The narrow path to saving the republic

A look at the state of the midterms

An American flag waves against a blue sky. (Photo by Grace Cary via Getty Images)

Not to be melodramatic, but I really believe the future of American democracy has been hanging in the balance the past few years.

January 6, as it played out, was more farce than tragedy. But normally, a president who becomes unpopular and loses power is discredited within his own political party. The fact that Donald Trump was able to survive not only electoral defeat but the specter of a failed putsch was an ominous portent for the country.

His ability to recapture the presidential nomination and then recapture the office itself is terrifying. And his second term has been a true “no guardrails” presidency.

It’s not that he’s suddenly a political superman who’s capable of anything; he remains quite constrained in his ability to accomplish all kinds of things. But the entire Republican Party has proven, time and again, that it will indulge Trump in essentially limitless levels of inappropriate conduct.

We have flagrantly unfit leadership at the F.B.I. We’ve seen repeated purges of senior military commanders. Bill Pulte is not only abusing power at the Federal Housing Finance Agency in previously unthinkable ways, but that willingness to abuse power was essentially his qualification for promotion to serve as director of national intelligence. With his pardons, Trump has made clear that there will be no legal accountability for any crimes conducted by his political allies, and he’s had many appointees across a range of agencies make clear that the White House can and will order prosecutions and regulatory crackdowns on his enemies.

The bad news for Americans’ well-being — but good news for the long-term future of the republic — is that Trump also massively fumbled the bag.

Rather than following a template for political success that would have allowed him to consolidate power, Trump has chosen overreach in almost every domain. And while his opportunistic promise to deliver a lower price level was never achievable, he was absolutely not forced to exacerbate inflation across multiple dimensions. These were voluntary blunders that have given the opposition a chance to beat him.

And the opposition has really needed good luck, because despite widespread alarm about these threats, the entire progressive movement has done less than nothing to respond to them.

While a hearty few souls have been organizing No Kings protests, the vast majority of activist energy has gone into a series of blue-on-blue primaries in safe districts, typically pitting an “establishment” politician whose views are already well to the left of the median voter against an insurgent whose views are identical on 90 percent of salient issues but who also says oligarchy and hates Israel. Even outside the circles of hardcore insurgents, the broad left-of-center media has displayed about 1,000 times more curiosity about what it takes to win primary elections in New York City than what it takes to beat Republicans in red-leaning areas.

But winning in red-leaning areas is what Democrats need to do.

If they can avoid blowing relatively easy races in Maine and Michigan, the decisive Senate race will be in Iowa or Ohio. With the Voting Rights Act gone, Republicans have been able to score a decisive advantage in gerrymandering and skew the House map heavily in favor of Trump, as the Senate already was. Democrats could easily win 52 percent of the vote nationally and see a Republican trifecta confirmed in place — except with Bill Cassidy and Mitch McConnell replaced by MAGA cultists.

The actual outlook, though, is better than that. Trump’s blundering and unpopularity, plus some good House and Senate recruiting, have put Democrats in a reasonable position to win.

Flipping both houses of Congress — and thus delivering a clear sign to American elites that this is not the time to surrender to authoritarianism — is not the most probable outcome, but it is on the table. To seize this chance, though, requires Trump opponents to focus on the thing that actually matters: not whether safe seat Democrats can be compelled to be even more uncompromising, but whether Democrats can win the key races.

The House is the states

Democrats have long been favored to flip the House, and their lead in the generic ballot is so large that all the gerrymandering probably won’t make a difference.

It is worth flagging, though, that with Virginia Democrats’ effort to gerrymander thrown out by the state’s own court and a bunch of red states in the South unleashing aggressive new gerrymanders thanks to the Supreme Court killing the Voting Rights Act, the landscape is now genuinely quite skewed. It would be historically unusual for an unpopular incumbent to see a big recovery between now and Election Day. But if Republicans can depress the Democrats’ generic ballot edge from its current range of six or seven points to something like four, the G.O.P. could potentially win the House.

