2026 midterms

In the midst of the most contentious Texas US Senate race in a generation, Democratic nominee James Talarico suddenly and mysteriously dropped off the campaign trail on September 29, and has yet to return, though his campaign claims a resurrection is coming tomorrow.  ​Talarico last appeared in public at a fundraiser alongside Robert DeNiro in New York City, which isn’t in Texas. On September 30, he showed his face on Zoom at a forum for the Hispanic Business Council, and said he had the flu. “I was ready to eat my favorite quesadilla tacos, but I was starting to feel kind of under the weather a few days ago, and last night it got so bad that I went to the urgent care here in Dallas,” he said.

Once upon a time Democrats used to ask, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” Now it’s Republicans who may be tempted to adopt the phrase. For almost a century – 94 years, to be exact – Democrats have not won a senatorial seat in the sunflower state. But what’s rapidly developing is a red undertow, thanks to President Trump’s mounting unpopularity. The widely respected Cook Report has just announced that a Senate majority is squarely in the sights of the Democrats – and moved Kansas from “lean Republican” to a toss-up state. Blimey! It’s no wonder that Trump has been barnstorming in deep red America to try and rescue the midterm elections.

Donald Trump’s greatest strength is his indefatigability. The grumblings within his administration grow louder. Inflation is stubborn, the price of oil too high, the Democrats ahead in the polls for all the key Senate election races. Yet the President is out and about, doing what he perhaps does best, which is campaigning. "Pretend I’m running, please. If we don’t win, they’ll end up impeaching me," Trump told a rally in Oklahoma yesterday. His aim is to turn the midterms into another presidential-style contest, and he’s right that the name Trump continues to be the key factor in American politics, something far more potent than the Republican party brand. As ever, though, the Donald divides opinions – and according to some surveys, his net approval rating is -23.

At the opening night of the first ever “midterm” Republican convention in Dallas, Donald Trump roasted the local Democratic candidate for US Senate, whom he calls James “Talafreako.” “He was also somebody that hated eating meat, but he ran a campaign to beat meat. He called it ‘beat meat,’” said Trump, to cackles of laughter from the MAGA faithful. “I don’t know what the hell he meant by that. These people are going to tell me ‘what the hell… he wants to beat meat?’ But it was bad for his image, so he started eating meat, and he recently – it’s getting worse. I’m getting myself in trouble.” That was the highlight of the President’s almost two-hour-long remarks.

"People don’t need no jobs," said Mike Judge’s marvelous comic creation, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. "I’m gonna tell you what people need, people need money, lots and lots of money… we gonna print so much damn money, I’m gonna give every single American one million dollars. Ain’t gonna be no more one percenters. Everybody’s gonna be million percenters." President Donald Trump hasn’t yet gone full Camacho. But he’s getting there. Last night, at the glitzy Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, he introduced the "Trump Dividend" – a $5,000 reward for every adult US citizen on the condition that his party keeps the House and Senate in November.

We’ve heard a lot about a “God gap” between Republican and Democratic voters in the United States – and for good reason. The gap between churchgoing conservatives and secular progressives, when measured by voting habits, has become conspicuously wide. In 1980, 40 percent of Democrats attended church regularly, with GOP voters a couple of points higher. Today, Republican church attendance is still in the low to mid-40s, while less than a quarter of Democrat voters are regular worshippers; only 17 percent of Harris voters in 2024 reported weekly attendance. Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, roughly 40 percent of Democrat or Democrat-leaning voters are religiously unaffiliated (atheists, agnostics or “nones”) compared to only 21 percent of Republican voters.

When Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly last month from a heart condition, official Washington paused its partisan spitting contests to honor a Master of the Beltway. Not since John McCain’s funeral in 2018 had there been such a high display of institutional respect for a senator – complete with eulogies in the Capitol Rotunda and an invitation-only funeral at the National Cathedral attended by foreign leaders. But now South Carolina has to decide who replaces the Great Man. We are used to a political climate dominated by candidates who embrace egotistical posturing and exaggerate their qualifications. So on one level it was refreshing to see the South Carolina debate last night.

