The most important US midterm trends I’m seeing

‘Voters seem mad that the establishment isn’t elevating their concerns enough.’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/ReutersView image in fullscreen‘Voters seem mad that the establishment isn’t elevating their concerns enough.’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/ReutersThe most important US midterm trends I’m seeingMolly Jong-FastThe one I worry about most is voter anger – which both parties are not taking seriously enough

That chill in the air you are feeling is not the weather, it is the Republicans freaking out about the 2026 midterm elections. Midterms are always referendums on the incumbent, though the party in power usually would rather they weren’t.

This midterm feels less like a referendum on Trumpism than a dirge. It’s easy to see how Republicans got here, lulled into thinking that their guy, Donald Trump, could once again defy political gravity. Trump certainly thought he could.

When it became clear he couldn’t, Trump tried to defy political gravity by federalizing elections and messing with mail-in voting (many would call this cheating) or redrawing the map to gain seats in states like Texas (many would also call this cheating).

Even Trump at his peak couldn’t defy diesel at $6.50 a gallon, and Trump is no longer the deft faux populist he was in his first term. Bored, his eyelids often droop and his mouth often becomes slack during his PM meetings.

Read moreIn a political environment like this where Democrats have about a nine-point advantage, even some of the redder parts of the country seem very much in play. Even some of those redrawn seats in Texas may stay in Democratic hands.

Trump’s mail-in voting plan has been foiled by six and half supreme court justices, the political reality is beginning to sink in and that political reality is looking like a doozy. Turns out doing the exact opposite of what you campaigned on is not that popular. Here are some of stories I have noticed emerging this midterm election cycle.

One of the things I noticed when interviewing political candidates for my podcast Fast Politics was that the cost-of-living crisis looks different in different places. In Maine, a candidate for the second congressional district, Matt Dunlap, told me his voters were worried about heating oil prices. That’s because diesel hit a record national average of $6.51 this week and both diesel and heating oil use a very similar chemical compound.

Maine also starts getting cold in October, so heating oil is a major expense for residents. Bobby Pulido, a Texas congressional candidate and Tejano singer, told me that one of the things that voters in his 15th congressional district are worried about was beef prices, which are about $7 a pound. But Texas cattle ranchers are also not happy about the administration importing beef from South America.

I’ve seen more than a few internet fights about the left v center divide in the Democratic party but there are candidates who represent both the left and the center. These are candidates who have been endorsed by the Blue dogs and Bernie Sanders.

They are populist moderates running in purple(ish) districts. I’ve talked to a lot of Democratic candidates who describe a political atmosphere which fueled by voter rage is not left v right as much as down v up.

These candidates include Pennsylvania’s Bob Brooks, Wisconsin’s Rebecca Cooke, Montana’s Sam Forstag and Ohio’s Brian Poindexter. All these candidates are either very involved in their unions or, in the case of Cooke, in a union family. They are centrists and populists, something that at least theoretically shouldn’t coexist.

Iowa has two major elections this cycle – in both the Democratic candidates are polling ahead, and in both the Democrats are running in an “up v down” framing. But the reason that Iowa, a state Trump won by 13.2 points in 2024 and 9.4 points in 2016, is so deeply in play this cycle may have more to do with environmental contamination than inflationary pressures. Iowa is in the middle of a cancer crisis; it has the second highest rate of cancer in the US. For people over the age of 50, it’s 10% higher than the national average.

Thomas Frank wrote about how Republicans in Kansas used culture war issues to get working-class people to vote for Republicans, who then enacted pro-oligarch legislation. Well, weirdly, Kansas has emerged as a focal point this cycle.

The Wall Street Journal reported Roger Marshall, a Republican senator, was met with boos, hisses and jeering at the Kansas state fair Senate debate. He is running against Adam Hamilton, a popular Democrat and mega-church pastor. Recent reporting details Marshall’s predatory behavior regarding debt collections for his gynecological practice. The Cook Political Report recently shifted the race from likely Republican to lean Republican, which for a state Trump won by more than 16 points is kind of striking.

In less than two years Republicans have gone from shocking bravado to desperately begging for votes. Vance went on the rightwing tech-bro podcast all in to ask voters to “give us another chance, or give us another couple of years, to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years”.

In Iowa at a rally for Republicans where Senate candidate Ashley Hinson didn’t show up, Vance pleaded with the crowd. “Whenever you hear me talk during this midterm campaign, I’ll say Rome was not built in a day because we know there’s a lot of work to do.”

And on X, Matt Gaetz, a former Republican congressman, posted: “Bro we need your vote. I hate the war too. But the Democrats want to trans your kids.” It was such a clear distillation of the Republican closing message of these midterms: we didn’t do any of the stuff you elected us to do but Democrats want to … and then you can insert any of the culture warrior tropes that the party has bantered about.

There are other trends, I’m seeing. The one that I worry the most about is voter anger. In 2018, we saw a rejection of Trumpism but voters didn’t seem as furious. It feels like both parties aren’t taking voter anger seriously enough.

Sure, voters want to kick out Republicans, we can see this in the polls, but voters seem mad that the establishment isn’t elevating their concerns enough. Datacenters and government corruption are issues that 80% of voters support action on. If the establishment fails to address these issues with authenticity and zeal, both parties are going to have real problems.

Molly Jong-Fast is the host of the Fast Politics pod, contributing writer for the times and an analyst for MS Now