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Notes -
Predictions & reasoning for the midterms (and if nobody else creates an official open thread, I'm interested in your own predictions below).
Full disclosure: I have worked on campaigns in the past (sometimes as a volunteer, and sometimes paid), first for Democrats for almost 30 years, and then in the most recent three cycles I've worked on Republican campaigns. But I'm trying to be objective in these predictions below.
These predictions are not what I want to see happen- I would prefer Republicans to win, and I dearly hope Republicans will maximize turnout in this election and prove me wrong- these are just what I think will actually happen. Bad news first, good news after!
House popular vote: Democrats +11%
House odds of Democrats winning: 99%
Senate modal outcome: Democrats 55 seats (note: this is not the average, nor is it the median, it is the mode, the most likely single outcome)
Senate odds of Democrats winning: 88%
I would advise that if you have bet a lot of money on Republicans, that you seriously consider whether the risk is worth it, especially the double-whammy of a possible emotional hit along with a possible financial hit tomorrow. But make your own best judgment.
-Almost everyone has been using 2022 or 2024 as their starting point for how this election will go. I think this is wrong.
We need to use the last midterm in which Trump was President. The 2018 midterms will have the most similar electorate to this year's election. And in 2018, Democrats won by 8.6%, and so that needs to be our baseline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections
If something had happened to drastically change the political coalitions, then we could use a more recent election. But that has not happened (and most demographic changes in the electorate have been for the worse, for Republicans).
2018 will have the most similarity to 2026 in terms of voter propensity to vote in a midterm, motivation to vote for or against Trump, education ratios, etc.
-In 2018, voters had a higher approval of Trump on the economy, than they do this time. So, we can expect Republicans to do worse this time than in 2018. I don't have much to add to this point, but it's the most important point.
-In 2018, the racial and educational situation among registered voters was better for Republicans than it is now. Republicans are in a constant race against the demographic clock. Since 2018, we have had 8 years of mostly older and whiter and more conservative voters dying off, while being replaced by younger & more racially diverse voters that have been heavily influenced by the media and school system to be liberal.
We can expect the baseline situation to be worse for Republicans in every single election going forward, unless a major change is made. Today's deportations help in the distant future, but they don't make much of a difference now.
-Side note: Republicans missed a fantastic opportunity to turn deportations into a win on economic issues. If they had sent out monthly checks to all citizens for the past 2 years, and labeled them something like "rewards check for less illegals" (which is just a true statement over the long-term, since illegal immigrants send huge amounts of money overseas, and the children and grandchildren of illegal immigrants are a huge burden in the school systems, healthcare system, and criminal justice system), Republicans would have achieved what most voters thought they would be getting with deportations.
Most voters thought that more deportations would mean less illegals on welfare, which would equal more money for everyone else. Republicans failed to deliver on the economic side of the equation of what voters thought they would be getting.
Interestingly, Trump is now trying to convert tariffs into a rewards check. And that's not a bad idea, politically speaking, especially if had been done from the start.
But it would have worked even better if Republicans had paired deportations with a clear economic benefit paid out every month. That would have kept their strongest issue front and center in the minds of the voters, and it would have simultaneously made immigration and the economy into even stronger issues for them. That probably would have been enough to turn this into a surprisingly good midterm, instead of the disaster I think we will witness tomorrow.
-The fear factor. Thanks to decades of a toxic political environment, roughly 10-20% of voters are afraid of both parties, and tend to vote for divided government when they get the chance.
This would already be bad for Republicans in this election, but it's been made even worse by the AI situation making a lot of voters more fearful than usual, and the Russian war, the Iran war, the tariffs battling, Greenland and Canada drama, etc.
A lot of people that actually dislike or are even mildly afraid of Democrats will still vote for Democrats to "keep an eye on the Republicans".
-Corruption has been costing incumbents elections since time immemorial, and certainly in recent elections, and whatever you think of the reality, Trump is perceived by a lot of voters as corrupt on numerous possible fronts (financial corruption allegations, Epstein allegations, numerous other claims, and even the Russia corruption claims are rearing their heads again).
This is a worse situation for Republicans than in 2018 when Democrats had less to work with. Democrats then were mainly focused on trying to get voters to care about Russia and Putin before the 2022 Ukraine invasion made it seem at least somewhat more relevant for Americans.
-We already have a mountain of recent evidence to confirm the base case that this election will be like 2018, but worse. Recent special elections have been atrocious for Republicans.
And the 2025 elections in Virginia and New Jersey were horrific for Republicans even though Republicans had high turnout for off-year elections.
The Republicans have actually done an amazing job of turning out their voters, and they have still been losing badly, because the Democrat turnout has been through the roof.
And the evidence suggests that Democrats are doing just as well or better in Virginia and New Jersey than in 2025, so the voter trend has clearly been to the left.
-This is a midterm in a President's 2nd term, and those usually go terribly for the incumbent party. Even Reagan and Obama had terrible 2nd-term midterms.
One major reason for this is that a lot of the President's base loses motivation to fight for the President and his party, because a 2nd-term President can't run for any more elections. This is an especially huge problem for Republicans, since so many Trump voters are low-propensity voters.
This is where ironically the intense hatred of Democrats towards Trump probably helps to turn out the Republican base, to some extent.
