Some thoughts on the 2026 midterm from TPM Reader TS (Theda Skocpol) …

After two or three days of stupor and disorientation Donald Trump has reverted to form as predicted is reacted to his historic repudiation by leaning into the powers of the presidency to reassert power and dominance. So far, they are most assertions and visual, thin performances not so much of power but of aggression, which seem more risible because the power is so clearly draining out of him. Trump appointed Stephen Miller as his new White House chief of staff. Today he has offered the press secretary position to Dana White, CEO of UFC, the mixed martial arts promotion company, who Trump lauds as “the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior” who Trump is asking to take on the press secretary role with a series of MMA fighter “assistants” one or more of whom is associated with a Chechnyan warlord. We say “offered” because Trump seems to have offered White the job and then asked him via Truth Social to accept the job.

It now seems pretty clear that Scott Colom (pronounced c’l-O-m or like ‘cologne’ but with a final m instead of an n) is going to be the next senator from the state of Mississippi — not called yet but getting close. He would be the first Democrat elected from Mississippi since 1982 and the first Black senator since Blanche K. Bruce who served from 1875 to 1881. But one striking thing about the claims of victory from Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, which manage to be both aggressive and half-hearted, is that as far as I can tell she has yet to appear in public since Election Day. I’m not even sure she’s done any media call-ins. Her first Twitter comment was written in the third person, as though the staffer who wrote it couldn’t even bother to pretend it was Hyde-Smith writing it. This turns out to be a through-line continuing from the campaign itself.

We’re already wise to the way the building Blue Wave in 2026 exposed a number of Republican incumbents who simply weren’t ready for prime time as candidates but had gotten by pretty much unchallenged on Republican dominance of their states. Outgoing Senator Roger Marshall is the poster-boy for this dynamic. But Marshall at least mobilized late and mounted a campaign — a really comically bad campaign but still a campaign. Reviewing the wreckage of Hyde-Smith’s apparent defeat, it really seems like she was at best a part-time candidate and that really over-states her involvement in the election.

President Trump’s decision to replace Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (a rare beacon of competence if not good values) with Stephen Miller confirms the predictable Trump storyline. Always double down. For maybe 48 hours Trump seemed stunned and drifting. Now he’s coming to from the smelling salts of ambient chatter about his political legacy concluding in disgrace and failure. We can’t know the future. But this is why Democrats can have realistic hopes of a second strong election in a row in 2028. Trump is making the characteristic decision of force feeding the country what it just spit up. We know this about Trump: he reacts to being dominated, owned and mocked by casting around for ways to assert power and dominance. It’s as predictable with him as night follows day.

Yesterday, I wrote about JD Vance’s push to make the 2026 midterm a referendum solely about the Iran War. Things were going great, he claims, substantively and politically, until the Iran War brought everything crashing down. We’re seeing that a number of Democrats, albeit for different reasons, want to push this line too. Yesterday Eric Levitz at Vox interviewed data guy David Shor who said something similar. If you’re not familiar with him, Shor’s in the group who argue that Democrats need to jettison hot-button social and cultural issues that make them unviable with big parts of the electorate — immigration, gender and sexuality, guns, policing, etc. This is one of these claims that is demonstrably accurate to a significant degree in electoral terms, but more complicated when it comes down to applying it to the practicalities, commitments and mutabilities of the actual world. In this case it leaves him wanting to place overwhelming emphasis on the Iran War since Democrats put up the biggest midterm landslide in half a century and mostly didn’t avoid hot-button issues, or at least not as much as people with this viewpoint said was required, for most of the 2026 campaign.

Here’s the discussion of this issue …

TPM’s Untitled Live Show (Name TBD) returns today at 2 p.m. Eastern. If you think everything to be said about the midterms has already been said, you might be right, but we’ve got thoughts and analysis nevertheless. We’re going to pay special attention to the non-politician winners and losers from Tuesday night. I hope you’ll join Nicole, Hunter, Derick, and myself this afternoon on YouTube.

