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Democrats Cannot Let Polls Make Them Complacent

At the moment, the polls and mid-term election predictions are looking positive for Democrats and anti-Felon candidates.  While this is certainly a welcomed development, I and others worry that the positive polls may make anti-Felon voters complacent and perhaps feel they do not need to go and vote. In 2016, many thought Hillary Clinton had the election in the bag and stayed home.  In 2024, as many voters failed to votes as those who cast ballots for either Felon and Harris. We cannot let this happen again and Democrats need to want to not only win in elections, but to make the margin of victory as large as possible. The larger the margin of victory, the more clear the repudiation of the Felon, his failed policies and his GOP enablers becomes. Wide victory margins will make it harder for the media to down play the Felon/GOP defeat and perhaps lead more within the GOP to grow spines and cease their self-prostitution to the Felon.  A piece at The New Republic looks at the polls while cautioning that they cannot be allowed to instill over confidence and/or complacency.  Here are excerpts: 

I’m nervous about the polls and election forecasts projecting a huge Democratic wave. And I think you should be too.

Why? For two reasons. First of all, the numbers, as eye-watering as they are, may be setting us up for disappointment, even if Democrats have a solid night next month. They simply seem too good to be true. According to polls and forecasts, the Democrats are virtually guaranteed to win back the House. Fairly progressive Democrats (Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, Maine’s Troy Jackson) are leading in blue-leaning swing states. More centrist Democrats (North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff) are comfortably ahead in swing states that traditionally lean a bit red.

It gets better. Democrats seem poised to win several races in states that have been reliably red in the Trump era: Alaska and Texas Senate, Iowa governor, the Senate and gubernatorial contests in Ohio. They have an outside chance of winning the governorship in Texas and Senate seats in Iowa and Kansas too.

I’m not done. Democrats could win enough governorships and state legislatures that a majority of Americans live in states with a Democratic trifecta next year. A Black politician from Milwaukee (David Crowley) is favored to win the governorship in Wisconsin, overcoming long-standing resentment against the state’s biggest city. In Georgia, Keisha Bottoms has a real chance of becoming the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history.

Twenty-one months ago, after Donald Trump won a second term, I would have been thrilled if just one or two of the things I enumerated above happened. Now, the polls suggest a blue wave that would even eclipse 2006 or 2018. If the polls are right, we are looking at a political earthquake akin to 2008, when America, including Indiana and North Carolina, chose a Black man to be president. Democrats winning statewide elections in Texas raises the prospect of the party being competitive in the state that delivers the most Electoral College votes (40) to Republicans, putting GOP prospects in presidential elections in peril.

Some data experts say that we should trust the polls; others argue that they might be inflating Democrats’ chances. In my view, polls are generally reliable, but they can’t predict the winner of a race that’s within three to five points—as many of these contests are.

I’ll admit it: I don’t have a data-based reason to doubt the polls. It just comes from covering U.S. politics for more than two decades and being a Black person in America. I will believe that a Democrat can carry Texas the moment that the Associated Press or one of the television networks officially declares that Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico or gubernatorial hopeful Gina Hinojosa has won—and not a moment before.

And honestly, to assume that the big blue wave that’s being projected won’t happen is probably better for my mental health. I was saddened when the 2016 and 2024 elections did not permanently force Trump out of politics and put a woman in charge of the country for the first time. I was dismayed at how close the swing states were in 2020, considering how terrible Trump’s presidency had been.

My advice for TNR readers and other liberals would be to assume that Democrats win 48 or 49 Senate seats, 225 House seats, and nothing major in Ohio or Texas. That’s not a prediction; it’s an exercise in setting expectations at a realistic but low level.

Here’s a second reason to be wary of the polls: They are creating expectations that the mainstream media might use against Democrats. In January 2025, if you told reporters at AP, The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, and other centrist news outlets that Democrats were going to win 225 House seats and 49 Senate seats in November 2026, they might have been skeptical Democrats would do that well. In January, I wrote a piece that was titled “Amazingly, the Democrats Have a Shot at a Senate Majority,” reflecting how unlikely that seemed even nine months ago.

Now, polls and election forecasts based on those surveys are projecting a much stronger showing for Democrats. The “median outcome” of the election is 242 Democratic House seats and 52 in the Senate, according to FiftyPlusOne, an election site run by G. Elliott Morris and other alums of FiveThirtyEight. Other sites view it similarly

If Democrats fall short of these projections, even if they win 229 House seats and 50 in the Senate, I am quite confident the mainstream media will revert to its preferred approach to covering politics: centrism/false equivalence/balance/both sides/“independence.”

This is nonsense, of course. Trump is an incredibly unpopular president, so disliked that Republicans are struggling to win in Texas. He is also an authoritarian figure bent on eroding democracy, including the freedom of the press. But the mainstream media is still eager to cast itself as above the fray, neutral, and certainly not opposed to a president trying to destroy its industry. If neither Talarico nor Hinojosa wins, the media will likely not cover this election as the decisive rejection of Trump that it almost certainly will be.

