Madison, Trump, and the 2026 Midterm

Many posts have discussed the Constitution. 

William F. Connelly Jr. at The Richmond Times-Dispatch  [links added]

Before the election, President Donald Trump seemed perplexed by his party’s looming loss in the November elections.

“I don’t understand it, nobody does, nobody’s been able to explain it … Whoever wins the presidency, Republican or Democrat, automatically does poorly in the midterms. I don’t know why…”

Maybe ask James Madison, Mr. President?

Madison, the Father of our Constitution, created a virtual constitutional constant: The party in the White House commonly loses seats in midterm elections. While there are rare exceptions to this rule, November 2026 was not one.

Like a pendulum, this constitutional constant applies especially to the second midterm election of a two-term president, often called the Six-Year-Itch. Political scientist Greg Weiner labels it “Madison’s Metronome,” just one of the many checks and balances in Madison’s complex separation of powers system.

Trump might understand if only he would read Federalist #10 and #51, Madison’s two most famous short essays promoting ratification of the Constitution. In Federalist #10 Madison all but predicted Trump: “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Consequently, in Federalist #51 Madison insisted: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected to the constitutional rights of the place.”

Madison understood that institutions matter. Institutions affect behavior, promoting institutional patriotism and responsibility by redefining the ambition and self-interest of politicians. Where you sit influences what you think. The competing branches, legislative chambers, and levels of government, naturally defend their institutional prerogatives. In this manner, our Madisonian institutions effectively regulate political behavior. Our constitutional system humbles and empowers Presidents and Congress, Republicans and Democrats, majority and minority parties. Constitutional analysis is critical to comprehending contemporary politics.

Why is Trump stunned when Supreme Court Justices with lifetime tenure dare to disagree with him? Why is he shocked that Congressional Republicans jump ship when their ambition demands it? Why is he surprised that states are pushing back? Frequent elections give voters the opportunity to voice their impatience with Washington.

Trump neither understands nor respects our Constitution and the institutions it creates. In 2022 he insisted we should terminate “all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution” to return him to the White House, so he could be “dictator on Day 1.” Yet our Constitution does not look kindly on would-be dictators. Madison understood the danger of a demagogic politician employing the “vicious arts,” fomenting anger among citizens to advance self-serving ambition.

Trump’s first-term Vice President, Mike Pence, concluded, “Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States … President Trump demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution” on Jan. 6. Pence chose the Constitution because he had read it.

Today Trump may wish he was Putin, Xi or Kim Jong Un. But he’s not.

Instead, James Madison rules America, and the Constitution governs.

The Constitution governs in the commonplace sense that ours is a “government of laws not men.” No one person governs. Neither the President nor the Congress alone govern, and certainly neither political party is ever wholly the government. Even majorities do not govern. The separation of powers humbles all three branches, three levels of government, and both political parties. Madison masterfully manages ambition to limit government.

Donald Trump is not the government. But does he know this?

Our republican institutions defined by Madison’s separation of powers, checks and balances, bicameralism and federalism have successfully governed our politics for over two centuries; limiting and empowering, as needed, our three branches and three levels of government, all for the purpose of promoting ordered liberty. The November elections again advanced this purpose.

Meanwhile, Trump’s narcissism led him to compare himself to our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln. Yet the premise for Lincoln’s greatness was his admiration for the Constitution. Lincoln condemned ambitious politicians willing to stoke the “mobocratic spirit,” and “disregard for law.” Instead, Lincoln worked to promote, in his words, “a reverence for the Constitution and laws.” Lincoln grounded his own greatness on his veneration for the Constitution which he understood and perpetuated, thanks to his prudence and moderation.

Madison and Lincoln were great because they served a purpose greater than themselves, namely, founding and perpetuating our constitutional republic. Thanks to Madison and Lincoln, the Constitution governs even Trump.

Nones, Evangelicals, and the Midterm

 Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.   The 2026 midterm is an example.

Russell Contreras at Axios:

Religious "nones" outnumbered white evangelicals by a stunning ten percentage points in the 2026 midterms electorate, up from just one point in 2024.

Why it matters: The era of conservative white evangelicals dominating America's religious-political narrative faces a mathematical collapse.

