How To Lose An Election In 60 Days

The polls say Republicans are likely going to get absolutely shellacked in the midterm elections.

There are four specific reasons for that. There is also one specific reason why Democrats could totally blow it.

Here is the very short story: People want normalcy.

I’ve been saying this for years. In 2024, Trump was the normie candidate, and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were very not normie.

In 2020, people wrongly perceived Joe Biden as a normie, and so he won.

What people want in the United States from their politics is very simple: 1) a healthy economy, and 2) to feel secure.

That’s it. Every single poll is downstream of how people feel about those two things: economic success and the prospect thereof, and security.

This is the reason why people institute governments. The Constitution of the United States essentially establishes a federal government capable of doing two things: protecting private property rights and ensuring national security.

Every election in the United States comes down to those two things in varying degrees: economic success and security. How people feel about whether those things are being achieved will determine whether the party in power retains power or not.

This brings us to the four reasons why the Republicans look like they’re going to have a bad election cycle.

1. The obvious off-year election dynamics. 
2. President Trump is extraordinarily distracted. He is not focused on what people want him to focus on, and it feels like he is picking every apple from every tree at once. 
3. Bad candidates
4. Most importantly, there are actual traitors in the GOP who want Trump and the Republicans to lose. They want House Speaker Mike Johnson to lose and Senate Majority Leader John Thune to lose. They’re ecstatic about the idea of a fractured Republican Party.

Some of these four things can be changed; some can’t and are basically baked into the cake.

We are now about two months away from the election. In the polling data, Democrats are about six and a half points up in the generic congressional ballot. The good news is that Republicans generally outperform the generic congressional polling in terms of seats.

That’s because you don’t vote for a generic Congress; you vote for your specific congressperson. So it may not be as disastrous as it sounds.

But in the Senate, things are looking pretty negative for the Republicans. North Carolina looks like it’s going to go for the Democrats’ Roy Cooper, who is up by eight versus Michael Whatley. In Texas, James Talarico, the self-righteous LGBTQ+ Howdy Doody doll, is up two against Ken Paxton.

In Ohio, Sherrod Brown, who had a formidable record of winning elections before he was defeated by Bernie Moreno in the last election cycle, is up about three points against Jon Husted.

In Maine, Troy Jackson — who is basically Graham Platner lite —  is up two versus Susan Collins. In Alaska, Mary Peltola is up two against Dan Sullivan.

If that polling were to hold, Republicans would lose the Senate, which again is insane considering that Trump won pretty much all of these seats, many of them by double digits, in 2024.

Republicans have a problem. Midterm elections are bad for the party in power. It is normal for the party out of power to look pretty good.

You can’t change the time. You can’t change the fact that when you’re the party in power, and people are in a bad mood, they tend to swing to the other party. It happens all the time.

But this brings up factor number two, the biggest factor in the problems for Republicans looking forward to the election. President Trump is not focused purely on the two things that matter: the economy and security. He’s been fragmented in his approach to both.

When it comes to politics, most people are not granular. Thus, what do Americans want? Direction. A narrative. They want a gestalt. They want a feeling of what is happening. They want solidity. They want predictability. They want to know where everything is going.

President Trump is famous for none of those things. He’s not famous for being predictable, solid, or narratively consistent.

There are benefits to that; because Trump is non-ideological, a so-called pragmatist, he is not wedded to any particular ideology. He will pick from various buckets, and his policy will be trial and error. He’ll try something. If it fails, he’ll try something new.

But the result is that when the president is running issue to issue, the administration’s narrative feels confusing. Take the economy. Right now, the American people are very concerned about the economy, even though it’s doing pretty well. Our unemployment rate remains low. Historically, our inflation rate is down in the mid-threes. We need to bring it down a little so it falls below the rate of wage growth. But we are by no means in a disaster-level economy here in the United States. Obviously, the stock market is doing quite well. We have a series of booming businesses.

But people feel discombobulated. They feel as though there’s a grab bag of various policies, none of them directed at a singular end.

So let’s say that the president was narratively focused, and said:

Listen, here’s what I want. I want economic productivity. We need to be the leading economy on planet Earth. The way that you become the leading economy on planet Earth is to drive up productivity, to drive up innovation. That means leaving money in the pocket of the American people so that they can build and consume. That means we’re leaving regulation. That means battening down the hatches against global opponents like China. But it also means cutting better trade deals with our friends, right? We have a singular end. That singular end is America out-producing, outcompeting, defeating everyone else on earth, and not just in a zero-sum way. Maximizing economic gains. Everything is geared toward that.

The president doesn’t tend to talk like that. And so what you end up with is a weird grab-bag of policy. On the one hand, he wants productivity, so he’s very pro data centers. But also he wants protection against the predation of global economics. He wants tariffs.

