen oxides: EPA’s 2020 National Emissions Inventory identified Memphis International Airport as Shelby County’s largest NOx source, at 1,077 tons that year.^[24] I still do not want the airport or FedEx to leave, and I would like to point out that I do not see protests outside of the airport. Outside of that, xAI makes the folks with the Chamber of Commerce in Memphis look like saints. When I ran for city council in 2015 and 2019, I would frequently complain about companies coming to Memphis and asking for tax abatements and all sorts of other incentives to come to our town. They would compete us against Nashville, Atlanta, Little Rock, St. Louis, and other surrounding cities in a race to the bottom. To be fair, the Chamber was likely working the best it could with what it had at the time, but I did not like what the city was receiving in those deals. These AI projects are dramatically different, and the Chamber deserves applause from likely and unlikely sources for what it has brought to Memphis. xAI did not ask for a property-tax abatement when it came to the Electrolux site, and the project was projected to generate at least $25 million a year in property taxes.^[10] xAI also started work on an $80 million wastewater-reuse plant; TVA and Nucor have agreed to use the recycled water too, which would reduce their reliance on the aquifer.^[10] That is a massive environmental benefit if the project works as intended. Memphis is also becoming an AI hub with other projects coming into the city. The announced Neural Nexus project, for example, says the University of Memphis and UT Health Science Center are exploring uses for its sovereign-cloud computing capacity, while FedEx has expressed interest; the Chamber has also highlighted St. Jude as part of the region’s broader research ecosystem, though St. Jude is not listed as a project partner.^[11]

While newer AI companies coming into town have so far avoided this particular controversy, one of the primary complaints about xAI has been its use of natural-gas turbines. I originally put a lot of weight on University of Memphis Professor Chunrong Jia’s modeling, which projected only a minimal effect from the turbines on surrounding air quality. That work still deserves consideration, but it had important limitations. Jia himself described the uncertainty as “huge,” in part because the emissions inputs came from xAI rather than independent monitoring.^[10] TIME later asked University of Tennessee, Knoxville researchers to examine publicly available NASA and European satellite measurements. Their analysis showed an approximately 3% increase in average nitrogen dioxide after the facility began operating, while the highest observed readings rose much more sharply—79% near the site and 9% in Boxtown. The researchers did not treat those changes as an xAI-only effect; they pointed to several possible contributors, including the turbines, greater use of TVA’s Allen plant, and vehicle traffic.^[10] Separately, a 2026 community project using PurpleAir sensors reported elevated fine-particle levels at its South Memphis sites. The Shelby County Health Department disputed how those results were being compared with federal standards and emphasized that the sensors are not approved for regulatory compliance; the research team responded that it used EPA guidance to calibrate and correct the devices.^[12] So I do not think it is fair to say xAI has been proven harmless. The honest conclusion is that the turbines clearly emit pollution, while the precise local health impact—and how much of the pollution can be attributed specifically to xAI—remains disputed.

However, I believe the technology that will come from AI development around the world will help us solve many of our current environmental problems, and I think fighting AI development itself—as opportunistic candidates and future candidates are doing—could eventually look like fighting against the release of the internet or motor vehicles.

Where the Left (and Many Mainstream Dems) Have Gone Wrong

In 2016, I gladly upset a lot of electorate illiterates (plenty intelligent in their respective fields, not limited to but including politics, but remarkably poor at reading the electorate) who thought, for some reason, that it was a good idea to run Hillary Clinton for president. They would have you think no one could have seen that loss coming, but I saw it coming from miles away. We had recently gone through the 2014 midterms, where voters were angry because they were given lots of hope but not very much change. Instead of fighting for that change, older Democrats and a lot of mainstream Democrats thought it was a good idea to turn the clock back to 1999, when Democrats were basically a small policy step or two away from being Republicans. People who wanted change did not want a familiar name and instead elected a reality-TV star who should have never made it to the presidency. This is one of the reasons I believe my reaction to Trump is so much different from that of a typical mainstream Dem (Y’all put him there—not intentionally, but by badly misreading the electorate.) Once in, Trump—especially in his second term—is putting many of our country’s institutions to the test at a time when voters are very unhappy with them and with the status quo in general. MAGA and American Compass, a think tank associated with the populist right, have been catering to these voters since 2016, yet Democrats still cannot read the electorate well enough to even begin to target them correctly (I thought this had changed recently, but I take it back). Running Clinton, Biden, and Harris are all examples, in my view, of not reading that electorate correctly, and I believe we would have lost in 2020 had it not been for COVID. If we run Harris or anyone else from the Biden administration in 2028, I think we will lose again. If you want to win nationally, I think you have to run an outsider at this point. The idea of Jon Stewart running is music to my ears because he would do a much better job communicating than most of our elected members of the party. As goofy as it sounds, we may need a celebrity like Jon Stewart or Matthew McConaughey (as my friend/politico Stuart Rosenberg suggested); cater to what the voters want in order to win. I told him how I wanted us to run Dolly Parton when Biden stepped down in ’24. Sadly, I suggest such because I worry that our civic knowledge is moving in the wrong direction. The latest NAEP civics assessment gives at least some support to that concern: eighth-grade scores slipped two points from 2018 to 2022, the first decline since the assessment began in 1998. The 2022 average was nevertheless not significantly different from the 1998 result, and only 22% of eighth-graders reached NAEP Proficient.^[13] Democracy cannot function well enough without a population that is properly educated in civics and understands how its institutions work.

As I like to frequently point out, the left needs to understand that it is a minority. Often, the left gathers in insular political spaces and mistakes the intensity of those rooms for the size of the broader movement. The reality is that the left, like the mainstream wing, is trapped in its own bubble. They perceive themselves as a larger portion of the population than they are because they constantly surround themselves with their allies and their own messaging, attending the same events and chasing the same causes.

Gallup’s latest annual numbers^[14] show 35% of Americans calling themselves conservative, 33% moderate, and 28% liberal. I would not take those labels too literally. Self-described “moderates” are not a single ideological bloc, and people frequently describe themselves as moderate even when their views on particular issues are decidedly left or right. For that matter, “liberal” and “conservative” mean different things to different respondents. But the numbers are still useful for illustrating a basic fact that those of us on the left sometimes forget: we are a minority of the electorate. So is everyone else. No major ideological tendency commands anything resembling a majority on its own.

Pew Research Center’s 2026 political typology^[15] makes that point even more clearly because it groups Americans according to their political and cultural values rather than simply asking them to choose an ideological label. Roughly 48% of Americans fall into one of Pew’s four left-of-center groups, but that should not be mistaken for a 48% ideological “left.” The broader left-of-center electorate itself is remarkably diverse: 7% are classified as Leftward Progressives, 11% as Loyal Liberals, 12% as the Left-Out Left, and 18% as the considerably more ideologically mixed Order and Opportunity Left.

Pew identifies the two most consistently ideological groups on this side of the spectrum—Leftward Progressives and Loyal Liberals—as the “left anchors,” comprising just 17% of the public combined.^[15] That 17% figure is Pew’s own combined estimate; the separately displayed 7% and 11% figures are rounded, which is why they appear to add to 18%. The broader left-of-center electorate is therefore much larger than its ideological core. The same basic principle applies on the right: a party coalition can be large without every person in it sharing the worldview of its most ideological members.

That matters for reasons that go well beyond winning elections. Neither the ideological left nor the ideological right is likely to get everything it wants under our current system—and, in many ways, that is by design. Ordinary legislation that is subject to a Senate filibuster generally has to overcome the three-fifths cloture threshold—60 votes in a 100-member Senate—while amending the Constitution requires approval by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states.^[16][17] Add bicameralism, presidential vetoes, federalism, the courts, divided government, and regular elections, and our system places enormous obstacles in the way of any one ideological faction imposing sweeping change.

Those safeguards have obvious virtues. They make it difficult for a temporary political majority to remake the country overnight. But there is another side to that stability: a system designed to resist bad change can also become exceptionally good at resisting necessary change. When the electorate is fragmented and the institutional barriers are this high, even broad dissatisfaction with the status quo does not necessarily translate into an ability to replace it. The left cannot simply enact its preferred future. Neither can the right. And the political system can remain stuck even when large numbers of people agree that something is not working.

That is one reason I believe artificial intelligence may ultimately prove more disruptive to American society and politics than any ideological movement currently competing for power. AI does not need 60 votes in the Senate, a constitutional amendment, or a durable national ideological majority before it begins altering the world in which those institutions operate. If the technology changes employment, productivity, education, information, government administration, and the distribution of economic power quickly enough, politics may be forced to respond to changes it was never capable of initiating on its own.

I do not necessarily view that prospect as a bad thing. Our resistance to sudden political change has helped preserve stability, but it has also helped preserve a status quo that I believe is increasingly inadequate. The most consequential force for change may therefore come not from the left defeating the right, or the right defeating the left, but from technology changing the underlying conditions so dramatically that the old political equilibrium simply becomes impossible to maintain.

A lot of my lefty friends have been and will be shocked to see my enthusiasm and excitement for AI, but my point to them is that they will never create the change they want in our current system. No amount of yelling (which they and the MAGA folks are great at), spirit-finger snapping, or civil disobedience is going to lead to the country we want. That, coupled with my increasingly guarded and worrisome view of humanity, has me to the point of wanting to give the robots/AI (under proper human guidance) a shot at creating change. Yes, it could go horribly wrong and will very likely be abused by the super-wealthy, if that is not already the case, but the alternative is to accept that things will remain much the same as they are now with no other major force (like AI, quantum technology, or the Grusch stuff) interfering.

So, you want universal health care, wealth equality, and a 32-hour workweek? Not happening with our government, even if you have a great election year. Meanwhile, AI very well may contribute to breakthroughs in clean energy and automation that eventually make today’s debates look antiquated. If you are someone who is actively protesting data centers right now, will you continue to protest them when new cures or treatments start popping up with AI playing a meaningful role? Just recently, Merck and Moderna announced that their personalized mRNA melanoma treatment, used with Keytruda, met its Phase 3 recurrence-free-survival endpoint. Nature reports that Moderna uses AI during the personalization process to help rank tumor-specific targets for each patient’s vaccine.^[18] That is not the same as saying AI single-handedly created the treatment, but it is a real example of AI being built into a potentially important medical advance. Oh, and the same personalized Moderna-Merck mRNA therapy is also being evaluated with Keytruda in Phase III clinical trials for certain forms of non-small cell lung cancer.

If you are more specifically protesting data centers in Memphis, are you under some belief that restaurants and tourism are going to save Memphis? Sure, crime is going down—and it is going down nationally too—but Memphis’s decline has been substantial: the major violent-crime rate was down 31.5% in the first half of 2026 compared with the first half of 2025, while the FBI reported a 9.3% national decline in the violent-crime rate from 2024 to 2025.^[20][21] Unfortunately, we still have serious public-safety and economic problems and find ourselves on plenty of the negative lists. BlueOval City is the only other positive example, but it has been repeatedly delayed and substantially reworked from its original EV pitch, with Ford now planning gas-powered truck production in 2029 and SK On planning battery production in 2028.^[19] In my view, AI is one of the biggest industrial opportunities available to Memphis right now, and it happens to be an industry that could become one of the most valuable in the world. Whether you realize it or not, I think data centers coming to Memphis are some of the best economic news Memphis has had in a very long time. Meanwhile, political opportunists (in the form of activists and candidates) are doing everything they can to cash in on an issue the public does not understand but is currently angry about. The left, like Trump, has managed to prey on folks’ irrational fears for votes, and way too many of you are falling for it. By the way: 1) the Texas pause is not a simple anti-data-center ban; it is an audit-driven halt on new grid connections aimed in part at weeding speculative “ghost” demand out of the queue, which could ultimately benefit serious, financed projects;^[22] 2) the Memphis moratorium is not final—it passed its second reading on September 1 and faces a third reading;^[23] and 3) even if a local ordinance passes, legal challenges or future state preemption are expected. If the state legislature ultimately wipes out a local ordinance, then much of the political theater surrounding it may accomplish little beyond raising the profiles of the politicians and activists involved.; they love and need that attention so badly.

Data centers are becoming a populist issue just like Flock cameras. I admit the argument against Flock cameras is better than the argument against data centers, but I am reading affidavits daily that show how the cameras are used to solve real crimes. I am typically a fan of cameras, like the body cams I pushed for Memphis police, because they show the truth of what happened. While I do sympathize with the Fourth Amendment arguments and concerns such as rogue officers tracking ex-girlfriends, I can also explain why “criminals” so often walk out of 201 without being convicted of crimes people believe they committed. It is not because of our DA, as many armchair warriors on Facebook would make you believe. It is because poor folks in Memphis either live by a code or are too afraid to “snitch” on someone who committed a crime. Back in my criminal-defense days, I would always warn my DUI and possession clients that there was not much I could do for them besides check the search or stop to make sure it was legal. A drive-by, on the other hand, would traditionally require a witness not only to make a statement but also to show up to court to testify against the defendant. More times than you would ever want to believe, victims do not show up to court and the case falls apart. That is because our system, pre-technology, often depended heavily on individual witness testimony for conviction. Just today, I read an affidavit where an individual allegedly shot up a house, and one of those Flock cameras caught the license plate, leading to an arrest. That kind of camera evidence can make a case far less dependent on a reluctant eyewitness, although it still has to be authenticated and considered with the rest of the evidence.

I believe bans on data centers and Flock cameras would be a mistake, with the former being a very big mistake; however, no one should complain about discussions of reasonable guardrails and regulations. Too much regulation can be a problem—as I saw in the Colorado cannabis market, and as I think happens with many things involving California—and could help China overtake us technologically. Too little regulation, on the other hand, could lead to environmental disaster and, in this case, more extreme situations like AI taking over society or billionaires creating a breakaway civilization where they take all of the benefits and leave us in the past. I say all of this to make it clear that I know there are potentially society-ending risks involved with this technology. I also acknowledge that I do not necessarily trust humanity to handle it correctly. So why, then, would I continue to support it? Because I see it as the only real way for our society and institutions to change; I see it as the one real way to end the status quo and bring about a new society. I am hoping for the possibility of real change as opposed to chasing a fantasy that will never pass through our existing government and legislatures. Are you okay with rampant poverty, constant price increases, overpriced health care plans that cover very little, diseases without cures, and outdated institutions? If not, get on board with my arguments in favor of AI because your meetings at the local library are not going to change much of anything with our current system of government.