By the numbers: White evangelical or born-again Christians accounted for 17% of voters Tuesday, down from 23% in 2024 and 24% in 2022, according to preliminary 2026 voter polling and earlier exit polls.

Their Republican loyalty barely budged: 82% backed GOP House candidates, compared with 84% in 2024 and 83% in 2022.

Religiously unaffiliated voters, known as "nones," accounted for 27% of the electorate Tuesday, compared with 24% in 2024.

Their Democratic support climbed from 70% to 78%.

What they're saying: "In most of those midwestern states, the white evangelicals are outnumbered in the population by the white mainline Protestants," Robert P. Jones, president and founder of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), told Axios.Jones said their decline over roughly two decades extends beyond election results, with evangelical denominations losing millions of members.

The big picture: White evangelical Protestants account for just 13% of American adults, down from 23% in 2006, according to PRRI's 2025 Census of American Religion.Yet they accounted for 17% of voters Tuesday, a larger share than their population footprint, though the surveys define the group differently.

Religious "nones" now account for 28% of adults, up from 16% in 2006.

Religion and the Midterm

 Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.  

Alec Dent and Dan Merica at WP:

President Donald Trump was propelled to the White House twice thanks in large part to how completely he won support from white Christians. Over the last few years, Democratic leaders have tried to find a way to challenge the narrative that the party is hostile to peoples of faith.

For example, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) a pastor at Atlanta’s famed Ebenezer Baptist Church and a key figure in this effort, has called for Democrats of faith not to shy away from talking about its influence in their lives.

This year, two Senate candidates with hopes of flipping seats long held by the GOP — James Talarico and Adam Hamilton — took that advice to heart and made their Christian faith a prominent part of their winning campaigns.

Talarico, now a senator-elect in Texas, is a Presbyterian seminary graduate, and often spoke of “loving thy neighbor” on the campaign trail. Hamilton, the first Kansas Democrat to win a Senate seat in generations, is a Methodist minister with a megachurch who has spoken about trying to be Christ-like in his approach to government.

Several House candidates — like Iowa’s Sarah Trone Garriott and Texas’s Frederick Douglass Haynes III, both ministers — took a similar approach.

The effort seems to have paid off; religious Democrats won up and down the ballot. And an NORC voter survey suggests shifts toward Democrats this cycle; 4 percent of self-described born-again Christians who backed a GOP House candidate in 2022 supported a Democrat this time, for instance, while 6 percent of Catholics and 6 percent of Protestants who backed Trump in 2024 said they backed Democratic Senate candidates this time

Adam Hamilton used his victory speech in Overland Park to preach Matthew 25: “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.” Then he told Kansas about a one-issue voter in Walton who refuses to back anyone who doesn’t believe “we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves.” https://t.co/rMap7rZvZN

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) November 6, 2026

Midterm

Dan Merica at WP:

The scope of the generational wipeout Republicans experienced on Tuesday is truly staggering.

Democrats won nearly every competitive Senate race. They are well on the way to a House majority that approaches 250 seats. The party swept key gubernatorial races, including the race in Nevada that was called yesterday, and could have total control of state government in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan.

To put it bluntly: It was Republican annihilation up and down the ballot, a rout that will have long-lasting implications for President Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

Nate Cohn at NYT:

At the beginning of this year’s midterm campaign, it seemed that everything would have to go right for Democrats to win the Senate.

On Tuesday, everything went right for Democrats, and more.

This was an electoral tsunami: a complete collapse of the Republican coalition and the largest victory by either party in half a century.

When all the vote is in and counted, Democrats will win the national popular vote in all House races combined by 13 percentage points, according to our estimates. That would be the largest margin of victory since the post-Watergate elections in 1974 and 1976.

And by one measure, it’s even larger: Democrats could flip as many as seven Senate seats that leaned Republican by more than 10 points in the previous presidential election.

There’s simply no modern precedent for either party to do so well in states that had leaned so heavily toward the other side.

Trust in News Organizations

Many posts have dealt with news media 

Kristen Eddy at Pew:

Americans are more likely than they were a year ago to trust information from national and local news organizations, according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted in September 2026. Trust has increased modestly among supporters of both major political parties and across age groups.

More on the Difficulty of Polling the 2026 Election

Many posts have discussed pollsters' challenges, including the plunge in response rates.  This year, the challenges are even greater.  In an polarized era, partisan nonresponse bias is a big problem.

