I meant to make fun of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who, according to the Wall Street Journal, is planning a “State of the Force” address in which only servicemen who exhibit “impeccable grooming” and appropriate “waist-to-height” ratios will be invited to attend. Short little slobs like General Grant aren’t good enough for Pete. Besides, Grant fought for the wrong side, and could hold his liquor.
But that was two days ago, and it slipped my mind because–well, this kind of bullshit is quotidian in Trumplandia. Yesterday I saw that RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, gave a speech in which he promised to look into the possible harmful health effects of electromagnetic fields and chem trails (aka contrails, the water vapor trailing jet planes in flight). His audience applauded enthusiastically these contributions to numbskullery. What will it be tomorrow? Perhaps a controlled study designed to get to the bottom of whether stepping on sidewalk cracks is bad for anyone’s back.
As I’ve said before, the Daily Show performers get too much credit. All you have to do is roll the tape, then cut to Josh Johnson or one of his colleagues looking into the camera with a dazed expression.
Horse race journalism has a bad name, but if your own thoughts about public affairs don’t extend much beyond the prospect of getting rid of these buffoons, or at least limiting their power to do damage, there’s no hotter topic. According to my researches, the vibe is more favorable than the numbers. Republicans are nervous, Democrats expectant, but, regarding the House of Representatives, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report thinks there are 208 seats in which a Republican is favored, and 206 in which a Democrat is favored. This leaves only 21 “toss-up” races. The gerrymandering wars were in the end won by Republicans and had the effect of lifting the floor and dropping the ceiling for both sides. If Democrats were to win 16 out of 21 toss-ups, and have three more upset victories than Republicans, the next Congress would have 225 Democrats and 210 Republicans. No “wave” by standards developed back in the day when voters chose their elected officials instead of the other way around.
The situation is similar in the Senate, where in Cook’s view the Republicans, barring upsets, will have at least 47 seats, to at least 46 for the Dems, after the election. The majority, then, currently appears to hinge on the outcome in seven states: New Hampshire, Maine, Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska. Two years ago, Trump carried five of these states, which is the number Democrats likely must win for a majority. Trump has never lost four of the seven. In those four–Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska–his winning margins in 2024 were, in order, 11%, 14%, 13%, and 13%.
On the bright side, Cook has already put two Trump-state Senate seats in the “lean Democratic” column–Georgia, where incumbent Jon Ossoff is ahead, and North Carolina, where Democrat Roy Cooper leads in a race for a seat left open by the retirement of Republican Thom Tillis. It’s not impossible that the trend could spread, though if it does it will be to states considerably more Trump-friendly than Georgia and North Carolina have been. The battleground for control of the Senate shows just how unfriendly that terrain always is for Democrats. Trump lost the popular vote two out of three times, yet there are 25 states that he’s never lost. Of course those 25 states have 50 seats in the Senate, and right now all 50 are held by Republicans. With Trump in the White House, that alone is sufficient for a Republican majority.
Probably the “vibes” shouldn’t be completely dismissed. They are for sure enjoyable in the moment. It was pleasant for me to read the other day in The New York Times that what I had taken to be the stinginess of Trump’s super PAC, named MAGA Inc., probably has an explanation even more embarrassing to Trump World–namely, that campaign laws require ads to include the name of the payor, and Republicans worry any ad could be spoiled by the tag “paid for by MAGA Inc.” There are also an accruing number of telling little details like this one, from the same New York Times story:
On Tuesday Representatives Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, both Iowa Republicans, voted with Democrats to direct the president to end the war with Iran. Their votes came as [Ashley] Hinson, [the Republican Senate candidate in Iowa], boasted in a new television ad about how she had “worked with Democrats” in Congress.
[Vice President] Vance is scheduled to speak at a rally on Friday for Iowa Republicans–but Ms Hinson said she would not attend.
Two years ago, Trump won Iowa by 13 points. Ms Hinson, as the Times’s style sheet insists she be called, would have been there.
I have a theory about why Republicans are so nervous. It relates to their gerrymandering successes. The old-fashioned way of winning elections is to persuade people that you’re a better choice. Failing that, you can draw circles in different places, so that the same number of votes yields more seats and more power. The drawback to this method is that at some point the greediness leaves you more vulnerable than you otherwise would have been. For example, the “average” Republican district in a state might formerly have been rated R+15. But the effort to squeeze out some more Republican seats almost inevitably reduces the expected margin in the “average” Republican district–let’s say, to R+10. Most current polling indicates that, asked which party they want to control Congress, Americans prefer Democrats by 5 to 8 points. That’s enough to win a majority but not enough to crash through the gerrymandered dam. If the margin were to creep a little higher, however, an extra one or two percent could suddenly yield 3 or 4 or 5 more seats in just one Republican gerrymandered state–and there are a lot of Republican gerrymandered states.
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