Sources

[1] Encyclopaedia Britannica — Ray Kurzweil

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Raymond-Kurzweil

[2] NPR — Ray Kurzweil interview on AI and the future

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/11/g-s1177-76551/its-only-a-matter-of-time-before-your-mind-merges-with-ai-says-ray-kurzweil

[3] Dartmouth — history of the term artificial intelligence

https://home.dartmouth.edu/about/artificial-intelligence-ai-coined-dartmouth

[4] Penguin Random House — The Singularity Is Nearer

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/535433/the-singularity-is-nearer-by-ray-kurzweil/

[5] Grace et al. — Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02843

[6] Forbes — Sam Altman and the “gentle singularity”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertszczerba/2026/07/27/openai-sam-altman-ai-singularity-explained/

[7] Bessemer Venture Partners — conversation with Ray Kurzweil on longevity escape velocity

https://www.bvp.com/atlas/ai-escape-velocity-a-conversation-with-ray-kurzweil

[8] Reuters — 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics: Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield

https://www.reuters.com/science/hopfield-hinton-win-2024-nobel-prize-physics-2024-10-08/

[9] The Guardian — Elon Musk’s Bolivia “coup” remark

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/25/we-will-coup-whoever-we-want-the-unbearable-hubris-of-musk-and-the-billionaire-tech-bros

[10] TIME — Inside the Memphis community battling xAI

https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/

[11] Greater Memphis Chamber — Neural Nexus Innovation District

https://memphischamber.com/blog/press-release/legacy-power-capital-announces-neural-nexus-innovation-district-in-downtown-memphis/

[12] Tennessee Lookout — Shelby County Health Department questions community air-monitoring report

https://tennesseelookout.com/2026/06/23/shelby-co-health-department-questions-integrity-of-community-air-monitoring-report-data/

[13] The Nation’s Report Card — 2022 Civics results

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/civics/2022/

[14] Gallup — 2025 ideology and party-identification annual averages

https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx

[15] Pew Research Center — 2026 Political Typology

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/06/10/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/

[16] U.S. Senate — Filibusters and cloture

https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/filibusters-cloture/overview.htm

[17] National Archives — Constitution of the United States, Article V

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript

[18] Nature — Moderna/Merck personalized melanoma vaccine and AI-assisted target selection

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02612-3

[19] Tennessee Lookout — BlueOval City five years later

https://tennesseelookout.com/2026/07/23/what-to-know-about-fords-blueoval-city-plant-5-years-later/

[20] Memphis Shelby Crime Commission — first-half 2026 reported crime

https://memphiscrime.org/media-release-july-22-2026-reported-crime-continues-decline-through-first-half-of-year/

[21] FBI — 2025 Reported Crimes in the Nation statistics

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2025-reported-crimes-in-the-nation-statistics

[22] Reuters — Texas data-center connection pause and “ghost” demand

https://www.reuters.com/business/texas-halt-powering-data-centers-reflects-us-reckoning-over-ghost-demand-2026-09-01/

[23] Action News 5 — Memphis data-center moratorium after second reading

https://www.actionnews5.com/2026/09/01/activists-celebrate-progress-memphis-data-center-regulation-efforts-901-day/

[24] EPA 2020 National Emissions Inventory; Shelby County NOx ranking summarized in SELC April 9, 2025 letter

https://www.epa.gov/air-emissions-inventories/2020-national-emissions-inventory-nei-data

https://cleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2025-04-09-Letter-from-SELC-Et-Al-to-SCHD-re-xAIs-New-Turbines.pdf

People who play Family Feud poorly do so because they yell out what they personally believe is the answer to the question asked. A good player knows that you are supposed to put yourself in the mindset of the average American and answer with what you believe the average American would say.

We have to learn to do exactly the same thing in politics, especially after losing the majority of the population by catering to the Democratic donor base (instead of the voter base) for far too long. For most of my life, Democrats were the majority, and the question was always whether turnout would be high enough for them to win. Now, the opposite is true.1 Republicans will be the party that wins or loses depending on whether its blue-collar base turns out. In midterms, Democrats will more often than not defy expectations in the current era because, while they have lost a majority of blue-collar voters, they have gained educated and high-income voters, who turn out very reliably. 2022 is a good example: Democrats were bracing for a rough year that turned out not to be so bad. In 2024, on the other hand, we lost a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, lost the national popular vote, and failed to regain the House. Gallup’s most recent annual party-identification data show Democrats and Republicans tied at 27%, with 45% of the country identifying as independent. Those numbers should be more alarming than reassuring because (1) I do not expect to see the alignment change dramatically any time soon, and (2) even though Trump is very unpopular right now, the Democratic Party is not all that popular either. Fortunately, we are not the incumbent party, and this era’s “incumbency disadvantage” should favor us in the House.

What about the Senate? I am a pessimist for now. This is not my prediction article; I have always avoided betting on midterms because they are traditionally harder to predict. However, midterms have felt easier to predict in the current era because polling has seemed more accurate than it traditionally has been in midterm elections. I believe this may be a symptom of the Democratic Party having more educated and wealthier voters.

Why am I a pessimist about the Senate? Because neither wing of the party gets it, for very different reasons. If you have read my previous posts, you already know my argument against the mainstream wing. The mainstream wing spent decades (the 1980s through the early 2000s) trying to stay close enough to Republicans to be electable. When it finally began to take on a more original or new identity, it chose to cater to its donor base and push moderate economic policy while moving further left on social issues. This is the opposite of what we should be doing if we want to win in the current era.

But what about progressives? They failed to learn from Bernie. What made Bernie so popular and successful in politics was neither his misuse of the term socialism nor the fact that he is left on nearly every issue. It was that he understood the era and realized that the average voter is fed up with the existing status quo. His progressive economic message catered to that, and he repeatedly hammered on that point rather than moving from issue area to issue area. I am still hoping that AOC is able to learn enough from him, but I have much less hope than I used to, based on the current direction in which the progressive wing is headed. I have been hammering away on this point for some time, but let me be clear: same-sex marriage still polls well above 60%, and an anti-abortion constitutional amendment failed in Kansas, showing that both can be politically safer issues. I often frame issues as economic or social in broad terms, but common sense would dictate that social issues as popular as those two should be safe in most districts. Unfortunately for the left, there are a lot of social issues—such as immigration, guns, and trans issues—that poll terribly. These issues, among others, combine with the mainstream wing’s inability to offer anything inspiring economically. Grant programs can be great, but we need something the broader electorate can feel.

So what do we need in red and purple blue-collar districts to win more often? Dan Osborn-type candidates who sound like Bernie on economics and Joe Manchin on social issues. I, of course, would fall somewhere between Bernie and Warren on economics and likely the same on most social issues, but applying the Family Feud thought from earlier, that is not what wins or appeals to a majority of Americans. So, instead of running me statewide in Tennessee, run a rugged, tough veteran and labor organizer who fits the Osborn mold.

I have not written in a while for a few reasons. Primarily, I have been slammed with my side and after-work projects. I hope eventually to be able to announce more about that, but the circumstances and contracts have forced me to stay somewhat silent. I believe I will have more of an explanation no later than next year. The one piece I attempted to write more recently is still sitting in my drafts. It was going to be a change from my usual complaining because I saw the party waking up to the fact that it needs to run outsiders rather than its typical slew of candidates. I wrote about my excitement over having a non-independent candidate—Osborn is running as an independent for Senate in Nebraska—to test in this year’s election. Seeing that candidate overperform others would tell me that my theory is right. Unfortunately, that candidate was Graham Platner. While he did have to go, as anyone facing serious allegations would have, not having that macho personality type in Maine has already likely hurt our chances of defeating Senator Collins. Speaking of macho personality types, the lack of one from Talarico in Texas has made me much more pessimistic about his chances. He was clearly more electable than Crockett, but you have to run tough in Texas. I hope to be wrong, but the Democratic Party’s realignment has us stuck with a group of people whom average voters would describe as weak. Tim Walz, Pete Buttigieg, and Talarico are all far too wholesome for the voters we need to win back from Trump. We need our own angry disrupter, whether you want that or not.

Would that angry disrupter not come from the left? While that is far more likely, I have become extremely concerned about the direction in which the left is moving, for multiple reasons. (1) It does not focus enough on economic issues and often brings up social issues that have helped Republicans make large gains. (2) It runs terribly unqualified people for office. (3) It does not understand that it is an ideological minority and is therefore very susceptible to existing in its own bubble. (4) It consists mostly of activists who do not understand that civil disobedience is one of many tools, not the only tool. An activist can make a good legislator, but that happens far less often than not. (5) More on this later—in an unwritten draft of an article I need to complete—but the left’s current stance on AI is not tenable for the future that lies ahead of us. Calling for reasonable regulations and guardrails is fine, but refusing to use a new technology and calling for a ban on data centers is stupid for many reasons that I will explain in the coming weeks, if not days. For this reason and those above, I removed “progressive” from my Substack’s name. The combination of points 2, 4, and 5 is too much for me to remain part of that eccentric and odd group.

How can I better explain this? Let us talk about State Rep. Justin Pearson. To the politically inexperienced or low-information voter, Pearson is an exciting speaker with a lot of promise. I admit that I fell for this at first as well. When he was unjustly removed from the legislature (overkill by the TN GOP), I volunteered to knock on doors for him. His work as a co-founder and spokesperson for Memphis Community Against the Pipeline more than qualified him for the state House. (Many other people, including activists and scientists, were behind the broader movement; spokespeople typically receive more credit than they deserve on projects.) That being said, since he arrived in the legislature, he has proven to be a very ineffective state legislator. Sure, his and the others’ protest on the House floor achieved the goal of bringing in a lot of attention and money, but not a single policy or law changed as a result. It only managed to become a jobs program for self-righteous left-wing activists. Have you noticed that they stopped taking the bullhorn into the state legislature? That means that even Pearson realizes it is not going to work under a Republican supermajority, or we would see them protesting every day.

I was previously hopeful and enthusiastic about Pearson’s entrance into politics. That hope and enthusiasm began waning when I attended a swearing-in ceremony and could not listen to any of the speakers because Pearson had to make sure to hoot and holler every five words. At first, I told myself that he did that because he came from a church family. Then, however, I saw the Fox News videos showing how he sounded at the private college he attended in Maine. The link below quotes a segment of that video, in which Pearson says, “I wanna bring together different voices—dissenting voices, voices that may be more liberal or more conservative—in order that we can reach a point of, sort of, the radical middle.”2 Video3 :

(1) This and other factors made me realize that Pearson appears to be seeking attention when he disrupts proceedings with all the hollering. (2) It made me realize that he is not even an ideologue, but another opportunist. I mostly kept these observations to myself, but then the activist, still trying to learn how to be a representative, decided to run for Congress. Why? Most likely because of the messiah complex encouraged by various passionate but ineffective nonprofits that are trying to prop him up as the next MLK. It is disturbing idol worship, and I hope to see it disappear from the left.

How did Pearson open his campaign? With what I believe was an outright lie. He likely used the goofy messaging suggested by David Hogg, with whom the left should not be working at all. What Hogg went through was terrifying, but being a victim does not make someone an instant political genius. The last thing we need is anti-gun candidates in purple-to-red, blue-collar districts. I am sorry in advance if that is your main issue, but it is not one we are going to win on in this country. Back to my point: Pearson opened his campaign by saying that Congressman Cohen lives in a “McMansion.” Having known Cohen well since 2005 or 2006, I knew that his house was not a mansion. It is a roughly 3,000-square-foot house near Overton Park. Is it nice? Sure, but it is about 2,000 square feet short of a mansion. Meanwhile, where does Pearson live? A roughly 5,000-square-foot McMansion on lakefront property. Someone please tell me how he was able to afford this house while his wife was in law school and he was earning a state representative’s salary. I understand that he puts his wife on a campaign salary, which donors should frown upon, but it still does not make sense. Family assistance is one possible explanation, but I do not know. He attended a private college in Maine, where he was searching for the “elusive radical middle,” but that fact alone does not establish his family’s financial circumstances.

What I view as his dishonesty does not end there, though. Check out this article from Jackson Baker4. Here is Gemini’s summary:

• The claim: Pearson called himself a “leading member” of the House Transportation Committee and claimed that he supported the transportation measure.

• The action: Pearson placed a borrowed audience chair front and center onstage at a TDOT ceremony.

• The reality: Baker noted that Pearson was a freshman in 2023 and voted against the measure.

Again, the above shows an attention seeker and opportunist, not an ideologue. Need more proof? Go back and look at how he spoke about Congressman Steve Cohen then, and compare it with how he referred to Cohen after he was no longer running against him in a primary. Following Steve Cohen’s retirement announcement, Pearson issued a statement praising Cohen’s long career and wishing him well in retirement. Pearson also indicated a desire to work with Cohen on organizing Democrats to combat federal policies and address economic issues.5 So, before, Pearson and his supporters were making hateful comments about Congressman Cohen, but as soon as Cohen retired he became someone you want to work with? Which is it? See my point?

The support of Justice Democrats and other progressives for Pearson has opened my eyes to how poor that wing’s candidate endorsements can be. Combined with its misunderstanding of the electorate—not to be confused with the mainstream wing’s misunderstanding of the electorate—it further supports my prediction that we will lose in 2028, even though my anti-status quo, anti-incumbent argument would posit that 2028 should be a good year for Democrats.

Lastly, why would we ever run a progressive or liberal Democrat in a district that leans Republican by 15 points or more? I urged Congressman Cohen to run in one of the districts only because he had a long history with the state from his days in the state legislature and had roughly $2 million in his campaign account. If it were not for both of those points, I would not have urged him to run, as he, I, and plenty of others are too far left for those districts. If we really wanted to win one of those districts, we would have run a veteran or labor-organizing roughneck. Again, I would be happier with Warren- or Bernie Sanders-type candidates, but, unlike the activist community, I realize that a majority of the public is not with me. We have to win, and we have lost so many white men to Trump that we sorely need to run tough, macho candidates who fit the mold I suggest.

