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The real “electability” question is about Donald Trump

Democratic infighting is distracting from the top story of the midterms.

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it.

One Big Idea: The electability conversation we should be having

Here’s something you wouldn’t know from most of the coverage of this year’s midterm elections: The biggest electability problem belongs to President Donald Trump and the Republicans.

The Midterms, Actually

Astead W. Herndon’s weekly guide to the big ideas and key people behind the political shifts shaping the 2026 elections.

GOP candidates in the midterm elections must contend with defending an unpopular president leading an unpopular war, not to mention $4 gas (if they’re lucky). The administration has upset its own base at various moments — first tariffs, then the release of the Epstein files, now a worsening war — and the party has followed Trump into backing scandal-plagued candidates in the general election, including Ken Paxton in Texas and Max Miller in Ohio. To top things off, more than six years after the January 6 insurrection, any Republican who wants to remain in the president’s good standing cannot acknowledge the fact that he lost the 2020 election, an issue that helped cost the party major races in 2022 and could still bite in 2026.

Tom Tiffany, the Republican Senate candidate in Wisconsin, has stood side by side with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp wrote about recently. Just this weekend, Tiffany said he did not regret his efforts at all, even after events like the Jan. 6 insurrection. And Trump has done nothing to help candidates move past these concerns; his pardons for January 6 defendants and (so-far failed) attempts at creating a government fund for payouts have kept the issue fresh.

Yet still, the focus of Politics World (and to some extent this Substack) has often been the story that’s more dynamic: the changing nature of the Democratic Party. In doing so, “electability” has become synonymous with the ideological battle between moderates and progressives, and specifically the idea that left-wing candidates, in particular, are electoral underperformers.

Take the latest edition of the New York Times political newsletter by chief polling correspondent Nate Cohn, which asks, “Could El-Sayed Cost Democrats Michigan?”

These candidates of the activist left often seem to fare much worse than mainstream progressives, even though they may not be very different on the issues. The members of Justice Democrats, which includes the Squad and many of their congressional allies, fare about five points worse than other Democrats. Elizabeth Warren, who might count as part of that broader group of activist-backed progressives who aren’t democratic socialist, has underperformed the Democratic baseline in Massachusetts by as much as 10 points on net.

These candidates of the activist left often seem to fare much worse than mainstream progressives, even though they may not be very different on the issues. The members of Justice Democrats, which includes the Squad and many of their congressional allies, fare about five........

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