I wanted to flag this critical data point: across the Deep South (AL, MS, SC, LA, GA) the percentage of the electorate made up by Black voters rose dramatically — by 3 percentage points in all those states except for, Alabama where it rose by 4 percentage points. For instance, in Mississippi, it rose from 30% in 2024 to 33% in 2026. Put differently, Black voters turned at out at 96% of their 2024 turnout whereas white voters managed only 71%. The impact of this gap showed up especially in Senate races in South Carolina and Mississippi. This was, needless to say, critical to Democratic victories throughout the region. Paradoxically the increase was greatest in Alabama which didn’t have a Senate race and lacked a high profile governor’s race, judged by national attention, though Democrat Doug Jones made it a much closer race against Tommy Tuberville than most anticipated. There was a closely watched House race where Rep. Shomari Figures (AL-2) retained his seat despite an attempt to gerrymander him out of it. These numbers can be compared to a stable share of the electorate in the Northeast and Industrial Midwest. So much of 2026 was a rebellion against Donald Trump and MAGA. Here it’s at least slightly different: all the evidence we have tells us this as a reply to the Callais decision in which the corrupt Court majority essentially struck down what remained of the Voting Rights Act and unleashed a string of rushed gerrymanders to eliminate Black majority districts across the region. How different this is is hard to say: SCOTUS is pretty much MAGA at this point. But it’s a distinct wave or tsunami within the larger one.

I’ve seen a few comments over the last couple days to the effect that our system turned out to be more robust, stronger than some of us feared. Trump tried to tamper with and rig the 2026 election. But he mostly failed. I would put it a little differently. We turned out to be — the American people — stronger, more robust than many of us feared. This may seem mawkish or merely semantic. But it’s more than that and the difference speaks directly to the current debates about accountability and how it should shape the next Congress and the next two years.

The singular lesson of the Trump Era has been that no system can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow and enforce the rules that govern it. It’s worth sitting with that for a moment. No constitution or system of laws and protections can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow the rules that govern it. Trump was faced with the big challenge that states control the administration of elections. But the White House came up with numerous quite ingenious angles to overcome those obstacles. It took an immense amount of work by voters, elected officials, judges, lawyers, countless Americans in myriad positions and professions to stop it. A governmental system provides a framework, a playing field. But as the authors of the federal Constitution debated and largely decided: there is no machine that runs of itself. It lives or dies, degenerates or perseveres, based on the people, the citizens who make it up.

The clearest signal from Donald Trump at the moment is the lack of any signal. His public comments have ranged from resigned to cooperative to boasting. His affect is disorganized, enervated, sometimes light. It’s one of the few times we’ve seen Trump seemingly unable to figure out how to react. This appears to apply to the whole White House.

We’re seeing Republicans wrestle their way toward a first reaction to Tuesday’s genuinely historic electoral collapse. We saw it most clearly, with a heavily “nationalist” tinge, in JD Vance’s Tuesday sleight of hand about Trump’s Iran War. Vance’s argument is that Trump Two was basically going great, both substantively and politically, until Trump launched his war on Iran back in February. So the problem isn’t Trumpism but not sticking to Trumpism with enough resolve. They only went wrong with the Iran War and even more Israel.

Let’s start by noting that Vance’s gambit is just warmed over TuckerCarlsonism, or TuckCarlsonism without all the charisma. That is, racial/religious nationalism which has a specific beef with both Jews and Israel as part of a broader argument that America is a white and Christian country where non-whites and non-Christians are at best guests. You see this in Vance’s frequent references to “heritage Americans” and attacks on “ungrateful” Blacks and non-white immigrants who should be kicked out of the country if they don’t express gratitude clearly enough. This is a reality that deserves a lot of attention from Jews who are rightly concerned about antisemitism of various sorts on the left. Vance is not only clearly an antisemite personally but he is signaling that he plans to use that animus as a central lever of his drive to power.