 Nate  Cohn at NYT:

There are two factors that help explain why it’s possible for the polls to be right, even when Mr. Trump’s supporters are less likely to respond.

One is turnout. There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that Mr. Trump’s supporters aren’t just less likely to respond to surveys, but also less likely to vote in midterm elections. This would help explain the basic pattern of polling error during the Trump era: Polls have a pretty good record in midterms but not in presidential elections.

The second factor is a technique called “weighting,” in which pollsters make statistical adjustments to give more weight to voters from groups underrepresented in the survey responses. This gives pollsters a chance to produce reasonable results, simply by giving more weight to registered Republicans, self-identified Republicans or the voters who say they voted for Mr. Trump who did respond to the survey.

Weighting is not a panacea. That’s because nonresponse bias can run much deeper than what can be observed and corrected in the data. A poll might be weighted to have the right number of Trump supporters but still have the wrong kind of Trump supporters — and particularly the kind of Trump supporter who might be voting Democratic.

Imagine, for instance, if the Trump voters who responded to a pollster were likelier to be the kind who supported Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary. A pollster might then have too many of the kinds of Trump supporters who would readily defect to Democrats. The Post believed it had this kind of issue in Kansas: Even after weighting, the results still seemed too good for Democrats.

Despite its imperfections, weighting has kept the survey industry afloat. In elections like 2018 or 2022, it was sufficient. For many pollsters in 2024, it probably prevented another misfire like those in 2016 or 2020. As far as I can tell, many public pollsters — maybe even most public pollsters — would have shown Kamala Harris with a clear lead over Mr. Trump in 2024 if they had used the weighting techniques that were common back in 2018 or 2020. Instead, they’ve adopted heavy-handed weighting techniques that can bludgeon even the worst samples back into the ballpark.

You can see why it’s hard to make any assumptions about the polling error this cycle in today’s Times/Siena polls. This summer, we adopted a new set of weighting techniques to improve our polling. When we re-evaluated our 2024 polls with this new weighting approach, we saw that our polls would have been about 1.6 points better on average. The difference felt meaningful, but it was fundamentally modest.
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What does all of this mean for 2026? Well, you can choose your own adventure. More than anything, it illustrates how hard it is to predict how the polls might err.

Maybe it implies that we’ve adopted weighting techniques that can handle the problems that caused the Times/Siena poll to overestimate Democratic strength in the past, especially in white working-class states. If so, maybe we’re dead-on.

Or perhaps one could argue that the Times/Siena polls will underestimate Democrats. Our polls were accurate in 2018 and 2022, after all, so maybe one should trust the old approach in a midterm election. If so, maybe the Democrats will do even better than our polls suggest.

Or maybe the extraordinarily blue results on our old methodology and the increased effect of weighting suggest that nonresponse bias is worse than ever. If so, polls could seriously underestimate Republicans once again. There’s no reason to assume that 2016 or 2020 is the worst case scenario.

We’ll find out soon enough.

Why Polling Is Difficult This year

Many posts have discussed pollsters' challenges, including the plunge in response rates.  This year, the challenges are even greater.

Michael Dimock at The Hill:

First, we’re seeing more completely “synthetic surveys,” — polls that purport to measure public opinion but don’t actually survey humans. Instead, they use AI to model what people would say. Our research on synthetic surveys finds they are not reliable substitutes for public opinion. Separately, we have also seen polls being shared that are entirely fabricated without disclosure.

Second, uncertainty about voting mechanics, such as mail-in ballots, changing election laws in some states and even concerns about voter intimidation could influence turnout in hard-to-model ways. Widespread mid-cycle redistricting has scrambled voters’ awareness of who’s on their ballots. And the 2026 race has fewer incumbents on the ballot than any general election since 1992.

Third, the issues of AI and data centers have swelled into the public dialogue but haven’t yet become completely polarized by party. This makes the impact of AI on elections more dependent on local conditions, such as planned or existing data centers nearby, and what candidates are saying about the issue.

In short, predicting who will vote has always been hard in lower turnout elections. It’s become more challenging over time, and 2026 has a swirl of unknowns compounding the challenge — a perfect storm ripe for confusion. Any one of these factors could yield surprises that are impossible to predict, even for the highest quality polls.