Last night went amazingly well for the Democrats. This morning, I woke up to the news that Democrats are now favored in the Senate race in f-ng Mississippi. At a macro level, the main issues were the economy and the fallout of the Iran War. But I think that, more fundamentally, Republicans have gone all in on low human capital, and they’re just not the type of people to show up for a midterm. This is concerning from a long-term perspective: if Trump is the only thing that can motivate them to get to the polls, what happens once he’s gone? Last night might have been a preview.
Instead of denying the election this time, Trump seems absolutely giddy about the results, which he sees as proving that the Republican Party needs him to succeed. We’ve learned that he may be right. And this indicates that he won’t necessarily be going out of his way to help Republicans in 2028, if he doesn’t engage in active sabotage. It’s crazy to think that a president would want his party to go down in flames for the sake of his own ego, but this is the guy Republicans decided to build a cult of personality around. If there were the threat of prison and he needed a pardon, that could be different, but the Supreme Court made Trump a lot harder to prosecute, and so even that consideration is less salient. I’ve always said Republicans would’ve been better off if they had encouraged Democrats to actually put Trump in jail after he left office in 2021, but they decided to become pro-crime instead, so here we are.
The economy is an evergreen concern. But the backlash to Trump’s immigration policies is what has the potential to have the greatest long-term effect on American politics.