Trump’s MAGA majority under big threat in mid-term elections says Paul Garver
The US polity is entering a heightened period of danger to its basic institutions, stretching from the mid-term election in November 2026 to January 2027, when the newly elected Congress would normally expect to be seated.
It is increasingly obvious that unless the Trump administration can successfully rig the elections, the MAGA majority will be swept away by a “blue tsunami” of voters fed up with the status quo. National polling now suggests that Republicans will lose control of the House and that the Senate may end up narrowly divided between Republicans and Democrats. Recent polls suggest that Republican candidates in their strongholds like Texas and Ohio are lagging behind their Democrat challengers.
This will not be because the Democratic leadership is popular or because it is offering an attractive alternative to MAGA policies. Polls indicate widespread disgust and mistrust of both political parties. Republican candidates are begging Pres. Trump not to come to their states to campaign for them. Similarly, many candidates running as Democrats posing serious challenges in strongly Republican districts do not want traditional Democrat leaders to campaign with them.
At the same time, “democratic socialism” is polling quite favourably, at least among traditional Democratic voters, especially among younger people and people of colour. Polls are of course not votes in the real general election. Fortunately, most actual members of DSA who won Democratic primary elections are running in strongly Democratic districts and will win easily in November. “DSA-adjacent” Senatorial candidates like Angie Nixon in Florida and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan face greater obstacles. Having narrowly overcome enormous negative campaigning from establishment Democrats in hotly contested primaries, they now face massively funded Republican opponents in the final elections. Democratic Senate leaders like Chuck Schumer seem uncommitted to their success in November, apparently preferring that Democrats remain the Senate minority rather than for Schumer to face more Leftist opponents in his own Democratic Senate caucus.
Trump appears to be cornered. His governing policies are increasingly unpopular. The failed war against Iran, resulting in soaring prices for petrol and groceries, is not helping him with his MAGA base. His vicious war against immigrant communities is alienating many of the Hispanic voters that helped him win in 2024. Trigger-happy masked ICE agents remind many Americans of the Gestapo, an impression reinforced by his delight in the recent election victories of the far-right Alliance for Germany.
But a cornered monster can still be lethal. Trump learned from his failed coup in January 2021 that even that debacle did not end his political career. After Trump’s re-election in 2024, he pardoned the leaders and foot soldiers of the coup, and his tame Supreme Court basically granted him immunity from criminal prosecution for his crimes.
Trump 2 has become even more dangerous and openly self-seeking than Trump 1. He accelerated the attack on his political enemies, purged the civil service, FBI and Department of Justice. He forced major law firms and universities to genuflect before his Majesty. His corrupt business transactions enriched him and his family by billions of dollars, while rewarding his oligarchic donors with massive tax cuts and favours. Top military leadership has been purged by removing many senior officers who are female and/or people of colour.
Other actions by Trump and his supporters have been directly designed to prevent his electoral loss in 2026 and 2028. The Voting Rights Act won by the civil rights movement has been gutted by the Supreme Court, opening the door to a systematic attack on Black political representation in the South. Congressional districts with Black congresspersons have been “gerrymandered” out of existence in Texas, Florida and other Southern states. There are constant efforts to reduce voting rights, including voting by mail, and, most insidiously, purging voter rolls of supposedly “illegal immigrants”. The Supreme Court recently allowed the use of corrupted databases to allow MAGA state officials to identify and remove such people (who, in practice, do not exist. One such effort in Nevada supposedly identified hundreds of thousands of illegal voters, which, upon legal objections, was reduced to a few hundred, not one of whom was shown to have voted illegally!).
The point of these interventions is not to identify actual illegal voters, but to muddy the waters and discourage legitimate voters thought to be against Trump. Speaking at a recent Republican mid-term convention, Trump explicitly urged his supporters to “cheat”. Shades of December 2020, when Trump telephoned a Republican state official in Georgia to demand that he “find” the 11,000 votes that he himself had lost by.
It is not possible to predict exactly how the Trump administration will try to rig the November election, or to annul its likely unfavourable results. The broad oppositional coalition that put together the No Kings Rallies is calling for a March to the Ballot Box to Vote Early on October 17. An Interfaith Alliance is organising a national bus tour to promote voting and protect the sanctity of the vote. Numerous organisations, including DSA Labor, are mobilising and training their members in election defence. The possible countermeasures to an attempted coup range from court cases to taking to the streets in mass demonstrations and large-scale civil disobedience. The cabal around Trump will likely be better organised than the comic-opera putsch at the US Capitol in January 2021. And a desperate Trump thinks he has little to lose from the most flagrantly illegal actions, having escaped unscathed in the past.
Recently, the US government paid for three propaganda ads directed at sports fans, featuring a belligerent Trump purporting to be heroically defending the nation against a socialist and communist takeover. These taxpayer-funded ads blatantly violated extensive US law. We might wonder why Trump chose to use taxpayer money when he has his own immense war chest available for political campaigning furnished by his billionaire donors. He thinks that he can now get away with anything no matter how illegal, since his docile Supreme Court majority has repeatedly accepted his assertion that the President is above any law.
Hubris comes before a fall. But only if we give it a shove.