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As the 2018 elections approached, President Trump found the perfect issue to reverse the usual pattern in which the president’s party suffers a midterm blowout at the polls.
Acting on the advice of his pollsters and his own infallible political instincts, he warned voters that a “caravan” of murderous immigrants was headed through Central America to the United States, ready to lay waste to our country.
“Every time you see a Caravan,” he tweeted two weeks before the election, “think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws! Remember the Midterms!”
It didn’t work. The election was a rout: Democrats won back control of the House (gaining 41 seats), flipped seven governorships, and netted hundreds of seats in state legislatures.
With midterm campaigning now in full swing, it’s worth remembering what happened eight years ago.
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Despite the general chaos emanating from the administration in Trump’s first term, relatively speaking, things in the country at the time were going okay. Inflation was low, the economy was creating jobs, he hadn’t started any new wars, abortion was still legal in much of the country, and almost no one had ever heard the word “coronavirus.”
Yet voters still went to the polls in extraordinary numbers — turnout was higher than in any midterm election in over a century — to give Donald Trump a hearty smack in the face.
The difference between 2018 and 2026 is that not only has Trump become an even more repellent personality, his actions have made everything worse. In fact, it’s hard to imagine what more Trump could do to enrage the electorate and ensure his party’s defeat in November.
It’s enough to make a vulnerable Republican member of Congress ask if Trump wants them to lose. As one GOP operative told Politico, “Everything is made more difficult by the nonsense coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” But if it were just “nonsense,” it wouldn’t be so bad. What Trump has done is much worse.
A comprehensive agenda to alienate voters
The simplest explanation for why the president’s party almost always loses in the midterms is what political scientists call thermostatic politics: Like an old curmudgeon constantly complaining about the temperature, voters are perpetually unhappy with what they have and want to adjust the thermostat. Whoever gets elected president, the next time they get a chance to vote, they say “Ech, I don’t like this, let’s go in the other direction.”
That tendency acts as a midterm election baseline; how intent voters are on reversing direction depends on all kinds of factors, including both the president’s policies and conditions that are out of his control. But the first year-plus of Trump’s term has been extraordinary in all kinds of ways, all of which have been unpopular.