Here is a basic theory of midterm elections. Voters notice prices. They blame whoever is in charge for them. Then they vote. The party in charge can argue with that chain at any of the three steps. It can say prices aren’t really high. It can say the high prices are someone else’s fault. Or it can try to make sure the people who are angry about prices stay home while its own people turn out. In 2026 the Republicans appear to be stuck mostly on the third option, and they have a lot of money to spend on it.
The situation, as John Paul Tasker laid it out for CBC News, goes like this. Donald Trump came back promising lower prices and no more foreign wars. What followed, in the first two years of his second term, was higher prices and a war on Iran. Inflation is running hotter than it was in January 2025, when he took office, and the Federal Reserve has just raised interest rates for the first time in three years. Researchers say his tariffs made affordability worse, and that without them prices might actually have fallen a little. Oil and diesel have spiked, partly because of Iran and partly because of the Russia-Ukraine war, which Trump said he would settle within 24 hours of taking office.
Asa McKercher, who holds the Hudson Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations at the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government, told CBC that Trump’s approval ratings are “historically low,” and “like below Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate.” One analyst cited in the piece calls Trump the most unpopular Republican president since Herbert Hoover. McKercher’s view: “Not only is Trump unpopular, but so are his policies, which have not borne out … any fruit.”
The identity shift
The cleanest sign that the first two steps of the chain are working is party identification. Gallup asks Americans which party they belong to or lean toward. For most of the past four years Republicans had a clear edge. In the second quarter of this year it was 49 per cent Democratic to 39 per cent Republican, a 10-point Democratic lead that matched the first quarter. According to Newsweek, Republicans led 47-43 at the end of 2024. In roughly 18 months that is a 14-point swing in the margin, which is a lot of people deciding they belong to a different team than they used to.
I think the thing to understand is that party ID is sticky in normal times. People don’t change it because of a bad week. When it moves this far, it tells you that a group of voters who thought the Republicans would deliver cheaper groceries and peace now think otherwise, and are telling pollsters so.
The money
Here is the Republican case, made to CBC by Mark Bednar, a Republican strategist who used to speak for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Trump still has huge support among his MAGA base, and he has beaten the odds before. The real problem, Bednar says, is an “enthusiasm gap”: Democrats are a lot keener to vote this year. And the fix is money. Trump alone has a war chest of roughly $400 million to spend in the last weeks of the campaign. (The chequebook advantage has been the main Republican hope for a while.)
“The Republicans have a huge financial advantage and that gives them the opportunity to actually get out there, get your message on the airwaves and tell your story as a Republican and prosecute the case against Democrats,” Bednar told CBC News. “The closer we get to these midterms, the closer the margins will be in some of these races.”
That is a coherent theory. The awkward part is that the money is meant to fire up Republican voters, and the main thing Republican candidates are doing with their messaging is getting away from the head of their own party. Trump keeps telling supporters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, has worked hard in the past to look like Trump’s ally. On Wednesday he put out an ad attacking Trump’s trade war with Canada. This summer Rogers said Canadians “have not been good partners.” In between, Politico found that just 26 per cent of Americans think the Canadian tariffs are the right thing to do. Susan Collins, in a close race in Maine, has said something similar about tariffs and has strongly hinted that she’d prefer Trump not campaign in her state. “I’m not exactly his favourite senator,” she said in a debate on Tuesday.
Then there’s the proposal McKercher calls a “gimmick”: $5,000 cheques to every adult if Republicans keep power. Treat it as a contract for a moment. Voters are angry that things cost too much. The offer is a conditional payment, owed only if the party they’re angry at wins. Inflation is the complaint, and the remedy is to pump a lot of cash into households. “There’s a sense of desperation there,” McKercher said.
The map
On paper, this year’s Senate map is bad for Democrats, with lots of races in Republican states. In practice, polls say those states are in play, as the Senate map has suggested for weeks. Kansas hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, and the Times/Siena poll and others suggest it might. CBC points to farmers, who have paid heavily for the trade war and say diesel prices have doubled under Trump.
Texas is the headline. Trump won it by nearly 14 points in 2024. Now Times/Siena has Democrat James Talarico six points ahead of Republican Ken Paxton. Fox 7 Austin reported it as 51 to 45, up from a 47-47 tie in June. University of Texas’s poll tracker lists it as 49 to 43 among 615 likely voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points. Either way, the gap is six. Some experts told ABC13 the result doesn’t match other polls now in the field. That’s a fair caution.
Hispanic voters go a long way toward explaining the shift. In 2024, exit polls had Trump winning 55 per cent of Texas Hispanics. YouGov now finds 34 per cent backing Paxton, a 21-point fall, and about 64 per cent disapproving of Trump. This comes after nearly two years of immigration raids that removed some violent criminals and also people who had long been settled in their communities. The Latino swing back toward Democrats shows up in national polling too. White Texans also say they are much more likely to vote for Talarico, a moderate Presbyterian seminarian, than they were to vote for Kamala Harris. In Ohio, which Trump won comfortably three times, Democrat Sherrod Brown leads by three points with a campaign pitch of “Life is too expensive.”
The schedule tells you the same story. Late in a campaign, a party usually sends its leader to must-win swing states. Trump has been to Ohio, Texas, Alabama and Oklahoma, and he was in Texas again on Wednesday rallying for Paxton. “This could be a perfect storm, where it’s not just a blue wave but a blue tidal wave or tsunami for the Democrats,” McKercher said.
For the record, $400 million buys a lot of television time in Alabama. Normally you wouldn’t need any.