The Midterm Sweel
Much is being written about the 2026 midterm election sweep, which will result in about 45 socialists being seated in Congress. Victor Davis Hanson offered excellent perspective in his 4 November interview with Jan Jekielek on Epoch TV: What the Democratic Midterm Sweep Means for Trump, MAGA, and 2028:
A full transcript is published on Epoch TV: Victor Davis Hanson: What the Democratic Midterm Sweep Means for Trump, MAGA, and 2028. A few excerpts follow:
... in the last 126 years of the modern period since 1900, the party that has the White House loses 90 per cent. In 90 per cent of the midterms, they lose seats in the House, and in 75 per cent of the midterms, they lose Senate seats...
That means Donald Trump, if he’s going to appoint a district, circuit, or Supreme Court justice, or fire a cabinet member and replace him, he better do it in the next 70 days before the new Congress is sworn in in January. Because they’re not going to approve anything that he puts up that requires a Senate nomination to be approved by the Democrats...
As it applies to Donald Trump, he will try to get the Iran war over as quickly as possible and denuclearize it. And part of the reason he lost tangentially here is he bombed for 38 days and had almost eliminated...
So, he’s going to have to denuclearize them, hit Pickaxe Mountain if he wants to eliminate that threat...
He can do almost anything he wants... He’s just going to follow the precedent of presidents.
In 2022, the inflation rate that year was 9.1 per cent. This year it may go to 3.4 per cent. It’s almost only a third...
If you look at the stock market, it’s 20,000 points higher than it was in 2022... You can also say that Trump inherited a 21 per cent inflation over four years...
But the people were saying, yes, but prices are 21 per cent higher than when you left office last time. So, what are you going to do about it? Well, they couldn’t do anything about it unless you wanted a recession or a deflationary depression, because we never go into a deflation and lose that 21 per cent...
The administration didn’t really explain that when they said, we’re going to lower the rate of inflation...
When he refers to the war, when the war broke out, he had over 50 per cent approval. They had spectacular success for the first 38 days. They did the impossible, but they didn’t explain it.
They have over 200,000 rockets...
The Iranians... they’re not going to negotiate. So, you’re going to have to hit them very, very hard...
How does the Left exercise political power and influence when they do not have the Supreme Court, the Congress, or the White House, as they do not as we speak?
The answer is a Gramscian, socialist, communist directive, a march through the institutions. And they understood that if you control K-12 in the schools of education, the universities... the media... corporate boardrooms, the foundations, and of course, the administrative state, then you can exercise enormous power without being elected...
The Republicans are not going to get back the House and Senate in the next election. With these huge leads, it’s going to take them two or three elections... And the next president will be, I think, from the left of the Democratic Party...
It’s going to be pack the court, let in two new states. The filibuster will be gone in January, I imagine. 200 years old... They’ll pack the court with 15 liberal judges. They‘ll probably defund ICE. They’ll restore USAID on steroids and make sure it’s bulletproof this time...
So, winter is coming, and it’s going to be a rough two years, but it’s survivable if the Republicans can stick together and prevent a veto-proof Congress...