The big issue here, though, is really 2028.

There are basically two things that could happen between this November and the end of the next cycle. First, there are several blue states that are not currently gerrymander-maxed but whose own state rules made it impossible to redraw maps in the time between the Supreme Court’s ruling and Election Day 2026. Over the course of two more years, though, Illinois will almost certainly draw an additional blue seat. New York will likely draw one and perhaps two additional blue seats. Maryland will probably create one.

But to get to within striking distance of even, Democrats will also need action from Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington state, all of which are less certain for various reasons, including the fact that their ability to act likely depends on the midterms. Slow Boring is working with collaborators on some future donation recommendations that will include strategically targeted state legislative races to try to help with this, so stay tuned!

But another factor in play is Georgia.

Georgia did not join the red-state gerrymandering party, but it will have a new governor next year. If that governor is a Republican, Georgia will probably redraw. If the governor is a Democrat, it won’t. Democrats had a couple of strong contenders in the field, but the voters seem determined to go with former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who isn’t a terrible nominee but seems like clearly the worst option. Nonetheless, Trump is unpopular enough that Bottoms has a decent shot at winning. There are also secret stakes in this race where if Bottoms wins, Jon Ossoff can run for president or V.P. without giving away a seat.

The Senate paradox

In the upper house, we have an odd situation in which Democrats seem to be in an unexpectedly strong position in some of the more challenging states, while a relatively easy race in Maine has become complicated and what ought to have been a layup in Michigan has turned into a clusterfuck.

First the good. Mary Peltola is genuinely favored to win Alaska’s Senate seat. Without her, the whole landscape would look very different. Peltola’s life would’ve been a lot easier if she’d run for governor, but she chose to run for Senate.

More than anyone else, she has “met the moment” in a real way, and Chuck Schumer talking her into it was a huge win. Every progressive NGO leader who ever gave her a hard time about anything while she was in the House should (but won’t) acknowledge that all their hopes and dreams hinge on her and make their apologies.

In Iowa, by contrast, the best candidate (Rob Sand) did run for governor, but Democrats still ended up with a really good candidate in Josh Turek, a Paralympian who holds a red seat in the state legislature. Zach Wahls should have done the right thing and stood down rather than turning this into a pointlessly expensive primary, but the voters chose correctly and the Sand-Turek ticket should have some complementarities and mutually reinforcing strengths.

In Texas, what I’ve seen so far from James Talarico suggests he is taking the obligation to win seriously. He’s seized the center ground on energy — touting “all of the above” in contrast to Trump’s efforts to kneecap renewables — and he’s moved toward the center on trans issues. He also appears to be collaborating with South Texas moderate Hispanics on a tactical level in a way that will hopefully unlock a good border message. This is a tough race that will cost a fortune and probably end in the election of crooked scumbag Ken Paxton, but the case for hope is real.

Ohio is the tough Senate race that I feel the most queasy about. Re-running Sherrod Brown makes some sense on paper but also strikes me as a little uninspired. Brown has moderated on cryptocurrency, which is good in the sense that it’s good to move to the center, but I think it’s a bit odd to treat his 2024 defeat as all about crypto spending. I was not a huge fan of his prior stance on this, but there are legitimate criticisms of the crypto industry and being anti-crypto was deeply consistent with Brown’s longtime populist persona.

To me, what separates the Sherrod Brown who won repeatedly in Ohio from the one who lost in 2024 is that the earlier Brown was a moderate on energy, while the 2024 Brown seemed like a deer in the headlights on Biden-era immigration issues. He’s polling okay in this race and I hope he pulls it out, but I don’t feel confident in his campaign’s approach.

Much has already been written about Maine, and because I’ll be in Hancock County Maine (where Graham Platner is from) for most of the summer, I’ll probably end up covering this a lot. I just want to note here that Maine had a ton of ambitious, age-appropriate, well-vetted politicians, absolutely none of whom ran for Senate. That includes guys like Troy Jackson, a Bernie factionalist whose politics I don’t really agree with but who would have brought everything to the table that Platner fans like without some of the downsides.

