WHERE WE ARE IN THIS COUNTRY BEFORE THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS
Our country is at a crossroads in 2026 as the midterms are about to take place. We are living through this turning point moment in history.
Trump was narrowly voted into power in 2024 by Americans who wanted to have better lives – lower cost of living, no more wars, exposure of corrupt elites. Trump has made a mess of it all.
He put in a cabinet full of kooks and incompetents. He enriches himself and his family every day and puts his name on vanity projects and taxpayers foot the bill. It’s pay to play and corruption on steroids with Trump as the mob boss president of America. He has massively damaged our country. DOGE. Tariffs, Iran War, ICE, the big billionaires bill, all of these are bad for most Americans.
If Putin had hired a hit man, a domestic terrorist, to wreck our country from within, he could not have chosen a better, nastier, meaner, more corrupt guy for the job than Donald Trump.
Trump, along with Russell Vought of Project 2025, Stephen Miller and his gang of immigration thugs, the radical rightwing Supreme Court, the cowering do-nothing bought and sold MAGA congress, Fox News and other rightwing media, weak-willed law firms, businesses and even the silent former leaders of this country are all part of the co-conspiracy that has hit this country upside the head.
Well… maybe our fragile democracy needed to get smacked upside the head. Trump, and his administration, has exposed the weak places in our democracy and rule of law. If you burn it all to the ground maybe you can build it up better, stronger and more durable than before.
One thing we have learned for sure: Gentleman agreements don’t work when our leaders are not gentlemen anymore.
WHY I AM THANKFUL TO TRUMP
Crazy as it seems, I am at times really thankful to Trump and the MAGAs for being so awful, so over the top cruel, petty, corrupt and incompetent. I have written about this before. The worse it gets, the better it gets. Because Trump has carelessly damaged even the lives of his most ardent voters: farmers, Hispanics, Black men, young men. They thought he was on their side. Now most of them know better. The fact that he is a con man has finally! finally! broken through with many of these former voters. But it only happened because they were personally affected by his bad judgement and policies. If Trump had not damaged the farmers with his tariffs and Hispanics with his rabid immigration raids, he might still be above the low water mark approval rating of 30% where he is malingering right now.
I think history will recount how Trump set off his own backlash, this rebuke of himself and the MAGA party that is turning into a blue wave and possibly a blue tsunami. Turns out, Trump was and still is a really inept autocrat. Americans have figured that out.
Trump set off and then stoked the countermovement rising up that could reclaim, reinvent and rebuild this democracy to be stronger and more durable. America could become a role model for the rest of the world. A true multicultural democracy of the people, by the people and for the people.
All of us who read the REAL news understand the danger and the potential of this moment in history.
We know this election could be a rebuke of Trump and his nasty gang of MAGA juvenile delinquents.
This election could be America’s Throw the Bums Out moment. Like Hungary with Viktor Orban.
The needle is moving away from Trump and towards the Democrats.
But if the rebuke is not strong enough, the power of Trump and the MAGAs could remain high for the next two years making life more painful for Americans. If Trump is finally seen as an albatross, a weight that is taking his party down and everyone on the SS Trump is going down for real, then people will start to think ahead about their futures without Trump. More people will peel away to save themselves.
This will only happen if Americans exercise their rights on November 3rd or before- early is better than later.
18 MORE HOUSE RACES TREND TOWARDS THE DEMS
Cook Political Reports more House races trending towards the Democrats.
The structural advantages Republicans counted on to protect them from big losses in this election — a favorable Senate map, redistricting wins, and a huge financial edge — are no longer holding. Middling Republican enthusiasm, as well as massive defections from the Trump 2024 coalition’s Latino voters and independents, have turned many safe GOP seats into nail-biters. Meanwhile, Democrats’ willingness to crawl over proverbial hot coals to send President Donald Trump a message at the ballot box has been elevated all cycle and shows no signs of abating.
FLORIDA VOTERS WHO VOTED FOR TRUMP IN 2024 REPULSED BY HIS PAID POLITICAL AD
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark conducts focus groups to track the sentiment of Trump voters. Trump is playing an ad he originally used taxpayer money to put on the air. There was massive push back. Now he says he will be paying for the ads. Here is the report from The Bulwark:
“If you’ve watched the NFL or watched college football, you might’ve seen it around a little bit,” the focus group moderator began. They were immediately interrupted.
“Oh my God,” Ramiro, 58, from Miami interjected, clearly knowing what was coming.
Then we played the ad.