Unfortunately, I no longer like either wing of the Democratic Party. Both are severely out of touch. While I used to believe that was only a problem with mainstream Democrats, watching progressives push candidates in primaries for deeply red districts and seats leads me to believe that they would all do terribly at Family Feud. After a few spirit-finger snaps, they immediately yell out what they want without ever considering what a majority of voters want. If they ever have their way and fill Congress with a bunch of inexperienced rookies, we will see lobbyists take over like never before. Does this mean I am leaving the party? Of course not. I do not see much value in being an independent, and I am far too left ideologically ever to join the Republicans. It is fair to say that I am a disgruntled Democratic voter, though.

As usual, I will make predictions later this year. Typically, I do much less for midterms, but I believe they are more predictable than I can remember, and I plan to make predictions and bet big. (I do not believe I have ever wagered more than $100 on a midterm.) My plan is to use Nate Silver’s data around September or October, and I will favor candidates who fit my suggested mold in close races. I will also give progressives a little more of an edge than mainstream candidates because mainstream candidates tend to be older, more status quo, more moderate, and less electable, but progressives will still take a hit in heavily red districts. Lastly, I am going to add a more subjective “toughness” barometer. A candidate who comes across as tough will get a slight edge over a more wholesome candidate. Assuming I can get around to it, I plan to apply this to both Senate and House races. I may post my betting spread this year, but it will come with all sorts of warnings. Until then, stay tuned for my already half-written article on AI and how it will completely rearrange our political system.

1

Noahpinion

Democrats benefit from low turnout now

For many years, I’ve heard Democrats fret that Republicans were trying to reduce voter turnout in order to win elections. This rhetoric kicked into high gear after 2020, with some Dems even framing measures like voter ID laws as assaults on democracy itself. I was always a bit suspicious of this line. Of course I want to …

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2 years ago · 262 likes · 119 comments · Wally Nowinski

One of the best responses to the left/“moderate” fight I have read has been that we need to stop fighting each other and “punch right.” While I do generally agree with that as election season approaches, for now, I believe it is very important that the party have its internal fights. Without them, we are bound to continue the same mistakes, though I admit that has been the result anyways, as the “moderate” wing is too stubborn to change and will likely dominate until either 2028 or 2032, depending on youth turnout in primaries. My hope is to get through to as many as possible that the “moderate” wing is the less electable wing in the current political environment, and that the “moderate” wing has to learn to stop running people that they like and, instead, run someone who is actually electable. The “moderates” have fallen deeply into their own bubble, and they are furthering that bubble by running to platforms that only fill their feeds with opinions they agree with.

Being an elected official does not make one out of touch on its own, but the crowds and circles they find themselves in are much like the circles of attorneys and doctors (wealthy or at least upper middle class). Many of these people are not in touch with the common working-class voter, and the candidates these folks would typically prefer do not appeal to working-class voters, as I have argued since 2016. On a good/positive note, districts widely vary, and, therefore, what is electable can vary a lot when it comes to the House of Representatives. However, with the presidency, you really do have to appeal to working class voters, as they are 60 to 65% of the vote. Having a strong majority of elite and educated voters may bode very well for Democrats in mid-terms for the next 10 years, but we are going to struggle every 4 years to win the presidency until we have another political realignment or until we properly attract working-class voters.

I swear to you that I am as bothered as many of you by the daily news, but I still currently believe that much of it is just for show/to appease Trump’s base, and, outside of filing lawsuits and protesting, there really is only so much Democrats can do when we lack control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency. Elections have consequences, and the Democrats ran the wrong candidate in the wrong era/political environment. Because of poor decisions of elites and wealthy people in the Democratic Party, we have to live through the current debacle. I hope the next Democrat to enter the White House will make similar attempts to test the system and create change. President Biden understood this when he discussed stacking the Supreme Court, though that talk went away quickly after the campaign. President Biden also showed that he understood this when he supported the progressive transportation bill; though Kamala failed to run on that or many of the other good progressive items President Biden did champion (overtime pay cap raise, student loan forgiveness where he could give it, and the best FTC Chair of my lifetime).

Eventually, I expect economic and world events to take Trump down just as they took Biden down in ‘24 and Trump in ‘20. If it takes him down enough, we may be able to pull off a close win again with a weaker “moderate” wing candidate like we did in ‘20, but a close win with another “moderate” is just going to create another political environment that lacks change and depresses future Democratic turnout operations. For now, Trump is enjoying a 53% approval rating for the first time since ever being in office. Again, they feel like he is creating change, and they will accept change in any form. The status quo and the system that has existed has been far too favorable to the wealthy and upper class. Our healthcare system, even with the improvements from the ACA, is still a national embarrassment when it comes to costs, and our wealth inequality issue is now a national security issue. Big money and oligarchs have taken over our system, and we do need radical major changes and reforms (in addition to a hefty wealth tax), just not the kind of reforms Trump is proposing.

I will eventually go down a whole list of Trump’s atrocities to date, which will include closing the CFPB, freezing NIH funding, and plenty of other more obvious issues. There is a lot to sift through, and a lot of what we are hearing from Trump is noise/fake gestures for media attention. Some (not all) of the outrage and stress/anxiety is rooted in outlandish claims from Trump that I do not believe will go anywhere (Greenland) because either 1) the administration will never actually pursue it or 2) courts or other countries will shut it down. I am still waiting for Trump to cap credit card interests at 10%, lower prices (inflation is back up), and do all of the other pro-worker items I never believed he would come through on. Anyone could audit the federal budget and find items to eliminate, but Trump will soon see how much harm blanket approaches (from tariffs to spending cuts) can cause; hopefully, he will be held accountable for that. I will give Trump credit where it is due. He chose well when it came to the FTC chair appointment, who will continue to push anti-trust lawsuits. The release of JFK files and the transparency unit he is putting together is great as well. I do believe that reforms in our intelligence agencies are likely warranted due to over classification and the military industrial complex, but I worry very much about pro-Russian elements in many of the Trump appointments dealing with intelligence (or Musk and his connections to China). I believe that, to be perceived as honest to the very people we will need to persuade in 2026/28, we need to acknowledge when Trump occasionally does something right, while always making sure to call him out on what he does wrong.

On a final note, while Democrats do need to continue to file lawsuits and fight against many of the terrible and unconstitutional items the Trump administration is pushing, simply yelling “fight” and just being against everything is not enough. We need to start to discuss what we would actually do, and, when Democrats come into power again, we need to actually fight for those changes and blame the Republicans when it is their fault the changes do not pass/become law. Now is a time to be creative and come up with ways to do government differently. With the benefit of hindsight and just as an example/quick thought experiment, were I Biden in 2021, I would have called for the establishment of a national price advisory board. Not in the way the U.S. used it during WWII and the oil crisis in the ‘70s (look up “Office of Price Administration” for some history), but as more of a consumer protection approach. The board would review costs and prices of products, and it would create labels for consumers to show them how much the product actually cost to produce and the % of profit the manufacturer/etc. receives. Consumers could then pick the products produced at the fairest price. If an entire industry is too high in prices across the board, the federal government could offer grants and loans to entrepreneurs willing to compete in those markets. Would any of this have passed Congress? Of course not. Could it have been done by executive order? I doubt it, but maybe? I could also see some issues with it favoring large companies that benefit from producing at scale and require smaller profit margins to exist; maybe we could designate large and small companies differently on the labels to help mom and pop businesses that lack the benefits that come with large-scale operations/lower profit margins. My point is that a policy like this would have made President Biden appear to be an agent of change. This would have given him a strong argument whenever inflation was thrown in his face (“I tried to lower inflation, but Republicans in Congress refused the consumer protection measures we fought hard for.”), and it would have appealed to the very voters we lost. Again, we cannot just be the anti-Trump party (it has not and is not working); we have to actually state what we would do differently. When Trump burns down anything from a good government program to a relationship with a close foreign ally, we need to not only make everyone aware (we have that part covered), but we also need to discuss what we are going to do to rebuild. Since my interest in politics sparked, I have worried that the change I want will never happen because big business, various special interests, and the oligarchs do not like big/fast structural change; it will always be a steep hill to climb. Now, here we are in 2025, and a group of loose canon right-wing oligarchs are attempting to demolish large segments of the federal government. Meanwhile, the oligarchs who did not play ball during the campaign season are now busy kissing the ring. This is why we as a country should have never allowed individuals to amass such massive wealth in the first place. Presidents are only able to do so much, and their political survival/popularity is often dependent on the winds/political environment of the time. Trump could have good fortune and we could still find ourselves in a tough mid-term year in 2026. The problem for Trump is that recent history has been filled with a lot more instability and chaos, which, as I stated earlier, business and other economic forces do not prefer. If world events and domestic economic conditions tank Trump’s popularity (53%; not great but over 50%), he may very well just have a second term defined by more tax cuts for the rich with the added scrutiny of mistreating immigrants and giving away chunks of Ukraine to Russia. Let us hope the courts do their duty, and that the President and his administration adhere to the orders of our nation’s judicial branch. I do not like to think about the alternative.

Towards Election Day, I stuck with my gut/predictions, but I admitted that the Selzer poll gave me reason for doubt. Unfortunately, the two best pollsters in the country missed the mark. Selzer overestimated white/female support for Harris, while NY Times/Sienna overestimated minority support for Harris. Ultimately, my predictions1 hit 50 for 50 states on the presidential level, and I accurately called all but one Senate race, PA, which was recently decided with only .2% separating the two candidates. My bold/risky prediction of a Democratic House fell short by 3 to 4 seats depending on the remaining yet-to-be-called races. My worst call was believing that Harris would win the popular vote. Though he was within the margin of error, I blame Nate Silver’s model for this prediction. My previously written articles on here, and, more specifically the Gallup registration data I shared,2 all pointed to a Trump popular vote win in a high turnout environment. Had I predicted a Trump popular vote win, I also would have predicted a Republican House. However, as I wrote in the prediction piece, the election did further solidify the fact that the House map bias is almost non-existent. Because of the realignment, the electoral college bias is now mostly non-existent as well, though that will change if Democrats can win back some of the voters we lost.

Sure, I was not the only one with a 50 for 50 presidential map call, and I did not perfectly predict the House and Senate. However, I called the range this year, comfortable Trump win to a slight Harris win, and I am not sure I will call a presidential race within a range with such accuracy for quite some time. Unlike most with my map, I also predicted where the vote shifts would originate. I have openly worried since 2016 that the party’s chosen direction would alienate young and working-class voters. In my articles this year, I went on and on about the apolitical, low information, anti-status quo, anti-institutional voters who would likely determine this election. I pointed out that these “news avoiders” (another clever term for this group) did not fit traditional demographics; they were not all a certain race, gender, or religion, though they did skew younger.

I should have stuck with my gut on MI being redder than WI, though I did discuss this in my prediction article. The polling was right about where I thought it would land: mostly accurate, but still slightly underestimating Trump. While Selzer and NY Times/Sienna missed the mark, this was not the big polling error of 2020 or 2016, and pollsters like Atlas Intel hit it right on the nose. While not all of the polls were perfect, many were within the margin of error, and strategies like breaking the polling down more by class and asking who people previously voted for appeared to correct most of the last two presidential cycles’ errors. Polling also provided a lot of insight that made this election more predictable than most would give it credit for: polling saw the split among working-class voters and more educated and/or wealthy voters, and it also caught the youth vote and minority swing towards Republicans. Issue polling was fairly accurate as well. The vote split between Senate candidates (generic Ds) and VP Harris is evident in the results, though tighter than polling suggested as I predicted.

That last point brings us to the difficult part of the recent election results. While I spent most of the year assuming that no Democrat could win the White House in the current environment, the reality is that it was a winnable race. The Senate races show us that running a generic D would have won us MI and WI, and a generic D would have also put us within .2% of winning PA and the entire election. As I wrote345 previously, the last place Democrats should have chosen their nominee was from the Biden administration. Yes, it was unfair that President Biden received blame for inflation and housing prices that he did not cause, but that is how our voters react to political environments…we/party experts should have known. President Trump was blamed for COVID-19 in 2020, and the Republican Party as a whole was blamed for the financial and mortgage crises in the 2008 election. Voters are reactive, and we had a stubborn group of Democratic elites who, isolated in their bubble,6 handed the election to Trump by replacing Biden with another from his administration.

While it would have been nice if President Biden had stepped down earlier, saving the country was still within reach this year. We as a party completely dropped the ball in the face of the obvious. President Obama and former Speaker Pelosi were right to call for an open process to replace President Biden; however, they were wrong to quickly back off that call once President Biden threw his support behind VP Harris. Anyone from Biden’s administration (Buttigieg or any of them) would have suffered a fate similar to VP Harris. While it did not help that the party lacked a clear message this year, just being from the current administration and running in defense of the status quo was all that was needed to lose. Sure, a quick-snap national primary, as I would have preferred, or a contested convention could have resulted in more problems and even worse results, but doing so would have at least given us a chance to nominate the anti-status quo/anti-institutional candidate we needed to win. Yes, Bernie was too old to come to the rescue, but a Bashear or a Whitmer (only naming people w/ a chance at being the nominee at the time) with an economic populist message could have won. Look at the independent Senate candidate in Nebraska, who out-performed Harris by +13.8. He ran on an outsider economic populist message.

We have to abandon the strategies that worked in the ‘80s and ‘90s but do not work now. An example is the obnoxious move to the middle we see candidates do after primaries. Be authentic. Stand by your personal beliefs, and make your views clear and understood. VP Harris attempted to go left in 2019 while running to be the nominee that year. It failed and so did moving back to the middle this year. I still do not know where she stands ideologically. We need to run candidates with a deep and committed ideology, and constantly switching positions does not help our optics or chances of winning.

