I guess voters have gotten tired of all the winning
It makes no sense to me, but all signs are that the US voting public is poised to put Democrats in charge of Congress. As time passes, I become more and more convinced that voters operate through pique and illogic. Things aren’t perfect? Turn the bums out and put in the far greater bums.
I guess they want to see endless and meaningless impeachment theater again.
Meanwhile, the economy is doing rather well, although you wouldn’t know it from the MSM:
Ah yes, the midterms.
As I’ve said, you can make a case that the economy is great or that it’s bad.
You can bet that between now and November, the Democrats and the media — but I repeat myself — will be focusing on the bad.
It’s an old playbook, one that Bill Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn wielded to defeat President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
The economy had actually recovered from a brief recession in 1991, but voters thought otherwise — because the media told them so.
“There is often a huge disconnect between belief about the economy and the true economic state of affairs,” Penn wrote in his 2007 book “Microtrends.”
“Until the statistics are actually published, people tend to assess the economy through the eyes of the national media.”
During the 1992 election, Clinton repeatedly told us we were experiencing the worst economy in 50 years.
The press echoed that message dutifully.
But as Penn recounted with glee, “The statistics that came out after the election showed that the period leading up to November had actually been a period of record growth.”
Whether this is the best of economies, the worst of economies, or something in between, you can bet that for the next month-plus we’ll be told it’s the worst.
Then there’s the Iran War – in which very few Americans have died or even fought. It’s come down to an economic war at the moment, one we seem to be winning. And Hormuz is pretty much open.
Let’s see, what else? Crime way down. Border closed.
One fear I have is that, as older cohorts die off and are replaced by the young who’ve been steeped in decades of miseducation, the trend to the left will only increase.
In the meantime:
As you struggle to pay your own bills, are you prepared to pay the bills for millions of non-citizens, too? That’s what Democrats are proposing – and every GOP campaign ought to be all over it. pic.twitter.com/tRD9omXTbW
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) September 24, 2026
“There is often a huge disconnect between belief about the economy and the true economic state of affairs,” Penn wrote in his 2007 book “Microtrends.”
The bigger picture here is that everyone should be very skeptical of everything they hear in the media. OTOH, what does a person believe? Ya gotta make some decisions, after all! And thus, beliefs.
My following point is related, though a little tangential:
The common wisdom about inflation in a national economy is that you really want to avoid substantial inflation for more than a year or two, because by then it becomes ingrained in the national psyche and it becomes very difficult to curtail.
Milton Friedman addressed this in one of his books. What is it exactly that penetrates the thinking of the average Joe or Jane that gets them acclimated to the idea of inflation? It’s when they, or their neighbor Pete, gets a salary increase. Or multiple increases.
I think there have been some significant pay increases during this Trump economy. But I fear that high gas & diesel prices and the media will win out. Get ready for a Democrat congress.
The polls are an information op by the leftists to drive down moderate voting. Unfortunately, it looks like even Rasmussen has been co-opted. Everyone here can cite multiple examples of polls that were way off. The California ballot is supposed to arrive in the mail in the next few days. I will fill it out and mail it back on the first day. For those in California, look up the reform California voter guide to help sort out the many voter propositions, and candidates for local office.
My recollection, living in DC at the time and thinking Clinton didn’t have a chance, is that he won because Ross Perot got 20% of the vote, most of which would have gone to Bush.
Good clip by Scott Jennings.
DisGuested:
The analysis I’ve read say the Perot vote came fairly evenly from both sides.
Someone (I think a commenter here a while back) made the point that the reason the party in power loses seats in the midterm election is that voters fall for a sort of “grass is greener on the other side of the fence” phenomenon: The party in power inevitably makes mistakes, and has its flaws exposed for two years. Voters project on to the party out of power this alternative that will somehow be better. I recall the commenter made an analogy to a marriage, where, say, the husband is keenly aware of his wife’s imperfections, and is drawn to another woman whom he imagines to be perfect in every way, because he doesn’t really know her. Makes sense to me, though I would like to think voters are more rational than that.