Bob shook his head dismissively before leaning back in his chair in apparent exasperation.
Others in the group made clear that they viewed the ads as an act of strongman narcissism. Their responses also pointed to a larger problem Trump is facing: He has become oversaturated, and the voters who have soured on him (including those who once supported him) grow more aggravated the more they see him. Here’s a sample of their responses.
Brenda, 54, St. Cloud:
It’s Trump, so it’s, like, talking the hell out of BS and trying to make himself look good all the time. And he’s always saying things that are not true. And it’s like he makes up numbers. . . . It’s despicable.
Dena, 53, Palm Bay:
He’s just power hungry. He just wants to be in control of everything and it’s just off-putting. It’s just off-putting, this control and power. It’s like a game.
Bob, 65, Spring Hill:
I saw that ad yesterday watching the game. I felt bad enough ’cause my beloved Philadelphia Eagles³ got beat by the Rams, then I had to watch that commercial—or public service announcement—I believe the only main way that would be good is if instead of “paid for by the U.S. government” it just said “definition of a narcissist.”
Paul, 63, Palm Coast:
The second that ad started and he started talking I literally just got nauseous, because I couldn’t wait for it to be over, ’cause he’s in your face with nothing but lies, and anything that he says now you know is just a lie. And it’s just hard to look at. . . . I need some Pepto-Bismol.
Eddie, 43, Miami:
He’s grabbing the best chapters from Communist countries and Communist leaders to apply that here so everybody’s distracted by this shit and he can do whatever he wants.
Ramiro again:
Trump right there, if you notice, wanna get rid of the socialists and the Communists. He has been the most socialist president we’ve ever had in the history of our country, okay? . . . He wants to control everything. He wants to have the power that Xi from China or the guy from Korea or Putin have in their own countries, and he wants to have it here, and that’s what he’s trying to show there. You know? But everybody’s caught on pretty much to his gig, you know?
These people voted for Trump in 2024, when this kind of messaging was a regular part of the Trump experience. Now they’re repulsed by it.
This is another sign of the shift in America away from Trump and an understanding by the American people that Trump is lying to them.
LONG TERM PARTY AFFILITATION PROSPECTS MAY ALSO BE SHIFTING
EVERY DECADE America undertakes a census. Our country redraws political maps, reallocating House seats—and, with that information, votes in the electoral college—based on shifts in population. Projections for the next census, in 2030, currently favor areas that today vote Republican. But red America’s demographic outlook is actually weaker than many think.
Reliably Republican counties skew older, but they have significantly higher death rates even after adjusting for age. The adjusted death rate in red counties was 16% higher than in blue ones in 2019. The gap had widened to 18% by 2024, and to 27% among the most reliably Republican and Democratic counties. People living in rural red counties are not as healthy. Longevity is different in red and blue districts: life expectancy in the most reliably Democratic counties is 80.7 years, versus 77.4 in the most reliably Republican ones.
This means deaths now outnumber births in reliably Republican counties for the first time since at least 1982. Natural population growth in solid-red counties fell to -2.0 per 1,000 people during the pandemic and is now -0.4; in solid-blue counties it is +2.8 (see chart 2).
Red America could still grow from migration. But The recent migration clampdown will hamper or even upend this form of growth.
Then there is domestic migration. There are more people moving from blue cities to red parts of America in the south. It is often thought to be evidence of a political realignment towards red America. Republican strategists think these newcomers are political exiles from blue states. They are supposedly fleeing high taxes, heavy regulation and progressive politics. But does that make them new reliable Republican voters?
Data from the Internal Revenue Service show that the fastest-growing red counties draw an unusually large share of newcomers from politically blue territory. In 2022-23 more than 20% came from solid-blue places and around 40% from competitive areas. They might be moving to red districts but that does not mean they leave their personal values and beliefs behind when they move.
This seems already to be affecting voting patterns. Before 2016 fast-growing red counties leaned more Republican than slower-growing ones. That has now flipped: slower-growing red counties lean more Republican, and GOP support in faster-growing ones has weakened.
This realignment is playing out in the midterm elections. It has helped put Talarico in play for a Senate seat in deep-red Texas and made a re-election bid by Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, so likely in Georgia that the Republican Party has stopped its funding efforts for that Senate race as well as Roy Cooper’s race for the Senate in North Carolina. If this continues, Republicans may stop celebrating the exodus of blue folks from up north to red districts in the south.
We shall see.
IS THIS AMERICA’S THROW THE BUMS OUT MOMENT?
We shall see.