Not to mention the fact that we ran on a pro-democracy platform, while completely ignoring democracy by having the party choose the new nominee as opposed to an open process. Something I am sure they would have preferred in 2016 as well, though it would not have changed the Trump win that year. I cannot hammer on that point enough. We had a clear opportunity to change directions and run the outsider we needed. Boomers stubbornly thought 2016 was because of emails and not because of candidate/ideological choice and the political environment. I believe strongly that a woman can be elected president in America, and I think that has been the case for most of my adult life. The problem is that we keep running the corporate pro-institution boardroom types in an environment that is anti-status quo and anti-institution. The “moderate” (center-right globally) wing of the Democratic Party has operated, since the ‘80s/’90s, under the belief that the winning coalition would include “moderates”, suburban white women, and a slice of Republicans. The problem with this theory is that we are in a hyper-polarized anti-status quo political environment. Persuasion is mostly dead, and the true middle is not as large of a group as it used to be. The modern-day moderate is economically conservative but socially liberal; that is a much smaller group than the old-school moderate of the ‘90s, who held fiscally liberal and socially conservative views. Even within the “middle” we see that most prefer one party or the other, and, again, we are hyper-polarized so there is not much movement with this group. Sure, if you ask a bunch of voters, most will tell you they are moderate, but that does not mean those voters are actually moderate (see issue polling). Though the Senate did split from the presidency to a certain extent, it was a matter of 2 points or less by blue wall state. The ‘80s/’90s coalition “moderate” candidate may work in a political environment where the majority of working-class voters are happy with the status quo (good perception of the economy/etc.), but, as stubbornly as the Democratic Party has tried, those suburban white women and all five Liz Cheney Republicans were never coming to save us. We do not have to and should not have played pattycake with war criminals to win. To be fair, this failed coalition archetype did do well in wealthier and/or higher education Congressional districts. Orange County, which used to be a stronghold Republican county in California, went blue by 3 points. However, we should remember that 65% of the voters in 2020 did not have a college degree. Catering to the wealthy and elite may work for fundraising, but what good did that do Democrats this year? Votes matter more than money, and the money is not even worth it if it requires you to sell your soul.

What irks me the most is that we potentially lost a generation we had previously locked in. Instead of listening to younger voters and running candidates they like, we ran the opposite and then acted surprised when the youth votes went from +24 to +11. This should have been a generational voting block in our favor; at least now we may finally invest some thought and resources into winning them back. The issue the Democratic Party leadership has is that they keep pushing the candidates they want instead of promoting the candidates the average voter wants. They are stuck in their bubble believing that fundraising matters more than voter-appeal, and they failed to understand that an anti-status quo message was key to winning. Democratic elites are going to have to learn to accept that the candidates that can win may not be the candidates they personally prefer. This is tough, which I know well because, throughout the late ‘90s and early 2000s, I had to accept that the candidates I liked could not win. Back then, being anti-status quo or wanting major change was shunned and you would likely lose with that message. This pattern/norm changed following the mortgage/financial crises, a recession, a global pandemic, and rampant wealth inequality, where the rich only appear to become disproportionately more wealthy during economic recoveries. Today, the average voter is angry and does not trust our system or our institutions, and, by catering our system and institutions to the super-wealthy and corporations, we gave them so many good reasons to feel that way. We did this to ourselves.

The painful lesson from this year I would have vehemently disagreed with in 2016 was that ideology mattered less than anti-status quo and anti-institutional messaging. What the political elites on the Democratic side need to understand is that working-class people do not perceive our institutions as good for us. Many poor and working-class people do not trust the police; many do not trust the IRS. Plenty of voters do not trust banks or Wall Street either, so this distrust of institutions goes beyond governmental institutions. That is why these apolitical news avoiders can go back and forth between parties in a hyper-polarized partisan environment; ideology does not matter to them as much as the perception that a candidate or party will fight for something different/change. The traditional swing voters of the ‘90s are gone, as the two parties are too far apart for that group to exist. We are mostly left with these apolitical anti-institutional voters, who for the most part do not trust either party. You have to run on change in this environment and you better create that change once in, or they will turn on you as well.

Why do I understand this so well? Because I am fairly anti-institutional myself. Anyone on the progressive side would fit that description. Since 2007 or earlier, I have been calling to abolish the Electoral College and remove the filibuster. Both my council races were centered on structural change away from the pro-oligarch way we draw the local council maps now w/ super districts and off-year/low-turnout elections. I believe our court system to be way too formal, and I cannot stand the fact that having a right to our civil court system requires having a certain amount of money to be heard. Our healthcare system is better than it used to be under the ACA, but it is still an embarrassment when compared to less wealthy industrialized nations and it caters way too much to multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies. Our social safety net, in general, is weak, and we have allowed wealth inequality to run rampant, with the $2 to $4 billionaires now becoming worth $220 billion. We have massive advancements in productivity and an AI future, but we still expect the average American to work 40 hours a week. Many of the institutional changes I want are centered on removing the barriers that only allow for incremental change. The obstacle/problem with that is Wall Street prefers only incremental change. Campaign finance reform makes it more difficult for Wall Street to buy off favors from elected officials, as one billionaire attempted this year when requesting VP Harris fire FTC Chair Lina Khan while contributing $10 million to a pro-Harris PAC. Of course, Elon Musk already announced that Trump would fire Chairwoman Khan immediately upon taking office. What separates a left anti-institutionalist from a right-wing anti-institutionalist is that most left anti-institutionalists want to reform these institutions, while right-wing anti-institutionalists either want them destroyed or privatized. Right-wing anti-institutionalists want to abolish the IRS instead of reform it; they would prefer to do the same with the Department of Education, border policy, and government bureaucracy in general. As Trump is a break from Reagan Republicanism, I do not believe Trump will make cuts to programs like Medicare, but, depending on who he listens to, he may attempt to privatize certain programs.

It will be interesting to see whether Trump listens to the American Compass group (Cass, Rubio, and Vance) or takes more advice and direction from Musk. These two groups are very different in ideological composition. The American Compass group, which I have mentioned in previous articles, terrifies me because it shows that the right understands the current political environment. They accurately realize the party of Reagan is dead, and they have to campaign to the disgruntled masses to prevail. That is why you saw them being friendly with labor unions; Trump picked a pro-labor Republican to lead the Department of Labor. My previous predictions discussed generational change, and how I saw a Republican party that would struggle in the future. The American Compass think tank has already done a lot to turn their fortunes around. I assume that Oren Cass, a former Romney staffer, realized that running as the party of the rich would no longer work once the political environment became anti-status quo. When the economy is perceived to be strong and civilians believe that it benefits them, they do not want to share their gains and prefer the more center-right to right-wing economic ideology espoused by the mainstream wing of the Democratic Party and the traditional wing of the Republican Party. While that approach may still work in wealthier and/or more educated districts, it fails in an anti-institutional and anti-status quo electorate. The American Compass realized this and changed the Republican Party in ways I never imagined. If Trump listens to the American Compass instead of Elon Musk, all that will likely stand in his way is the political environment. Presidents have way less of an impact on the economy and other global events than the public assigns credit and/or blame for. If Trump institutes poorly planned blanket tariffs as opposed to targeted tariffs and takes inflation up, he will be blamed. If inflation shoots back up on its own, we enter a recession, or we end up with some new form of a pandemic, Trump will be blamed by voters. If Trump is absolutely lucky and inherits a good economy with no other outside interference, voters will thank his party for it as long as they perceive he is doing the anti-institutional work they want. That last part requires Trump to listen more to the American Compass and less to Elon Musk. Who the president listens to is important. What separated George H.W. Bush from George W. Bush was the former listened to Sen. James Baker while the latter listened to Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Here is an excerpt from an article I wrote back in June that discussed the American Compass and what worried me about its effectiveness7:

”Recently, I saw this quote in the NYT: “'We really like capitalism, but we recognize it’s not working right now,' said Oren Cass, a former aide to Mitt Romney and the executive director of American Compass, a think tank that published the manifesto."[1] You would not have seen a Republican make that statement in the last 40+ years. The article goes on to point to other Republicans taking non-free market ideals such as Senator Marco Rubio supporting collective bargaining with a preference for Germany’s model and Sen. Vance supporting clawing back executive pay of failed banks.” BTW Sen. Vance worked with Elizabeth Warren on that legislation.

Am I suggesting that the new/alt-right is a positive development? Of course not; their positions on human rights and many other important issues are atrocious, but the direction they are taking their party in makes them more, not less, electable. We also need to be aware, if you look at my excerpt example above, that they will do some level of good work that they will use to cover up their bad deeds. We need to prepare ourselves to agree with them over the small handful of issues they get right. It is difficult for most of the educated and elite to wrap their head around the fact that Donald Trump is more electable than John McCain, Mitt Romney, or Liz Cheney. Welcome to the new-ish political era. I do not believe the pro-institutional and pro-status quo wings of either party will have a chance at a comeback until there is a perception of increased prosperity among working-class voters.

This leaves us with the final topic of how to move forward. I believe moving forward requires us to listen to two very different voices: Bernie Sanders and James Carville. If you have not watched it yet, the new Carville documentary on Max is a must-see. I have always respected Carville, but I have taken issue with his attacks on the left for quite some time. I hate to admit it, but I believe he is partially right when it comes to left-wing social issues. While criminal justice reform was the up-and-coming bi-partisan issue of its time in the 2010s, pandemic and poverty-related crime increases in 2021 and 2022 have made it a much less popular issue. I believe this will eventually come back in fashion, as crime continues to come down since criminal justice reform fits the anti-institutional reformer mindset well. The trans issues polled so well for Republicans that it was their primary message in many states over the last few years. I stood for cannabis law reform and gay marriage in the early 2000s, when both issues shared around 30% support. I do not believe we should EVER back down on human rights issues, but I do believe Carville is right enough in his assessment to say that we should probably not make these issues our central message.

My problem with Carville’s stance is that I believe he makes the mistake of conflating left social policies with left/progressive economic policies. It is typically the “moderate” wing of the Democratic Party that touts the more liberal social issues because, economically, they are not all that far from a ‘90s Republican. Social issues are how the “moderates” have thrown red meat to the base for a while; however, the progressive economic issues are what will put our people into office. Sure, run your corporate boardroom candidate in Orange County where that works, but do not push those types of candidates nationally. Carville is correct that our social issues, outside of abortion, hurt us, but he is so incredibly far from correct when it comes to economic policy. The economic policies of the types he usually supports are not enough; we need to focus our message on anti-status quo populist economic issues, which demand major changes to our system.

I believe my last point has already been proven in the data. Look at the exit polls in the MI 2016 Democratic Primary or the exit polls in the NV 2020 Democratic Primary:

https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/primaries/polls/mi/dem

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-primary-elections/nevada-results/

I picked those states and years because they were both important battleground states at a time when the primaries were still up for grabs. Bernie Sanders performed better with young voters, white working-class voters, men, and Latinos. That same list covers most of what we lost this year. In 2016, when Clinton won the primary, I lamented (loudly and frequently) that nominating Clinton would cost us the race and a generation that was more Democratic than ever. Some of this was due to unfair hatred put onto the Clinton name by right-wing AM radio hosts throughout the ‘90s, but the other problem with nominating Clinton was that she was the wrong ideological composition in the wrong political environment. Biden, who was at least a little more populist, narrowly won in 2020. I do not believe this would have happened without the pandemic, which created a tough political environment for Trump. Because the pandemic prevented us from learning lessons we should have learned from 2016, we decided to take the same pro-status quo/pro-institutional approach to 2024, and that is why I believed we would lose well before campaigning ever started this year. Yes, we Democrats are in a big tent party, and we do have to make sure that we check a lot of various boxes to appease our diverse electorate; however, we have to keep in mind that the white vote is still 71% of who voted, according to the CNN exit polls (11% AA, 11% Latino, 3% Asian). We also have to keep in mind that 60-65% of the voting electorate (even more if you include who stays home) is working class. This does not mean we should ignore minority voters, older voters, or wealthier voters, but we need to avoid taking working-class voters of all races for granted in the future.

Check out this interview which includes an ad from the independent Senate candidate who outperformed VP Harris by +13.8 in Nebraska:

He handles the tariff issue correctly. While he does go to the middle on immigration, he also has a populist economic stance and complains about billionaire control over government.

While the above message may not fit every district, it does fit the current national political environment very well. After 2016, the Democratic Party played the blame game instead of learning from its mistakes. Again, the pandemic prevented us from learning the same lesson as we otherwise would have learned in 2020. This year, I hope we hold ourselves accountable for this monumental loss. Instead of running off to safe spaces and trying to come up with a new person or thing to blame for the loss, we need to realize and internalize that we did this to ourselves. Our elites, our experts, and our institutions failed us. They fell victim to their own stubborn bubbles, and they could not understand what blue-collar Americans thought or felt. The wealthy and even the upper middle class have their own social clubs, gated neighborhoods, and private schools/institutions that have allowed themselves to separate from working people. In their circles, Trump was too offensive and could never get by in a polite society. Their circle was wrong, they did not realize they were in the minority, and all now have to deal with the aftermath. As we have heard before, elections have consequences. We should have cleaned house of the campaign advisors in the DNC, DCCC, and DSCC after 2016. We did not and we allowed the same bubble-trapped advisors to run us into the ground again. For now, we can enjoy our families for the holidays and hopefully avoid politics, but, in the new year, we need to take note of what worked and what did not work and do everything we can to win the working class vote back. Democrats should do very well in the 2026 mid-terms due to the re-alignment that has given us a more reliable voter base; however, the realignment also makes presidential elections more difficult because there are more working-class voters than anyone else. Lastly, it will not hurt to be the outsider/non-incumbent party moving forward, as we just learned it is difficult to run as the party of change when you are the incumbent.

This will likely be my last article for a bit, but I will post again as I wrap my head around the upcoming political environment and what comes next.

Maybe I have been scarred by how close the race was in 2020, and I am allowing the last 8 years of polling errors to cause me to go against the data in a year that polls correct their previous/recent errors. However, that is not my current read. If I had to pick one state that I am likely to call wrong, it would be MI, which, though mixed, has had polling leaning more Harris. I would be most confident in my calls in NC, GA, and AZ, and I am fairly confident in my NV call. Though it goes against a lot of the data out there (not all), I believe the R early voting advantage does matter in NV (NV is apparently the only state worth viewing early voting data in since so much of the vote is cast early). I primarily stick with NV going red because it is a working class state that has experienced a higher amount of inflation than a lot of the U.S. I expect both WI and PA to be nailbiters (“closest states" if the polls are right). If the polls are underestimating Trump again, MI becomes the closest state. In a Trump blowout scenario, which I doubt as much as a comfortable Harris win, possibly even VA could become the closest state (unlikely, but possible).

