Although there may be still more than two months to go until November 3rd, 2026, the 2026 midterm election has already made history in its own small way. After cycle after cycle after cycle defined by virulent disagreements about which side would win, 2026 has been characterized by something different: real, wide-ranging consensus. Across the whole span of the political spectrum, from the most arrogant Republican operatives to the most radical wings of DSA, everyone to speak on the midterms lately has accepted the same basic truths: that Trump is deeply unpopular, the GOP is in a massive hole, and Democrats are at least threatening to win in places that they haven’t won in a long, long time. The House, despite all the very real success of the Republican gerrymandering campaign, is a fait accompli. The Senate, as shocking as it might be given the map, is a true tossup. The backlash is real and a wave is coming, as mediated by power of polarization, candidate quality, and Hasan Piker. Amen, amen, amen.
From one perspective, it is quite strange that this election, of all elections, is the one to finally have a ho-hum and largely agreeable discourse surrounding it. From another, it makes all the sense in the world. Even if the possible outcomes on tap this year (Blexas!) are far more momentous than anything that was in play over the past few cycles, the idea of the GOP falling behind after these 19 months fits squarely within a wide beliefs in a way that the ideas of a neutral 2022 or even a Trump victory in 2024 didn’t. Within the GOP, Trump loyalists can simply say that it’s simply a result of his name not being on the ballot like in past midterm cycles, while those rare few anti-Trump far-rightists can pin their party’s woes on his betrayals of the so-called American First movement. Those on the left, meanwhile, hate Trump more than enough to understand why anybody might also hate him; right now, they’re just hoping they won’t wake up to see that their leads in Texas, Ohio and Alaska are all just a dream. It’s all so coherent; so legible; so easy to explain in a way that doesn’t require the observer to truly reconsider their underlying beliefs.
It is, in other words, a lot like the leadup to the 2025 election cycle, when our last careful, mediated, and widely accepted understanding of how far the anti-Trump backlash would go ended up underestimating Democrats by double digits across the board.
Then, as now, the pre-election expectations and polling fit entirely with a certain conception of the anti-Trump backlash. A close race in New Jersey and a high-single-digit Democratic advantage in Virginia both stood as examples of a blue environment overcoming the Republican-friendly local factors (the presence of an unpopular Governor Phil Murphy and a popular Governor Glenn Youngkin respectively). Neither looked set to be a world-beating result even in that context, but that was about what was expected from a damaged Democratic Party that didn’t look like it was going to beat the world anytime soon. But then the actual results came in, and they showed a degree of anti-Trump backlash several gears higher than what the consensus said was occurring or would even be possible. The political world was shocked, the pollsters hedged a few points towards Democrats, and then everyone moved on to focus on the next big story, simply leaving one of the most dramatic systemic polling errors in recent memory in the past.
Perhaps this is warranted. But perhaps—perhaps—it is not. Ever since that fateful night last November, an ever-convincing case that even the wave-level numbers we are seeing for Democrats right now are just the party’s floor rather than its ceiling has been building up. It is a case that says that what occurred in New Jersey and Virginia could end up being the rule, not the exception, and that an already-satisfactory situation for Democrats could become even stronger, making 2026 a true double-digit tsunami that outdoes even 2018. It is one that promises a moment of historic, exquisite irony, where Republicans are felled by the exact same forgotten voters that drove their own overperformance in 2024, all for the exact same reasons that those same demographics abandoned Democrats for Trump.
And now, we do not need to guess what it might look like at the federal level. As of last week, all we need to do is look at the primary results in Alaska, where the GOP quietly received a result so mortifying that it raises serious questions about their ability to defend either chamber of Congress this November.