What goes for drug dealers also goes for political addicts and pundits — don’t get high on your own supply. We want to believe what we want to hear. Confirmation bias is a real thing. It’s out there, waiting to suck you in and turn you out. That’s why I try to be rigorously objective. I try to look at the facts. I’m by nature an optimist, or rather, I’m always looking for an edge, a way, a means to counterattack and seize the initiative, and I always assume it’s there. But of course, Patton's flipside is Pollyanna. Sometimes you’re trying to save the Kobayashi Maru whether you’ll like it or not, and you’re never going to be Captain Kirk. But let me tell you, here’s what my gut is telling me — the Democrats have peaked.
Just a couple of weeks ago, it looked pretty dire. A lot of people told us we were about to be swamped by a blue tsunami. Well, in the last couple of weeks, they modified that take. It’s now a red undertow. And I agree that the Democrats will probably do OK. I think they’re very likely to take the House, though not necessarily by very much. But I don’t think they’re taking the Senate. We were being told that we weren’t just going to lose North Carolina, Michigan, and Georgia. No, we were going to lose red stalwarts like Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio. And it was going to be worse. We were going to lose the states we could never lose: Kansas, Nebraska, and even Texas. And not only were they going to win Texas, but they were also going to do it with a creepy communist halfling who babbles about loving trans kids and how God has 68 genders.
The Republican Party was going to get destroyed. MAGA was going to get repudiated. The socialists were on the rise. Fat, pierced, multicolored-haired, gender-confused non-workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your student loan debt.
It all depended on one thing: us. It depended on us not showing up. It depended on us not caring. It depended on us being so mad at Donald Trump over one buck a gallon more expensive gas that we were going to throw away closed borders, tax cuts, a revived military, the end of DEI, deregulation, and all the other great things that Trump II has accomplished. But that hasn’t quite happened. It was probably never going to happen. Sure, there’s some dissatisfaction out there, but normal people realize that life is about choices. You can choose Donald Trump, who has only done about 80 percent of the things we want, and a bunch of communist fellow travelers of the Islamist death cult who want to trans your kids, take your guns, and generally wreck this country once and for all.
The Republicans started spending, highlighting those distinctions, telling people what their choice was, and it worked. Sure, they spent a lot of money doing it. They had to. Even in the best of times, it’s hard to rouse people at midterms. But this time we had an ace in our pocket: the Democrats’ nominees. In Michigan, you have a guy who wants to be the senator from Gaza. In Ohio, you have a 50-year retread who’s never had a job in the private sector; he’s channeling Joe Biden in his oncoming senility. And in Maine, the Democrats decided to replace the dude with a Nazi tattoo with the dude who was doing his cousin.
Yikes. But it’s a good yikes. It’s a good yikes because where they have relatively normal candidates, they’re doing OK. Not necessarily enough to overcome the inherent redness of some of the places they are running, but better than would usually be expected in places with inherent redness where they are running.
Trump’s also doing things to help. He’s out there making campaign appearances all over the place, and that’s rousing the troops. His decision to shoot that traitorous goat molester has reminded us of why we voted for him. And he has made a move to get Russia to release diesel stocks to lower the price, forcing Democrats who argued that it’s an outrage that we have to pay an extra dollar a gallon to support a war against our existential enemy, Iran, but that we should pay an extra buck a gallon to support some foreign country in its war with its neighbor for some reason. Tying them up in those kinds of rhetorical knots, as well as the growing chorus of good economic news, will help.
The polls have tightened, but the real story with the polls is that the pollsters and those who obsess over them are admitting the uncomfortable fact that they can’t get a conservative to answer a poll to save their life. Democrat voters are eager to stand up and shout their love of communism and perversion. Republicans remember the last time somebody got up and talked about what he believed, and how a leftist shot him and a bunch of Democrats smiled. We’re not talking to some stranger on the phone about our politics. The consensus is that the conservative count is wrong; it’s an undercount, and the real question is by how much. There’s no way for them to know what conservatives will do. Conservatives will keep their thoughts to themselves and express themselves at the ballot box.
And express themselves they are — some places are already voting, and the results are interesting. In Virginia, they’re terrible for Republicans — the northern Virginia parasite class is positively turgid at the opportunity to vote against the party of the Bad Orange Man. But so far, in other places, the electorate looks very favorable to Republicans. It’s a lot of older people; the young people you hear about who love socialism aren’t showing up, at least not yet. The only people who count are the ones who actually vote. And it was always inevitable that Republicans, even if they were grumbling, were largely going to come back into the fold. There may be some protest votes, but those will take the form of not voting at all. It’s hard to see an actual Republican — not one of those Never Trump Fredocons — who would vote for one of these kooky, commie Democrats.
Plus, the Democrats have problems with some of their key constituencies. Take blacks. Jasmine Crockett still hasn’t endorsed James Talarico, but in her defense, maybe she can’t find him. Choosing the skinny, little, white guy over a black candidate basically told black Texan Democrats that they don’t matter, which is consistent with the Democrats’ view that blacks don’t matter since blacks always vote for Democrats and can be taken for granted. Same thing in Michigan — there was an MS NOW focus group where black Michiganders were wondering what the hell Abdul El-Sayed was going to do for them. And of course, the answer is nothing — his constituency is Hamas. Oh, and if you’re Jewish, forget it. In the Democrat Party, the moderate position is anti-Jewish. The growing mainstream position is to help the people who want to kill them.
A Democrat Party that has demoralized blacks and threatened Jews is a Democrat Party that’s going to have some electoral challenges. While it’s not particularly likely that many of them will switch over and vote for the Republican, though some may. If there’s a significant protest vote, it’s going to be a protest non-vote. And we Republicans will take them not voting.
This was always going to be a tough election cycle, but the things that usually happen tend to be the things that happen again. Republicans come home. They may be mad, but every one of us out there who voted for Mitt Romney understands what Republicans do. They swallow hard and pull the lever in the end. This is especially true in red states; you rarely lose if you bet on a red state going red.
But reversion to form also makes it likely that our stretch goals in Minnesota and New Hampshire will end up just out of reach. In the end, bluish states are probably going to vote blue, but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep pushing and trying. After all, underdogs sometimes win. Every once in a while, you have an upset. That could happen with us in our red states. We may get an unpleasant surprise or two, or even three. But so might the Democrats.
Still, the vibe has shifted. The tone has changed. That’s not mainlining copium; that’s looking at all the facts objectively. The tsunami has morphed into an undertow and over the next three weeks may morph again into still water, and we may end up with a Senate that hasn’t changed much at all. And, compared to where we were a month ago, we will be glad to take it.
Just one month until Kurt’s next action-packed conservative novel, “American Warlord,” is unleashed, and it is out for presale now! Read Kurt’s Kelly Turnbull/People’s Republic series, including the latest "Panama Red," and follow Kurt on X @KurtSchlichter!
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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