If I am wrong and Selzer is right, this is the map (or better) we should expect:

If NY Times/Sienna is right, this is the kind of map we should expect:

As mentioned, the above map makes little sense to me. I could see WI going more blue than MI in certain scenarios (even wanted to predict that at one point), but the odds makers would tell you MI is more blue than WI. More importantly, I have a really difficult time seeing PA go red and NC, GA, or even NV going blue. I believe, if Harris is winning NC or GA, she is also winning PA, MI, and WI. When looking at the data, instead of going through a qualitative analysis like I do when discussing the political environment’s persuasion on an election or when Dr. Allan Lichtman talks about his 13 keys, the educated guessing game we all play is whether or not the polling will be mostly accurate or whether it will skew in a certain direction. Due to how tight all of the battleground states appear to be, a polling error in either direction would likely mean that party wins all 7 battleground states (either my prediction map or one that shows all 7 battleground states going blue). On the other hand, if the polls are right, we should see an extremely close election in all seven battleground states.

Harry Enten, formerly with 538 and now with CNN (good pickup, CNN), gives one more legitimate reason for Democratic hope:4

“Don't count on polls underestimating Trump: 1. No party has ever been underestimated 3 pres. cycles in a row. 2. In 2020, right leaning polls correctly said averages were way off. In 2024, averages look a lot more like the right leaning polls. 3. 2022: Dems were underestimated.”

I do believe his first point is worth consideration, and his second point is even better. I agree enough to the point that my 2nd place prediction map would look more like this (tied with a map showing either WI or MI red); Note: This would be in line with the Silver Bulletin map and the betting sites (Silver would argue he does probabilities not who will win each state, but, meh, his map shows blue and red):

However, it is Enten’s third point that I would dispute. I do not believe it is wise to compare a presidential election year with a midterm. The media underestimated Democratic chances in the 2022 and 2018 midterms, even though polling was fairly accurate those years, because most had not caught on to the realignment and the changes created by it. Democrats now have more wealthy and/or educated voters, who are very good about voting in midterm elections. As I have stated many times before, redistricting will likely be the best of my adult lifetime for Democrats after 2030, due to better midterm performances and a better House map.

Speaking of the House, my riskiest (least likely to happen) prediction this year is a Republican President, Republican Senate, and a Democratic House. Conventional wisdom/Odds would say we will either see a Republican sweep or a Democratic President, Republican Senate, and a Democratic House (A polling error in either direction would likely = sweep - the Senate which goes R either way). While I acknowledge those are the two most likely scenarios, my gut tells me the Democratic chances of winning the House are being underestimated. Why? Because, while the electoral college bias requires Democrats to win the national popular vote by 2 to 3 points in order to have a real shot at winning the electoral college, the post-2020 House map only requires Dems to win the national popular vote by a little over 1 point (1.3, if I remember correctly). If the polling is accurate this year, then the House really should be on a knife’s edge and the Democrats could win it even if narrowly losing the presidency. It is worth pointing out that generic house polling shows Democrats at around +1.

The Senate, unfortunately, is where Democrats have the worst chance of obtaining a majority. I would feel much more comfortable betting on a Republican Senate than anything else. Why? Because U.S. Senate seats are staggered to where only 1/3 of the U.S. Senate runs every two years. The seats that happen to be up this year do not create a map favorable to Democrats. Our best hope for a pickup would be either TX or FL, and, even though polling has TX close, I do not see either of those seats flipping. Democrats currently hold 51 Senate seats, and we are very unlikely to hold onto MT or WV. My prediction (map below) is that we do not win OH either, even though Brown, with his populist messaging, is putting up a great fight in a Trump state and could prove me wrong. While this prediction does put the Republicans at 52 Senate seats, the silver lining is that Senate Democratic candidates appear to be mostly outpolling Harris in the battleground states. That is why I am predicting a Democratic Senate sweep in the blue wall states, though I have Harris losing all three in my Presidential prediction map. This overperformance among Senate Democratic candidates also adds to my hopes for a Democratic House. There is a good chance I am letting the data lead me in the wrong direction, like I did in 2016 and 2020 (though I did bet the winner in both cycles). However, there is also a chance that pollsters have learned from previous errors, and I am correctly following the data as I did in 2012.

What does make me doubt/debate the D House prediction (I’m still sticking with) is that it is hard for me to imagine a Trump voter who is enthusiastic about a Democratic candidate for the House or Senate. Split ticket voting was supposed to die with the need for persuasion in a hyper-partisan and polarized environment; however, the polls are telling us that it is alive and well, unlike 2020, when I believe only Senator Susan Collins (R) won a state that did not side with her party in the ‘20 presidential election. One could argue that this could be some sort of systematic polling error, and we should expect to see much closer/partisan voting margins between Trump and the R candidates for House and Senate. We will see Tuesday; here is my Senate prediction map:

When looking at a presidential election year, I try to view it as a range. In 2020, I saw the range somewhere between a narrow Biden win and a Biden blowout. The political environment was very good for Dems and the polling was good for Dems as well, so I favored the comfortable Biden win in my predictions. While I did call the winner, I did not predict the election would be so close. Sure, Biden won with a comfortable margin in the electoral college, but the vote was very, very close. This year, I see the range as a comfortable Trump win to a close Harris win. Some of my predictions are in line with the former (prediction map), while others (D House, D popular vote win, but R EC win) are more in line with a very narrow Trump win.

If I had to predict which of my calls were likely to be wrong, I would say my D House majority and blue wall Senate races are wrong, which would mean a Republican sweep and 55 R Senate seats. This scenario would also suggest a Republican popular vote win. I am sticking with my predictions for the reasons listed above, and I have a hard time seeing Republicans win the popular vote, even though the realignment/raw voter number gains made by Rs make it entirely possible in a high turnout environment.5

When I thought about what all I would be writing into my predictions this year, I worried it would ONLY be a focus on the negative thoughts I have had for years due to the post-2016 political realignment and the surprisingly tiny number of votes that decided the 2020 election. While my final presidential predictions are in line with this pessimism, I am glad to write that there are now legitimate reasons for hope in the data. I am no oracle, and, though I have accurately bet the winner for president in every election since 2008, I am bound to call one wrong. My House and Senate predictions have not been dead on since 2012, when every single one of my bets/predictions hit, and my 2020 prediction for a Democratic Senate majority came down to and was narrowly won in a runoff election in Georgia. Thanks to Selzer and NY Times/Sienna, we do have legitimate reasons to believe Harris could win on Tuesday. Let us hope.

In a way, we did that to ourselves. By allowing upper-middle class and upper-class people to separate themselves completely from normal society through private schools, legacy admissions, and gated communities, they no longer have any interest or perceived stake in strong public institutions. If our country ends up in a similar state to the movie Idiocracy, we can thank the elite for the chaos and the results that follow.

Outside of the ideological component, I generally agree with the mainstream poll-aggregating forecasters and other experts. Keep in mind that poll-aggregating forecasters provide probabilities of who should win as opposed to who they believe will win. That is what makes their work more accurate than would appear at first glance. A lot of people have criticized Nate Silver for calling the election incorrectly in 2016, where I believe he had Hillary at a 70% chance to win, but his forecast was one of the only voices out there that assigned Trump a 30% chance of winning. While I did accurately bet against Silver that year, I would not necessarily say he called 2016 incorrectly, but that the 30% probability hit. It happens, and anyone attempting election forecasting is bound to call one wrong here and there.

Unlike poll-aggregators, who rely on complex models and algorithms consisting of a mixture of polling, state fundamentals, and other data, depending on the aggregator, Dr. Allan Lichtman predicts a winner as opposed to a probability of winning. I have been pretty critical of his model and will explain why; however, I have to admit that my own method of predicting elections is very similar to his in that I do not attempt to create the algorithms and models that Nate Silver uses to come to his conclusions. I, like Dr. Lichtman, rely on my own list of assumptions (I won’t call them keys), and then, unlike Dr. Lichtman, I compare those assumptions to Nate Silver’s model on the Silver Bulletin on Substack along with a few other forecasters. I say this in order to convey that I was probably overly critical of Lichtman’s approach, considering my own is similar, but let’s go through his model key by key.4

1. Party Mandate After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.

   1. My problem with this key is, post-realignment, midterm elections now favor Democrats. This is a reverse of the previous trend, when midterms favored Republicans, but wealthier and higher education voters have moved increasingly into the Democratic column while working class voters have moved increasingly into the Republican column. This prevents this “key” from showing which party has momentum going into the election, as it likely would have pre-realignment.

2. No primary contest There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.

   1. While I understand his point of including this key, I do believe a healthy primary produces a better general election candidate. However, it could be useful for showing whether or not there is division in the party.

3. Incumbent seeking re-election The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.

   1. Traditional political science literature and experts from other fields would argue that incumbency comes with an advantage. I would argue that this key is not helpful because it depends on the perception of the incumbent. In 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, it was actually a disadvantage to be the incumbent.

4. No third party There is no significant third party or independent campaign.

   1. These keys are rated on a true or false metric. It would be difficult to apply this key since I would question whether the third party or independent campaign’s ideology more closely resembled the incumbent party or the opposition. If adjusted for that, this key would be useful. Without it, it is not.

5. Strong short-term economy The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

   1. I would not disagree with this key. If the economy is in a recession, whether the president had anything to do with it or not, voters would be likely to blame the incumbent party.

6. Strong long-term economy Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.

   1. While I understand the purpose of this key, I doubt the average voter would think through and factor this into their vote. Also, let’s not forget that perception of the economy can matter to voters more than the actual data. Let’s also not forget that our more recent economic recoveries have gone disproportionately to the wealthy.

7. Major policy change The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.

   1. I believe this is one of the keys that is way too subjective. The infrastructure bill that Biden signed was a huge deal, even if it did not include the progressive measures, but a vast majority of voters are unlikely to factor this accomplishment into their vote. While I am somewhat sympathetic to this key, I would reword it to account for what voters actually perceive and feel.

8. No social unrest There is no sustained social unrest during the term.

   1. This is also somewhat subjective, though extreme examples would likely redeem it. Would the Middle East protests be considered as unrest?

9. No scandal The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.

   1. This one could be useful, but, again, it would come down to perception. Partisans will likely disagree over what is a scandal and what is an accusation/etc.

10. No foreign or military failure The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.

    1. Another overly subjective key. I was personally very glad we finally pulled troops out of Afghanistan, but the exit has been generally viewed as a failure. I still do not believe this will be an issue that will switch votes. If we lost a major war or something that would be free of subjectivity, then I would agree with the use of the key.

11. Major foreign or military success The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

    1. Again, overly subjective. Though it still rages on, some could argue that our efforts in Ukraine have been a success in that Russia did not roll through Ukraine in a matter of days, as originally expected. Others could argue that the war still continues and point to recent Russian gains.

12. Charismatic incumbent The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

    1. I would argue this is subjective as well, but there are obvious examples where you could see the use of this key. Clearly, Barack Obama was very charismatic, and that did likely help with inspiration, excitement, and turnout. You would likely see some pretty heated debates over whether anyone is charismatic this year.

13. Uncharismatic challenger The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

    1. Same as 12.

As you can see, out of the 13 keys, my opinion is that four of them should not even be included anymore, eight I see as maybe helping but their use is likely diluted by subjectivity, and I only see the short-term economic key as a definite help in predicting the winner of an election. The problem with stagnant models like this is that politics evolves fairly rapidly, and this model needs to be updated in order to adapt to the current times and, as much as possible, to remove the potential for subjectivity. Two people could apply this model very differently and reach opposite conclusions.

Here is the draft model I would propose for 2024:

1. Assume that the non-incumbent party will turnout at a higher rate in presidential election years. This may or may not apply to midterms anymore post-realignment. I would assume it still applies, but to a lesser extent due to the Democratic Party having a larger share of wealthy and high education voters, who will vote in midterms.

2. Considering the fact that swing voters are now apolitical, low information, anti-status quo, and anti-institution, which candidate exudes more populism and would therefore appeal to this demographic?

3. In the last four years, what are the economic indicators saying? Is there a recession, and what is the perception of the economy, according to the polling?

4. What are the issues polling highest among voters, and which party has an advantage on the top three issues of concern?

5. Who are the polling aggregators assigning a higher probability to?

   1. How accurate has polling been in the previous two elections, and is there any expectation of a continuing trend in polling errors? (This is admittedly a guessing game, but something to consider when looking at/relying on a poll aggregator’s data.)

6. Which party benefits from a higher turnout, and is the turnout expected to be low or high?

7. Out of the toss-up states, what was the most recent presidential year outcome in those states? What are the fundamentals and makeups of those states, and how does each candidate poll with key demographics in those states?

Admittedly, my proposed/draft model above is not perfect, and that gets us to my point. The polling aggregators, assuming the polls are accurate like 2012/etc., are the best at forecasting elections, and I would be unlikely to make a confident prediction without them. While I have my criticisms of Dr. Lichtman’s model, I should probably criticize with care considering that my educated guesswork is done in a similar way, though I would argue I take polling aggregators into account in a way that he does not.

Dr. Lichtman is betting on a polling error in favor of VP Kamala Harris. While this is completely within the realm of possibility (pollsters could have over adjusted for their 2016 and 2020 misses), I do not believe the current political environment favors that outcome. I will put out my final election prediction article on Monday, but my current prediction is still the same map I posted recently (article in footnote 2). I do see a 25% chance of a polling error in Harris’ favor, which would make me wrong and the country better off, but I believe we are most likely to see some fairly accurate polling or polling that underestimates Trump, but only by 2 or 3 points (instead of 5 to 9 as seen in 2020 and 2016).

