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.

   According to RealClearPolitics, in the South, Democrats have big leads in North Carolina (+8) and Georgia (+7). They narrowly lead in Texas (+2) and are only slightly behind in South Carolina (-3). In each state, they're polling far ahead of Trump 2024 benchmarks in North Carolina (Trump +3), Georgia (Trump +2), Texas (Trump +14) and South Carolina (Trump +18).

   Overall, these Trump +9 Southern states are averaging +3 Democratic in Senate races -- a big +12 Democratic swing.

   The picture is different in four states up on the Canadian border. Democrats have only narrow edges in RealClearPolitics averages in Maine (+2), New Hampshire (+5), Michigan (+3) and Minnesota (+4). These numbers are in line with 2024 benchmarks in Maine (Harris +7), New Hampshire (Harris +3), Michigan (Trump +1) and Minnesota (Harris +4).

   Overall, these four states that averaged Harris +3 are now averaging Democrats +3. No swing at all.

   What accounts for the difference? One answer that quickly occurs is candidate selection.

   Trump effectively chose the Republican nominees in the Southern races. He prompted the retirement of the occasionally anti-Trump incumbent Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and replaced him with the unknown Michael Whatley to run against a reputedly centrist two-term Democratic governor.

   He issued a late endorsement of scandal-prone state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas Republican runoff rather than incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and evidently never considered the young Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas), who ran third in the primary.

   After the sudden death of incumbent South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham in July, Trump encouraged his inexperienced sister Darline Graham Nordone to run for the remainder of his term and endorsed her to run in November for a full term.

   And while contesting the 2020 result in Georgia, Trump discouraged Republican turnout in the two January 2021 runoffs, which enabled Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Rafael Warnock (D-Ga.) to win 51% to 49%. Warnock won a full term against Trump-endorsed Herschel Walker by the same margin in 2022, and Ossoff seems headed for a bigger win this year.

That gives the two Democrats 20 years in the Senate from a state that didn't elect a Democratic senator between 2000 and 2021.

   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.

   Running closest to Harris is Democratic Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, who led primary polls by wide margins but won the primary by only 48.4% to 47.6%. A charismatic campaigner, he may have been hurt by bringing into his campaign the streamer Hasan Piker, who famously declared that America "deserved 9/11," and by responding to an attack on a synagogue in March by saying, "Hurt people hurt people."

   Running further behind Harris is Minnesota's Peggy Flanagan, winner of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party nomination, who, as lieutenant governor, has been attacked for failure to prevent the hundreds of millions of dollars of Medicaid fraud by Somali immigrants.

   The national spotlight has not been kind to Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) since he was selected by Harris for the vice presidential nomination -- his weak debate performance and the fraud perpetrated against his administration tarnished his party in a state whose many Scandinavian- and German-descended voters have been proud of the state's and the DFL's reputation for probity and competence.

   Local and personal factors help explain Democrats' apparent difficulty in nailing down Senate wins in northern New England. In New Hampshire, John Sununu, son and brother of governors, won the same Senate seat in 2002 and lost it in 2008. The centrist record of his brother Chris Sununu, governor from 2017 to 2025, has made him surprisingly competitive in a high-education, Trump-averse state, which national Democrats have deprived of its first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

   In Maine, Republican Susan Collins, after 30 years in the Senate, chairs the Appropriations Committee and has a moderate record, which helped her win reelection in 2020 by 51% to 42% after Democrat Sara Gideon outspent her two-to-one and led in every public poll.

   This year, Democrats nominated Graham Platner, Marine veteran and oysterman, though he turned out to have a Nazi tattoo, and his only oyster customer was his mother's restaurant. Forced out by allegations of sexual harassment, he was replaced in September by logger Troy Jackson, whose working-class credentials seemed stronger but who had finished only third, with 21%, in the June primary for governor.

   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, at least in the four northern Senate races mentioned here, 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."

   Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.

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