Bill Clinton was a rare President who had an OK midterm in his 2nd term, and I think part of it was because Republicans tried to remove him from office. The impeachment fight motivated Clinton's supporters to fight for Democrats as thought it was a Presidential election, and that made a big difference.
.....
Alright, the bright spots for Republicans, to explain why I'm not projecting a +16% win for Democrats:
-The electorate in 2026 appears to be older than in 2018. And older voters have less reason to change their votes, and more reasons to like the Trump economy.
The stock market helps them the most, they don't drive as much and don't care as much about gas prices, they often own their own homes, their pensions are usually pegged to inflation, their healthcare is usually covered by Medicare or some other plan, etc.
Even though there are a lot of liberal boomers, an elderly electorate will help blunt the Democrat advantages. The older the better.
-The financial balance between the parties is better than in 2018 (perhaps mostly thanks to Elon Musk). That can help to improve Republican turnout somewhat.
-If Republicans can manage to win 49+ seats, Fetterman might choose to caucus with them and save the Senate for the Republicans.
On the other hand, Murkowski in Alaska might switch and caucus with the Democrats. This is one reason why I think the modal outcome is for Democrats to finish with 55 seats.
The other reason is that Darline Graham in South Carolina is an inexperienced candidate hand-picked by Trump. And political swings tend to be stronger when your neighboring states are swinging, and North Carolina and Georgia are swinging left in this midterm, so South Carolina is also in danger.
-Republicans have some genuinely good candidates in some states. Collins in Maine, and Sullivan in Alaska, and Rogers is a much better fit for Michigan than the incredibly antisemitic and Palestine-focused El-Sayed. And the Stevens endorsement of Rogers might swing the election, if it's close enough.
And Peltola is a good candidate in Alaska but shot herself in the foot by gaming the RCV system with a fake Dan Sullivan candidate. I wonder if that drama might be enough to not only cause Peltola to lose, but also to cause ranked-choice voting to be repealed, which might also doom Murkowski in the next election.
-Most important of all, Republicans can save the Senate if they can simply do a good job of turning out their voters. There is a real chance that Democrats will have amazing turnout in those red states, and then simply run out of room, as long as Republicans can turn out their base.
Democrats obviously have a ton of possible voters they can turn out in blue states like Virginia and New Jersey, but Republicans have the larger turnout universes in states like Texas and Kansas and all the other red states.
So if Republicans turn out their voters in red states as well as or better than they did in Virginia and NJ in 2025, they have a fighting chance.
This theoretically should be doable if the Republicans understand their base well enough, and the fact that these are federal elections helps a lot. Voters are often more comfortable voting for the minority party in state government, but not for federal elections. Federal elections nationalize the issues and make more conservative-leaning voters fall back on Republican instincts.
-The social media situation, and some aspects of the overall media landscape, aren't as bad for Republicans as they were in 2018. This helps somewhat.
-Last but not least: while I think 2018 is the base case, 2020 and 2022 and 2024 can't be discounted entirely. There are large quantities of voters that have now voted Republican in three straight elections. Voting is a habit, so there might be enough habitual Republican voters to prevent complete disaster, even with excellent Democrat turnout.
I'm not sure if you are not typical-minding yourself (presumably an ideologically fairly hard Republican) too much there. There is an obvious spin the other side can put on such a move, which is to make it rhyme with "Nazi Germany redistributing confiscated Jewish property/profits from selling gold teeth at the concentration camp". This might be quite enough to make ideologically more middle-field voters (who, unlike bleeding-heart Trump followers, are not feeling maximum spite towards illegal immigrants even if they might on the balance feel that it is just and necessary to deport them) feel uncomfortable about receiving the money; even if they think the Nazi comparison too extreme, an air of benefitting off of others' misery would stick to it.
(For an intuition pump, how would you feel about a law that caps palliative medical expenses of the "dying grandma kept technically alive on Medicaid money for years by drug cocktail and mechanical lung" type, if some of the savings came back to you as a "reward check for pulling the plug on grandma"?
Better still, assume for the sake of argument that by getting rid of various lower-class mistakes, abortion is a net economic positive. This at least seems plausible. Do you think the net favorability of legal abortion means that handing out "rewards checks for less unemployed single moms" would help the Blue vote?)
Early in the post I spelled out that I was literally a Democrat activist for almost 30 years. Back in the day, I door knocked and had phone bank conversations with thousands of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents. I understand their thinking just fine.
Please read more carefully next time before making your replies, and in general you should be careful to not make weird speculations about other people.
This is utterly absurd. I'm not suggesting stealing anything from illegal immigrants, like what happened to the Jews.
It's well-documented that if allowed to stay, the children and grandchildren of illegal immigrants use up a lot of welfare (huge per-pupil expenses in schools, higher Medicaid expenses, higher likelihood to go to prison which is expensive for taxpayers, etc.).
I merely suggest that some of those long-term financial benefits to removing illegal immigrants be passed on to citizens now.
BTW, this idea primarily comes from conversations with the kinds of Democrats that switched to voting for Trump. They believed that they would be getting more welfare because there would be less illegal immigrants getting welfare.
Republicans should have leaned into that belief more. It's a similar concept to Trump's idea to give the money from higher tariffs directly to voters. But hey, if the idea isn't for you, it isn't for you.