I should change the title of my Substack to “Marek’s Take, I Hope I am Wrong” because of how many times I have stated that I hope I am wrong this year. I continue to feel that way, and I also strongly feel that the Democratic Party is going to have to dig deep down and find a better way to communicate with working class voters and the post-realignment apolitical/low information swing voter.

This year, as in 2016, my views are somewhat counter to a lot of the conventional wisdom out there. In 2020, reading my thoughts would have likely been fairly boring, as they were in line with most of the other political writers and predictors. Polling was so high for Biden that it seemed impossible to think he could lose. While I did predict/bet (legally at predictit.org) that Biden would have a comfortable win, as opposed to the blowout scenario many were predicting, I was off a bit in that Biden BARELY won (70k votes or so in swing states). I sat in terror during the 2020 election night as I watched how close the election was in MI and other states. Fortunately, Biden did win because of voters blaming Trump for the pandemic, but 2020 served as a reminder of how much presidential year polling has been off in the era of Trump. In fact, Harry Enten, formerly of 538 and now on CNN, recently pointed out that polling in 2016 was off 9 points while it was off by 5 points in 2020.1

When making my predictions this year, my original thought was to move 7 pts. from the polls toward Trump, as I believe this year is much more like 2016 than 2020; however, I have read a good number of articles2 (one of several in the footnote) that have made me at least a little more confident that the polls will not be off by as much this year; however, I still predict/make the educated guess that they are missing the mark by 2 to 3 points or so.

If you look back, you will notice that polling was amazing in 2008 and especially in 2012. That is why Nate Silver was able to call 49 out of 50 states in both 2008 and 2012.3 His model works excellently when the polling data he is working with is accurate. However, as I predicted and bet in 2016, the polls were wrong. Qualifier: I did believe briefly, on Election Day only, that Hillary would win in 2016 due to the polling and how accurate it had been pre-2016. While I said such in a social media post, I still worried to my self and kept my bets on Trump winning through PA and MI. Betting well against Nate Silver in Senate races in 2012 required one to put polling over the state fundamentals in his model, while, in my opinion, betting well against Nate Silver this year in the presidential race will require folks to put post-2016 state fundamentals over polling.

Most of the articles writing about polling errors in the era of Trump point to the fact that they missed working-class white voters by a good bit. While I believe this is the main culprit and that they have improved their methods some as a result, it does not tell the whole story. What most of the media and writers are missing is that we have had a major political realignment in the U.S. In the 2016 primaries, the Democratic Party was faced with whether to go back to triangulation and third way policies from the 90’s, with some updated/more liberal social views, or whether it should go the populist/progressive route. Meanwhile, Republicans were deciding whether or not to stick with the traditional/post-Reagan Republican Party or whether to go the right-wing populist route, marked by nationalism and more vague/flexible/empty on ideology/policy. Republicans chose the populist route while the Democratic Party did not. This has resulted in a massive voter swap, with more educated/wealthy voters moving to the Democratic Party, while more working-class voters moved over to the Republican Party.

I would imagine that the rise and popularity of populism in the American electorate is the result of massive unaddressed wealth inequality, where so much of the actual economic gains are very disproportionately flowing to the most wealthy. If you are an economist, the outlook of our economy is shaky but overall positive/reasons to celebrate, especially when compared to the current global economy. The problem with that analysis in terms of how voters will react is that wages have not kept up with inflation (when viewing it from the 1970s forward), and our billionaires who used to be worth 2 to 4 billion are now worth over 200 billion. We should view that as a national security issue, but instead we ignore it while continuing to provide a much worse social safety net than many of the world’s developed countries; scratching our heads wondering why we deal with more crime than Europe. If I am right and Trump does win, we have no one better to blame than the actors in both parties who allowed such rampant wealth inequality to exist in the first place. Extreme wealth inequality means you have a large segment of your population not receiving proper health care, not receiving proper education, not receiving proper income/careers, and then you are sending these understandably angry people to vote. Did people really think the deregulation and smaller social safety net were going to create a thoughtful electorate?

This realignment has caused some major changes to our elections. Early voting used to favor Republicans and Election Day favored Democrats. High turnout was traditionally good for Dems while low turnout was traditionally good for Republicans. Midterms traditionally favored Republicans while Democrats did better in presidential elections. Due to the realignment, these are all the opposite now. A lot of people predict that polling this year will be great because it was great in the 2022 midterms. It was fine in 2018 as well, but it was still not that great in 2020. Why? Because the demographics that vote in midterms, wealthy and more educated voters, now favor Dems.

For a good read on which party benefits from high or low turnout4:

Noahpinion

Don’t Rock the Vote

For many years, I’ve heard Democrats fret that Republicans were trying to reduce voter turnout in order to win elections. This rhetoric kicked into high gear after 2020, with some Dems even framing measures like voter ID laws as assaults on democracy itself. I was always a bit suspicious of this line. Of course I want to …

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2 years ago · 253 likes · 125 comments · Noah Smith

The age of polarization has all but killed off persuasion, but one odd side note to point out is that Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate are performing worse than Trump across the board. I find this interesting and a bit confusing because split-ticket voting was supposed to die with persuasion, but it somehow has not. Why are some Trump voters going with the Democratic Senate candidate? Does Trump really have a small % of Democrats supporting him that will still vote for the Dem Senate candidate? I find that hard to believe and see the Senate numbers and Presidential numbers mirroring each other more closely by Election Day; however, I do still believe we may see some Dem Senate wins in states won by Trump (AZ, NM, OH?, PA?). In 2020, we only saw one split-ticket state, where Senator Collins (R) won Maine even though Maine went blue. Maybe I am wrong, and this is some sort of sign of a polling error going the other way in favor of Dems. If that is the case, Harris could win by a lot. If the polling is more similar to 2012 in its accuracy, I am likely wrong, and Harris could win by 1-3 points.

While my opinion is that, unfortunately, Trump will win, the two items, especially if combined, that could prevent it are 1) low turnout across the board, which would mean less working-class white voters turning out and 2) In an otherwise low turnout environment, a high turnout among key demographics, particularly youth and African American voters, to the point that polling did not account for when considering the expected makeup of the electorate. This last point is a point argued extensively by well-respected pollster, Celinda Lake. She points out that, every year since 2020, we have lost 2.5 boomer voters while gaining 4 million Gen Z voters. That could make the difference and prove me wrong. For the sake of Ukraine, Europe, women’s rights, the Supreme Court in general, and my $297k in student loans, I hope she is right.

That being said, I am still not optimistic. I believe it is important, especially for individuals, groups, and parties who work on campaigns, to understand the reality on the playing field instead of being trapped in bubbles. What do I mean by bubbles? Believing that Sen. Elizabeth Warren could win the primary in 2020, as I did briefly, is an example of myself being in a bubble. That being said, I was able to look at the polling data and knew that she would not be able to win, only having strong support among college-educated white voters. That was why I did eventually switch to Bernie in 2020, while a lot of my Warren-supporting friends still held out hope a little longer. I point out my own experience with bubbles to show that even political nerds like myself can fall prey to echo chambers. It is not limited by party either; look at the Trump supporters, some of whom still hold onto the bizarre belief that the 2020 election was “rigged.” Bubbles do not usually have walls that thick. We increasingly only associate with those who agree with us, and this creates a lot of blind spots, confusion, and surprise, when results do not match what we expect. Fortunately, at least in politics and elections, we always get the report card/reality check on Election Day.

Currently, I am of the opinion that a lot of Democrats are in denial about the state of the election. Sure, the race should not even be close. Donald Trump should have never made it past any primary election, but he did it by breaking away from the traditional GOP, which caters its messaging to the wealthy. Believe it or not, Trump ended the party of Reagan, and, though he is more uncivil and undemocratic than any major political figure in recent history, he is more moderate or at least vague on policy. The alt/new right and the think-tank behind them, American Compass, is driving the Republican Party in a very different direction. Sure, they are more extreme on immigration, but they are more moderate on certain social and economic issues. They are attempting to cater to the large number of working-class voters that they have been receiving since the post-2016 realignment. I believe the realignment was caused by Democrats catering their messaging more to wealthy/educated voters in an attempt to raise more money, while Trump used conservative red meat issues and fear to pull working class voters away from the Democrats. Unfortunately, it worked5 :

Oddly enough, the current trajectory, though neither is anywhere close to this point yet, suggests that the modern-day GOP is moving increasingly towards becoming the old Southern Democratic Party, while the modern-day Democratic Party is moving towards the GOP of Eisenhower and Nixon. I do not believe either will reach that point due to millennials and Gen Z becoming a majority of the voting electorate sometime between 2028-2032. Once this happens, I believe the plug on the current realignment will be pulled, and the Democratic Party will be overtaken by the progressive wing, while the GOP will either have a more tolerant version of MAGA or it will go full libertarian.

While I could be and hope to be wrong because of the above, I believe that Democrats were doomed before our non-primary ever began. In the age of polarization, political environments determine a lot more in our elections than anything else. Since our politics are so polarized, most voters already lean so heavily one way or the other that primary choice does not really affect anything. It would be too large of an ideological leap to go to the other side, even if you do not prefer your party’s candidate of choice. That leaves a very small group of voters that I refer to as apolitical or low information, while I have seen others refer to them as “news avoiders.” I have written more extensively on the realignment and this group in previous articles on this substack, but the gist of it is that these voters are not affected by the polarization in the way that most voters are because they do not have much in terms of a political ideology. They make up a very small % of the electorate (likely 5-15%), but they are what is leftover of the swing voters, and they are much more likely to vote in whatever direction the political environment pushes them in than more partisan leaning/ideologically aligned voters. Messaging and persuasion will not make much of a difference for them. They are overwhelmingly apolitical, low information, anti-status quo, and anti-institution. A lot of my pessimism is rooted in the fact that the description itself makes them sound more like Trump voters.

1. Political Environment: Part of predicting elections and running campaigns is pattern recognition. As mentioned above, common political knowledge changes and evolves fairly rapidly. If you took a book I studied in 2006 on political parties and looked at the states considered blue vs. red, you would notice it is now completely outdated. One pattern I am not sure will ever go away is that the electorate will blame or credit an elected official for whatever exists in the political environment leading up to or at the time of the election. I used to tell myself that President Obama won in 2008 because of his inspirational message and data-driven campaign team. While that did help with turnout, I am now convinced that he would have won anyways because voters were blaming the GOP for the mortgage and financial crises which started around 2007. Similarly, I believed so strongly that President Biden would win in 2020 because voters were angry and blaming then-President Trump for the government’s handling of the COVID pandemic. We could go further back to Jimmy Carter and many other administrations/elections, but hopefully you get the point. This year, the issue driving voters most appears to be inflation. While the studies suggest that the pandemic stimulus legislation added 1-3% of the increase in inflation, most of the inflation was caused by pandemic-related supply chain shortages/issues. That being said, John McCain was not president when the mortgage and financial crises happened, yet voters still blamed him and the GOP for it. Similarly, though Biden/Harris did not cause the inflation, I believe voters will blame them as well. Sure, inflation has cooled, but prices rising slower does not mean we are back to pre-pandemic prices, and working class folks and people in need feel that more than the wealthy.

   1. Incumbency disadvantage: One environment-related pattern I picked up on in recent years has been that whichever party is in power during an election, the other party appears to be more riled up and turn out in higher numbers. I believed so strongly in this pattern that I attempted to encourage a well-funded Dem to run in Memphis City Council District 5. My belief was that, since Trump was in office in 2019, Democrats would turnout in a higher percentage of the electorate than they did in 2015 when President Obama was in office. This turned out to be correct, but, unfortunately, I ran a last minute not well-funded campaign (40k or so if I recall). Since then, the district has been drawn more in favor of the GOP and is likely a lost cause. While I do not believe this theory applies at the same strength in midterms anymore due to the realignment, I do think it still manipulates turnout to a certain extent.

2. Post-realignment Polling errors: I covered this above already, but in 2016 and 2020, instead of the perfect polling we saw in 2012, we saw very inaccurate polling and much better than expected performances than were expected for Trump. In 2016, the Huffington Post’s Pollster.com site had Hillary at a 96% chance of a win, which is likely why that site no longer exists. Even Nate Silver, who calls elections better than anyone else, had both 2016 and 2020 as ~70% chance of the Democrat winning. In Silver’s defense, he gives probabilities as opposed to telling you who will win. Because of this, a 30% chance is still just 20% shy of a coin flip, and his predictions were way more realistic than most of the others who gave Trump little to no chance of winning. While I have been critical of James Carville since 2016 or so, I have to admit that he is back to being in touch with the electorate due to recent interviews he’s done. A lot of his points center around my concerns about the Democratic Party losing so much of the working-class vote, and he has offered Democrats good advice telling them to run away from Biden and not with him. Again, I am not beating up on President Biden as I do not believe he is at fault for inflation or the mood of the country. I believe he has done a lot of good, but a lot of voters will blame his administration and Democrats for anything in the current/recent environment that they are not happy about. Sure, there are some good economic indicators to point to, but so much of our economic gains over the last forty + years have been distributed so unevenly to the super wealthy that your average voter is not feeling or perceiving it.

   
   With all of the above in mind, do we really think this year is going to be better for Democrats than 2020, when Trump’s mishandling of the COVID pandemic dominated the election? Do we really believe that record inflation and rampant continuing inequality is going to produce an electorate that will be intelligent enough to know that the current administration is not to blame? Again, we had everything going for us (Dems) in 2020 and we still barely won. I not only believe this year's political environment is more like 2016 than 2020, but I actually believe it is worse. I am not sure this would have been a good year for any Democrat to run for president. For the sake of our country and our world, I hope that most of what I wrote above is wrong, and that all of my detractors can remind me every two to four years how I called it wrong in 2024. I have not called a presidential election winner (bet-wise) wrong since 2004; let’s hope this is the year I miss the mark again.
   
   P.S. Here is the current map I see, but I will put out an actual prediction article in early November. I do still see a world where Harris could win NV, WI, MI, and PA, but I do not believe that will happen this year.

   

   
   

2

SBSQ #12: Will the polls lowball Trump again? (natesilver.net)

Silver Bulletin

SBSQ #12: Will the polls lowball Trump again?

