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Every few days, friends overseas ask me the same questions, usually in the expectant tone of someone checking whether the patient has finally turned the corner. Is this the blue wave? Are the Americans coming to their senses?
The answer is a qualified yes – and the distinction matters more than the cable news chyrons will admit, and is a complication the Democrats don’t fully grasp.
What you’re watching from across the Atlantic isn’t some great realignment towards the Democratic Party, and it certainly isn’t sweeping support for democratic socialism.
It is a brutal rejection of Donald Trump. In earlier eras, it would feature tumbrels, pitchforks, and the guillotine, so brutal is the rejection of our mad king.
Charlie Cook, who has been reading American elections longer than most people on TV have been alive, put it better than anyone. Forget the blue wave, he wrote. Think of it as a red undertow. He’s right.
Voters aren’t running toward the Democrats: they’re fleeing Donald Trump. And they’re taking a great many Republican candidates down with them.
Cook’s language about Trump has been escalating on a schedule. In 90 days, by his reckoning, Trump went from very unpopular to toxic to radioactive. His disapproval has crossed 60%, the worst mark of either term – worse than the weeks after a mob of his followers beat police officers at the US Capitol.
Cook’s shop moved 15 House races towards the Democrats in a single day last month, and 18 more on 9 October. Democrats need a net gain of three seats to take the chamber. You can do the math.
But look at where the movement is happening.
Broke, No Fixes
In deep-red Texas, after spending $130 million on GOP nominee Ken Paxton, James Talarico’s lead has grown to the point that Republicans fear the unthinkable.
Senate races in Alaska, Kansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, and South Carolina – all states Trump carried by between 13 and 23 points – have seen Democrats tied or ahead of their GOP counterparts.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has abandoned Georgia and North Carolina, and rumours are flying that Ohio is next on the triage list. It’s now pouring money into Kansas and South Carolina, where razor-close races in deep-red states are fuelling a mounting sense of panic.
In Nebraska, Pete Ricketts, a Republican senator from one of the richest families in the state, is in a dead heat with Dan Osborn, an independent and former union leader.
In Florida, Angie Nixon is within the margin of error against Republican Ashley Moody in two recent polls. And Democrat David Jolly is ahead of or tied with Republican Byron Donalds in every recent poll, with Donalds outspending Jolly by $85 million.
Greg Abbott, who won Texas by 12 points four years ago, is trailing Democrat Gina Hinojosa in the latest New York Times/Sienna poll.
A wave lifts the party riding it everywhere.
The rot in the foundation of the house Trump built is spreading as voters blame him for an economy in perilous waters and a nation less safe and trusted in the world than at any time since the Vietnam war.
The spell isn’t entirely broken: there is still a diehard cohort of Trump extremists comprising perhaps 15%-18% of the country, who would follow him off a cliff and blame the woke liberals when they hit the rocks.
But I’ve watched this cult – and there is no other word for it – since the day he rode down the escalator, and I have never seen the spell more tenuous than it is right now.
The reason isn’t complicated.
Trump’s policies have done to his own base what no Democratic ad campaign ever managed to. The tariffs he sold as punishment for China landed on the kitchen tables of the people who cheered for them. Gas sits at around $4.50 a gallon. Diesel is more than $6.50, which matters enormously if you farm, haul freight, or run any small business with a truck attached to it – and that describes a fair chunk of rural America.
Mortgage rates hover around 7%, with no decline in sight. And the country is seven months into a standoff with Iran, the endgame of which nobody in the administration can describe.
The farmer in Kansas didn’t vote for a trade war that would cost him his soybean buyers. The trucker in Mississippi didn’t vote for diesel at a price that eats his margin before he leaves the yard. The retiree in Nebraska didn’t vote to watch Medicaid cuts gut his rural hospital so Peter Thiel could get another tax break.
They voted for a man who told them he alone could fix it. Instead, he broke it – and they are noticing it via the unspinnable pain in their wallets.
Rejection, Not Embrace
When people ask whether the Democrats are winning these voters, I’d be careful.
A handful of their star candidates have worked out how to talk to working people without seeming like they’re in a faculty lounge, and they’re making it work. Jon Ossoff, James Talarico, Amy Acton, and David Jolly are standouts. Good for them.
But the party’s brand remains in poor repair, and Charlie Cook himself said he hadn’t seen a shred of data suggesting Americans were happy with the Democrats.
For my Democratic friends, that’s okay. Take the win, and get to work when you have the majorities. But remember that voters are rejecting the Trump Party – they aren’t converting to anything.
His polling is bad across every issue, and rejecting him and his party is the only path out of this chaos and economic agony.
British readers will recognise the pattern: a great many people who voted for Labour in 2024 were voting against 14 years of Tory chaos rather than for Keir Starmer – and anyone who mistakes rejection for embrace learns the difference quickly.
There is a serious chance that the Trump administration will make an organised attempt to steal the midterms, and I don’t say that lightly.
It isn’t a guess: the Justice Department spent the past year demanding that states hand over their voter rolls. The Attorney General offered to pull federal immigration agents out of Minnesota if the state surrendered its voter database – the kind of offer you usually hear from a man collecting protection money.
The administration fired the people whose job was protecting American elections from interference, then announced it was terribly worried about interference. Election deniers are in the Oval Office, and the President just gave Project 2025’s Russell Vought a public shout-out over its election plans.
None of this is subtle.
A man who refused to accept losing in 2020 is building the machinery he lacked in 2020.
The good news – such as it is – comes from the plumbing.
American elections are run by states and counties, by thousands of local officials, many of them Republicans, who held the line last time and say they will again. The courts have pushed back more often than not. The question of armed and masked Department of Homeland Security troops (and the states’ response to it) showing up in polling places will decide both the election and, not to put too fine a point on it, whether the American Republic survives.
I can’t predict how this ends. What I can tell you is that, if this administration tries to overturn a midterm it has plainly lost, it will break this country apart in ways nothing in our history matches except the Civil War. I mean that literally.
States against Washington; institutions against each other; neighbours who no longer agree on whether the government in the capital is legitimate.
The undertow is real. Whether the men being dragged under by it decide to pull the rest of the country down with them is now the question.
Watch closely. We will be. ●
Rick Wilson co-founded the Lincoln Project of moderate conservatives and former Republicans opposing Donald Trump
This article appears in the current print and digital edition of the Byline Times monthly magazine.
There is a layer across US leadership that has to be cleared out before the US regains any kind of trust or respect across the world. Apart that is from its corrupt friends in Russia, Israel and N Korea.
That is not just in politics, but judiciary, law enforcement, business (especially tech, finance and fossil) and the military. All those who have let Trump do the damage he has done, out of greed or cowardice. It’s systems of governance have been shown to be fatally flawed
The “undertow.” Spot on. I really appreciate this article—Democrats voted in on a red undertow better be strong swimmers.