I read your post just fine. It's just that I don't consider "I was X for many years" to be good evidence of understanding X. Few born believers can match the zeal of an adult convert; most of those who convert were never typical examples of what they converted away from; and your post gave me a lot of signs of strong alignment with the perspectives of your current tribe, starting with how you naturally wrote it as if you could not conceive or did not want anyone else reading ("Bad news first, good news after!").
Did you read my post, actually? I thought I made it quite clear that I don't think anyone would think it literally equivalent, just that it is sufficiently similar to trigger similar moral impulses. (Mind you, the Nazis surely also did not think of what they were doing as stealing, but rather as reclaiming what was rightfully theirs. Whether you see it as equivalent more depends on whether you agree with their premise, or conversely feel that the extra expenses being saved also "belonged to" the illegal immigrants in the US.)
Either way, I'm not a US voter, but I've lived there long enough (and can speak for others in my household who are) that it should count for something if I think that switching D->R around Trump 1 and back to D around now (as I would do and people around me did), and seeing the moral analogy I outlined, is a plausible pattern.
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No Western country (no, certainly not even Denmark) has ever reversed mass immigration in modernity. Why? Because it’s boiling the frog. People get animated about it for a couple of years, then get bored. They start caring more about other things. It doesn’t even matter what those other things are, they could be anything. But they always find something else to care about. At that time, the pro migration side always comes back to power, even if a very faintly anti-immigration side (and it is never more than that) happens to be in power for a brief period.
It is important to understand and accept this. Nothing about the political situation is ever, ever, ever going to get better for conservatives in any Anglo country. At best, you carve out a brief catharsis against history, maybe very slightly and temporarily slow the tide (but deport nobody), accomplish nothing else, then lose. Maybe you get to laugh at a few crying progressives making sad YouTube videos, I guess. The happiest day for any conservative is an election victory, it is downhill from there. It doesn’t matter if Le Pen or the AfD or Farage or One Nation or anybody else wins, you will lose because they will do nothing to reverse the decline.
It is fate that the US midterms happen the day after the British government hands out citizenship to 800,000 poor Boriswave migrants from India, Pakistan and Nigeria, hired on wages of as little as $30,000 a year (many will move onto welfare as soon as they can, and even those who don’t will be net burdens on the state every year of their life), and who can now bring over millions more dependants. You can only lose. They will always win.
One propagandized video of a few border control cops being vaguely mean to a well-meaning liberal or a sympathetic migrant is enough to reverse even a neutered deportation initiative. A dead Kurd on a Mediterranean beach means you have to accept two million more young Afghan and Syrian men, sorry. A Hurricane in Haiti? Well, infinite migration from there can continue indefinitely because of course nobody can go home. Try and deport anybody? Well, you might get a few thousand, but the rest just have to lay low for a while until the opposition came back to power.
All one can hope is that the decline is slow and that the outcome is a society in which civilized people, come what may, can still live in some form of civilization for a time, gated behind walls that keep the tide at bay.
USA did it. The way I think about it is as a nonlinear system that decides if the country can absorb immigration. Here are the variables:
In USA in the past, the peak foreign born population happened in 1890ies where it climbed toward 15%. However back then the TFR was very strong running close to 4 children per woman. Just simple arithmetic women age 20-40 are are third female of native population or (100%-15%)/6 = 14% of the population and they produced 4 children thus reproducing rapidly. Moreover schools inside all the nations during early 20th century leveraged state power, propaganda of Radio, Television and huge government push toward local assimilation - be it Germanization, Magyarization, Francization or of course Americanization
Americanization came after Civil War and it coincided with lucky historical events: reconstruction after civil war, fulfillment of Manifest Destiny, jingoism and imperialism during FDR and of course winning the WW1 and birth of American exceptionalism and legitimacy of the system based on all available metrics: military power, industrial power, growth of GDP and everything. Nevertheless USA adopted very harsh anti-immigration stance even during this period ranging from Chinese exclusion act of 1882 to Immigration act of 1924. There were additional factors. After WW1 a lot of people remigrated from USA - especially people who heeded national call of rebuilding from nations like Poland, Czechoslovakia etc. Moreover USA was not a welfare state and the great depression led to more voluntary remigration during the Great Depression, where outflow exceeded inflow especially from Mexico but also European countries.
As a result of all of that, the foreign born population dropped to around 4% in 1964 at the time where TFR also dropped to around 2.5 per woman. Since then the immigration took off along with huge drop of TFR to current levels of 16% of foreign born population paired with 1.5 TFR. This is unsustainable level bordering on replacement, especially paired with national shame, refusal to proceed with any meaningful assimilation programs or curbing of immigration paired with welfare state that prevents remigration. But this is historically a new situation.
In this context, that isn't "in modernity".
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Hold up. Are you specifically talking about Anglo countries or Western ones? Or do you think the two are essentially the same at this point? Is federal Germany practically an Anglo country as a long-term consequence of Anglo military occupation? What about France?