As far as I can see with informal talking with acquaintances is the key is gas prices. That’s all they care about as it’s immediate and in their face multiple times a week. Second is grocery prices which, of course follow gas prices due to transportation costs. Trump WILL lose the midterms and badly, if both stay high. I understand that such cannot be part of the equation with Iran, but I’m in a very tiny majority. Also remember, 50% of that voting population is on the low end of the intelligence bell curve. They vote based on emotion and pure self gratification.
Anyone who vote for the demons over high prices is too effing stupid for self rule. These losers would have surrendered to Japan in WW eleven.
I’m reading that shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has reached 80% of prewar levels, the remaining shortfall due to Iran itself not being able to use the Strait. I’ve also read that the bigger choke point now is in refining. I wonder how much of that is due to the loss of refining capacity in places like California.
Dems are going to win because the Reps want them to (see any evidence they don’t?)
Buy more ammo. Gonna need it early next year.
Get out of big cities while you can.
Don’t forget to hide your BB guns.
DT:
The Republicans I see give every indication of wanting to win.
No doubt there are a few exceptions, especially in blue states or blue districts. But I think it’s BS to say the bulk of Republicans don’t want to win.
Republicans, plain and simple, need better messaging. In sales there’s an idiom that goes “sell the sizzle, not the steak”. People are mostly concerned about money, safety, and health. Everything else is just white noise. And they need to be bold. Yet they avoid certain issues because they fear being labelled a “racist” or “homophobic”. My 2 cents.
The economy is not bad, but it’s not been great either. Private sector hiring has been anemic, though may be showing some signs of recovery.
Most Americans, however, care about prices, which have not gone down. Monetary policy driven inflation has largely been tamed but tariffs and high gas prices due to the conflict in Iran and Ukraine have largely offset any benefits there.
I support confronting Iran, but think the Administration did a poor job of selling why it was necessary to the public, and were unprepared to deal with the Hormuz situation (which has turned in our favor now).
Meanwhile, Trump spends too much time on frivolous things like renaming stuff, the ballroom fight, etc. Some good things have happened but he’s his own worst enemy.
The likely outcome isn’t a surprise and perhaps is even deserved. Americans are open to at least some of the populism but still wants adults not narcissists.
Well, who promised voters they would get tired of all the winning? I think voters miss that guy and need to hear from him.
Good news — he’s back:
______________________________
DURANT, Oklahoma, Oct 1 (Reuters) – US President Donald Trump began a 32-day campaign blitz on Thursday with stops in Texas and Oklahoma, aiming to bolster Republican candidates as his party fights to hold onto its slim congressional majorities in November’s midterm elections.
“Pretend I’m running please,” he said on Thursday at a rally in Durant, Oklahoma.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-launches-midterm-campaign-push-texas-oklahoma-republicans-face-tough-races-2026-10-01/
______________________________
The Reuters article slants negative but the point is Trump is on the campaign trail and it takes one back to Truman’s successful whistle stop tour in 1948.
______________________________
A whistle stop or whistle-stop tour is a style of political campaigning where the politician makes a series of brief appearances or speeches at a number of small towns over a short period of time. Originally, whistle-stop appearances were made from the open platform of an observation car or a private railroad car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistle-stop_train_tour
______________________________
I’m just a guy at a keyboard, but I’m betting this makes a difference.
@Bob Wilson: The polls are an information op by the leftists to drive down moderate voting.
Though I can’t prove it, I too have the impression that the polls are intended to discourage GOP support.
When it gets close to the election, the polls can get more honest, so that if Republicans win, pollsters can say the race tightened. Which may be partly true.
There is one factor that goes unmentioned and I am curious to see how much it will effect these midterms.
Dem cheating. I think they pulled their punches in the ’24 Pre sidential election as everyone was watching for the cheat. Not in the down ballot races, though.
This time it’s all down ballot races and I think the Trump admin – despite some of the unhelpful court rulings – is going to be watching closely and they are not finished with their mission to clean up our electoral process.
Also agree with Bob Wilson that the polls right now are a pysop. Not falling for it.
