Samuel Johnson once said that while Milton’s “Paradise Lost” was a great work, “none ever wished it longer than it is.”
With unbridled spending (surpassing the entire advertisement budget of the NFL), unparalleled accusations (the estranged mother of a gubernatorial candidate calling her candidate daughter a “liar”) and wild exaggerations (the charge that one party had veered into communism), the 2026 midterm election campaign was not a great work of human endeavor.
But no one wishes it were longer.
The country is preparing to breathe a sigh of relief. No longer will political advertisements dominate television viewing. (The proliferation of them was so great and so broad, that ads for the Ohio Senate race aired during baseball playoffs.) No longer will appeals for money clog your email inbox. (Sometimes they came from a single source twice in one minute.) No longer will dinner conversation be dominated by political polls or contemplations about margins in the House of Representatives.
No one will miss any of those things.
So as the end draws near on campaign 2026 — one more bite at a rotten apple — here are the moving parts in this fall’s elections:
What’s the size of the turnout?
With the stakes so high — everyone says so, considering the chance that control of both chambers of Congress may be in balance — there’s every reason to expect a big turnout.
But what is “big”? The turnout in midterm elections is less than in presidential election years, where it is roughly 60%. The typical midterm turnout is in the 40% range, though it reached its highest mark (50%) eight years ago during the middle of Donald Trump’s first term. The president has that kind of effect on things.
Advice from the pros: Ignore anecdotal reports about lines in some polling stations and empty voting halls elsewhere. It’s a big country, and lots of districts have no real competitive races. Besides, huge chunks of the electorate voted early (especially Texas) or by mail (pretty much everywhere).
Did campaign treasuries count?
Maybe not. Sure, they allowed candidates to flood the airwaves, but the vast volume of ads probably canceled out one another. Surely the negative ads did, because one candidate’s accusations were countered by another candidate’s counterattacks. Many voters ignore ads, and few are persuaded much by them.
The one outlier may be the Ohio ad produced by supporters of Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy; that is the one with the mom dissing her daughter. Even fellow Ohio Republicans, including Senate candidate Jon Husted and current Gov. Mike DeWine, condemned it.
By mid-October, the midterms became an arms race, with billionaires checking in with tens of millions in contributions. Elon Musk ($440 million) and Michael Bloomberg (at least $80 million) spent massive amounts of money and made headlines with their contributions, but huge amounts were spent by people you’ve never heard of. Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate for Senate, has spent more on his race than Texas Gov. George W. Bush spent to win the White House in 2000, and Democratic state Rep. James Talarico is on track to do the same. Overall, the top 50 donors have spent more than $2.77 billion.
What issues mattered?
This is the lone positive element of this election ordeal: Issues really mattered.
There was, of course, affordability — and that provided the connective tissue for much of the debate animating the political season.
The war in Iran was a central issue — and, with gasoline and diesel prices soaring and fertilizer prices reaching terrifying heights in the farmlands, the conflict shaped the economic issue. No one was unaffected. The public considered the wisdom of the Iran war less through the prism of geopolitics, or even nuclear politics, than through its economic consequences.
The war also intensified public debate and candidate talking points about Israel, once unassailable as an American ally and now a controversial player whose war-making, both in Iran and Gaza, prompted a fundamental shift in American sentiment. Israel hadn’t been a central element of election debate before. This time it was.
The gerrymandering fandango.
Ordinarily, districts are redrawn once every 10 years, after the decennial census required by the Constitution. But there is nothing normal about this period, and so, at the impetus of Trump, several states began the undertaking a half-decade early. The consensus was that this produced a net gain not of the 15 seats the Republicans planned on achieving, but, instead, of far less. That’s because the Democrats entered the game as well.
In total, nine states engaged in this exercise, not quite rendering it futile, but, on paper at least, reducing the Republican advantage to nine seats. That’s the tentative math. But at a time when there was special focus on self-dealing and corruption — here the billions that the Trump family is said to have profited by in the past two years come into play, at least subliminally — this gambit may have backfired. Plus, the process infuriated and perhaps motivated Black voters, who had moved markedly toward Trump in the 2024 election, to go to the polls to punish the Republicans.
Then there is the question of the entire theory of the process. By diluting Republican voting power in some of these districts — the inevitable consequence of all this district shifting — the process may have rendered some of the reconstituted districts surprisingly competitive.
And the president?
The campaign inches to a close with Trump scoring record-low approval ratings. Midterm congressional elections often deal a blow to the party holding the White House. When the Democrats lost 63 seats in the 2010 midterms, Barack Obama called it a “shellacking.”
When the Republicans gained 54 seats in 1994, Bill Clinton was humbled.
“I am the leader of the efforts that we have made in the last two years,” Clinton said. “And to whatever extent that we didn’t do what the people wanted us to do or they were not aware of what we had done, I must certainly bear my share of responsibility, and I accept that.”
Trump almost certainly won’t make a statement like that, and he certainly won’t accept the blame.
But at a time when there is widespread economic distress, the president urged people to go to the polls and vote as if he were on the ballot. That may be a miscalculation as great as when George W. Bush appeared in 2003 beneath a premature Iraq war “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
