Republicans are beginning to sound the alarm about the 2026 elections. The concern stems from a Texas state Senate race in a district President Trump won by 17 points in 2024, but which shifted 14 points toward Democrats. That’s a 31-point swing.
Republicans closely watching these races have noticed that a bunch of special elections, ranging from Texas to Mississippi to Georgia, deep red areas, are moving toward Democrats.
According to the markets, 63% of people say the Republican Party will retain control of the Senate. 37% believe the Democrats will take control. But those are the worst numbers for the Republican Party this cycle. Those numbers seem to be converging, and the hopes for the Democratic Party in this election cycle are rising.
The markets also suggest 78% of people believe Democrats will win the House, with only 22% saying Republicans will retain control.
A Harvard-Harris poll shows that Democrats are +4% on the generic congressional ballot, which is a bad number for Republicans. In the Senate, there are a bunch of vulnerable seats for Republicans, including Maine, where, according to various betting markets, Susan Collins is now the underdog in that race.
In North Carolina, a Republican Senate seat that will be vacated by Thom Tillis appears to lean toward the Democrats. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown could easily pull that race off. So the Democrats could get to 50 seats in the Senate before you know it. There are other seats in Alaska, Iowa, and Texas, which are normally a reach for Democrats, but in a really bad year, you could see them move in the direction of the Democrats.
What can Republicans do about it?
There is some mildly encouraging news for Republicans in the Harvard-Harris poll.
According to the poll, 56% of Americans say that the economy is shrinking. It is not. 66% say inflation is above 3%, which it is not. Only 38% of Americans say the economy is on the right track. Yet Americans are split roughly 50/50 on whether the economy is weak or strong.
There’s a serious informational gap here. The administration needs to do a better job of fighting that informational gap.
The most unpopular Trump policies with regard to the economy are on tariffs and inflation. Those two things are related because the president keeps shouting over and over and over about lowering the interest rates. That leads people to worry about inflation, because inflation has not yet been fully conquered, and because the president keeps touting his tariffs, and they have had an impact on businesses in the United States, that’s unpopular, too.
If the president simply stopped talking about tariffs so much, or if he were to stop putting such public pressure on the Federal Reserve to shift the interest rates, it would probably have some impact on how Americans think about the future of inflation in the country.
But there’s something else here: If you want to know why Democrats are creating absolute chaos in places like Minneapolis, the answer is they are trying to undermine President Trump’s top issue. President Trump is most popular on the immigration issue. 51% of Americans still approve of President Trump’s response to the anti-ICE protests. 47% still approve of his crime policy when it comes to his most popular policies. Deporting criminal illegal immigrants is approved by 73% of Americans. 67% of Americans oppose sanctuary city policies. 60% of Americans say Democrats are encouraging resistance to ICE, and 57% of Americans oppose them doing that.
Americans are pretty evenly split on whether they want to see only criminal illegal immigrants targeted or whether they want to see broader sweeps. With that said, targeting criminal illegal immigrants is what most Americans approve of , which is why, of course, Democrats are trying to necessitate that ICE and Border Patrol go after illegal immigration more broadly.
When it comes to PR efforts, trotting out various members of the administration to say over and over and over again that every single person is going to be caught and deported from Home Depot is bad politics.
Forget about whether it’s right or wrong for a second. It is not smart politics. But the Trump administration is starting to do the right things on PR with regard to Minnesota. Tom Homan has made an offer to Minneapolis, saying, “Give us your criminals,” which is the right policy.
From a PR perspective, targeting criminal illegal immigrants in the United States is an 80/20 issue with Republicans on the side of the 80 and Democrats on the side of the 20.
Democrats are trying to drive the perception that the Trump administration is focused indiscriminately on everyone across the country who is an illegal immigrant. They’re trying to instill the belief in Americans that tyranny is upon us. The plan for the Democrats is to up the ante, to undermine President Trump’s popularity on his most popular issue.
Watching the legacy media and so much of our culture attempt to foster what feels like BLM summer part II, that you have to demonstrate solidarity with criminally illegal immigrants, is not going to work because the BLM issue in 2020 had more purchase in the American imagination, given America’s racial past, then the idea that criminal illegal immigrants are somehow victims of a system that’s trying to pick them up and deport them.
The winning issue for President Trump is immigration. And if he can take control of the narrative, the GOP will bear the fruit.
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