politics

This Is What A Dominant Democratic Midterm Election Looks Like

A deranged shitlib fever dream or an accurate depiction of the current political environment?

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You will be pleased to know we have a shiny new data point in mainstream media outlets not quite understanding the vibe shift – the shift in critical alternate consciousness – happening right now in the United States.

This week The New York Times – in the grand tradition of The New York Times – published an opinion piece saying, in so many words, that there's still time for Democrats to blow the midterms. This piece was very much in line with every other NYT opinion column in following the Golden Rule of politics in the 21st century: Nothing can ever be Good For Democrats.

The NYT column hits on the same tired themes of every election cycle in which Democrats seem poised to do well: The Senate map is "unfriendly" – it always is – and not every election result over the past 18 months has been overwhelmingly in Democrats' favor. To drive home this point NYT columnist Frank Bruni points to the results of last week's Virginia redistricting vote, decided by a closer-than-expected three point margin.

That Virginia Democrats' redistricting (gerrymandering) plan was not well understood by voters and subject to a far-reaching misinformation campaign funded by Peter Thiel and other fascist moneymen was never mentioned in Bruni's column. That Democrats over the past year have won easily in House districts taken by Trump by yawning margins in 2024 – upwards of 15-18 percent in some cases – is not mentioned. That Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia won Trump-adoring young men in 2025 is nowhere to be found in Bruni's piece.

That congressional Democrats' low approval rating is due to their refusal to stand up and fight the authoritarian menace is absent, per my exhaustive control-F search. That a Democratic candidate won a place called White Settlement, Texas a couple months ago is curiously missing from Bruni's analysis.

I talked recently on the Bad Faith Times podcast about how and why major media outlets are having an exceedingly tough time grasping the mood of the American electorate a year and a half into the second Trump term. Folks who run these outlets either need or want the midterms to be close, to come down to a handful of critical seats in purple states.

That makes things interesting, I guess. For me and you and tens of millions of others who have been horrified by the country's descent into lawlessness, a crushing Republican loss in 2026 is quite interesting. But it's clear now: The New York Times, among other outlets, does not fully get what's going on. The Times somehow does not know normies are finally sick of this shit.

Visualizing The Unprecedented

We live in a time that so often lacks precedence. Every week something happens that is correctly described as unprecedented in the history of the country. It is exhausting, this absence of precedent in a fragmented reality. I wouldn't mind returning to slightly more precedented times; precedent seems nice right about now. Maybe you feel the same.

I've wondered for a few months what the 2026 midterms would look like if I'm right and the country's stunning wave of Republican opposition holds up and even accelerates ahead of November. Thankfully G. Elliott Morris, an insightful numbers guy who regularly annihilates mainstream media narratives with the power of analytics, created a cool little tool that lets you see what an unprecedented midterm wave might deliver for congressional Democrats.

Republicans' House majority is as good as gone. We are eyeball deep in a political environment so toxic for Republicans that they won't be able to gerrymander their way out of it. Republicans are crafting these corrupt mid-decade gerrymanders based entirely on the results of the 2024 election. The good news: The 2024 electorate no longer exists. In fact, it fell to pieces within a few months.

What about the Senate though? What would the upper chamber look like if the political environment is still churning at D+15 levels come November?

I went ahead and ran that test on Elliott's tool.

You might see this simulation as "wildly optimistic" and a "totally deranged shitlib fever dream" and "straight from the head of the guy who said Kamala Harris would win in 2024." None of that is exactly wrong, of course. This does come from me, the blogger who believed polling numbers and forgot Trump is magic and unlike any politician in world history.

It's also, I think, well within the range of outcomes for the midterms. Every ruby red state is seeing shockingly close Senate polling six months ahead of Election Day. That includes Ohio and Georgia and Mississippi and Alaska and Nebraska. It would be something of a stunner if Alaska's open Senate seat isn't won by the Democrats. That's the sort of environment we're in: Unprecedented, as usual.

Even if we back off the above shitlib fever dream and move the slider to D+10, Democrats would have an 80 percent chance of heading into 2027 with a Senate majority.

Let's engage our collective inner-doomer and say Republican voters summon the will to step up for their god-king in 2026 and stave off a Democratic Senate majority and prevent the Big Boy from facing any kind of accountability for his endless stream of crimes against the country. To do this properly we will have to suspend disbelief since Trump-backed special election candidates have had their teeth kicked in again and again over the past 18 months.

A D+5 environment – constituting a monumental shift to the right – would give Republicans a 65 percent chance of retaining the Senate majority by one seat, or in a 50-50 split, which is functionally a GOP majority with the vice president acting as the tiebreaker. Turn up the uncertainty (the volatility) of the midterm election cycle and Republicans' chances drop to 56 percent.

The last simulation – the one in which Republicans somehow make major gains between now and November – is the only one being considered in most major media outlets, which seem to base their 2026 and 2028 analyses on the outlier results of the 2024 election. This is dishonest at best and manipulative at worst. Thanks to G. Elliott Morris, we know what a crushing Democratic victory would look like in 2026. I think The New York Times should too.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.