So for now, I’m taking the polls seriously but not literally, to borrow a formation from earlier in the Trump era. I am confident that Republicans will do worse in Kansas, Texas, Iowa, and other red states than usual. I am sure that some Democrats will win by larger margins in many swing states than seemed possible two years ago. But I will be delighted and surprised if there are Governors Bottoms, Crowley, and Hinojosa or Senators El-Sayed or Talarico. It could happen, though. The polls in 2026 look as rosy for Democrats as 2008. They were right back then. They could be right again.

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ICE Is Everywhere and Acting with Impunity

For years Republicans were preferred on the handling of immigration and securing the nation's borders. Yet the Felon and his Josef Goebbels-like henchman, Stephen Miller, have pushed brutality and cruelty as ICE has run amok and mistreated immigrants and citizens alike with impunity and no accountability whatsoever,  When ICE abuses are challenged, ICE and DHS lie about abuses, always blaming the victims of ICE violence even when video evidence reveals the lie.  The result has been that support for the Felon and Republicans among Latinos has cratered - personally I cannot grasp how Latinos ever voted for the Felon in the first place - and the brutality towards children and deliberate family separations have repulsed many white American citizens.  Rather than detaining criminals ICE has seized landscape workers, maids, restaurant workers, construction workers, farm workers and workers at meat packing plants who have no criminal charges and in many cases have worked in the USA for years and collectively paid taxes to support the government now hunting them down. Of course, the Felon also continues to spread the lie that non-citizens are voting in U.S. election even when no evidence can be produced. A piece in the New Yorker looks at ICE abuses:

It has taken the Trump Administration less than two years to make violent encounters with federal immigration agents a regular fact of American life. On a single day late last month, a citizen and a noncitizen—one in Illinois, the other in Texas—became the most recent examples of this new reality. That morning, in Evanston, a Black man walking to a pharmacy was left injured and bleeding by the side of a road after a group of ICE officers, mistaking him for an immigrant “fugitive,” threw him to the ground and tried to handcuff him. Once the agents realized that he was a U.S. citizen, they said that they offered him “assistance,” then drove off. A few hours later, in Austin, an ICE officer shot a Venezuelan delivery driver in the back as he tried to flee in his car. He was detained, and partial paralysis had set in before doctors removed the bullet, several days later. Last Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced that it was charging the man with assaulting the officer who shot him.

Almost as alarming as the incidents themselves has been the government’s refusal to acknowledge a pattern of abuse that is clearly metastasizing at the Department of Homeland Security. Since Donald Trump took office last year, agents from D.H.S. have shot at some two dozen people in the United States, killing six of them.

[I]n South Padre Island, Texas, Ruben Ray Martinez, a twenty-three-year-old U.S. citizen, was shot and killed by an ICE officer—something that the government didn’t disclose for nearly a year, until American Oversight, a nonprofit group, obtained the incident report. In one week this past July, ICE agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had lived in this country for thirty-five years, raising a family and running a building company, and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a twenty-five-year-old Colombian with a wife and toddler. These incidents were documented as officer shootings. But how, for instance, should news outlets categorize the death, on July 14th, of a Mexican man visiting family in Florida, on a tourist visa, who was hit by a tractor-trailer as he ran from immigration agents?

Not only has no ICE officer been federally charged in these deaths, but the agency has made a habit of casting blame on the people it has appeared to victimize, turning impunity into another form of aggression. The most common claim is that immigrants attempting to escape arrest are “assaulting” officers and, in particular, that motorists are “weaponizing” their vehicles. In many cases, video evidence seems to contradict such accounts; in others, officers weren’t wearing their body cameras. The Times found that the Administration had filed assault charges against more than five hundred and fifty people and that, in about half of the roughly four hundred cases that have been resolved, “juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them.”

Because the federal government has largely forsworn—and, indeed, actively blocked—independent investigations of its agents, states have tried to bring their own cases.

This all comes at a time when ICE arrests have reached a record high—nearly fifty-one thousand in August alone—with agents conducting operations nationwide at hospitals, at airports, and outside schools. Past calls by Democratic lawmakers for D.H.S. agents to end the practice of wearing masks in public were ignored, and this summer the department announced that it would be purchasing for its personnel twenty million dollars’ worth of gloves that deliver powerful electric shocks. Flush with cash from Congress, D.H.S. is planning to hire five thousand more ICE officers by the end of the year.

Given the lack of accountability at D.H.S., it should come as little surprise that Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE, has taken the lead in prosecuting one of Trump’s principal obsessions: searching for evidence that noncitizens might vote in the midterms next month. Noncitizen voting is virtually nonexistent, as D.H.S.’s own figures show. Since last year, on the President’s orders, the department has pursued some sixteen hundred voter-fraud cases, only a hundred and sixty of which even led to arrests.

Over the summer, Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of Homeland Security, announced that some sixteen thousand noncitizens were on the voter rolls in Nevada. But a subsequent review by the Nevada secretary of state’s office of a list of voters provided by D.H.S. found that they were all U.S. citizens.

