The Briefing, Vol. XIV, Issue 38
Sept. 28, 2026
This week:
- Beware: Democrats’ unpopularity won’t help Republicans
- Sullivan jumps into the lead, but short of 50 percent
- Susan Collins leaps ahead in Maine nailbiter
Outlook
The hour is getting late for the midterm elections. Early voting will soon be underway in some states — and if you’re planning to get an absentee ballot, you’d better do it quickly.
The polling looks quite bad for Republicans, and does the overall political environment — everything you would expect in a president’s second midterm. Think back to 2006, when George W. Bush’s Republicans lost the House and Senate, and to 2014, when Barack Obama’s party lost an incredible nine Senate seats and set the stage for the Trump era.
Republicans keep consoling themselves with a narrative about the unpopularity of the Democratic Party. They shouldn’t.
Current polling points to an average net-unfavorability for Democrats of about minus-15 points, according to the RealClear averages. In September 2014, Gallup had Republicans at a minus-17 point net favorability. Pew Research had Republicans at minus-16 point net favorability, compared to a net favorable +1 point for Democrats. Yet when it came time to vote, Republicans ran the table that year, winning their largest majority in the U.S. House since 1928 and a net of nine Senate seats, defeating five incumbent Democratic senators in the process.
How did this happen? The lesson is that in 2014, Republicans were more self-critical and thus had lower ratings, but that didn’t make them less likely to vote for their party. Democrats may be similarly situated now.
Senate is key: So Republicans cannot afford to lean on such “copes.” What they should be doing — and to some degree what they already are doing — is spending down every penny they have to save as many Senate seats as possible, because Democratic control of the Senate will be key to any moves to abolish the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court in any scenario where they win the presidency in 2028.
As we have noted previously, President Trump has never had to govern without a Senate majority. As a lame duck president in 2027-2028, he would lose all leverage on legislation and appointments, were Republicans to lose the Senate in the coming midterm. It could be crippling for his presidency.
But even more importantly, much-speculated attempts by Democrats to engage in real power-grabs — for example, abolishing the filibuster, creating new states to cement their majority, adding multiple liberal justices to the Supreme Court, all the stuff that would really blow up the country — depends most of all on their controlling the Senate at the key moment. Because Senate terms last six years, every seat salvaged in a bad year accumulates toward the total going into the next presidency.
Senate 2026
Alaska: A New York Times story landed last week about former Rep. Mary Peltola’s (D) fits of rage and degrading treatment of staff, including wishing (by text) that a board member for Planned Parenthood “dies of a botched abortion.”
Meanwhile, a Trafalgar poll shows Sen. Daniel S. Sullivan (R) leading very narrowly, 47 to 46 percent. The decoy Republican candidate whom Democrats put on the ballot in order to confuse voters, Daniel J. Sullivan, gets 3 percent.
This is the second poll in a row showing Sen. Sullivan with a lead, but it is not enough to win with a plurality — he will either need a majority or he will have to win based on second and third-choice preferences on the ranked-choice ballot among the four top finishers from last month’s primary election..
Maine: Pro Publica, a George Soros-funded leftist journalism non-profit, published a story strongly insinuating that Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) had steered military contracts to a company, and that her staff demanded $500,000 in donations to her SuperPAC in 2020 in exchange. The piece also suggested that she and other politicians in both parties had been investigated by the FBI.
The story was based entirely on an interview with a contractor informant facing a long prison term at the time, whom the FBI found unreliable. Collins has directly denied all allegations, saying she was never a target of the FBI’s investigation and claiming that her staff had provided investigators with all materials they had requested about the contractor’s case.
Meanwhile, a new New York Times-Siena poll shows Collins opening up her largest lead yet, 49 to 46 percent, over opponent Troy Jackson (D), after trailing for the first several months of the race. Collins may yet manage to repeat what she did in 2020, outperforming the polls by a meaningful margin.
New Hampshire: Their actions — in particular their decision to reserve millions in ad buys — show that Republicans perceive an opportunity in the Granite State, where former Sen. John Sununu (R) is taking on Rep. Chris Pappas (D). But that suggests that they see something not reflected in nine of the last ten polls of this race that had been released as of this writing.
Ohio: For an example of how big spending by a superPAC can affect a close race, watch this ad, narrated by detransitioner Soren Aldaco. Aldaco, who is female, was forced into an irreversible gender transition as a child after a doctor had seen her for “less than 20 minutes.” She suffered badly from a botched double mastectomy and later went back to representing her self as a woman.
She recounts her story in the ad in the context of former Sen. Sherrod Brown’s (D) support for transgender procedures on children. The resulting ad is forceful enough that Brown felt forced to respond publicly, which says quite a bit on an issue Democrats generally try to avoid in public.
The latest poll, taken mostly before the ad hit shows Sen. Jon Husted (R) narrowly trailing Brown in a statistically tied race, 45 to 46 percent.
South Carolina: This race may need a little bit more attention from Republicans. Trafalgar, a Republican pollster based in South Carolina, has Darline Graham Nordone (R) leading Annie Andrews (D) by just one point, 43 to 42 percent.
