This may be the hardest election cycle to analyze in my lifetime.
I have been watching elections since the 1956 Dwight Eisenhower-Adli Stevenson race.
Yet, with everything I have lived through and studied, I find this campaign deeply frustrating and puzzling.
I could make a case for a blue tsunami: high gasoline and diesel prices; a seemingly endless, inadequately explained war; and intense dislike of President Trump by the great majority of Democrats. All these indicate a Democratic victory night of historic proportions.
And yet…
My good friend Barry Casselman, who has been a great observer of Minnesota politics for a generation, just wrote an article pointing out that the fraud scandal is so enormous the Republicans have a real shot at winning Minnesota’s U.S. Senate, attorney general, and secretary of state seats. He also notes that to everyone’s surprise (including mine) incumbent Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who should be winning easily, has a close race even according to the Democratic polls.
In Iowa, we clearly have tough races for governor and senator. Yet, President Donald J. Trump just visited and announced the largest steel plant in America with thousands of jobs for rural areas. This had strong, positive coverage in the Iowa media.
In Maine, where Democrats pinned their hopes on beating the last statewide Republican in New England, some vicious nasty person just painted a disgusting attack on Susan Collins’s campaign headquarters. It could push her into a sympathetic lead with her fellow citizens, who know that as chair of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee she can do a great deal for her state.
In Texas, we have a candidate with an easy record to attack, and the Democrats have a candidate who says things like God is nonbinary and there are six genders. Maybe Texas has changed enough to vote for a nut cake left-winger with weird values, but my hunch is that Attorney General Ken Paxton will end up winning by 4 to 5 points.
Elections are determined by turnout, not by polls. I remember when the liberal Detroit newspaper had Republican candidate John Engler 19 points behind the incumbent Democrat governor on a Saturday — and Engler won decisively three days later. I don’t think that many people changed their minds. I think the liberal poll was designed to demoralize Republicans and keep them home.
If President Trump focuses the next 35 days as intensely as Harry Truman in 1948 he may well increase turnout and win the arguments enough to have one of the greatest off-year surprises in American history (and maybe the most consequential).
Remember that Truman was so far behind that Gallup quit polling. But the American people did not quit listening.
The third-quarter economic growth rate is now 5.1 percent or better and real wages are starting to rise. The amount of money people have kept in their family budgets through the One Big Beautiful Bill is astounding. It is reflected in the continued consumer demand. The Trump administration has lowered the cost of pharmaceuticals for the first time in modern times.
Big government socialism still loses decisively when matched against small business, free enterprise, and private sector job creation. Socialism does dramatically better than big government socialism, but when people look at what the Democrats would really do they lose ground.
Despite every complaint, the GOP is still in the hunt — and the election is far from over.
My tea leaves are too confused for me to read them, so I am just going to continue working to save the country from those who would guarantee two years of investigations, impeachments, and decay.
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I think we'll do better than expected, if the people running the elections walk the straight and narrow, out of fear their past dirty tricks will be exposed.
We shall know soon enough.