I spent six years as a press secretary on Capitol Hill and 25 years in media and public relations. Those jobs required a deep understanding of trends, gauging the mood of ordinary people, and analyzing economic data — whether people could afford to pay a little extra or were looking for ways to spend less.
You learn to sense where public sentiment is heading and how much of it comes down to what’s in people’s wallets. I’ve also studied and worked on campaigns since the 1980s, and I have never seen a landscape like this midterm election or a storm so perfect.
At the risk of repeating every political pundit, James Carville was 1,500% right — as Donald Trump might claim. It’s the economy, stupid. Always. That’s because prices are the nearest and dearest thing to the average voter, and their main connection to politics. When groceries, gas, health care, and electric bills climb, voters look for someone to blame or someone to help them.
Whether that’s fair will be debated forever. But it’s how elections work. And it will always be that way.
What’s different this year is that Democrats have fused affordability with corruption, and they’ve done it flawlessly, in a way that has eluded them throughout the Trump era, which began in 2015.
We’ve been told for decades that voters overlook corruption if they can still afford their groceries and summer vacation. It wasn’t a coincidence that when the economy started to unravel in 1973, voters began paying more attention to Nixon’s Watergate scandal.
This year, the economy and Trump’s overt corruption have been joined at the hip. In several polls, corruption has run neck and neck with the economy as the top issue. When I saw that corruption had landed at the top of some polls as the midterms headed into the final stretch, I knew Democrats were likely headed toward unprecedented success.
If you understand PR, you know that Trump’s corruption is different because it doesn’t need a lengthy explanation to the average American, as Watergate, Iran-Contra, or Russiagate did. In other words, voters didn’t need a news article to understand it.
They saw the wrecking ball hit the East Wing to make way for a White House ballroom. They saw the photos of the grand staircase in the Qatari luxury jet and an overdone gold Oval Office. They also saw Trump in photos surrounded by tech and AI billionaires. And they saw those same CEOs pour massive amounts of money into campaigns while aggressively pushing data centers into the backyards of communities.
Good political imagery like that needs no distillation, and all of this imagery is devastating.
Then there’s that famous do-nothing current Congress. Republicans have accomplished almost nothing, and what they’re known for is deference to Trump. When you have no record to run on, you reach for culture-war attacks, like the ones aimed at trans kids or the attempts to paint James Talarico as effeminate in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed as a terrorist in Michigan.
But this time, with voters’ household budgets bleeding and corruption so easily identifiable, people aren’t falling for the distractions. Costs and corruption outdo cruelty every time.
Then there’s Trump himself, who refused to stay off the campaign trail. Every unscripted, deranged rally reminds independents and moderates why they’ve drifted away. He has left the GOP with its hardcore base and little else. And even they are metaphorically and literally walking out on him.
To top it off, Republicans have fielded a very weak class of candidates, and nowhere is that clearer than in the Deep South. Two examples, Darline Graham in South Carolina and Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi — Ken Paxton is in a league of his own — are counting on built-in advantages that may not hold this year.
Hyde-Smith has held no town halls. Graham is a really bad campaigner and is woefully inexperienced. Both have tied themselves tightly to Trump at a moment when that’s poison with swing voters.
Democrats Annie Andrews in South Carolina and Scott Colom in Mississippi are the kind of candidates who can exploit that weakness. In a normal year, those seats are safe. This isn’t a normal year.
Early voting backs this up. Turnout has been huge, including among Black and Hispanic voters, and that’s exactly the pattern you’d expect when the energy is on the Democratic side. Democratic voters see a massive opportunity to confront Trump – finally. Moderate voters see a chance to redeem themselves after being lied to by Trump, and economically challenged and frustrated GOP voters – not the rich 1% – are crying for help.
So here’s my call. Democrats will win in Michigan, North Carolina, Maine, Georgia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska. They will edge out wins in South Carolina and Mississippi, and I expect them to be competitive enough elsewhere to push the total to 55 seats. That’s a sweep, and I’m saying so a day before the votes are counted.
The House is harder to call because those races are so local, and the unknown effects of redistricting, among other variables, but Democrats should land around 230 seats, on the higher end, if this perfect storm spreads — metaphorically expanding storm warning zones with a Sharpie like Trump did.
Perfect storms are rare in politics, but this is one. An unpopular president, a stalled economy, corruption in plain sight, a weak GOP candidate class, a record of nothing to run on, and an electorate that has had enough, with early voting soaring. When all of those line up, the usual rules don’t apply.
Tomorrow night may be a long one for Republicans. I’m crossing my fingers, toes, legs, and arms, saying 10 Hail Marys and 10 Our Fathers, knocking on wood, and avoiding ladders and black cats for the next 48 hours.
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