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Reversing mass migration to instead do mass deportations of people whose ancestors did not live in your country, will cause a lot of suffering in the short term. This is unpalatable to a lot of voters and so is unlikely to happen. The kind of dehumanization it takes to get people to accept this is heavily associated with world war 2 and earlier, and is a mindset that modern western nations have no desire to go back to.
and that's why they won't survive the next 50 years.
i'm still relatively optimistic about the US but Europe as Europe has existed for 1000 or 1500 years has been dying for 80 years now, and has seemingly no interest in recovering.
fascinating lesson for future civilizations. tl;dw "don't half-ass dominance."
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Immigration is the white whale of the right, but it's not going away because the people demanding its abolition want to dismantle the engine while retaining everything it powers.
This will animate a lot of people, but serious anti-immigration rightists need to sell a practical program after closing the borders. Believe it or not, corporations do NOT possess an inexhaustible treasure chest of profits which can simply be redistributed to American workers without affecting prices, employment, investment, or competitiveness. Economics is not a zero-sum ledger in which every foreign worker represents an American deprived of his rightful wages. Someone needs to foot the bill! Usually, that's the American consumer.
No, I am NOT for mass immigration (don't shoot the messenger!). I strongly believe that GDP should not be the sole measure of national well-being, and a country is entitled to care about social cohesion, domestic wages, or demographic preferences over maximum economic growth. But the tradeoffs those priorities involve are not at all minor. You can't have inexpensive software and cheap subscription services without cheap labour.
Editing to add that the above is triply pronounced in the matter of offshoring, another white whale of the right.
This is a thing that I try to explain over and over again to the very immigration concerned. There are some jobs which, in practice, require young-ish male labour. There are a certain number of American young males willing to do physical labour. That number is less than the number of jobs needing them; raising wages will not make the market clear, it'll just redistribute them from commercial fishing and oil drilling to whatever you raised wages in. The obvious solution is hondurans- they're willing to do physical work and the normal wages in these fields are already an exceptional deal for them. The alternative is using the criminal justice system to coerce lower class American men into these jobs. That, too, has its limits. But immigration into the US is driven largely by the market for physical laborers not clearing because there is a shortage of physical laborers.
The number will increase significantly if wages and working conditions improve.
citation needed
Or you could use the carrot approach and give them money to work. And maybe the stick of taking away their gibs.
Or it could be driven simply by the fact that the clearing market rate, set by supply and demand, for unskilled physical labor, is far higher in the US than it is in the home countries of these people.
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Too much doomerism. You can win the day. We did pause immigration for 40 years starting in the 1920’s. I would consider saving an entire generation as positive. I can’t predict the world 100 years ago but winning for a generation is still a win.
Europe might be in trouble. The US isn’t even at Brazil issues yet. A pause now means we just have to work around a mostly high-IQ but maybe culturally alien Viveks and a half-white/have indigenous Central American population that can somewhat fit in culturally. Yes, I would rather they were gone but America can still be somewhat American.
America hasn’t been overrun with low-IQ Indians/Pakistanis plus lower classes from the Middle East that are completely foreign like Europe or Canada. America can still be a better Brazil which is worth fighting for.
Minneapolis is probably the new west Baltimore but atleast the weather sucks there so I was never moving to Minneapolis.
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The effects of course are driving up the debt even further and massively accelerating the already quite high inflation. At some point we gotta start asking "with what money?" again when people propose insane spending ideas because we aren't even affording things now.
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Where are y'all betting on Republicans? Asking for a friend.
I hope Talarico wins. If Paxton is the best thing Texas Republicans can put forward, they deserve to lose. They won’t, of course. Trump said Paxton was based, so he won the primary. Trump says Talarico is a vegan, so he’ll lose the general. No amount of graft, inflation, or foreign adventurism will convince modal Texans to break with the big man.
Trump's approval rating is deep underwater in Texas. Paxton still has a good shot to win, because
"likes Trump" is more of an ask than "likes Paxton"which is much more of an ask than "doesn't dislike Paxton enough to vote for Talarico instead", but the late polls are nearly all going for Talarico and he's favored nearly 3-1 on the prediction markets.Bias warning: I've already cast my vote, for Talarico. First time I've voted (D) for a national-level race since 2008. (Half of the time the polls in Texas aren't even close and there's a decent Libertarian I'm free to vote for, the other half of the time the Democrat just sucks)
Edit: scratching out a claim that @hydroacetylene corrected me on.
'Likes Paxton' is more of an ask than 'likes Trump' in Texas.
I voted for Paxton, because Talarico is terrible and I have a rule against caring about politicians' corruption issues. But I won't be too upset if Talarico wins- Paxton was a terrible candidate who probably would have been arrested and replaced with an Abbott appointee for corruption. Hinojosa would be the really terrible outcome.
Looks like you're almost certainly right; thanks for the correction! Trump has higher approval and a higher (though still currently negative) net approval-minus-disapproval than Paxton in Texas. Trump has a higher percentage disapproval, but that's due to Paxton's larger "neither/don't know" numbers; if we exclude those from the denominator than Paxton's negatives are higher too. My only caveats are that Texas-only polls are relatively small and high-margin-of-error and that the polls I could easily find were slightly apples-to-oranges (job approval vs favorability, and I'm sure we could all name politicians who were good at their job despite being bad people or vice-versa).
