For more than 40 years, Charlie Cook has been the gold standard for election forecasting and political trend analysis. In 2021, he stepped back, and Amy Walter, a top political analyst in her own right, took over the newsletter, which was renamed The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. But Charlie, now 72 and living in Maine, still writes a must-read column in National Journal. Earlier this year, Charlie was much more cautious about the midterms. Now he thinks President Trump’s unpopularity will decide the outcome.
For the last few years, I’ve been part of a regular Zoom call with a couple dozen former Carter administration officials, plus a few journalists and others. Started by Les Francis, a former senior White House aide to Carter, it’s called Carter Old Farts Amiable Discussions, or COFAD. Last Sunday, Cook was COFAD’s guest. The following is excerpted from his remarks.
Why Midterms Punish the President’s Party
Donald Trump’s job approval ratings are usually in the mid-to-high 30s. The history is clear. Unless a party has a president with an approval rating in the 60s, as Bill Clinton did in 1998 and George W. Bush did in 2002, it will suffer losses. That party might lose just five or six seats, or it may lose 50 or 60, as Democrats did under Clinton in 1994 [when they lost 54 seats] and Obama in 2010 [when they lost 64 seats]. The post-World War II average is around 26 seats lost by the party in the White House.
This is just as natural as it could be. People in a president’s party might be satisfied, complacent, a little disappointed, or deeply disillusioned, but they are rarely pumped up and energized, thinking, “I can’t wait to go vote.”
Conversely, people in the opposition party, particularly in this era of hyperpartisanship, hate anything the president is doing. They hate everything he might even think about doing. Everything. They want to relitigate the last election. They can’t wait to vote.
And then you’ve got this little slice of pure independents, and I’m not talking about the 45 percent of all adults or the third of all registered voters who claim to be independents but consistently lean toward and vote for one party. I’m talking about the three to six percent who don’t lean toward either party and are legitimate independents. They tend to be very fickle. They read, watch, and listen to the news less than partisans. They tend to get buyer’s remorse and turn on whoever they voted for two years earlier.
There’s nothing mystical about why midterm elections turn out the way they do. But there were some really good reasons to think this one might not be as bad for Republicans as one might expect, given Trump’s low approval ratings. There are so few competitive districts these days that there’s not much elasticity. Look at where Republicans are right now—basically 220 seats. That’s barely more than the minimum majority of 218, assuming all the seats are filled. An ironclad law of politics is you can’t lose a seat you don’t have. Because Republicans had so few seats to begin with, they didn’t seem to have much downside risk. But notice how I’m making this point in the past tense. That’s the way it looked several months ago. No longer.
Why the Senate Is Different
The Senate’s just a different animal. We’ve had four elections in a row where the party that gained seats in the House actually lost seats in the Senate. Go figure. I don’t think there’s really a relationship, but Senate results are a lot more idiosyncratic. With only a third of the Senate up every two years, it matters which third is up. Usually there are only a half-dozen, maybe ten, competitive races; each race counts more, and there is often less of a consistent pattern. And a lot of individual decisions come into play.
Let’s say you had Joe or Jane Generic Republican in the White House instead of Donald Trump. Or suppose you had a Democrat in the White House.
Would [Republican] Thom Tillis in North Carolina run for another term? Probably. Would Roy Cooper [now leading in the polls] be running? Probably not. Would Brian Kemp have run in Georgia against Jon Ossoff? Good chance of that. Might he have won? Good chance of that.
If Donald Trump weren’t in the White House, there’s a pretty good chance that John Cornyn would be the Republican Senate nominee right now and wouldn’t have a care in the world about the general election. That illustrates just how idiosyncratic the Senate is, and those factors alone could conceivably cost Republicans two or three seats.
So, theoretically, this shouldn’t have been shaping up to be a truly horrible election for Republicans. When Trump was just an unpopular president, I thought Democrats would probably gain around the average of 26 seats in the House—or maybe fewer—and pick up a couple of Senate seats. That would have been a reasonable forecast.
How Trump Changed the Forecast
But then Trump went from unpopular to toxic, and then to radioactive. It was almost like he was targeting his own base. Let’s see: tariffs and trade wars exacerbating inflation, particularly hurting rural America; the war with Iran sending diesel prices to record-high levels; gasoline approaching record-high levels; heating oil heading up toward record levels.
Ron Brownstein had a great statistic recently. Only 17 percent of new pickup truck buyers are Democrats. Something like 60 percent are Republicans, and the rest are independents, but probably independents who lean Republican. So Trump is going straight at the people who have been the backbone of his movement. We’re seeing [good] numbers for Democrats in places that haven’t voted for a Democrat since Moby Dick was a guppy.
