Toward a post-Trump politics
From the clutter of midterm election poll results, it's possible sometimes to see new patterns of political support emerging.
The overall pattern, as it stands, makes some sense. As in the 2006 and 2018 off-year cycles, the Republican president's job approval had sagged to well below 50%. Polls at this point in the year showed Democrats competitive in states and districts that the president had carried by solid margins two years before.
Democrats ended up gaining 30 House seats in 2006 and 41 in 2018, ousting Republican speakers and, in both elections, installing Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). A similar result is expected this time, with Democrats needing to gain only three seats to win control, though Pelosi is retiring from Congress at age 86.
Such gains are not necessarily inevitable. Census redistricting ended up favoring Republicans. As Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini has pointed out, the summer polling understated Republicans' fall polling and November percentages in Senate races in 2014, 2018 and 2022. But he spots no similar move in polls conducted up through mid-September.
What I find striking is a sharp divergence in Senate polling between what have turned out to be seriously contested races in the North and in the South.
What accounts for the difference? One answer that quickly occurs is candidate selection. Trump effectively chose the Republican nominees in the Southern races.
Meanwhile, up by the Canadian border, left-wing and anti-Israel Democratic activists and primary voters have given their party's Senate nominations to candidates who, so far at least, are running behind former Vice President Kamala Harris's percentages in their states.
All of which looks like the beginning -- the birthing pains, you might say -- of a post-Donald Trump politics. The Republican polling firm Echelon Insights has been asking respondents whether they are "Trump-first" or "party-first" Republicans. In February 2025, a month after Trump's second inauguration and two months before his "liberation day" tariffs, Trump-first Republicans outnumbered party-firsters by a record 63% to 33%.
That was bound to decline at some point, and it has. This September, party-first Republicans, at 56%, significantly outnumbered Trump-first Republicans at 34%.
That inevitable process may have been sped up by Trump's stubborn preoccupation with issues of personal importance to him -- putting his name on the Kennedy Center or demolishing it, the ballroom and triumphal arch, cryptocurrency -- but of no value to the party or its voters, current and potential.
If I were a Democratic candidate, I'd consider plagiarizing the effective 2024 pro-Trump ad "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you" with "Donald Trump is for him/his, this Democrat is for you."
In the meantime, Republicans seem to be getting in the habit of nominating candidates suited to local terrain and emphasizing issues tailored to their states -- NFL commentator Michele Tafoya in Minnesota, seven-term congressman from a marginal district Mike Rogers in Michigan, and John Sununu in New Hampshire.
Gambling on many such candidates, as Democrat Rahm Emanuel did while heading his party's House campaign committee in the 2006 cycle, can be an effective way of expanding one's party to new constituencies.
In contrast, the Democratic Party today is saddled with a dominant faction, white college graduates, that demands obeisance to defense of wildly unpopular stands on cultural issues, from defunding the police to open-borders immigration to boys in girls' sports. Some even insist on sympathizing with the motives of those who launch armed attacks on synagogues.
Americans in the 21st century have, in increasing numbers, voted straight party tickets for or against candidates backing policies associated with George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump. How that works out depends on decisions not yet made and events that have not yet occurred.
Poll numbers have Democrats favored to win majorities in the House of Representatives and, by narrower margins, the Senate. But disparate regional trends suggest the Republicans may be getting a head start at what my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York calls "moving into the pro-Trump future."
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