Victor Davis Hanson argues that the 2026 midterms remain unsettled despite Democrats’ historical and polling advantages.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The more we learn about the Democratic Socialists and the more that the Democratic Party feels they’ve already taken over the apparatus of the party and they’re going to join them, or at least they’re not going to oppose them. They’re going to be culpable or responsible for what these people say. And they’re saying all sorts of stuff. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson from the Daily Signal. Let’s have a periodic check on the status of the midterms that we’re now less than 80 days away from. The Democrats are riding high. They feel that historical trends, i.e. 39 out of the last 41 midterms, the end party in the White House loses seats. And there’s not very many seats a Republican can afford to lose. And they may lose the House and Senate. They’re already, I guess you would call it measuring the drapes, but in the sense that they’re already explaining how they’re going to go after the Trump family, the Trump family associates, cryptocurrency concerns, any hangers on people going to the Middle East and investing. They’re going to open it wide open. These are the people, of course, who never investigated the Biden family or Hunter Biden. That’s no excuse if there’s culpability. But nonetheless, you can count on a two year investigation of Donald Trump and a never ending impeachment inquiry and the end of the MAGA agenda. Should he lose the House and the Senate? Donald Trump is strangely confident. He now has finally hit on a strategy that he feels will work. And earlier I called it the Anaconda strategy, the idea that he is squeezing a debilitated Iran. In other words, the kinetic 40 days of bombing have left the nuclear military industrial complex in shambles. And this time he’s not just blockading. He’s not just having an embargo on goods. He is not just freezing the bank accounts of Iranian grandees. He’s not just debanking the entire country. He’s going to third parties and saying you and China and Russia and Europe have been trading with this country. Even while we were bearing the burden of defanging a potential nuclear renegade nation. And we’re going to isolate you. We’re not going to do business with you if you do business with Iran. And the Iranians now are crying foul. They’re saying we’re colonials. But what I’m getting at, after all that military damage from February 28th for the next 40 days and after all the blockades, they’re not able to withstand a renewed squeezing. And so time is actually on our side. The second part of this strategy is Donald Trump has now put the war on the back burner. He is saying that we don’t need to have ground troops. We might not even go in and bomb them again unless they egregiously attack an ally of ours or one of our carriers or ships. We have managed it now. The strait is mostly open. Strait is mostly open. And whatever the status of the nuclear stockpile or enriched uranium of the theocracy, it’s pretty clear they can’t get at it. Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah don’t seem to be getting money. They don’t seem to have enough rockets to threaten the Gulf states or Israel, at least to get through their missile defenses. And so we’re just going to concentrate, Trump thinks, on the economy. So what he is doing now is he and J.D. Vance are bombstorming the country and they’re starting to make headway. They’re not worried about the polls that show a generic seven percent Democratic advantage and betting odds and polls that say they’re going to lose the House because they looked at the recent primaries. El-Sayed, the candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for the Democratic senatorial seat in Michigan was was polling ahead 10 points and he scarcely won by a point and a half. Ms. Fong, the Wisconsin Democratic candidate for governor, was polling ahead 10 or 15 or 20 points. She lost and lost handily. Mr. Vindman, who was running for Senate in Florida, was polling ahead. He lost to a crazy, wacky Ms. Collins, who’s a Democratic socialist. So the point, excuse me, she lost to Ms. Nixon, a Democratic socialist. So what I’m getting at, the polls are worthless. And what we need to look at is what is the status right now? The war is starting to wane. If it should end or if the Iranians crack in the next 60 to 70 days, that would be a spectacular achievement. That Donald Trump at, you know, we tragically lost 17 Americans, but at a tolerable cost and blood and treasure, he ended a 50 year problem that seven presidents said was existential. You could not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. And the pressure that he’s put on them and the damage he’s inflicted would probably, in the next year or two, prompt a renewal of internal opposition against a theocracy that is bleeding. The second thing to remember very carefully is, as I said earlier, the redistricting, the red state redistricting and the Supreme Court prohibition on racial gerrymandering might give him an additional four or five seats. But the most important developments are money and the agenda of the new Democratic Party. Very quickly, Donald Trump has got a war chest of about $ 400 million, and he’s now going to use it. He says he’s going to use it all in his political action committees to help save the Republicans in the midterm. Elon Musk said that he is going to match dollar for dollar the Democratic oligarchy class that if they start to donate to in great amounts to Democratic candidates. So the money issue probably favors also like the redistricting and maybe the course of the Iran war that could wane and to be not an issue. But the most important thing to conclude is the Democratic Party. No one thought that the Democratic Socialists would ever try to absorb and even seem to succeed in absorbing the Democratic Party. Nancy Pelosi, Hekim Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, they’ve all said they have no problem with the Democratic Socialists, that it’s a big tent party and they’re going to help them win their seats. But the problem is once you have the money and the effort and the attention and you show what the Democratic Socialists are like defunding the Pentagon, defunding the police, opening the border, mass amnesties, warring on fossil fuels, isolationist foreign policy. The transgender issue reopened with biological men now by statute free to compete in women’s sports. It could go on and on. They want even want to destroy the Senate and the Electoral College, not to mention packing the court, ending the filibuster and bringing in new seats in the Senate by admitting new blue states such as Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. And so what I’m getting at is the more we learn about the Democratic Socialists and the more that the Democratic Party feels they’ve already taken over the apparatus of the party and they’re going to join them, or at least they’re not going to oppose them. They’re going to be culpable or responsible for what these people say. And they’re saying all sorts of stuff, not just anti-Semitic venom, not just anti-Israel venom, but questioning the very legitimacy of the United States government, the way that our founders created a legislative, judicial and executive branch, the Declaration of Independence. Our entire traditions, they’re saying, are flawed at their origins. They got worse during our maturity and now they’re got awful right now. That’s not a winning message. So the midterms are very much up in the air. Contrary to historical precedent, there’s still a chance that the Republicans can save both the Senate and the House.

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