In what's promising to be the most jaw-dropping irony in political history, Democrats are laying the groundwork for the electoral whine of all time:
Donald Trump and the Republicans stole the midterms.
All the polls are showing a "Blue Wave" victory for the Democrats. Some Democrats are asking how any Democrat can lose. It's going to be a "bloodbath," a "wipeout," an electoral reckoning for Trump that is a decade in the making.
Or not.
There are several reasons the polls may be off, not least of which is that they aren't much more accurate today than they were in 2016, when many pollsters' predictions were way off. The wild card, then and now, is Donald Trump. Pollsters are usually very good at sussing out when a respondent is not being truthful. With Trump, it's guesswork. Trump consistently outperforms the polls, and there is no reason to believe that will change in 2026.
I believe it is very likely that if the Democrats win the House and Senate, it will be much closer than projected, with several races too close to call on Election Night and a chance that Republicans hold the Senate.
Democrats are still planning to allege Republican tomfoolery with ballots, registration lists, and outright fraud. And if they happen to lose the Senate, the cries of "stop the steal" from the left will be loud and long.
Democratic candidates and officeholders, who arguably have an even stricter duty than pundits to stick to the facts, have nonetheless joined in. “We’re anticipating the trouble he might create, the evil he might do,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in July. “Trump intends to repeat his playbook from 2020,” said Senator Adam Schiff that same month, “and attempt to deny any result he does not like.”
“We’ve got to win by massive numbers,” said Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on October 11. “Donald Trump has already threatened to do what he did in 2020, which is deny the outcomes of an election, and right now, he is president of the United States.” California governor Gavin Newsom declared that Trump is “going after the voting rolls, trying to purge those rolls.”
"The Trump administration has been on the warpath, especially after failing to pass the SAVE America Act, pressuring states to turn over voter rolls, flirting with sending immigration officials to polling places, and preemptively involving administration officials in the election process," writes Mark Halperin in The Free Press.
The Democrats remind me of what General Grant told his officers during the Wilderness Campaign when Robert E. Lee seemed to show up behind the Union positions on a regular basis. The officers were almost panicking at what Lee might do next.
"Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."
Trump's "double somersault" in 2026 is working just as well as Lee's tactics in 1864. What Trump and the Republicans are doing is perfectly legal, if not psychologically damaging to the electoral process. Is it necessary? There's evidence of fraud, but no evidence of massive fraud where tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of votes are cast illegally or stolen. It's just not there.
Democrats are now claiming the same thing, just through different channels. "Bogus" searches for illegal aliens on the voter rolls, attempts by the Feds to interfere in local elections, the threat of sending ICE agents to stand around at polling places; these are all hysterical overreactions to legal efforts to ensure compliance with federal election law.
After the election, if Democrats underperform significantly, we'll be treated to these arguments without a hint of irony. It will be like 2020 never happened, and Republicans are the only ones who cheat.
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