The media keeps telling President Trump’s voters the midterms are already over.
Every pollster with a microphone is lining up to bury the Republican majority before anyone casts a ballot.
But Nate Silver let slip one detail about Trump’s midterm position that Democrats would rather nobody heard.
Silver Walked Onto Friendly Turf and Gave Up an Awkward Fact
Polling analyst Nate Silver sat down for a recent episode of Lovett or Leave It, the Crooked Media podcast Jon Lovett hosts for a left-wing audience.
He came with a gloomy forecast for Republicans.
“This is one of the more consistent elections that I’ve tried to forecast, in that sense that like, every indicator is bad for Republicans,” Silver said.
And then he kept talking.
“Except maybe the outside money, that is the one thing they have going for them,” Silver added.
Silver told the podcast that the President’s party usually eats a swing of seven to eight points in a midterm. His model projects a swing of 10 to 11 points against President Donald Trump this year, and he compared the cycle to 2006, when Democrats gained 31 House seats and six Senate seats and flipped both chambers under then-President George W Bush.
That’s the part the press ran with. But Silver also said Republicans still have time before November to turn things around, and that a big cash lead is a good way to do it.
The Cash Gap Democrats Can’t Spin
CNBC dug through the latest Federal Election Commission filings and reported that the GOP’s “three national committees entered September with roughly $233.4 million in cash on hand, nearly double the $130.4 million held by their Democratic counterparts.”
The committee-by-committee numbers look even worse for the Left. According to CNBC’s analysis, the Republican National Committee closed out August with $125.6 million in the bank. The Democratic National Committee reported $16.9 million in cash and $17.6 million in debt.
Read that again. The Democrat Party’s national committee owes more than it has.
And none of that counts the biggest pile of all. Trump’s MAGA Inc super PAC entered the fall with roughly $416 million on hand, and two other Trump-aligned groups, No Going Back PAC and Safety & Affordability PAC Inc, account for another $126 million.
There is one soft spot. CNBC found the National Republican Senatorial Committee trailing its Democrat counterpart, $18.7 million to $37.6 million. Why the Senate committee is the lone laggard in a year when every other Republican account is flush is a question somebody in Washington, DC ought to answer.
CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten went further than Silver did. Enten pointed to Trump’s net approval rating of minus 16 and predicted a “blue wave.”
“Simply put, mathematically, this equals a Democratic majority for the House of Representatives,” Enten said.
Why 2006 Is the Wrong Year to Bring Up
Silver’s favorite comparison deserves a harder look than the podcast gave it.
The Republican Party that got wiped out in 2006 belonged to George W Bush. It ran on the Iraq War, an open-ended nation-building project that cost thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars, and its own voters walked away. The Boston Globe’s look back at that election found that independents bailed and a big chunk of the disillusioned Republican base simply stayed home. Bush limped into that November with approval around 39 percent.
So 2006 was a year when Republican voters quit on a party that had quit on them. Those voters came back for Donald Trump, who built his movement by running against the Bush-era establishment on war, trade, and the border. Treating his coalition and Bush’s as the same animal is a stretch.
But here’s where honesty has to cut in. A different coalition doesn’t erase a minus 16 approval number, and Trump’s name won’t appear on a single ballot this November. His voters have a history of showing up for him and skipping the years he sits out. That’s the real question hanging over this cycle, and no forecast model can answer it.
Which is exactly where the money comes in.
Cash doesn’t change anybody’s mind about a President. It pays for door knockers, mail, ballot-chase programs, and ads in districts where a few thousand votes decide the seat. A party sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars can go find its low-turnout voters. A party whose national committee is underwater can’t.
And the forecasting crowd has earned some skepticism. Silver’s own model gave Hillary Clinton about a 71 percent chance on election morning in 2016. His final 2024 forecast called the race a coin flip, and Trump went on to sweep all seven battleground states.
Forecasts are not votes.
The pattern is familiar by now. Analysts go on friendly shows, declare the outcome settled weeks ahead of time, and the coverage itself becomes a tool for depressing turnout on the Right. Enten’s “mathematically” line does that work whether he means it to or not.
But Silver, to his credit, said the quiet part. Every indicator he trusts points one direction, and the one he can’t model points the other.
Expect the story to shift from here. If Republican numbers tighten in the closing weeks, the same commentators now predicting a wave will start complaining that Trump’s donors bought the result. They’ve already written the first half of that script.
Sources:
Mediaite, “Nate Silver Says ‘Every Indicator Is Bad for Republicans’ in Midterms — Except One”
CNBC, “Democrats lead the polls. Republicans lead in cash heading into the midterms”
The Boston Globe, “What will happen in the 2026 midterms? Consider how it might be 2006 all over again.”
Lovett or Leave It, Crooked Media podcast episode featuring Nate Silver