Does he want low prices because he says he wants inflation to go down? Does he want low prices, or does he want to reduce interest rates and increase prices? Does he want a trade war with Canada?

These are all discombobulated policies. Does he want regulatory relief, or does he want to take government stakes in private companies?

Does President Trump want to ferret out waste, fraud, and abuse and put his vice president in charge of overseeing that? Or does he want family and friends making bank, including people who are associated with the administration?

Who is he going to deploy to discuss economics? Is he going to deploy Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, who is good at it, or is he going to deploy Peter Navarro and Howard Lutton to rant about tariffs and railroads?

That discombobulated posture has a cost. It’s okay for people to feel a little discombobulated when they feel like things are going swimmingly. But when things start to feel dicey, if they don’t feel like we’re being driven toward an actual end, it starts to feel like we’re at sea in choppy waters.

The same thing is true with national security. On certain issues, President Trump has been perfectly consistent. Illegal immigration is a national security issue. He’s been very consistent on it, which is why that has always been his best issue.

But on national security, it feels discombobulated. Does the president want to face down America’s enemies like Iran, or does he want to negotiate with them while ripping on allies? Does he want to take an anti-Russian position? Does he want to go to the EU and rip on the EU? Does he want to yell at the Italian Prime Minister? Does he want to oppose China in every aspect, because China has been interfering in a wide variety of ways in the American economy, even in our election system? Or does he want to make nice with China and talk about what a great friend he is with Jinping?

And even with regard to specific policies, even the ones that I like, what does he actually want to do when it comes to Iran? Does he want to treat Iran as an implacable foe, and does he want to bring them down the way that Reagan did the Soviet Union? Or does he want to pretend that they’re rational actors and deploy JD Vance to broker a crappy MOU?

Does he want to open the Strait of Hormuz or abandon it? Does he want to bomb Kharg Island, or does he want to send JD Vance to talk about how wonderful the Pakistanis are?

When voters feel confused and feel dyspeptic, they tend to turn to the other party.

Now again, there is some method to this confusion.

Historically speaking, for President Trump, his political approach has always been a laser pointer with a cat. The media are the cat, and he points the laser, and then they jump wherever he wants them to jump. When the seas are placid, that’s fine. But when the seas get choppy, you start to feel a little seasick. And right now people are getting sick of feeling whipsawed.

The third reason why Republicans have a midterm problem: You can’t pick crappy candidates. I understand a lot of Texans were unhappy with John Cornyn, that they felt he was too moderate, and he was too easygoing with Democrats. I did warn that Ken Paxton was a bad candidate, and I think it is fair to say that if you are running a competitive race with James Talarico in Texas, you are, by definition, a bad candidate.

Paxton’s basically counting on Texans to recognize that James Talarico is a radical leftist Howdy Doody doll. And that’s true. But you have to make that clear to people.

That may change. I expect Texans will revert to type and Paxton ends up in the Senate.

But it makes it a little tough when you run bad candidates.

The fourth reason, and this is the big one: Traitors in the GOP who are looking to undermine the GOP. There are people who are desperately desirous of the GOP failing.

They want the GOP to fail. Why? They look at Trump, and they see his term is going to end. They look at Mike Johnson, and Mike Johnson is a pretty traditional conservative. John Thune, he’s a pretty traditional conservative.

And they want that GOP to die. They want that GOP gone, and they see the GOP losing as the predicate to them fracturing the party and then taking it over.

These are people who actively want the Republican Party to lose. They’re not shy about it, by the way.

Those same people are running a gambit to take over the GOP from within. President Trump is pretty hawkish on foreign policy. They don’t like that. They don’t like the fact that the GOP, generally speaking, is free-market oriented.

What they want is a GOP that is big government in nature and significantly more sectarian and isolationist on foreign policy. That is what they want, and they’re being open about it.

That has electoral consequences, because obviously, in close elections, when “part of your party,” the part that is being appealed to by specific politicians in the administration, won’t build new audiences, but is going to try and get the Tucker Carlson audience or the Candace Owens audience — that’s a problem.

If you spend all your time appealing to the people who are actively saying they want you to lose, you’re probably going to lose.

Those are the four factors that are putting Republicans in a seriously bad position for the midterms.

This doesn’t mean Democrats can’t blow it; they are providing target-rich opportunities. One example is they decided to run a pro-terrorism candidate in Michigan, but apparently most of the Republican Party is spending its days not talking about that.

This is why a driven narrative would help. Americans are worried about security. That is a real issue when you run people for the Senate who are actively pro-terrorism.

Republicans have a lot to run on because the Democratic Party continues to turn to the Left.

The question is: Will they regain focus?