Deploying government agencies without regard for facts or consequences is, of course, a hallmark of authoritarianism. Last week, it emerged that the White House used part of the D.H.S. budget appropriated by Congress to make ads that celebrate the President. They carry a disclosure that doubles as a warning: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.” 

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New Fox Poll—a Disaster for Trump

A new Fox News poll came out last week that is a disaster for the Felon and his sycophants who have been a study in corruption and incompetence. The Iran war - a war of choice that was poorly planned - and the resulting soaring prices combined with the Felon's repeated statements that "affordability" is a hoax have severely eroding support for both the Felon and the larger GOP.  Throw in the lawlessness and cruelty of ICE operations that have Latino support for Republicans plummeting and its a toxic mix for Republicans to surmount as they find themselves increasingly have to defend congressional seats long thought to be "safe." The Felon's unchecked corruption and self-enrichment are the icing on the cake.  A piece at The New Republic looks at the poll results and the alarming message for Republicans.  Yes, much can happen in the coming 30 days, but if this trend continues - or better yet, worsens - November 3, 2026 could be a much deserved bloodbath for Republicans.  Critically, those who oppose the Felon need to get out and vote, preferably early and in person, to make sure the bloodbath occurs, No one can be complacent.  Here are highlights from TNR.

“If you look at that Fox News poll, he’s ahead by seven points in the state of Texas,” Fox anchor Ainsley Earhardt lamented on Friday, adding: “How is that possible?” The “he” is Democrat James Talarico, who leads Republican Ken Paxton in Fox’s striking new poll of Texas. This shocker prompted Earhardt’s guest to warn: “Texans have to wake up!”

In truth, both Fox figures are slightly overstating matters. The poll does show Talarico up by seven points among registered voters, 53–46. But it shows his lead is much tighter among likely voters, 51–49. The latter might matter more.

Still, Talarico’s lead among both groups is remarkable in a state where no Democrat has won statewide in decades. What’s more, the poll’s internals help shed light on Trump’s role in bringing about Talarico’s lead. Here the news for Trump is very bad, and it captures something essential about the winding-down Trump era.

Let’s start with Trump’s approval among Texans. The Fox poll finds Trump badly upside down at 44–55—remarkable in a state he carried by 14 points in 2024. Drill down, and it’s worse: Trump’s approval is underwater with non-college voters (47–53), meaning he’s losing the working class, and Latinos (38–61). He won the latter by 55–45 two years ago.

And here’s a surprise: Trump is even underwater with Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA, or “non-MAGA Republicans,” at 46–53. Why does that matter? The Fox poll sheds light here too: Only 50 percent of non-MAGA Republicans are “extremely interested” in the election, which lags behind Texas likely voters overall (62 percent), and even further behind Democrats (67 percent).

Though MAGA Republicans are enthusiastic, a nontrivial number of GOP voters, alienated by Trump, may peel away and stay home.

Critically, this dovetails with the Talarico campaign’s theory of the case. Talarico is winning around 10 percent of Republican voters in the Fox poll, versus only 1 percent of Democrats going to Paxton (not a typo). This is driven by Talarico getting 22 percent of non-MAGA Republicans.

In addition to getting more than one-fifth of non-MAGA Republicans, Fox finds Talarico winning nearly one-fifth of conservatives, almost exactly at parity with Paxton among non-college voters—Talarico is getting half the working class!—and edging into the requisite mid-60s with Latinos. His 79 percent of Black voters probably needs improvement, but a big tent appears to be forming. . . . .Many are exactly the voters who would have supported Senator John Cornyn, and didn’t understand why Trump ordered them to vote for corrupt adulterous dirtbag Paxton in the primary. Talarico’s ads, Rocha notes, often echo attacks on Paxton from Cornyn’s primary ads.

Let’s be clear: None of this means a Talarico victory is remotely assured. This is absolutely on a knife’s edge. Talarico has led in most polls, and some quality surveys have found his lead significantly larger than Fox’s two-point likely-voter lead. Yet the averages have the race within three points. That’s very, very close. We’re talking about Texas here.

But for now, at least, what’s happening seems to confirm some basic insights about the slowly expiring Trump era. The Trump coalition is fracturing due to his peculiarly terrible misrule. Inflation, tariffs, and war are alienating working-class voters. His subjugation of the GOP into his own personal cult is alienating non-MAGA Republicans. His violent ethnic purges are driving away Latinos. The Latino shift to Trump—which was never the durable realignment observers discerned—has come undone . . . . His corruption and dictator-megalomania are badly alienating independents.

All of which might be creating the conditions for a large anti-Trump, anti-MAGA coalition to come together, a coalition perhaps broad enough to swamp Trump-GOP rigging efforts. Crucially, Democrats are now outperforming in Texas in ways that could overwhelm the GOP gerrymander there. It all hints—let’s hope—at the very broad anti-corruption, anti-authoritarian coalition that ousted Viktor Orbán in Hungary earlier this year.

If Democrats can win the House and/or the Senate with such a coalition, it will have the party’s back in constraining Trump as the era of Late Stage Trumpism sputters out during his final two years. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First—and again, it’s all on a knife’s edge—that coalition has to really show up, and candidates like Talarico have to put this election away already.

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