Midterms

Amid yesterday’s blue deluge, a number of interesting ballot initiatives – a citizen-initiated referendum on a particular measure – were also voted on. Cockburn has compiled some significant or curious ones for your reading pleasure... California billionaire wealth tax – Failed  Proposition 40, which would have levied a one-off 5 percent tax on the net worth of the state’s billionaires, has been defeated 56 percent to 44 percent. Bernie Sanders supported the measure, but Governor Gavin Newsom was not in favor, and Silicon Valley funded the opposition.

An American political operator contacted me last week, before the blue tidal wave swept aside Donald Trump’s Republicans in Congress, with his favourite quote from the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, about an American president starting a war to distract from domestic difficulties: ‘Change the story, change the lead,’ Robert De Niro’s character declares.  The politico, who once ran an abortive Democrat campaign for president, then predicted: ‘The bigger the defeat, the bigger the bombs Trump drops on Iran.’ At that point, the results of the Israeli elections had already eroded Benjamin Netanyahu’s chances of remaining Prime Minister and left two of the most dominant leaders of the last decade with their backs to the wall.

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.

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.

“I love inflation,” said Donald Trump earlier this month, when asked about the latest increase in the Consumer Prices Index to an annualized 4.2 percent. But the power of the President’s positive thinking cannot overwhelm the enormous threat that rising prices pose to his legacy. The new figure is more than an inconvenience or a technicality. It could bring about a sharp change in the political order. Rising costs will likely prove to be Trump’s undoing and present the Democrats with a free hit for November’s midterms and beyond. There was one reason above all others why Trump returned to the White House in 2024: high inflation during the Biden years. His 2016 slogan, “Make America Great Again,” morphed into “Make America Affordable Again.

The missiles and bombs may have stopped, at least for the moment, but the war between the US and Iran continues. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the US sanctions remain in place, and the fundamental issues separating the combatants remain unresolved. The bilateral negotiations have gone nowhere, and the two sides remain far apart. This stalemate has puzzled observers since it’s not hard to see the outlines of a deal. For Iran, the minimum acceptable goal is regime survival. For the US, it is the end of the Iranian nuclear program, which poses an existential threat to America’s regional partners and, eventually, to Europe and South Asia. Since the regime’s survival and the end of its nuclear program are compatible goals, a deal should be possible.

In 2020 Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose Virginia twice since William Howard Taft. Then in 2024 Trump lost once more, this time to Kamala Harris. Now he has in effect lost it a fourth time as Virginia voters approved on Tuesday a fiercely contested referendum redrawing congressional districts to favor Democratic congressional candidates in the 2026 midterm elections. "This is really a country election. The whole country is watching," Trump said. If so, it watched Trump suffer a major blow – one that will prompt renewed questions about his political acuity and judgment.

When President Trump speaks to Congress and the nation Tuesday night he will follow several familiar tropes. Like a long line of presidents before him, Trump will say the state of the union is great and take full credit for it. They all say that, unless we are in a recession or at war. They typically add that everything is getting better, too, thanks to their wise policies. In a nod to the next election, they warn voters that the only thing stopping our country from reaching even greater heights is the mule-headed opposition of the opposing party and a few Supreme Court Justices. What differs each year are the specifics.

In the unforgiving arena of American politics, few patterns are as reliable as the midterm election bloodbath for the party holding the White House. And this year Democrats are trying to capitalize on the midterm curse by fielding 150 candidates from medical and scientific backgrounds. All have entered the fray since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services and are putting his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) on the ballot. In particular, his vaccine reform program. Yet, a major driver of the rise of MAHA can be directly attributed to the Biden administration's disastrous handling of Covid, when Democrats in power contorted science to fit political imperatives.

Each Supreme Court term typically includes at least one explosive case that inflames political passions and captures the public imagination. When the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, or when it greatly broadened presidential immunity, as it did last year in Trump v. the United States, or when it ruled against race-based college admissions in 2023, it reaffirmed its centrality and reminded voters that it mattered. As it happens, very few Americans can name the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (surveys show it is consistently under 16 percent), but most know instinctively the high court’s opinions deeply impact governance, politics and culture.

Elon Musk has set up a third party and pledged to contest next year’s midterms. But to find a third party that has performed well in a midterm election, we must journey far into the annals of American history. Minnesota and Wisconsin-based parties managed a handful of House representatives and a senator or two in 1934, but these were states-first campaigns that were anchored in a geographical power-base – something Musk does not have. We can discount the movements linked to Ross Perot in the 1990s and George Wallace in 1968, who both ran for president but did not have a viable wider party slate at their own elections or ensuing midterms.

The passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” early Thursday morning by the slimmest of margins in the House of Representatives is a clear victory for Donald Trump, but even more so for Speaker Mike Johnson, who managed to buy off both blue-state SALT Republicans and Freedom Caucus fiscal hawks, moving closer to their demands by just enough to thread the needle. This was by far the biggest challenge Johnson had yet to face, and the question if “Deacon Mike” was up to the challenge was back of mind for many in the GOP conference. Had Johnson failed to deliver, his speakership might not have ended immediately, but he would effectively be a dead man walking – and the next time someone decided to pick a leadership fight, Trump might not have his back.