Cheers from London, where I’m wildly jealous of how much better the Indian food is than in the States but still terrified I'll look the wrong way and get run over every time I cross the street. And welcome to the August edition of Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions. Now that we’re back on track after some…

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2 years ago · 425 likes · 461 comments · Nate Silver

4

Don’t Rock the Vote - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion

Noahpinion

Don’t Rock the Vote

For many years, I’ve heard Democrats fret that Republicans were trying to reduce voter turnout in order to win elections. This rhetoric kicked into high gear after 2020, with some Dems even framing measures like voter ID laws as assaults on democracy itself. I was always a bit suspicious of this line. Of course I want to …

Read more

2 years ago · 253 likes · 125 comments · Noah Smith

His dig struck me in a way that never really left me. Sure, I held the party line and avoided saying anything negative about my own side, but at what cost? The answer to that is credibility, and that is why I have since greatly changed my approach to communications in politics. One of our missions is supposed to be to persuade, and, even in the age of polarization where base turnout matters way more than persuasion, we still have to strive to retain our credibility while making our arguments. Why? Outside of more obvious answers, it is because the small group of persuadable voters that are left do not trust us and will not trust us until we drop the thought that we cannot speak critically of our own side.

Bill Maher, who I have plenty of agreements and disagreements with, recently went on The View, and he discussed this exact issue with the show. He and Joy Behar were going back and forth, and she admitted that she could not say anything bad about Joe Biden because she worried it would hurt his chances at reelection. First of all, most of us (even celebrities like Joy) do not have the ability to change an election outcome through a simple discussion or post. Even more-so in my case not being a celebrity and being from a deep red state like TN. More importantly, Bill Maher pointed out to Joy Behar that she loses all credibility when she takes that approach, and, here, he is 100% correct.

Jon Stewart recently returned to the Daily Show on Mondays, and the modern political class was shocked to hear him bash on both sides, as he has always done so well. He also, more accurately than anyone else, attacks the medias’ partisan portrayal of the issues and candidates. The reason Stewart’s approach works is because people crave honesty in politics, and that does not come from carefully worded/pre-screened partisan statements.

What is worse, and why I have such a doom and gloom view of the 2024 election, is that the very group of voters that we need to try to persuade have nothing but disdain for the normal/status-quo way the two major parties typically communicate. While I believe Nate Silver, formally from and founder of 538 who now writes on his Silver Bulletin on Substack, has the best grasp of where the election is at, I must point to Dr. Bitecofer’s study on the group of voters who voted for President Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. None of the traditional metrics applied to this group; they were not similar in age, race, religion, gender, or income. The only recognizable traits were that they were low information (meaning they do not focus a lot on politics; this does not mean they are dumb…their knowledge is invested elsewhere), apolitical, anti-status quo, and anti-institution. They are less likely to vote, but, considering they are one of the only groups of persuadables really left, their opinion matters regardless of their turnout rate. The ones that do vote will likely determine this election and subsequent elections.

If we ever even want a chance at breaking through to the small number of swing voters that still exist, we have to communicate in a way that builds credibility, and, until our economy does a better job at benefiting everyone as opposed to the wealthy, the message needs to be progressive, anti-status quo, and demanding of change.

But what about the swing voters that do still exist (5-10% of the population as opposed to a third of it)? Again, they are the anti-status quo, anti-institution, apolitical, and low information type. To garner their support, you need to be the most anti-status quo, and, for both swing voters and non-swing voters, you need to offer policies that they would actually feel in their daily lives. With economic recovery after economic recovery benefiting the wealthy more than anyone else, it is easy to see why more populist economic policies are becoming mainstream. That is why we see Trump and Harris talking about removing taxes on tips, and we even recently saw Harris support price controls on groceries; this would have been unimaginable in the ‘80s/’90s. When will populist economic policies become less popular as they used to be in the ‘80s and ‘90s? When we have a strong enough economy that benefits a strong majority of the population enough to make them selfishly conservative on economics again; once people perceive that they have something, they typically do not want to share it.

How do we get rid of a system that seems to carry more opportunists than ideologues into elected office? More parties. Unfortunately, we only have two major parties, when there is a four-quadrant political spectrum (econ left vs. right and authoritarian vs. libertarian). This is why inter party battles like progressives vs. “moderates” and alt/new right vs. traditional right are so important. More parties would create more ideologically defined candidates. They would not be able to simply move on one issue or another at their convention because, in a multi-party system, that would likely put them in a different political party. That does not mean that a 4 to 5-party system would consist of unmovable positions, but it would make it way more difficult for the opportunists in the political world to shift into whatever form they believe will help them climb the ladder the fastest. While I do not see us moving to a multi-party system any time soon, I do hope that, when millennials and Gen Z become the majority of the voting electorate between 2028-2032, we can see a more concrete push in that direction. In the meantime, I hope to see continued pushes for ranked choice voting and other tools that are useful for dealing with our archaic and antiquated two party system. My advice? Research your candidates, and make sure that they have a real reason to run and ideas about what they would actually do once in office.

Now, we as a party have to decide if we actually want to win. I'm sorry to say, but, if we run Harris, we will lose. Maybe I am wrong if her VP pick matters enough, but I doubt it. While we should run an outside, anti-status quo, populist (regardless of ideology, to my chagrin) to win in this environment, I do not see a DNC convention producing such a nominee. The best we can hope for from a convention, in my opinion, is a Whitmer/Fetterman or Whitmer/Shapiro ticket. That could possibly be enough in a close race, but polarization may prevent that from working well like it (picking certain candidates from battleground states) used to.

President Biden does not deserve the blame he is receiving for inflation and housing prices/etc., and he does not receive enough credit for what he did accomplish. However, the last place we should be picking his replacement from is his own administration. That would be tone deaf and show that the party is still out of touch with the politically realigned electorate

Trump has forged his distinctive coalition with a message that is suspicious of elites, leery of foreign entanglements, energized by opposition to illegal immigration, willing to disrupt traditional norms.

It's less about ideology and more about personal philosophy and personal circumstance,’ Frank Luntz, a pollster and communications analyst with roots in the GOP, said in an interview. ‘If you feel ignored, forgotten, betrayed; if you feel the elite doesn't understand you, doesn't care about you, and you've been left behind − that's the new Republican Party.’

The sight on the convention stage Monday night of a significant number of blue-collar and Black speakers, delivering speeches that criticized corporate America and the status quo, reflected ‘the realignment of American politics, Trump-style,’ he said.”

“They overhauled the platform to cut some conservative positions and add some populist priorities.

The party's 40-year commitment to a national abortion ban? Gone.

The emphasis in the last platform, drafted in 2016, to cut fiscal deficits? Nowhere to be seen.

The previous platform's endorsement of expanding free-trade agreements with friendly foreign nations? That was replaced by a promise to increase tariffs on foreign imports, to deport millions of undocumented immigrants − endorsing the policies and often echoing the language that Trump uses on the campaign stump.

The delegates shouted their approval of the platform on Monday, by acclamation. There were only a handful of shouted objections in the hall.”

From Politico2:

“Perhaps most shocking to some more traditionalist Republicans was the fiery speech from International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien — the first Teamster to speak at an RNC in its 121-year history. In his remarks, he trespassed on traditional economic conservatism, decrying the ‘corporate elite,’ outlining the harm of Right to Work laws, which make it harder to organize and have been passed mostly in GOP-run states, and called the Chamber of Commerce ‘unions for big business.’”

All of the above is taking place, while the Democratic Party is still stubbornly going against the grain as it pushes its more “moderate” wing. The RNC would have had a much more difficult time pulling in blue collar voters and changing its platform to cater to them, if the Democrats had chosen the progressive route in 2016. The progressive route is anti-status quo, anti-institution, and polled well in more conservative and rural areas, much to the confusion of Democratic operatives during the 2016 primaries. Progressive ideology communicates directly to people who feel that our institutions have been rigged in favor of the wealthy. Unlike conservative populists who also like to incorrectly blame minorities and other groups for their shortcomings, progressives accurately put all of the blame on big business and the greed of oligarchs.

While I do believe that President Biden does not receive nearly as much credit as he deserves for his accomplishments and for working with progressives, there is nothing we can do to bring back the blue-collar voters we lost as long as he is the nominee. That being said, if the Democratic Party thinks we should replace him with someone else from his administration or one of many more “moderate” governors/candidates being considered, they might as well keep President Biden as the nominee because none of them will win. Choosing another moderate will just mean we receive the same result, a Trump presidency. Persuasion is dead for the most part, which is why Trump’s 34-count felony conviction, Biden’s awful debate performance, and the horrific assassination attempt on Trump all failed to move the polling much at all. This is because of polarization; the parties were very close to each other in the 90’s and early 2000’s, but that is no longer the case. When you have polarized parties, there is much less ideological room to exchange voters. Democrats have to think outside the box, look at the small group of swing voters that remain, and properly understand what messages and candidates work with these voters.

Again, the group of swing voters that remain are apolitical (lacking any strong ideology), low information (not dumb but just generally uninformed in politics), anti-status quo, and anti-institution. This is the group that will likely determine the election, and they are not going to vote for the status-quo incumbent, while being angry about inflation and housing costs. With everything that is on the line, Democrats need to move fast and run an outsider. In 2016, I was a voice in the wilderness calling out to everyone that we needed to change course because there was very little chance that Hillary Clinton would win. The difference between now and then was that the polling suggested that Hillary could win, whereas our polling now makes it clear that Trump is favored. Polling since 2016 has underestimated Trump, which means he is likely in a more comfortable lead than we are even seeing now. The only way Democrats can stop the alt/new right is to run a candidate that caters to these apolitical, low information, anti-status quo, and anti-institution voters. The logical place for this to come from would be the populist wing of the party, but really anyone that could fit that framework would offer us our best chance. I hate admitting that because, in 2016, I really strongly believed that it all came down to ideology and turning out the base. Now, I even believe that a well-received/liked celebrity that could fit the anti-status quo label would work.

Unfortunately, our media, for decades, has pushed the untrue narrative that presidents are responsible for the economy. In the recent presidential debate, this could not be clearer than when they referred to the economy as the “Biden economy.” Sure, they nominate Federal Reserve board members, but global/national events and the free market itself have much more to do with the state of the economy than the president. Even congress only has so much of an impact on the economy, as spending bills are spending money already in the economy. It was refreshing to see Jon Stewart push back on Bill O’Reily, during a recent interview on the Daily Show. Bill O’Reily went down a list of prices that had increased during Biden’s presidency. Jon Stewart asked Bill O’Reily how President Biden caused the price increases, to which he had no answer (because Biden had very little to do with it).

Even with Stewart pushing back through his platform, the above is not going to change overnight, if at all. Though traditional economic indicators are positive for Biden, how voters react to an economy is not based on the many metrics economists rely on and most average people do not pay attention to but more about the perception of how the economy is personally affecting voters themselves. Inflation, that was mostly caused by pandemic-related supply chain shocks with corporate greed sprinkled in, has very little to do with Biden just as Trump had very little to do with COVID, when many voters were angry at his mishandling of it and voted him out in 2020.

Well before and more recently on my first much longer post on this platform, I have taken the position that the clock is ticking on the Republican party. I went as far as to say they will not be electable (or at least unable to obtain/maintain a majority) by 2032, if not sooner. That was based off a belief that a party with economic conservative views would not be able to survive a millennial and younger majority electorate. I firmly believed the future Republican Party would be more libertarian, which means even more conservative on economics. They are doing quite the opposite here, which, if combined with moderated stances on social views, as they have already done with abortion, could make them very relevant well into the future. The GOP’s move towards populism is very unfortunately both brilliant and effective in the current political environment. If Democrats do not move away from pleasing elites and donors by going with their own populist progressive wing, they very much may find themselves as the party that struggles to maintain a majority and remain relevant.

My absolute favorite thing about him was appointing Lina Khan to the FTC. If you are not aware of her, look her up. I would want her to run for president at some point, but she was born in the UK. She has been taking the fight to Ticketmaster, Amazon, and many of the other large companies over monopolistic practices. President Biden may not be perfect, but he did not cause the inflation that he is being blamed for, and he has actually done a lot of good. I would much prefer him to Trump; I just do not believe he or anyone from his place in the ideological spectrum could win.

In 2024, President Biden is being blamed for inflation. Trump did not cause COVID and President Biden did not cause the inflation, but that matters very little to angry apolitical voters. I really wish the media would stop framing the economy as the president’s responsibility as was done in the recent debate. It is misleading, and it contributes to the confusion that exists with the average voter.

While my pessimism believes it is too late to change course, for the sake of our country we must find ways to communicate to this group of voters that Democrats do want to change the status quo and do not want to settle for more of the same. Settling for more of the same will only mean more poverty, more crime, more mass incarceration, more out of control healthcare bills, and a struggling middle class wondering why things have to be this way in the wealthiest country in the world seeing record profits in the stock market and corporate world. Less wealthy countries in Europe and other parts of the developed world have stronger social safety nets, lighter criminal sentencing, and less crime. Imagine being able to walk down the street at night without being in fear.

While social sciences are not the same as hard sciences, there is both qualitative and quantitative data to be relied on. Admittedly, part of my work in predictions is educated guess work, but, in the age of election prediction markets, there is plenty of soft science to rely on. It would be anti-science not to have a willingness to update one’s views with new data and information, and, unfortunately, I believe most political commentators on both sides are guilty of this as they still treat the electorate as though we are in the ‘90’s.

Let us consider the ideological framework pre- and post-80’s. Before and throughout much of the 1980’s, the Democratic Party played safe on social issues but was economically liberal. Yes, there were some Southern Democrats who turned Republican over JFK’s support of and LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act; however, this ideological formula kept many of the South’s state legislatures under Democratic control as late as the early 2000’s. This was a good formula for keeping the South, which was once a base of the Democratic Party and held most of what we would have called “moderates” back then. Beginning with Nixon’s Southern Strategy and continuing with Reagan’s Southern strategy, which mostly consisted of convincing Southerners that minorities and not the rich were to blame for their problems, the South was transformed into a socially and economically conservative region. Democrats struggled to deal with this throughout the ’80s as the South became more and more Republican territory before finally going fully red in ’94 on the federal level. Again, Dems would continue to pick up Southern states in ’96, and gerrymandering would allow the Dems to hold onto many state legislative seats due to gerrymandering. Many of these Southern Dems would continue to be socially moderate to conservative and economically liberal, until they were mostly stomped out in the early 2000s.