This brings us to Michigan, a true fiasco.

Gretchen Whitmer would have cleared the field and easily won this race. But she pulled an anti-Peltola and is throwing a promising political career away for no clear reason.

Meanwhile, nothing this cycle has caused me more heartache than this primary. We have Abdul El-Sayed, a Bernie factionalist, running not in one of the D+infinity House seats that are the left’s specialty, but statewide in a swing state where even small underperformance could be deadly. The establishment kinda sorta but not really consolidated around Haley Stevens as their candidate but, while Stevens is a moderate, she’s actually a weak electoral performer. Mallory McMorrow, the third force in the race, has more political skills than Stevens, but those skills have mostly been deployed in ugly fighting with Stevens.

I have friends in both the McMorrow and Stevens camps, and unfortunately instead of working together to fix the party, the narcissism of small differences is creating a situation where El-Sayed will likely win the primary.

It’s a massively frustrating situation. Even without Whitmer in the race, there were better options like Kristen McDonald Rivet (one of the top electoral performers in the House) and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan (who instead chose to run for governor as an independent and then drop out). Maine is the bluest state on the 2026 map, but it’s tough for Democrats because Susan Collins is tough. Michigan should have been easy, but instead it’s become very hard — a true blunder.

Tactics versus strategy

I think the tactical efforts of Democratic Party leaders have been a little under-appreciated.

Hakeem Jeffries has his people collaborating on actual House votes, winning discharge petitions, and doing a surprisingly good job of influencing the news agenda. With the exception of one House race in California (pour one out for Jasmeet Bains), he’s managed to keep the factional infighting firewalled from the important races. Redistricting ended up being fucked, but that’s not his fault.

Schumer, I think, is guilty of a legitimate brain fart in Maine, where there were many better places to park his hopes and dreams than in Janet Mills.

But the Michigan situation, while a total nightmare, is not his fault. It’s not like he forgot to call Whitmer; she just chose to do the wrong thing. Iowa, Alaska, and Texas have all worked out quite well, and while I’m kind of gritting my teeth about Ohio, I do understand the play and I think this race is basically on Brown to read his old press coverage and talk to some steelworkers and people in the building trades about energy.

But as a guy whose whole thing is complaining about Democrats, I really do want to emphasize that 80 percent of what’s keeping Democrats in the game here is Trump blundering.

To that you can add some strong tactical optimizations around candidate selection and messaging emphasis. My moderate-aligned friends who work in ads and testing are all really happy with the direction the party is going in. I am less pleased, because I think operatives tend to massively overrate paid media and direct-to-camera videos relative to strategic position-taking.

But the national party has not made even token gestures at a rebrand. There’s nothing like the Republicans’ “young guns” from 2010 or the brand refresh Democrats did in 2006.

I think Democrats think they’ve changed their pitch on immigration after the Biden fiasco, but I genuinely don’t understand what they think is different about it. They know that “affordability” is their best talking point against Trump, but that has meant rebranding ideas that were mostly developed in Obama’s second term rather than an actual renewed focus on interest rates and productivity.

I’m trying to not be too whiny about this, because Weber specifically warns against the person who will “crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer.” The stakes are high, but there are real reasons for hope in these midterms and green shoots of the kinds of change that need to happen.

Democrats have under-reacted relative to what will maximize their odds in the midterms, and I really don’t want them to get complacent if they flip the House with two seats to spare. But there have been positive changes, and taking advantage of Trump’s screwups is a legitimate way to conduct politics. Relative to the disastrous situation the party was facing in the winter of 2024–25, things are looking up.

It’s going to take a bunch of small things all going right to make me feel good about this November. But it’s definitely possible if we all pull together and walk the narrow path to save the country.