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Paxton did not win primarily off of Trump's endorsement; in actual fact Trump endorsed Paxton when his victory appeared inevitable and before then it had been conventional wisdom that he would endorse Cornyn. Paxton won the primary because GOP primary voters find gun control more objectionable than taking bribes.
Mea culpa. I forgot how little time passed between the endorsement and the primary. It looks like cornyn had no chance even before that.
I’ll say instead that Paxton’s MAGA credentials made the difference.
The activist base that put Paxton over the top wasn't 100% MAGA(although there were MAGA activists in it). The local far-right wanted to take down Cornyn because they were upset about his votes on gun control, and they joined up with MAGA fans of Paxton's 2020 lawsuits. But Cornyn could have lost to a block of wood in a Gun Owners of America hat- or at least come close.
I voted for Wesley Hunt.
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Could you not say the exact same thing of Talarico? "If Talarico is the best thing Texas Republicans can put forward, they deserve to lose"? He will show support for murderers and blatantly lie about how unjust the system is for particular demographics to get votes from those demographics. Of course, it's all in the eye of the beholder. But considering the red-leaning nature of Texas, it will be profoundly sad to me if they elect someone that is way to the left of the state and deviates significantly in religion and culture, even if Paxton is particularly controversial.
For my predictions, I think Talarico will lose, Ossoff and El-Sayed will win, and Troy Jackson is unclear to me. I guess I'd say he's probably going to win, too.
Tangent: isn’t Talarico a fairly serious Presbyterian? I’m seeing some claims that his church is hyper liberal, but I don’t know how you get a religious degree without some genuine faith.
Oh my dear friend, you have plainly not read me sperging out about his views on the Annunciation (hint: the point of it is not the Incarnation, redemption, repairing the broken relationship between God and man or atonement for sin, the point is God is okay with abortion so go right ahead and have your abortion without guilt like the mean ol' bad right wing Christians try to make you feel!) Even the liberal Jesuit magazine had to go "Er, no" on that one 🤣
He had to clarify what he meant by "God is non-binary" (theology behind that remark is not incorrect, but it's a shit-awful way of phrasing it and Jimmy boy was clearly trying to be both one of the cool kids and get the normies all het up, but just inserted his foot in his mouth).
His church is indeed hyper liberal, the retired-but-came-back Pastorette Babs was assuring all and sundry that Jim boy was lying through his teeth about LGBT+ issues in order to get elected, but once elected would reliably go back to the right side of history (in another interview, she wasn't as sure about if Jesus ever existed, but she was sure about Jimmy boy). The main pastor of the church thinks, well, where do I even begin with the bounty of material from "referring to God with masculine language makes girls feel their brothers are more important" onwards? Jimmy boy isn't quite as to the extreme edge as his pastor, but he's done the usual "True Christianity is all about being nice" liberal crap in politics so to sum up, this Catholic isn't sold on how solidly Presbyterian this seminarian is, apart from "member of a progressive church in a liberal branch of the denomination and reliably on-board with the Democratic platform on everything".
Though fear not, he has now accepted there are two biological sexes and not six 😁
This is still just so crazy to me. Even secular historians agree that Jesus existed, it’s decisively been the (again, secular) consensus for over a century, at least. This could be sort of an edgy but intriguing thing to say in like the Vienna cafes of the early 1800s, now it’s just stupid.
The Texas senate race this year is truly the Battle of the Bad Candidates, isn’t it. I don’t envy people voting in that one, especially moderates. Curious if there’ll be an unusual rate of abstention in that particular vote.
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His church is extremely liberal (in both "open minded" and "leftist" senses). The top three images on their website are a video that begins by pointing at their "Love They Neighbor - No Exceptions" banner, a photo of a cross covered in progress-pride-flag-design drapery, and a "No Human Is Illegal" sign.
Whenever I visited (before my father's death but after he moved to Austin he was a member for a few years) everyone I talked to (including the current pastor making headlines, but I don't recall meeting Talarico) seemed animated by genuine faith, even if the level of liberal (in both "open minded" and "ample" senses) interpretation required for that faith gave it a very struggling/double-think tone to me. That sounds patronizing, but it isn't intended to. I met a lot of loving and helpful people there toward the end of that "before my father's death" period, and I'm a bit worried about the Eye Of Sauron now shining on the place. I did sadly conclude that their beliefs are wrong in a descriptive way, but there seem to be a lot of people now angrily concluding that their beliefs are wrong in a normative way, and I'm hoping that doesn't include anyone too unstable.
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Don't non-denominational schools of theology exist at some universities?
Maybe, but I’m not sure any of them are labeled seminaries.
They adopted that term from Catholicism as the Protestant denominations became mainline and wanted to sound respectable and rooted in ancient tradition and shed any vestiges of "Brother Billy-Bob leading the tent revival because he was called by the elders". Brother Billy-Bob went to Bible College. The Reverend Robert went to seminary and got a Masters Degree in Divinity.
Oh, those wacky Protestants.
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No?
Paxton sucks for a number of nonpartisan reasons.
Talarico has none of these issues. A replacement Republican politician has none of these issues. Therefore, primary voters choosing somebody with these issues are shooting themselves in the foot before ever getting to the partisan bits.
Don’t get me wrong: Paxton has plenty of those “eye of the beholder” points.
