Look, I can’t tell you that everything is going to be OK for us patriots in the midterms. I think it will, but I’m not sure. Nobody knows for sure. What I do know is what the correlation of forces, to my mind, indicates. It indicates another 2022, a year when we Republicans were going to clean up against an unpopular, semi-conscious president. And we did OK. Not great. OK. And it looks to me, from where I sit, from who I’ve talked to, from what I’ve seen, and yeah, from my gut, that that’s the high-water mark for the Democrats. They might do OK. They might get the House by a few seats, and they might cut our lead in the Senate. That’s just my perspective, though. I’ve talked to well-placed optimists and doomers (one who, you know, says we lose the House and 50-50 in the Senate if we are lucky). But I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows.

Let’s look at the big themes, then get down to specific cases. What do the Democrats have going for them? History, for one. History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The party in power, especially in a second term, tends to struggle in the midterms. People get tired of the status quo.

The problems add up, the friction and the fog of war slow the progress, and people get bored. That gives Democrats another advantage: excitement and intensity. And boy, are they ever excited and intense about taking us out. They can’t wait to crawl out of their old folks’ homes, cat-overrun condos, moms’ basements, Hollywood mansions, university dorms, and perverted communes to vote out those wicked patriotic Americans of the Republican Party. They would crawl over broken glass to vote against us or at least hire illegal aliens to do the crawling over broken glass that American Democrats won’t do. Every single one of them is going to vote, probably several times.

That intensity leads to their third advantage: the polls. Negative polling can demoralize Republican voters.

But to the extent the polls are not actively bent to support the Democrats (which some of them manifestly are), Democrat intensity skews the polls because Democrats actually answer them. Anecdotes are evidence of nothing but anecdotes, but I like to informally poll fellow Republicans about whether they ever respond to political polling. I never do. And they tell me they never do. I don’t know who the Republicans answering these polls are, but I haven’t met one.

The polling is terrible for us if you take it at face value. It has us losing in places we have no business losing. But I just can’t make myself believe it. The polls don’t fit the fundamentals, and they’re too darn convenient for the opposition. Is that wishful thinking? It may be, but it’s wishful thinking based on polling’s track record of failure. Remember the famous 2024 Ann Selzer Iowa poll that had Kamala three points up on Trump? Trump ended up beating her by something like 13 points. And just a couple of weeks ago, Hasan Piker’s Hamas-diddling puppet Abdul in Michigan was supposed to win by double digits over his moderate (sic) Democrat opponent, but he ended up barely squeaking to victory by a point or so. The polls are wrong a lot, and always in one direction. When’s the last time you found a polling error that favored a Republican? That’s about as likely as finding leftovers in JB Pritzker’s fridge.

Of course, the polls could be right. I don’t think they are. Given the dire unanimity of the current polls, disbelieving them means betting on both the malice and the incompetence of the pollsters. I’ll take that bet, especially when so many are polls from outfits you’ve never heard of, like the “University of College/Pepsi Challenge Public Opinion Survey” or the “Geebo Strategies Online Solutions.”

What do we have in our favor? Well, we have a ton of money. That’s good. Plus, the folks in the know whom I’ve talked to like the strategy of waiting until after Labor Day to really start spending. Democrats have been spending for a while, but traditionally you spend early to create a positive image for your candidate and tear down the other guy. That used to work, but will it work now? This is a very partisan environment. If you’re a Democrat, we already know what we think of you, and all the ads with you and Mee-maw sitting on the porch talking about values you don’t actually believe in aren’t going to change your image as an avatar of a political party that supports crime, communism, castration, and open borders.

We also have Donald Trump, who’s good for turning out our voters. His ability to enrage the other side is already baked in, but he’s going to be out and about everywhere rallying our troops. That’s good. And while the convention was slammed for low ratings, it did what needed to be done. It set a positive tone and motivated our base.

This election is all about turning out our base. We now have a decade of experience getting the kind of voters in our coalition to come out and vote when Donald Trump himself is not on the ballot. We better turn them out. That we can’t is everyone’s big fear. But the base staying home because it’s mad seemed much more plausible when the Democrats were just annoying rather than a threat to our way of life. It’s easy to say, “Who cares?” when, at their core, both parties are composed of people who generally like America and want what’s best for it. But that’s not true with today’s Democrats.

They want to flood us with Third World barbarians, mutilate our kids, take our guns, tax us into poverty, and outlaw normal people. Yeah, there’s an affordability problem, and there’s a crime problem, and there are lots of other problems, but the Democrats caused all those problems, and everyone knows that it’s not like they’re going to fix them. America has become vastly more partisan, and vastly more binary, and I’m thinking that very few Republicans are going to be able to swallow the idiotic notion that we need to show the dumb Republicans among us (and there are a lot of dumb Republicans among us) what-for by allowing the election of a bunch of communist pervert-enablers.