The State-by-State Picture
The Alaska thing is real. [Democrat Mary Peltola is leading in the polls.] I was a naysayer about Kansas for a long time, but I think the race there is really competitive.
In Iowa, I’d be stunned if Rob Sand didn’t win the governorship, and the Senate race is basically 50-50.
In Ohio, it’s like, wow: Sherrod Brown [is ahead], and the Democratic nominee for governor is running even or slightly ahead.
In Texas, I think Talarico will pull it out. I like that Jonathan Martin line about Ken Paxton having more baggage than DFW at Christmas time. Republicans managed to nominate the one guy who was perfectly capable of blowing Texas.
The [trend lines] seem magnified in places Republicans have controlled for a long time. So there is just no place else for an angry electorate to point fingers at.
Where Democrats are struggling is in blue and purple states: Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire.
In Maine, had Democrats simply nominated Janet Mills, I don’t think Susan Collins would have had much of a chance. A Mills-Collins race would have been about Trump. A race between Troy Jackson and Collins will be about Jackson, and he’s underwhelming.
If ever there’s a state where you need somebody between the 40-yard lines, it’s Michigan. You don’t want someone [Abdul El-Sayed] on the ideological four-yard line. I’m not talking about ethnicity. I’m not talking about religion. I’m not talking about any of that. If Democrats had just stayed between the 40s [with their Senate nominee], the year would have gotten them over the top.
In New Hampshire, it’s not that Chris Pappas, the Democratic nominee, is particularly flawed. But people in New Hampshire are very familiar with the Sununu family, and they know that Sununus aren’t Trumps. The only two blue states in the country with Republican governors are Vermont and New Hampshire, and they both have a tradition of not nominating Tea Party types. New Hampshire is really purple. When you elect Republican governors five elections in a row, and the legislature has been Republican for years, that’s really not a blue state.
And I’m wondering about Minnesota, where Democrats went with the lieutenant governor. She is not as mainstream as some of the alternatives.
Beware the Junk Polls
We’re going to see some surprises. There is more crappy polling out there this year than any election cycle I have ever seen. And more lazy, gullible journalists are reporting poll results when they have no earthly idea who did the poll. It’s just a name. What’s their track record? Were there interviews actually conducted?
My advice to people watching Senate and gubernatorial races nationally is to stick to the big-name pollsters because we’re seeing a nice flow of quality polls now. Nobody does a better job than the New York Times/Siena poll.
You probably don’t have much use for Fox News, but frankly, its polling is pretty good. It’s just as good as CNN’s. AARP also uses a bipartisan team of pollsters; its surveys are very good. Stick with these name-brand polls and ignore the others.
The Senate Map Turns Against Republicans
So, what do I think is going to happen in the Senate? I think it’s going to be on the north side of four [seats]. Early on, I wasn’t a believer [in Democrats taking control], and I was certainly skeptical about Kansas. But Democrats may have a really terrific year, and they may win some places where they haven’t won in a long time.
That doesn’t mean Democrats are going to win every one of the 22 Republican-held seats up this year. When I see a poll showing Tom Cotton only three points ahead in Arkansas, that’s bullshit. Polls showing Idaho and Mississippi [as competitive]—just absolute horseshit. South Carolina is not going to happen. Florida is not going to happen. Florida could have been competitive if Democrats hadn’t nominated an acknowledged member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Why Republicans May Be Out of Time
Directionally, attitudes are baked in. It’s not like in presidential elections where a debate or convention or something else can shift things around. That just doesn’t happen during midterm election years. The year before a midterm, yes. During the midterm election? No. And I’m not big on the idea of October surprises changing things. Voting starts in September. You could take the five or ten smartest minds in the Republican Party, put them in a room with Trump, and have him do everything they said. I’m not sure that would help at this point. Six months or a year ago might have been different.
I think most of that Republican turnout will just go through the floor. And some heartland Republicans are so pissed off that they may decide that if they actually vote for a Democrat, their hand won’t fall off.
Democrats shouldn’t be too worried about money because, at the candidate level, they’re outspending Republicans by huge margins. And there’s not much TV time left to be bought. We’re already reaching saturation levels. How many ads can they pile up at 4 o’clock in the morning? Money is one of the most overrated things in politics. In competitive races, the law of diminishing returns kicks in.
I don’t think this is a blue wave election. I think it’s a red undertow election, where Republicans are getting sucked down. But I haven’t seen any data whatsoever suggesting people are happy with the Democratic Party. None, zero. This is 100 percent about Trump.