But if it was down to those, I wouldn’t be talking about “deserving to lose.” Regardless of my personal opinions, I recognize those as subjective in a way that the first set really weren’t. A difference in values is not a difference in competence.
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I just have a hard time believing that black Christians will vote for an Arab Muslim.
Yeah, I could be wrong. I forgot about his having troubles with the black vote and doing ads targeted towards black people. But it seems like that state is really blue now, with all the protests and all the Muslims.
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There is no way deporting a few million illegals moves the needle enough to generate any significant government savings this soon especially when running ICE is quite expensive. On net how much did we decline the illegals by? 2-3%? It’s better than increasing but that’s not the shrinkage you would need to make it work.
I see 3 big chunks of money that a Doge could get but it’s hard:
Military disability pay. My gut says like 90% of it is fraud and without looking it up it’s like 300b now. Optics would be awful if you did it.
Medicaid fraud. Some of this is illegals I think. Home Health care has boomed and it does seem like a lot of fraud here.
SNAP. 100 billion per year. I have no idea how 12.3% of Americans are now on SNAP….even a large portion of Americans not on Social Security.
Sending checks would be flashy and more like UBI versus our current programs that reward people for doing soft fraud (technically allowed, but programs were designed for far needier people). The better economic management though would be to cut 400B in federal spending and that fiscal drag would collapse interests rates.
What in the world do you mean by this? Military disability by definition only goes to those who were in the military, and who have documented injuries/disabilities related to that service. Where do you imagine fraud comes in to it?
Some cases of genuinely disabling PTSD exist, but it is easy to fake.
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Maybe I am online too much but most people who follow the data collection on military disability pay realize it’s a lot of healthy people getting disability who spent a couple years in the military. To begin to educate you on the issue look at Graham Platner who ran for Senate and runs a farm while getting a 100% military disability rating.
https://www.pressherald.com/2026/05/11/how-can-graham-platner-run-for-senate-with-a-100-va-disability-rating/
If you are serious curious spend a half hour with Google and AI to see why policy wonks consider military disability as semi-legal fraud now.
I'm neither 'curious' nor need to 'begin to educate' myself, I'm in the military and know many people on VA disability. A friend of mine had to fight for years to get 100% disability, he hasn't been able to work since he got out. Another one got blown up and it affects his ability to think - is that fraudulent because it's mental health?
If you want to argue that military servicemembers don't deserve disability payments, or that they should be less, or that standards for medical evidence are too low, then make that case. But calling it 'fraud', even '90% fraud', is simply offensive.
So if someone doesn’t have an actual injury that prevents them from working but gets disability that’s not fraud?
I 100% agree there are real cases of military disability but that in no way contradicts my point that many cases of military disability appear to be essentially fraud.
We currently have 1.85 million Americans with 100% disability rankings in 2026. In 2015 we had 493k veterans with 100% disability ratings. The US withdrew from Iraq in 2011. Afghanistan we only had like max 20k troops since 2014. So where did 1.3 million fully disabled veterans come from? These are massive numbers. Since 9/11 we have 2.7 million Americans who have deployed.
So yes a 50% rate of “fully” disabled is insane. And most people in the military do not serve in combat roles.
Just because a group has a “sympathetic core” does not mean that there aren’t a huge amount of people adjacent to the core abusing the system.
And yes if you are fully capable of running a Senate Campaign then you are not 100% disabled so we even have very high profile cases of obvious fraud.
My 90% fraud might be too high. The 2014 disability numbers are likely mostly true cases.
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My understanding is that (now) disabilities include mental disabilities, which are trivial to fake.
No doctor and no government wants to be the guy to say to an angry and potentially violent veteran, "You were in Iraq, but you never actually got into combat. I don't believe that you really have PTSD from that time your buddy's drinking-partner's friend got blown up driving out of Helmand".
It's easier to pay them all off with a lifetime pension.
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It's not super strong evidence, but there's this show called Financial Audit by Caleb Hammer, and every time a veteran is on the show, they're on disability, and it doesn't look like they're really disabled.
Here's a video of just four examples from his show:
https://youtube.com/shorts/cJSWeCwIIZQ
Comment from Caleb on the above video:
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But will shutting down the various Learing centers graft and other democrat adjacent pork help? Aren't all of those things under the "healthcare" subheading we've been hearing is so overrepresented in the budget?
Shutting these things down is 100% good for me besides simply saving money.
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I didn't refer to current savings, I referred to future savings and remittances. "... a true statement over the long-term, since illegal immigrants send huge amounts of money overseas, and the children and grandchildren of illegal immigrants are a huge burden in the school systems, healthcare system, and criminal justice system".
Giving voters an upfront reward for making a wise long-term decision makes both political sense and financial sense, to me.
Why do you think sending money overseas is bad?
As long as they get the money through real jobs and not government handouts it's a win win situation for Americans.
In economic terms they are giving us labor and increasing the purchasing power of the US dollar making all foreign goods cheaper for us.
You've got that reversed... Remittances decrease the value of the USD, because they are selling USD to buy their home currency.
The bigger issue is that remittances are money not recirculating in the economy. An American worker will generally spend a significantly higher percentage of their salary on American goods and services, which causes follow-on economic activity. Remittances just vanish out of the economy, creating no follow-on value.
Remittances don't cause money to get moleculaly obliterated.
