Twenty-five days before the midterm election, Democrats are poised to capture the House of Representatives, while Donald Trump’s unpopularity has also equipped them for a fierce challenge to Republican control of the Senate.
That’s the bottom-line assessment of Los Angeles Times political columnist Mark Z. Barabak, who returned to Newsmakers TV on Friday to analyze the national political landscape. The war in Iran, high gas prices and blatant White House corruption have created a “red undertow” for Trump-allied GOP candidates that may result in a “blue wave” flipping control of both chambers of Congress, he said.
In the House, Republicans currently hold a narrow 218-214 edge (with two vacancies and one independent), and Democrats are now favored to win a majority, giving them at least one platform from which to slow or stop the right-wing agenda Trump has rammed through a pliant Republican Congress in the first 21 months of his term.
The big surprise, politically, is that the Senate is also in play.
With Republicans holding a 53-47 edge, Democrats need to net four seats to gain a majority that is not at the mercy of tiebreaking votes from Vice President J.D. Vance. The effort breaks down this way:
Holds. Democrats first need to protect seats they already control in four purplish states — Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire — and current polling suggests their candidates are favored to do so.
Pickups. Democrats need to win North Carolina, where former Gov. Roy Cooper is heavily favored, plus some combination of Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Ohio, Texas and Kansas, all states now held by Republicans where polls show favorable opportunities to flip the seat.
“It is very much a reaction and a backlash against President Trump,” Barabak said. “I think it would be a mistake to misread this as, all of a sudden, people love the Democratic Party. They don’t. It’s a binary choice.
“People talk a lot about ‘negative partisanship’ … which basically means ‘I’m not crazy about my party, but I hate the other one even more.’ And that seems to be what’s going on this election.”
Barabak also offered an optimistic take on whether Trump can disrupt the election, despite the administration’s all-of-government effort to do so.
“I’m pretty confident it’s going to play out without utter chaos. I think that the guardrails, which Trump has tested time and again, have been holding so far,” he said. “So I think there’s so much awareness and consciousness around hijinks and these sorts of things that folks are going to double down to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”
Check out our full conversation with Mark Barabak on YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify or SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.
Image: AARP.