— neo
What a substantial portion of the discontented want is the same thing they wanted in 2024: for prices to come back down to pre-covid levels. Not just stop increasing, they want the price rises to be reversed. Obviously that won’t happen, bar something truly disastrous like a major deflation cycle (the last big deflation cycle was the Great Depression), but it’s what they want.
The same thing happened in the 1970s. For people who could remember the prices before that inflation cycle, the new prices were a perpetual irritant, to some degree even after wages caught up. Whatever their heads knew, it felt like they being robbed. Cheated.
These people weren’t voting for Trump in 2024, they were voting against Biden. Now it’s 2 years later and the prices still haven’t come down and wages have not fully caught up (and gas prices are high) so they want to throw out the incumbent again. They’re angry and looking for a way to vent that anger.
— Jimmy
That was me.
It’s the nature of things, to some degree. The supporters of the party in power are always disgruntled to some degree with their own side, because they’re dealing with imperfect reality, while the out-party supporters can draw on pure anger and rage.
It’s human nature to be primarily motivated by the negative, one source of anger or fear is more motivating than three successes. Evolution favors a negativity bias because it’s better to overlook three tempting food or sex sources than to overlook one lurking saber-tooth tiger. That tendency is why social media tends negative, why clickbait algorithms emphasize anger, it just works better to hold attention and motivate engagement.
— neo
The rank and file, sure. The danger there is not that they don’t want to win, it’s whether they’re motivated enough to turn out. Off-year elections come down to motivation of the base voters, most of the time.
Now a lot of Senators and Congressmen and officials, I think they’re of two minds. They want to win, to hold their chairmanships and control the flow of money, but many of them hate Trump and want desperately to open the borders and get back to ‘normal’. So I suspect some of them see upsides to either winning or losing.
At the top, what a lot of Establishment politicians in both parties want, deep down, is to go back to September 10th, 2001, and stay there. The late 90s were their nirvana.
— huxley
Absolutely. Though it’s dangerous to assume that the polls are entirely false. It’s an off-year election and the unfiltered data is probably negative for the GOP, but the establishment media, the polling companies, the pundits, etc. are spinning. Both sides are spinning, the goal being to drive down opposition turnout and boost one’s own.
When we get this close to election time, genuine analysis and reporting gives way to cheerleading. Each side is rah rah rahing, and you having to allow for that when you look at their product.
Now, all that said, I see plenty of signs that the Dems are more nervous than their cheerleaders want to let on, too. Look at all the Dems out talking about how Trump wants to cheat, wants to steal the election, etc. They’re hedging their bets in case of a fizzle or an upset.
neo said:
> The Republicans I see give every indication of wanting to win.
Do you think John Thune wants the Republicans to win? I don’t think there are very many Republican Senators who want that. Most of them can’t seem to get past the idea that giving Trump what he needs to succeed, and for the country to succeed, is somehow wrong. It’s OK to stand up to Trump when he’s doing something wrong, but to relentlessly block so many of his efforts and appointments is just handing the midterms to the Democrats. And the Democrats’ masks are off now. They are now openly enemies of this country and what it stands for.
All these perfectionists out there—from both sides of the aisle.
(Makes one wonder if perfectionism—or a claim to it—is, at least in some cases, a kind of totalitarianism or a lead-in to it….)
Problem is, one party—super-saturated with murderous hate—wishes to destroy the country while the other party wishes to save it. At the same time the former, together with its supporters, claims—with non-stop, brutally dishonest “passionate intensity”—the exact diametric opposite.
Having invested so much time, lucre, and deranged emotions in their 24/7 deception—and selling their degenerate souls in the process—will they, in the end, succeed in bamboozling the country?
Interesting times…
Speaking of “perfectionist” totalitarianism…
‘”Why would USAID fund socialist or communist movements?” If you take a step back and look at the corporate and financial investments of many DNC megadonors, the answer will make a lot more sense.’—
https://instapundit.com/827491/
+ Bonus:
Google “update on free speech at Cambridge University”…and then ask yerself, “who’s responsible for ‘the law’” and, “what happens when the law changes?”…