Normally, a presidential year brings out marginal voters that do not show up for midterms. This is why a normal political party normally loses power in normal midterm elections. Donald Trump is not a normal president, and nothing about his presidency has ever been normal, so we should not expect things to go normally.
The so-called midterm penalty is real and well understood by political science. The party outside the White House always frames the midterm election as a referendum on the president, and it does measure voter sentiment towards the most visible representative of power in Washington, DC, particularly in regards to the economy. Americans like checks and balances on power, so they tend to check and balance power in midterm elections.
Unless.
This has all been understood since at least 1960, when Angus Cambell, a social psychologist who influenced the formation of the public opinion research industry, published “Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change” in Public Opinion Quarterly. Campbell assumed that “off-year congressional contests must always present the electorate with a less intensely charged situation than the presidential elections which precede and follow” (emphasis added).
Whether Republican or Democrat, the out-party must avoid activating the in-party’s peripheral voters. Threats of criminalization and violence, for example, are a great way to motivate peripheral voters “whose level of political interest is lower but whose motivation to vote has been sufficiently increased by the stimulation of the election situation to carry them to the polls”, Campbell wrote.
Democrats cannot stop core Republican or Trump voters, those “whose level of political interest is sufficiently high to take them to the polls in all national elections, even those in which the level of political stimulation is relatively weak”, from voting. They have not avoided motivating peripheral Republican and Trump voters, indeed they have done everything possible to activate those voters in 2026.
Campbell died in 1980. He would have advised Democrats to lower the temperature this year. “It is very unlikely that a political situation which heightens the public’s sense of the importance of choosing one party-candidate alternative or another will favor these alternatives equally”, he explained. “Increases in turnout will consequently be accompanied by shifts in the partisanship of the vote” — in other words, Democrats need low turnout to win.
At the time I am publishing this post, it appears that early voting turnout is high. This does not necessarily translate into victory for Democrats, according to Campbell. Negative partisanship is the most under-appreciated, and misunderstood, force in American politics. Turn the negativity up to 11, and you will increase overall turnout, but you will not increase your chances of winning a midterm election. A strategy of ‘owning the chuds’ can backfire.
Generally, the more moderate candidate always fares better in a generic midterm race. Voters will punish candidates they perceive as extreme. In a 2018 article in American Political Science Review, Andrew Hall and Daniel Thompson analyzed US House races from 2006 to 2014 and found that nominees perceived as extreme decrease their party’s share of voter turnout. Perceptions matter, so Democrats leaned into the public perception Trump extremism thinking they could increase their share of the midterm vote today.
They leaned too hard. Democrats have treated Trump’s second term as a permission slip to be as threatening and activating as they please. The broader progressive ‘movement’ of NGO networks, activists, and Hasan Pikers has apparently taken over the party. There are few adults in the room. Instead, there is talk of intended tyranny: of packing the Supreme Court, of arrests, of personal destruction for political thoughtcrimes.
Here is video of Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed explaining that white kids have it easy in life compared to “brown kids”. He is talking about Pete Hegseth, calling him a bench-warmer (“ride the pine”), but imagine what those peripheral white Trump voters in Michigan make of El-Sayed, here, and ask yourself whether they are more or less likely to vote in this election for hearing him talk like this.
If I held a casting call for a candidate to terrify and annoy and activate peripheral Trump voters, I could not do better than Abdul El-Sayed. He complains that his family — which seems to consist entirely of members of the Muslim Brotherhood — gave him too little love and attention as a child. The message received by peripheral Trump voters is not what he intends.
Here is Elissa Slotkin, the sitting Democratic US Senator from Michigan, announcing her plans for future prosecutions of Republicans to deter young conservatives from getting involved in politics. “I want them to be, like, ‘Lord, that might bring me a ton of problems.’” Is the peripheral Trump voter is reacting to this talk from Sen. Slotkin in the privacy of the ballot booth today? I don’t know, but it would not surprise me if that is the case.
Democrats have made it clear they will use any majority to instantly launch criminal investigations into everything and everyone associated with the Trump administration. “We’re not going to wait for a new administration. We’re going to kick right into oversight and investigation mode. It’s urgent,” Rep. Jared Huffman, D-CA, said in June. “But it’s a long list; we’re going to be very busy.” Show them the man, and they will show you the crime.
Rep. Hakim Jeffries has been singing this same tune for two years:
“The one thing that should be clear to all these Republican extremists, and sycophants, and the people who are either actively involved in corruption, violating the law, engaged in extrajudicial activity, is that the statute of limitations for any crimes being committed now [is] five years,” Jeffries said in December.
“It will extend well beyond the end of the Trump administration.”
We are going to see how this kind of talk impacts the turnout performance of peripheral Trump voters. We will be able to compare the final results tonight with what was projected by all the months of ballyhooed poll results that assume the electorate will resemble the 2008 Obama coalition.
Democrats are still stuck in the past, and now they are too angry that it is over. As a result, the entire progressive apparatus has spent the whole midterm cycle activating their opposition, the exact thing they do not want to do in a midterm election. If polls are way off the mark outside the deeply-blue urban areas, which is what I believe to be the case, it is going to be quite a night that Democrats brought upon themselves.
Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens has provided America with one last, final great helping of peripheral Trump voter activation. Since she endorsed Mike Rogers against Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan on Sunday, Stevens has been subject to a campaign of vindictive character assassination from the Democrats, the media, and the progressive left all at once. Democrats are showing every peripheral Trump voter what the party is made of, these days. It could indeed be quite a night.
If The Polls Are Off By More Than 3 Points, The Republicans Will Still Control Congress
Overall, the conversation at CNN is pretty much what you would expect, right now. Democrats are leading generic ballots and state polls according to the same polling firms that were off by 3 points or more in multiple previous election cycles. On that note, Chief Data Analyst Harry Enten made sure to give viewers an important caveat this week.