While the ‘80s - ‘90’s political alignment held strong for quite some time, one has to be careful in applying it in today’s elections due to the realignment that occurred within the Republican Party between 2010 and 2016, and to a lesser extent, the Democratic Party between 2004-2016. Blue-collar white irrational anger about Obama being president led to polarization in 2010, and polarization set up far right European politics to take over the Republican Party. When I first saw Trump running, I realized that he was running like the anti-immigration parties I had studied in Europe. A key and often ignored part of this type of ideology is that it is light, if not sometimes center-left, on econ policy. That plus fear mongering over minorities is what makes it the conservative version of populism. Typically, I see the term populism as a positive because it means attractive to the masses and your average middle- and lower-income voters (large majority of the population), who feel that their concerns have been discarded by the elite. However, as Trump has reminded us, populism can be a bad thing when it relies on political divide and conquer strategies that target ethnic minorities. Sadly, papers have shown that larger safety nets exist in countries with more homogenous populations, which shows how far humanity still has to go.

Many if not most Democratic strategists view Trump and other alt-right candidates as weak. While we did see many of the alt-right candidates lose in 2022, I believe assuming the alt-right is a weakness is a misreading of the post-polarization/post-Trump electorate. Lining up candidates in 2008, I would have agreed that John McCain and Mitt Romney would have been much stronger candidates than a candidate like Trump; however, the opposite is true in modern times. How so? Think about the makeup of each political party, and think about which group(s) in each party are more difficult to turn out. Wealthy and educated folks in both parties are known to turn out at higher rates, and they make up a smaller % of the electorate than other groups in the category of income/wealth. With Democrats, the most difficult to turn out bases are young people and minorities, which is why President Obama was such a strong candidate. With Republicans, the most difficult to turn out part of their base is non-degree holding blue-collar white voters. McCain’s “maverick” voting patterns and Romney’s elitist sentiment that he cannot shake off prevent either of them from being viable in today’s Republican Party. Meanwhile, Donald Trump turns out blue-collar white voters like no one else.

The 1980’s (Rs) and the ‘90s’s (Ds) disappointingly saw both parties embrace far right economic policies. A lot of it revolved around deregulation and anti-labor policies, and we are feeling the negative effects of that today through massive wealth inequality and American made oligarchs that far exceed the extreme wealth of oligarchs in the early 1900’s. Both Democrats and Republicans worked together to create this mess from the 1980’s through the early 2000’s through Ronald Reagan and later Bill Clinton’s “third way” policies.

Fortunately, the Democrats began to get away from third way policies, when President Obama campaigned against rampant wealth inequality and went as far as to say “[w]e needed to spread the wealth around.” Notice that he won after saying that. This was a brilliant strategy because, before Republican populism reared its head, Obama was able to use economic populism to pull in and turn out young voters, minorities, and the remaining white blue-collar Dems like we had not seen in my lifetime. Unfortunately, under the pressure of being the first African American president and wanting to protect his legacy, President Obama ran as a progressive but governed much like a moderate Democrat. Instead of pushing for filibuster reform, comprehensive campaign finance reform, proportionate representation in Congress, or eliminating the electoral college while we had 60 votes, we passed the heritage foundation’s healthcare law. To be fair, the healthcare law was an improvement and Democrats only held the 60-vote majority for President Obama’s first two years; however, those two years were our chance. While President Obama did serve with hope and dignity, he focused his hope on trying to work with Republicans that many of us already knew would not work with him and would fight to limit his legislative accomplishments as much as possible. Sure, I was thrilled the night President Obama was re-elected in 2012, but the 2012 win was not at the level of 2008. Fast forward to 2016 through today, and we see a progressive wing of the Democratic Party that may have fallen short in 2016 and 2020 but is set to take over the party by or between 2028-2030. The progressive wing of the party turns out the youth vote like no other, while the moderate wing of the party mostly excites older voters and wealthy voters who will already vote. We have Trump to thank for the high Democratic turnout in 2020, and we still only won in the swing states by roughly 70,000 votes.

What is most interesting to me is that the political realignment of the Republican Party is not quite complete. Recently, I saw this quote in the NYT: “'We really like capitalism, but we recognize it’s not working right now,' said Oren Cass, a former aide to Mitt Romney and the executive director of American Compass, a think tank that published the manifesto."[1] You would not have seen a Republican make that statement in the last 40+ years. The article goes on to point to other Republicans taking non-free market ideals such as Senator Marco Rubio supporting collective bargaining with a preference for Germany’s model and Sen. Vance supporting clawing back executive pay of failed banks. Very recently, Congressman Tim Burchett, who I knew as a state senator when I worked for then-State Senator Cohen in 2006, called out the pentagon and defense contractors for being “war pimps” and challenging the military industrial complex over what I expect to be the biggest illegal cover-up in possibly world history over UFOs/UAPs/non-human biologics.[2] The latter topic involves the scientific community and the world being put in the dark and set back no telling how many years technologically due to greed and a fear of the public’s reaction to learning more about where we are in the cosmos; it appears Congress and all presidents before Trump (Obama was reportedly briefed-post presidency) were kept in the dark and not allowed to know about any of it, while unelected bureaucrats continue to keep their cards close to their chests. I point this out to show how odd and different this political era is. I would not have expected a 5-year Republican Congressman to be the one calling out the military/industrial complex and leading the charge on transparency/truth in what appears to be one of the largest cover-ups ever. Yet the news keeps talking about Trump and Hunter Biden, neither of which are currently elected officials…So why are Republicans distancing themselves from traditional Republican stances? Because the Reagan era died with Trump’s election and alt-right European-styled politics is not so obsessed with unfettered capitalism. This may make them lose some level of wealthy voters, but, until we have a more equal system, there are not a lot of them compared with the total population anyways. What they have gained, through their realignment and the employment of the same fear tactics Reagan and Nixon used, is the white blue-collar vote that Democrats should have never lost.

I believe the context above is needed before finally asking the question of, “how will trends affect upcoming elections?”

 On the federal level, I believe the lack of COVID as an issue and Biden’s low approval ratings (not that Trump’s ratings are any better) will make 2024 more of a rematch than most want to acknowledge. As of today, whether or not he is in prison, I believe Trump will be elected again in 2024. Before getting angry at me, keep in mind that this is my prediction and NOT what I want to happen. I may not be thrilled about the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, but, unlike most moderates, President Biden has done a good job at reaching out and working with progressives. I believe his time in the Obama administration taught him not to count on Republicans working with him unless they have to on issues such as raising the debt ceiling. While I do believe he was too late in calling for such measures, I was happy to see him support filibuster reform, stacking the court, and the version of the infrastructure bill supported by progressives. His fight for student loan debt has been a calculated and intelligent move as well; however, I do not believe he will benefit electorally from these items as well as he deserves because the American public has to actually feel the change to believe in it. The watered-down infrastructure bill was still good, but it lacked many of the provisions that the American public would have actually felt.

That being said, there is one major factor that can turn my depressing (if you are a D) news on its head. Celinda Lake, one of President Biden’s pollsters and a respected/long-time pollster, recently put out data showing that 4 million Gen Z citizens become eligible to vote each year, while 2.5 million older voters pass away each year.[3] This is by no means meant to celebrate death as it is often interpreted by older friends on social media, but it will have big implications on the upcoming 2024 election and huge implications on presidential elections on down the ticket starting as soon as 2028 and as late as 2030.

David Leonhardt from the New York Times wrote, “Contrary to conventional wisdom, younger voters throughout U.S. history have not automatically been liberal. In 1984, Americans under 30 strongly backed Ronald Reagan’s re-election. In 2000, they split almost evenly between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

It is true that people often become somewhat more conservative as they age (and millennials are following this pattern, as my colleague Nate Cohn explained). But the more significant factor is that generations tend to have distinct ideologies. People are shaped by the political zeitgeist during their adolescence, as research by Yair Ghitza, Andrew Gelman and Jonathan Auerbach has shown.

Americans who came of age during the Depression and New Deal, for example, leaned Democratic for their entire lives. Those who grew up during the Reagan era (many of whom are part of Generation X) lean to the right. In recent decades, major news events, including the Iraq war, the financial crisis, Barack Obama’s presidency and the chaos of Trump’s presidency, appear to have created a progressive generation.

For four straight national elections dating back to 2014, Democrats have won at least 60 percent of the vote among 18- to 29-year-olds. It is [the] longest such run of success since at least the 1970s, when Catalist’s data begins.

The pattern offers reason for Democratic optimism. Millennials and Generation Z are growing parts of the electorate, while older, more conservative generations are gradually exiting the electorate. Even in the short term, the age dynamics matter: A Republican will have a slightly harder time winning the presidency in 2024 than in 2020. In the long term, Republicans will struggle to win national elections unless they can appeal to more Americans born since 1980.”[4]

Personally, I do not see a new generation of Republicans rising from our youth until the American youth inherit a good economy that actually benefits them. As an elder millennial, we inherited productivity to wage ratios well-worse than our parents, cost of tuition that skyrocketed in the early 2000’s, a job market that is not as excited about college degrees as we were told it would be, and all of this has made it much more difficult for us to afford a house, which is the basis of the “American Dream.” It should be no surprise to anyone that millennials and younger are supportive and turn out more in response to progressive candidates. While Biden is very unlikely to excite the younger generations, Democrats are lucky that Trump excites them to vote Democrat. Will it be enough to flip my prediction of a Trump win? I hope so. Regardless of whether it is enough to flip next year’s election, it will undoubtedly change the political landscape by 2028, and, without serious changes to their party’s platform, I do not believe a Republican will be able to win at the national level by 2028. Currently, using my own math, millennials and Gen Z made up ~39% of the electorate and ~33% of the actual vote in ‘22. Sometime at or between 2028-2030, I expect that number to break 50% on both counts, and I expect the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to control the Dems, while likely not being friendly to those in the party that held them back. I expect the Republicans to go more libertarian (socially liberal). What can Democrats do to speed this process up? Run more progressives. Too many people believe that progressives have such extreme views that they would scare off the middle, even though President Obama ran to the left and won by wide margins while McCain, Romney, Clinton, and even Biden who won struggled. Remember the old definition of the moderate voter I have described (economically liberal socially conservative)? That no longer applies. Today’s moderates are economically conservative and socially liberal, which means they come from wealthier bubbles and make up a much smaller proportion of the population. That is one of the reasons for polarization. While some want to kumbaya and never talk bad about candidates or policies from their own parties, this is a travesty. We only have two parties, when we should have a proportional representation system with many parties. While we are stuck with two parties, we all have a duty to fight it out during the primary season. Too long, the wealthy in this country have managed to exercise control over the two major parties. That is starting to change with both parties, and, outside of the racism and authoritarianism coming from the alt-right, I am here for it. Like Congress, the state level changes will take time due to gerrymandering, but I expect the generational change that is coming to slowly turn more and more state legislatures blue.

To sum up how trends and political realignments will affect the 2024 state and federal elections, I believe that Democratic heavy early voting and Republicans waiting until Election Day will continue to help (Note: Since this was written last year, Rs have made attempts to encourage more early/mail voting), though I also believe that Republicans limiting access to the ballot box and vote-by-mail will help Republicans. I believe that incumbency, especially if we have a recession (as economists I follow predict as soon as this month or September) or if COVID comes back strong, will make 2024 more difficult than 2020 was for Biden. Incumbent presidents rarely do better in the second run than their first, and the first race was much closer than most onlookers seem to realize. The Republican realignment that is still taking shape will continue to bring in the larger group of blue-collar voters of all races, while voters with college degrees will continue to move towards the Democrats. Overall, I believe it is the Republican’s race to lose, but young voters have the power to stop them and Democrats should cater to the wants and wishes of minorities and young voters if they want to win on Election Day.

The TLDR version of the second/final part of this article would be that Democrats, who should have fought harder for structural reforms when they had 60 votes in the Senate (as well as the House and the White House) and large majorities on the local level are in trouble in the short-term, but should be in a great spot long-term minus any major new political realignments. These trends and political realignments are often ignored by both parties. Campaigns, parties, and even voters should not take them for granted. Even when I am unhappy with the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, I still deeply want them to win over either wing (oligarch-enabling wing vs. the Trump/alt-right wing) of the Republican Party. The reality is that, until we make significant structural reforms, we are stuck with two parties. Being that we only have two parties, we have not just a right but a DUTY to fight it out in the primaries. A former co-worker/friend of mine made a post that said “Broken people are a byproduct of broken systems.” To that I say Amen. You receive a much better shake in our educational, legal, and healthcare systems if you are wealthy. Until we have wealthy people participating with everyone else in these areas and more I have not mentioned, we will continue to sit around dumbfounded wondering why crime has gone up. Meanwhile, we can vacation in less wealthy European countries to see how much safer it is in a society with a strong social safety net.  

That is why I support Medicare for all, much more funding for public defenders, equal pay between public defenders and prosecutors (prosecutors are currently paid more), public attorneys in civil law, the overturning of the Citizen United decision, and that is why I am not a fan of private or even charter schools. All of these public institutions give a limousine path to the wealthy, and that + plenty of other factors is how we became a country of such vast inequality. At the moment, I only see the progressive wing of the Democratic Party fighting for these things. I hope to see the rest continue to come around, as they have come a long way from where they stood in the ‘90’s. Until then or when I expect the progressive wing to take over the Democratic Party (’28-’30), we will continue to struggle making our case to an American public who is not really sure about either party.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/briefing/republicans-inequality-free-market.html

[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4119366-gop-lawmaker-slams-war-pimps-at-the-pentagon-ahead-of-ufo-hearing/

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/19/gen-z-voters-2024/?wpisrc=nl_most

[4] https://milled.com/new-york-times/the-morning-millennials-just-keep-voting-2Otn-NsiAYOMYxV5

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