|
 |
To commemorate PN’s 5th anniversary, this week we’re offering paid subscriptions at the special yearly rate of $40 (or about 16¢ per edition). This newsletter is only possible thanks to the support of paid subscribers. If you’re not already one of them, please sign up and keep us thriving for many years to come.
Thanks for reading, and here’s to the next five years.
Almost every psephologist and pollster believes the midterm election in 26 days will deliver Donald Trump a stinging rebuke.
Midterms are typically bad for the incumbent president’s party: In six of the past eight midterm cycles, the presidential party lost congressional majorities in one or both chambers. A seventh midterm, 1998, is moot because Bill Clinton had already lost both chambers in 1994; George W. Bush’s post-September 11 midterm of 2002 is the lone exception.
But recent developments suggest that Trump’s losses may extend beyond mere surrender of Congress.
 |
|
Trump is bleeding political capital across the board: among independents, non-MAGA Republicans, even among some of his most devout, red hat-wearing followers. A small but growing contingent of Republican politicians have also begun to openly criticize and even vote against Trump before the midterm results.
Should November 3 be the disaster for Republicans that analysts are predicting, Trump will morph overnight into something less than a lame duck president with a ticking, two-year expiration clock: he will become politically bankrupt in ways all-too-familiar to him as a businessman.
Political bankruptcy
The media routinely bandies around the term “political capital,” but three decades ago presidential scholar Paul Light defined its four components: party support, public support, electoral margin, and reputation.
Across each measure, Trump is hemorrhaging capital.
Party support. Although they are selfishly abandoning him to save their own political hides, a growing list of Republicans running for election or reelection, from Maine to Miami, are like rats abandoning the Trumpian ship.
Seven House Republicans recently voted to curb Trump’s Iran war powers. South Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar openly fumed about Trump’s reckless and dehumanizing deportation polices, which are turning constituents in her Cuban-majority House district against her. A “concerned” Susan Collins criticized Trump’s trade war with Canada because, along with spiking diesel-based home heating oil prices, Trump’s policies and unpopularity are jeopardizing her reelection bid.
And in ruby-red Texas — a state, like Florida, where Trump in 2024 enjoyed record-setting Latino support and where no Democrat has won statewide in three decades — departing Sen. John Cornyn and former Bush adviser Karl Rove refused to back Ken Paxton, Trump’s troubled nominee for Senate. Heck, even Paxton privately complained that Trump’