I just don’t think Republicans are going to stay home in droves, much less actually vote for Democrats. I do expect the polls to tighten as we get closer to Election Day, largely because that’s when pollsters have to start thinking about their reputations and will take at least a couple of their fingers off the scale. It always happens.

So, let’s look at the races. There’s just too much going on in the House to go through individually, but our maps will do a lot to limit any damage. The House is going to be tough because we only have a handful of seats in our majority, but some of the folks I’ve talked to were confident about it in private. These people have nothing to lose by telling me what they really think. You can take it or leave it. But while Team Black Pill will get all the regime media coverage, know that there are a lot of GOP guys out there who think we can do OK in the House.

The Senate remains our firewall. We have a 53-seat majority. Democrats need to net four seats to overcome JD Vance’s tiebreaker vote. Let’s ignore the wildcard scenarios, like whether Lisa Murkowski or John Fetterman might switch parties to ensure a majority. Let’s find those four seats, if we can. We’ll start with the seats Republicans are defending. Keep in mind, the polls are negative for Republicans in pretty much all of them.

I’ve talked about Texas and that blasphemous imp Talarico already this week, and for the reasons I set forth, I think we hold it.

With the guy with the Nazi tattoo having been replaced by the guy who has kids with his second cousin, Susan Collins has a very good chance of keeping her seat in Maine. It would be pretty wild for the Maple Syrup State to swap out the chair of the Appropriations Committee for a guy who makes family Thanksgiving dinners awkward with sexual tension. She’s likely to win.

North Carolina is probably the Republicans’ toughest fight, with Michael Whatley struggling against that state’s less masculine version of Abigail Spanberger. Roy Cooper is a straight-up leftist pretending to be a moderate, and North Carolina is a purple state. I think we lose that one, but we shouldn’t give up.

Dan Sullivan in Alaska has to contend with Dem dirty tricks like ranked-choice voting and a doppelgänger on the ballot. It will be tough. I think he holds – a lot of Alaskans depend on oil, and the Democrats want to end the industry. But it will take money and effort.

Jon Husted is allegedly struggling in Ohio against leftist retread Sherrod Brown. The same is true in Iowa, with Ashley Hinson against Josh Turek. Both of these are red states. It’s hard to toss out an incumbent like Husted, and Hinson is a strong candidate. It’s going to take money and work, but I think we pull it off and keep both seats. There is also some crazy talk about Democrats expanding the map to Kansas and Florida. That’s just not going to happen, and if it does, it’s such an apocalypse that nothing else is going to matter anyway.

Now, the best defense is a good offense. What states are we going to take from the Democrats? Jon Ossoff is getting the full-court press from the regime media in Georgia; he’s an even more beta Beto, but they do like young, glib, good-looking guys. He’s up against Mike Collins, who’s a good old boy, and who I’ve gotten to know a little from interviews. The dude is smart. He ran a trucking company. When you talk to him, he doesn’t talk to you in hack clichés. He talks about money, organization, getting out the vote, and what matters. Do not underestimate him the way a lot of people seem to. Governor Brian Kemp, who backed somebody else in the primary, just decided he wanted to remain a viable GOP candidate in 2028 or later and has endorsed Collins. Let’s see if he turns his formidable Republican machine out to snatch that Senate seat; if he does, that makes him viable in the future. If Kemp can’t help recapture the seat, what good is he? In any case, we have a decent chance in Georgia, but let’s be conservative and assume we don’t; though if we do, that destroys all the Democrats’ dreams once and for all.

In New Hampshire, John Sununu seems to have a decent shot at beating Chris Pappas, who’s another Spanberger Democrat who talks moderate but would vote left. New Hampshire is a purple state, and they do elect Republicans. The name Sununu still means something there. Again, my conservative nature tells me that it’s more likely than not that we lose, but if we win, oh boy.

In Minnesota, Michele Tafoya is running against a lunatic, pervert-loving communist woman in a state that elects lunatic, pervert-loving communist women of all genders. But enough about Tim Walz. We’re probably not going to win this one, but there’s that outside chance.

And then we come to Michigan, where Mike Rogers, a straight-up veteran patriot, is going up against Abdul El-Sayed, a straight-up Islamist communist who makes AOC look like William F. Buckley. Here we’ve got a real opportunity, and I think it’s more likely than not that the good people of Michigan are going to want to be represented by a resolutely normal guy rather than a guy who dreams of imposing socialist sharia on a country he despises. I think we win this one.

So let’s tally it up. I think we lose one we had, and I think we gain one we didn’t. I think we have a couple of other pickup opportunities in purple states, but it’s hard for me to see them picking up any in our red states. It could happen, but I don’t think it will.

So I put the Senate at 52 to 54 GOP.

This is just a snapshot just under seven weeks from the midterm election. That’s an eternity. Anything can happen. And anything probably will happen.

Kurt’s next action-packed conservative novel, “American Warlord,” is out for presale now! Read Kurt’s Kelly Turnbull/People’s Republic series, including the latest “Panama Red,” and follow Kurt on X @KurtSchlichter!

Kurt Schlichter