If They Can't Cheat...

Something is in the air. And it's a bit inexplicable. But let me try anyway.

I've been hesitant, on-air and in person, to give an opinion about this year's election.

A second-term president with approval numbers in the 30s by some polls, gas prices higher than anyone wants, and a "personality" that gets dissected endlessly by the party not in power. These would be bad signs if the other side weren't nuts.

Never mind the mile of nuance behind those indicators that voters will actually weigh. Does anyone like a president 100 percent of the time? Are temporarily higher gas prices a reasonable short-term trade for keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of death-obsessed mullahs who want to see us gone? And haven't voters already weighed in on this president's personality, three election cycles running? Franklin Roosevelt ran four times and pulled roughly 103 million votes across all four combined. Trump has run three times and pulled roughly 214 million combined — more than double FDR's total in one fewer election. Say what you want about him. The personality is baked into the equation by now, and has been for a decade.

So maybe it's for these reasons, and others — he's kept more campaign promises than the last several modern-era presidents combined — that you're not seeing a groundswell of revolt heading into his final midterm.

If the polls are accurate, the House and Senate both look like nail-biters. Good thing he's worked so hard on election integrity. Close races deserve accurate results.

And now look at what the opposing party is literally suing to stop.

Top congressional Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, filed suit this week alleging the administration has unlawfully pressured states to clean suspected noncitizens off their voter rolls and has leaned on local election officials to comply. Schumer called it bullying. He called it un-American. He said the voters decide elections, not Trump.

Fine. Then let only the voters who are legally entitled to decide actually be the ones deciding. That's the entire point of a clean roll. Democratic leadership is suing to stop a process aimed at confirming that the people voting are the people legally allowed to vote, two weeks before an election. Read that sentence as many times as you need to. That's not a lawsuit defending voting rights. That's a lawsuit defending the status quo of whoever's currently on the rolls, questionable eligibility included.

That nullifies legal votes by diluting them with illegal ones. That's how a candidate can run a campaign largely from his basement, speak carelessly about black voters in ways that would have ended a Republican's career in a single news cycle, and still walk away claiming 80 million votes with a straight face.

CNN's Harry Enten has been straightforward about this, too, to his credit, on a network that doesn't exactly benefit from the message. His numbers say if public polling misses by even a few points — well within the range of past cycles — Republicans hold both chambers. He's right to flag it. Trump has out-defied bigger polling gaps than that in every cycle he's run.

And that brings us to the actual policy differences, which remain the real story underneath all the noise. James Talarico has called parents who won't affirm a child's gender identity "abusive," on the record, and voted against a bill that would have shielded those parents from child-abuse and neglect findings for simply declining to go along. Abdul El-Sayed has spent a campaign aligned with a platform built on abolishing ICE and ties to associations he's downplayed rather than disowned. Others want to pack or restructure the Supreme Court outright. Not one of them has a credible plan to lower prices. Not one of them is campaigning on actually securing the border.

To their credit, American voters are watching European cities burn this autumn — France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Albania — and noticing how quickly imported grievance politics curdle into street warfare. We're watching the documented pattern of non-assimilation inside certain Somali and Islamic communities in Minnesota and Michigan play out in federal fraud investigations, and wondering, reasonably, whether we're sitting on our own version of that same problem. We're watching a sitting member of Congress, Ilhan Omar, under active federal investigation serious enough that the administration itself has floated denaturalization and deportation as possible outcomes — something that, if it happens, would make history for reasons nobody should want.

This cycle, from a pure narrative standpoint, should be a layup for the party out of power. Inflation fatigue, approval numbers, a president voters have spent years being told to resent.

But they're nuts. And these are difficult, genuinely concerning times to be voting in anything but full possession of the facts.

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

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