When dollars are sent overseas they are exchanged for another currency, someone else is buying those dollars.
Those dollars must eventually be used to purchase American goods and services, invest in American stocks and bonds, or be exchanged again with someone who wants dollars.
Foreign demand for dollars and dollar-denominated assets is actually a major economic advantage for the US!!!!
If the dollar goes overseas and someone buys goods from the US, that is because they gain from buying the goods. If the dollar had not gone overseas, someone in the US would have gotten this gain instead.
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Ah so I do, but we still keep the labor they provided. Which is lowering the costs of goods and services provided in the US. And foreign workers can send money home but they still have to live here so that means purchasing housing, food, transportation, etc.
I was thinking this was consistent with complaints about Chinese currency manipulation. The complaint against them was that they devalued their currency to give a boost to their manufacturing centers.
But now I'm confused, it's bad for us when China devalued their currency and thus boosts their exports. But also bad when immigrants devalue the US currency and boost US exports?
I would generally just think it's bad to devalue the currency, and that boosting imports is the better thing to do all around since that translates to a higher standard of living.
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This doesn’t work since we have high interests rate and above 2% inflation. You can’t transfer savings in 2030 to be spent today because we are resource constrained today. Checks today would just cause higher interests rates and higher inflation and do nothing to boost consumption today. You would just have more money chasing the same amount of goods.
Hypothetically in say 2010 you could do something like that because we had excess capacity, low interests rates and sub 2% inflation.
The best you would get today by sending out checks is a short term mid-term bump as people get money and then pissed off voters in 2027 when inflation jumps back to 5%.
You would just be giving them a fake reward in the current environment.
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I tend to think MAGA will over perform here as well. Trump has done something that is pretty rare in American politics — he has visibly kept most of the promises he made in the campaign (with a minor problem of the Iran war). This, I think is going to cover up some problems for the MAGA right, because no matter what you think about the MAGA agenda, you can absolutely see that it’s being done. Democrats don’t have such a record of visible accomplishment. Biden was supposed to “build back better” and have a bunch of infrastructure improvements. Nobody can point to a stretch of road or power stations or a renewable energy plant and say “Biden did that and kept his promise.” But with Trump, you have tge EU finally starting to take care of its own affairs, you have mass deportations, you have the government working to make abortions and transed kids rarer, you have trade protection for US manufacturers. Whether or not you agree with his agenda, he’s keeping his promises. Most politicians in my lifetime have been basically saying what the polls told them to say, and then quietly make excuses as to why you can’t just do that.
Secondly, the Democrats have no serious agenda. They don’t have an economic agenda, a foreign policy agenda, a social agenda, their entire political agenda seems to be “Prevent Trump from doing things, and hate on Israel.” Most people are probably not anti-Israel and even if they were, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as other issues that actually touch them personally. More people are affected by the laws allowing men into their daughter’s locker room and her sports team than are personally impacted by anything going on in Gaza.
"NO MORE STUPID WARS"
"I'm bringing prices down like you wouldn't believe"
> Starts a stupid war
> Prices go up
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Trump campaigned on tariffs as a means of boosting US manufacturing employment. Everything not connected to data centers is doing horrible. Keeping this campaign promise seems like it was bad.
Manufacturing has been growing steadily with record foreign investment.
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Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?
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I hope you're right. I do agree that Trump has some unusual successes to point to, so at least there's that.
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Trump campaigned on ending forever wars and he campaigned on lowering gas prices / inflation. Those were heavily featured. Now he's got a war that he started and which looks like he can't finish, and its raising gas prices a lot and causing inflation. That seems like a major problem, not a minor one? And a very visible problem?
He has kept promises on immigration for example, but the nature of that problem is that when there isn't a crisis it doesn't get much attention. Yeah he solved the problem, he kept that promise, but doing that also makes the problem a lot less visible. Compare to the Iran war - very visible, lot of air time. And its causing gas and diesel to shoot up, which is also very visible.
Do they need an agenda to win an election? Does it help them?
First thing is that agendas don't have to be serious or even good, they just have to be popular. “Prevent Trump from doing things" seems like it would be a pretty popular agenda, as he is -20 net approval.
Second thing is that agendas should also not be unpopular. When Dems do have an actual agenda it is very often very unpopular. Can't be hit over the head with the wrong side of a 80:20 wedge issue if you haven't taken a side!
Third is that by having no set national agenda Dems don't get pegged to a national agenda in purple state races, red state Dems can more credibly run as centrists when they aren't tied down to Kamala.
So I don't think having an agenda helps them. It's probably the best thing they could do to be honest.
The Dem agenda is gibs. Everyone loves gibs. Even old white people love gibs (yes, social security and Medicare are gibs).
Arguably, the Democrats spent the last 10 years shooting themselves in the foot by running on anything besides gibs. Social justice? Institutional integrity? Just tell people you’ll give them free stuff lmao.
The highways around here are full of, “James Talarico will protect benefits”, billboards. That’s it. That’s the message. I don’t see any Ken Paxton billboards.
You don't like the democrats, ok. But what you describe is not unique to democrats. Voting to give yourself free stuff is the bane of all democracies in existence, since forever. It is the quintessential "populists run amok" agenda item, not just a "gibs" thing.
