There are several reasons to think we won’t see a blue wave in this year’s midterm elections. A basic one is that the Democratic party simply isn’t very popular. In late May, Donald Trump’s approval ratings in the RealClear polling aggregate stood around 40 percent, which sounds bad. Yet Trump is more popular than his party – approval of the Republican brand was in the vicinity of 38 percent. And the Democrats’ ratings were even worse – standing, or one might say wilting, at about 36 percent.

Those figures are not to be confused with “generic ballot” polling, which asks voters which party they would prefer in the forthcoming election. Democrats have lately enjoyed a lead of some seven points over the GOP in that category. Normally a number like that would portend enormous gains for the Democrats in November.

But normal isn’t what it used to be. Four years ago, Joe Biden’s approval ratings were low, prices in the supermarket were high, and Republicans had the edge in the generic ballot. They expected to do very well – but didn’t. The GOP lost a seat in the Senate and won only a thin majority in the House. Republicans had relied on economic conditions to do their campaigning for them.

Democrats misread their own good fortune, however. They assumed it augured well for 2024, which is one reason they were in no hurry to dispose of an already-deteriorating Biden. They were utterly unprepared for Trump’s electoral resurrection.

This year, the Democrats are following the playbook that disappointed Republicans in 2022. Rather than making a case for themselves, they’re hoping Trump’s lackluster approval ratings and the economic impact of the Iran war will defeat the GOP by default. Yet it’s not only the 2022 midterms that suggest these calculations are wrong. In 2020 – not a good year for Trump, to say the least – Republicans actually gained more than a dozen seats in the House. In 2020 and 2022 alike, House races proved less sensitive to the prevailing winds than experts had imagined.

There were no dramatic changes in 2024, either: Republicans lost two House seats, despite Trump’s success in winning every battleground state and a popular-vote plurality. This year, whatever losses the GOP might be set to suffer will be blunted by the mid-decade redistricting that’s added about ten seats to the red column.

Democrats are praying November midterms follow the pattern of 2018’s, which did produce a wave for their party. Their strategy is the same: make the election a referendum on Trump. Democrats may have no strong proposals of their own, and they may enjoy even less public approval than Trump does. But as long as the focus is on him, not them, their own deficiencies will go unnoticed. The party can succeed merely by defining itself as anti-Trump.

Yet that’s not a safe bet, either. The grand narrative that Trump’s opponents don’t think to question assumes that the President’s coalition is splintered and weakened, while anti-Trumpism inspires more passion than ever. Even as Trump-endorsed candidates won primary after primary this spring, his enemies insisted on interpreting the results as signs of weakness rather than strength.

Every victory supposedly meant the MAGA movement was shrinking, as if fewer factions inside a party were obviously a bad thing. This isn’t the tale that’s told whenever any faction the media doesn’t sympathize with gains ground in the Democratic party – or in the GOP, for that matter. And if Trump’s candidates had lost their races, wouldn’t the narrative have been that the President’s grip on his party is slipping and every defeat makes him weaker? The more natural read on Trump’s endorsements is that they are exactly what they appear to be – indications of party unity and party-building success.

On the flipside, however, what about anti-Trump sentiment? Does it seem as passionate as it did in 2018, when the Washington Post was blazoned with the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness”? The Post hasn’t had a change of ownership, but its owner has had a change of heart, or at least judgment: Jeff Bezos has chosen not to define his newspaper as simply anti-Trump. He tried the anti-Trump experiment and found it to be a dead end.

While Bezos may be an unrepresentative figure in many respects, sheer fear and hatred of Trump no longer seem to be the animating forces they were eight years ago, for nearly anyone. The fire just isn’t there –it’s been replaced by acceptance. Trumpism isn’t going away, and anti-Trumpism has become rote rather than fervent. Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Maine, is a perfect illustration of this.

Platner has many of the qualities the President’s critics claim to find objectionable about him – though Trump, unlike Platner, has never had to alter a purported Nazi tattoo. Platner has, at one time or another, said something to offend almost every group that might consider voting for a Democrat. Yet his outrageousness has not made him a pariah within his party. The Democrats have shifted from trying to present Trump’s words and behavior as politically unacceptable to accepting someone who is far more offensive. They’ve given up – instead of trying to police Trumpism, they’re now trying to ape what they once found highly objectionable.

The Democrats are unpopular, ill-defined and divided. At some point in the not-too-distant future, a culturally leftist variation on populism will probably reshape the party and reorder its priorities as drastically as Trump has changed the GOP. The Republicans certainly are heading into the midterms under conditions highly unfavorable to them. But the party, remade in the image of MAGA, is better adapted to the landscape of the 21st century than the Democrats are.

If Republicans suffer a setback in November, they’ll recover quickly, much as Trump bounced back from the 2020 election. Democrats shouldn’t expect a wave – they should worry about being swept away by the tide.

The Spectator