Last week ended with Republicans debating whether or not to pull funds from North Carolina and Georgia and spend them in other states where Senate Republicans are in trouble. In North Carolina, Michael Whatley has never caught fire, and Donald Trump’s visit to the state last week probably hurt him more than helped him. In Georgia, incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff has led his opponent by a substantial margin all cycle.
Roy Cooper has sounded a warning, claiming that the election is a long way from over and that he expects the final margin to be in the low single digits. In such a race, anything can happen down the stretch. Cooper, Ossoff, and every other candidate should run through the tape. The fable of the tortoise and the hare applies to campaigns.
Cooper could be right. There are still six weeks left in the election, and Democrats might be peaking too soon. Republicans could recover. Voters might start to move back toward the GOP because, for all their dissatisfaction now, they’re more concerned about what Democrats could do if they gained power. They may decide that the devil they know is better than the devil they don’t.
But that’s not how it feels right now. It feels like the forces driving this election are bigger than either party or their efforts to control the dialogue. It feels like a wholesale rejection of Trump and the GOP.
Most indicators suggest that Republicans are about to take a shellacking. As Nate Silver pointed out this weekend, gas prices are now over $4.00 per gallon, we’re stuck in a war with no end in sight, and Trump’s approval rating is about 20 points underwater. He says the conditions are right for a wave. If the election is a referendum on Trump’s performance, Democrats should have a big night on November 3.
Republicans really have no one but themselves to blame, not even Donald Trump. When voters elected Trump in 2024, they knew they would get a lot of bluster and bravado. They had lived through it before. They also expected Republicans to keep his worst instincts in check. They had seen that before, too. They expected Trump 2.0 to be a continuation of Trump 1.0.
Boy, were they wrong. Instead of holding Trump accountable, Republicans in Congress gave him everything he wanted. They confirmed an incompetent cabinet loyal to Trump, not the country. They let him impose tariffs that wrecked a quickly recovering and growing economy. They looked away as his family and business cronies plundered the government. They refused to put the brakes on his ill-advised war with Iran. And they’ve been muffled as Trump increasingly drives a wedge between the US and our Western allies.
Ironically, Republicans caved to Trump out of fear of electoral defeat. They believed they would lose their elections if they crossed MAGA. That might have been true in some primaries, but now Republicans are at risk of losing the Senate, a scenario virtually unthinkable a year ago. MAGA won’t save them now. The swing voters who narrowly broke for Trump in 2024 are overwhelmingly opposed to him now.
The national indicators favor Democrats, who have widened the congressional ballot to more than eight points—on par with 2018 or 2006. In North Carolina, Andy Jackson at the John Locke Foundation notes that last week, “Democratic registrations have picked up some steam. Republicans, not so much.” Almost 1,700 people registered as Democrats while only 357 registered Republican. Those numbers won’t mean much in the final vote, but they do indicate which party is motivated.
Republicans are starting to panic. I suspect they will shift funds away from Whatley in the coming weeks. They’re at risk of losing seats in places like Texas, Iowa, and Kansas. If those states become swing states, the Republican electoral college advantage vanishes quickly.
I hope Cooper keeps running as hard as he has been all year. I hope he wins big, and I hope he drags a bunch of Democrats across the line. It’s time for every Democrat to kick into high gear. They probably won’t get another chance like this for a long time.
A total repudiation would be nice.
Gasoline and groceries are driving this election Thomas The first lesson I learned as a reporter is people vote with their wallets, not their brains