GOP’s future in doubt as lame-duck Trump fails to 'trick voters into living his delusions'

Democrats suddenly have a major chance to grab new voters and disrupt the GOP's power, with a new analysis from Intelligencer crediting the shift to Donald Trump doing "almost nothing... that Americans like."

In a piece for Intelligencer published Wednesday, Ross Barkan explained that Democrats' odds of taking the Senate majority in the 2026 midterms are gradually increasing. However, to overcome the current map's GOP edge, "the most important thing" the party must do is "start to think much harder about winning over the voters who are drifting away from Trump but have no idea what the Democrats are for."

This, Barken argued, is especially important in Senate races, where Democrats face statewide electorates and must pull off wins in Trump-friendly states to meaningfully tip the balance of power in the chamber. Some of the options available to them involve candidates willing to, in some way, shed the trappings of the Democratic Party, such as Mark Osborne, who is running as an independent in Nebraska and has "decent" odds of success.

"But it’s not exactly feasible to find Osborns everywhere. Democrats can’t simply ditch the party label," Barkan wrote. "What might help is to lean harder into economic populism, as past overperformers like Sherrod Brown have done, while meeting rural voters, culturally, where they are. The Democratic Party might have to get more comfortable with major-party candidates who don’t sound very progressive on guns and immigration. They may have to offer more leeway, in certain states, to Democrats who are not terribly enthusiastic about abortion. This isn’t easy — it’s even alienating — but the point is to win in hostile territory again."

Helping Democrats achieve this goal considerably is Trump's continually unpopular leadership. Barkan wrote that it was "good news" for the party's midterm odds that the president and his MAGA movement have "squandered so many of their natural advantages" in the last year, adding that "there is almost nothing, right now, coming from this administration that Americans like."

Barkan included a link to another of his Intelligencer pieces from January, in which he went deeper on Trump's failure to maintain a broadly popular policy agenda.

"Today, Trump is a lame-duck president with an approval rating around 40 percent," he wrote on Jan. 6. "The expiration of Obamacare subsidies and the skyrocketing health costs for millions of Americans will be blamed, almost solely, on him. He cannot even force Republicans in a state he overwhelmingly won to gerrymander new House districts. More importantly, though, he cannot trick Americans into living his own delusions."

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