Alan I. Abramowitz explains why the “Generic Ballot Model Gives Democrats Strong Chance to Take Back House in 2026“: “…Even in a neutral political environment, one in which the two parties are tied on the generic ballot, Republicans would be expected to lose about 13 seats in the House and about 5 seats in the Senate. Losses of that magnitude would give Democrats control of both chambers in the next Congress. As of April 23, 2025, the generic ballot average, according to RealClearPolitics, favors Democrats by 1.5 points—very close to a tie…While the generic ballot model’s current prediction of a Democratic gain of more than a dozen seats in the House probably will not surprise most observers of American politics, the model’s forecast of a Democratic gain of five Senate seats—one more than Democrats would need to regain control of the Senate—undoubtedly will. The main reason for the expectation of a significant Democratic gain in the Senate is the fact that Republicans will be defending 22 of the 35 Senate seats at stake in the 2026 midterm election, and seat exposure is a strong predictor of seat swing in the model. However, there are reasons to be skeptical about the model’s Senate forecast…Over time, Senate elections, like House elections, have become increasingly aligned with presidential voting patterns. In 2022, for example, the correlation between the Republican share of the Senate vote and the Republican share of the 2020 presidential vote was a near-perfect .96, and 34 of 35 states voted for a Senate candidate from the party that carried the state in the 2020 presidential election. The only exception was Wisconsin, which backed Democrat Joe Biden for president in 2020 and then reelected Republican Sen. Ron Johnson two years later, both by very narrow margins…The challenge for Democrats in 2026 is, while 22 Republican seats will be up for grabs compared with only 13 Democratic seats, only one of the states with a Republican Senator—Maine—voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, while two states with Democratic senators—Georgia and Michigan—voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Moreover, only one other state with a Republican senator—North Carolina—voted for Trump by less than 5 points. The next likeliest states for Democratic gains in 2026 would be Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and Florida, all of which voted for Trump by margins of between 10 and 15 points…Given the close connection between Senate and presidential voting patterns in recent elections, these results suggest that the national political environment would probably have to be tilted significantly in favor of Democrats for Republicans to suffer a net loss of four or more Senate seats in 2026. The current 1.5-point Democratic advantage on the generic ballot probably would not be enough. It would probably take a Democratic lead of close to 10 points to produce a swing of that magnitude.”

“Donald Trump won back the Oval Office and took charge of the government amid the strongest poll numbers of his political career,” Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy write in “CNN Poll: Trump’s approval at 100 days lower than any president in at least seven decades” at CNN Politics. They continue, adding “but as the 100-day mark of his presidency approaches, Americans’ views of what he’s done so far have turned deeply negative, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds…Trump’s 41% approval rating is the lowest for any newly elected president at 100 days dating back at least to Dwight Eisenhower – including Trump’s own first term…Approval of Trump’s handling of the presidency is down 4 points since March, and 7 points lower than it was in late February. Just 22% say they strongly approve of Trump’s handling of the job, a new low, and about twice as many say they strongly disapprove (45%)…Since March, Trump has seen notable drops in approval from women and Hispanic Americans (down 7 points in each group to 36% among women and 28% among Hispanics). Partisan views of Trump remain broadly polarized, with 86% of Republicans approving and 93% of Democrats disapproving. But among political independents, the president’s approval rating has dipped to 31%, matching his first-term low point with that group and about the same as his standing with them in January 2021…The poll finds the president underwater and sinking across nearly all major issues he’s sought to address during his time in office, with the public’s confidence in his ability to handle those issues also on the decline.”

The ‘abundance’ freaks get a proper thrashing in “An Abundance of Credulity; They want abundance. But they ignore who profits most from scarcity” by Hannah Story Brown, who writes in her review article of two books at The American Prospect, “In the months before the re-election of Donald Trump precipitated our rapid descent into authoritarianism, two books were being written about the idea that progressivism went astray in the 1960s and 1970s. In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe a drift into a “politics of scarcity,” and in Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman calls it a “cultural aversion to power.” Both books ask a pertinent question: Why doesn’t the government do big, bold things, quickly, to address the pressing issues of our time? We have an abundance of viewpoints and veto points, they argue, but a shortage of affordable housing and transmission lines. Something’s got to give…The unstated question, of course, is who must give. The problems the authors identify are real, but they largely ignore who benefits from prolonging them. Their vision is of a government that’s more responsive to the public’s needs, but their proposal is to remove already inadequate levers for accountability in political decision-making. We should be able to agree that the tools we have to ensure progress and affluence are insufficient, without concluding that the answer is to throw them away. Improving those tools—making them actually fit for purpose—will require keeping them out of the hands of those who would wield them to exploit us. But that discussion is missing from these books…Yet the political landscape has shifted rapidly under the feet of these authors over the first several weeks of the second Trump term. Arguing for fewer checks on government action hits very different amid mass firings, unilateral cancellations of appropriated spending, and dissolutions of entire federal agencies. The diagnosis of what constrains the state acting authoritatively to meet public needs—more or less the messy multivocality of democracy—is an ill match for an era of accelerating authoritarianism.” Read on here for more of Brown’s argument.

If you want to give the yapping of nationalist wingnuts a rest and ponder current politics from a global perspective, check out “The Chainsaw International: From Trump to Milei, the far right is betting that spectacles of revenge will compensate for steep economic sacrifice.” by William Callison and Veronica Gago, who write at Boston Review: “In an image shared around the world, Elon Musk is seen grunting while waving a chainsaw over his head at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington in February. Perhaps less virally circulated was the scene just before, when the far-right libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei, walked onstage to gift Musk the chainsaw—a replica with a blade etched with his now-famous motto, ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! (“Long live freedom, dammit!”)…Milei represents a far-right vanguard of authoritarian experimentation. From the war on gender to defunding universities, from the glorification of Israel’s destruction in Gaza to rejecting an independent judiciary, new authoritarian regimes are showing how fascism can develop most rapidly and directly…In this project, the chainsaw is not simply a metaphor. It is the logic of a new far-right wave of anarcho-authoritarian neoliberalism spreading across Latin America, North America, and Europe…Milei turns the whole country into a “sacrifice zone”—to borrow a term from scholarship on extractivism—by offering up land to businesses for further plunder and environmental degradation…In this way, individual sacrifice and national sacrifice zones are two sides of the same coin. Sacrifice is a rhetoric that seeks consent for dispossession. You are neither exploited nor dispossessed, it says; you are part of a greater sacrificial project that must be embraced to be successful. Your suffering is necessary and will ultimately do you well. While land, resources, and peoples must be sacrificed—that is, gifted—to international capital, the ethos of speculative competition is imposed on individuals as a general law, transforming subjectivities and exhausting social reproduction…From the United States to Argentina, El Salvador to Ecuador, the wager of the resurgent right is that these spectacles of revenge—trolling the zurdos, owning the libs—can mask or even compensate for material dispossession. When citizens start balking at the sacrifices demanded of them, these governments simultaneously deflect, deepen their cuts, and demand anticipatory obedience. How long the wages of cruelty can substitute for real wages remains to be seen. But so long as they do, popular resistance will be necessary to contest the chainsaw’s right to rule.”