Do you not see this same impulse in Donald? If so, why bash the dems then? If not, how? He is I think the most shameless of all of them. Interesting that he killed the Romney / Ryan wing of the GOP that was the only real force pushing against entitlement growth.
You can tell that their hearts aren’t really in it though. It’s like when dems act like they’re going to be tough on border security.
Roger Marshall might lose re-election in Kansas because when he was a practicing physician he sued patients who didn’t pay outstanding medical bills.
I get why messaging like that plays poorly with voters, but the only coherent opposing position is that patients should not have to pay for healthcare. That’s what dems are running on.
Well yes, people think patients shouldn't have to pay for healthcare. The only question is whether the government should pay instead.
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Ken Paxton is campaigning on 'Talarico is too far to the left on social issues'. This is, in fairness, essentially true by the standards of the Texas electorate.
the whole 2020/21 debacle driving every left-of-center into completely batshit racism means that anyone to the right of AOC quite reasonably distrusts the "but we were all crazy, shouldn't you just forget?" bullshit that they all try to pull.
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I think it’s true by the standards of the American electorate. Talarico is quite radical
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I think the optics are good for Trump when it comes to immigration and when it comes to helping beat back leftist excesses like trans in women's bathrooms and defund the police. But the optics are bad for him on bringing back manufacturing, improving the economy for the average person, avoiding pointless wars, and AI.
Note: I am not making a judgment here about whether Trump lived up to his actual promises or not. I'm just talking about how his promises are widely seen. For example, Trump never promised to not attack Iran, indeed he has a long history of anti-Iran statements. However, many people assumed that he wouldn't attack Iran, and attacking Iran has hurt his popularity I think.
The Democrats, on the optics level, do have an agenda that can attract many people. Their economic agenda is more wealth redistribution from the wealthy to the not wealthy. Their foreign policy agenda is to do what Biden was doing. Their negative view of the AI revolution is likely to be popular. Their social agenda is one of their weak points, but they have learned a bit from what happened a few years ago and now seem more aware that peak woke is unpopular with the general electorate and that it might be a good idea to run a white man even if you really really think that a black woman deserves to be President, or whatever.
Again, I'm not making claims about what the Democrat agenda actually is or how well it would work in practice. Just what the optics are like.
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I think you underestimate the current liveliness of the Democrat bloc, particularly their attempts to tap into left-populism. Trump's perceived failure to deliver on economic gains has led many to have a wandering eye. His approval rating is at an all time low, and while it might be somewhat shallow, the Democrats are smart to rally hard around a nega-Trump agenda.
The messaging has been quite consistent, at least among swing state candidates that I've followed closely (Talarico, el-Sayed, Jackson, Ossoff). Beyond their usual discussions of "human rights," general appeals to progress, etc. I've seen the following points hammered ad nauseum:
Regardless of if these beliefs are true or if they will benefit the country, the idea that Democrats lack an agenda does not seem accurate to me. Listen to any speeches from the candidates I've listed and they're so similar they begin to blend together. el-Sayed and Ossoff are both even trying to do their best Obama impressions as of late.
The most important item on the Democrats' positive agenda, arguably going back to Clinton, has been "fix healthcare". Their problem is that this is popular in the abstract but that any particular concrete proposal is unpopular - particularly because most sick people are covered by Medicare, which works in every respect except cost control.
But you are right that the Democrats' agenda in 2026 is mostly-negative (and popular for it) - basically "stop Trump making things worse" and "do not use our electricity and water to build the Torment Nexus".
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I definitely wouldn't go assuming that every republican voting in Texas is voting for Ken Paxton. I expect a large split between Abbott and Paxton.
Sure, that's plausible. When I referenced "larger turnout universes", that just means the number of possible voters that are available to Republican candidates. It doesn't guarantee that they will actually vote, and even if they do vote, it doesn't guarantee that they will vote for the Republican.
One factor in Paxton's favor is that he's running in a federal election. There will definitely be some Republicans that hold their nose and vote for him because they want the federal Senate to be Republican. It's more likely that Paxton would be doomed if he was running in a Texas state race.
In the mind of Texas conservatives, these two things are reversed. Senators are those people on TV that accept bribes in exchange for not doing anything; the state government is more important to high propensity Texas GOP voters.
Senators are just votes but seem like they do little…..but they are still extremely important. It’s just for the vast majority of Senators their job is to vote for your side and maybe 5-10 of them are important for setting the agenda. Probably less.
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Thanks for the education, I did not know that. Maybe Texas really is its own country.
Historically speaking, for other states there is a pattern of state races being more winnable for the minority party, than the federal races. Kansas hasn't had a Democrat senator elected since 1932, and was +22 for Trump, but they recently had a Democrat governor. And Vermont keeps re-electing a Republican as governor, but I think he would lose if he ran for Senate.
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Paxton's electoral record is pretty good though! He won a state race in 2022 for Attorney General by 10% and he beat Cornyn by 27% despite Cornyn spending over $100 million.
I know he's supposed to be the worst candidate ever, but the results would indicate otherwise.
Talarico, on the other hand, is not the strongest candidate himself.
I mean, maybe it's a super blue wave and none of this matters, but Texas seems less likely to fall than other states.
In an R+14 state.
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