Tuesday evening saw the second polling upset in as many weeks in the Midwest. In Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, David Crowley beat democratic socialist Francesca Hong by half a percentage point. It was a margin that bore almost no relationship to the polling which had Hong ahead by an average of 20 points. A week earlier, Michigan told the same story: though extreme left candidate Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary by 48.5 percent to Haley Stevens’s 47.5 percent, his one-point margin was significantly less than the ten-point margin the polling average had it at. Across the country, socialist candidates are finding – at the primaries stage – that they are not the slam-dunk choice of the Democratic party grassroots.

Mike Lindell is not ready to rest his weary head. The MyPillow magnate stepped aside from his bedding business to run as a Republican for the governorship of Minnesota – and earned President Trump’s “COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT.” Sadly for him, primary voters in the Land of 10,000 Lakes didn’t heed his call to arms: with 95 percent of the vote counted, Lindell trails Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth by over 45,000 votes. Lindell was infamously subject to defamation lawsuits from voting machine companies Dominion and Smartmatic for claiming they had rigged the 2020 presidential election against Trump. Naturally, he smells foul play in his own defeat. Earlier this morning, Lindell told a huddle of press that there were “problems with the computers.

Do the Republicans have a secret weapon they can deploy in the midterms? In fact, I think they have two weapons, one sort-of-secret, the other out in the open but somehow not quite recognized.  “That’s good,” you say, if (faute de mieux) you want the Republicans to win. Midterms, we’ve been told ad nauseam, almost always favor the party out of power. I believe that the last time the incumbent party won in the midterms was in 2002 when George W. Bush, riding the tailwind of public sentiment following the September 11 attacks by our Muslim friends, picked up eight House seats. Many of the most noteworthy Democrat candidates hail from la-la land At the moment, all the polls have the Dems leading by a comfortable margin.

Just a few hours before Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, he told me that he was going to “beat the shit” out of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, in the November general election. His tactic, he explained in a Detroit farmers’ market yesterday, would be to “staple his [Rogers’s] sins to his forehead.” What those sins were, El-Sayed wouldn’t say. He has in the past criticized Rogers as a "corporate shill" who prioritized pharmaceutical and corporate interests over Michiganders while in Congress.  November looks likely to be a fight between capitalism and communism In truth, although he did scrape to victory last night, it was El-Sayed who almost had the shit beaten out of him by Haley Stevens, a mainstream Democrat.

“For the best night’s sleep in the whole wide world, visit mypillow.com” is a jingle that punctuates every hour of Fox News viewing. Now “MyPillow guy” Mike Lindell is changing his tune: for the best governor of Minnesota in the whole wide world, vote Mike Lindell 2026. Lindell is a Trump ally, businessman and election conspiracy theorist. He’s known for his rags-to-riches origin story, rising from a crack cocaine addiction to achieving sobriety and turning to religion. He founded My Pillow in Minnesota in 2004. For readers unfamiliar with Lindell’s political history: before his run for governor, Lindell was sued by a voting machine company, then known as Dominion Voting Systems,  for defamation pertaining to false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

In recent months, America’s political rumor mills have been grinding out whispers about Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Maine. Platner, the military veteran turned oyster catcher turned left-wing populist, has somehow survived the story about having a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest – although he says he was unaware of its meaning and has since had it covered up. And he is still on course to beat Susan Collins, the long-serving Republican, in November. His is thought to be the most obvious – yet vital – win for the Democrats as they seek to win back the Senate.  But Platner has a colorful past – to put it mildly.

Parts of the MAGA movement are unhappy with President Trump’s migration strategy. The administration has softened its policy on deportations following a public uproar over the ICE killings in January, it is said. The focus has been on removing only the most violent offenders. “The truth is the first year was not a year of mass deportation,” says Mike Howell of the Mass Deportation Coalition. “A conscious decision was made to go after the worst first, which was, we’ll call it a deviation, from the central campaign promise of mass deportations.” Such criticisms miss the point. The Trump administration has tackled the worst offenders to shore up support for its wider migration crackdown. And that crackdown has been wildly successful.

Donald Trump has had a career-long love-hate relationship with the press. On one hand, he popularized the phrase “fake news” and branded the press “the enemy of the people.” On the other, the President takes phone calls from virtually every reporter with his personal cell and is fixated on cable news and his print media coverage. Trump views journalists as friends, foes and foils, or some combination of the three. But if a story catches him at the wrong moment, the author could find themselves on the receiving end of a Trump-SLAPP. A Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP, is a lawsuit filed with a tactical intent besides disproving a damaging story in a court of law. Usually the suit demands an attention-seekingly large sum in damages.