Will There Be Midterm Elections?
According to a site that aggregates data from several betting markets, bettors think there’s a 63.9% chance that the Democratic Party will regain control of the US House of Representatives in the midterm elections scheduled for November 3rd, 2026.
This is aligned with historically-informed analyses of the election, such as this one from Brookings.
None of the betting sites appears to be taking bets on this question: “Will the 2026 US midterm elections take place?”
Is that good news?
The question of whether the elections will happen has been one I’ve been concerned about for several months, and I don’t have a good grasp of whether this is a reasonable or bonkers question.
Even though philosophers may have difficulty conclusively answering certain kinds of questions, we tend to have strengths in identifying and evaluating questions. So I thought I would put it to you, dear readers: is “will there be midterm elections” a reasonable question?
“What do I mean by ‘reasonable question’?” you might (quite reasonably) ask. So here are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a question’s being reasonable:
- just
- kidding.
What I’m after is whether concern about the elections taking place is more like concern about whether my old car will explode next time I’m driving it (not a reasonable concern) or more like concern that my old car may need to have its transmission replaced in the next couple of years (a reasonable concern).
Since one (the main? the only?) factor affecting the reasonability of the question is the likelihood of the occurrence it asks about, reasons brought to bear on it will probably be relevant to answering the first-order question, too, and vice versa. So you’re welcome to just take up the first-order question directly, if you prefer.
Basically, what I’m asking you all to do is make me feel better. Either you’ll convince me that the question isn’t reasonable, in which case I can be a little happier about the future of the United States. Or you’ll convince me that the question is reasonable, in which case I can be a little happier about my political judgment. Thanks.
I’m less concerned about analyzing what makes a reasonable question and more concerned about figuring out what it would mean for the elections to “take place.”
It’s almost certain there will be voters putting marks on ballots next November, but will the elections be free and fair? Will the federal government use whatever levers it has to try and influence results? Will Republican controlled state governments do the same?
We’re already seeing unprecedented gerrymandering, so what new unprecedented election rigging awaits?
This seems correct. There will certainly be voters casting ballots. But will the national guard (or state militias) be deployed to “crime-ridden” areas as a way to suppress turnout? What measures will be implemented to maximize the difficulty of casting a vote? I believe the current military deployments are meant to initiate the legal process so that the Trump administration gets the OK from the Supreme Court in advance of 2026 midterms. That way, there can be a heavy military presence in heavily Democratic areas. If I were able to bet, that’s the sequence of events I would bet on.
the program is to make voting difficult and uncomfortable, even dangerous, for specific populations. gerrymandering is only one aspect, along with many state laws that make voting more difficult for certain groups under the aegis of (essentially non-existent) voter fraud mitigation, likely militarization of polling sites in blue cities during the midterms, undermining public trust in elections through unsubstantiated conspiracy allegations (trump’s foundational political move was birther-ism, let’s not forget), ice police-state tactics, and so forth.
we’ve seen all this before during jim crow in the south. it’s a coherent strategy to make voting a) more difficult for certain people, and b) discourage voting based on voter cost/benefit analysis. as some have noted on this thread, elections will happen and local election authorities will generally do their best to make them fair and free, but this will not counter the intimidation factor that the administration is actively cultivating.
it isn’t hard to imagine that trump/maga enthusiasts will be allowed to congregate near polling places, increasing social costs and the intimidation factor for people who present as non-maga approved (brown-skinned, trans, gay, spanish-speaking, etc.) while left wing groups will be labelled “antifa” and subject to arrest.
the question becomes, for the voter who might have something to lose by being harassed/detained/frightened/arrested/shunned, is it worth going to vote? the act of voting threatens to become, again for some and not others, an act of bravery in the face of discomfort and possible danger, social and otherwise.
and if or when democrats do win midterms sufficiently to take the house, the delegitimization of the election results from the administration will begin in earnest. “stop the steal” already brought us the january 6th debacle. what we see the next time around could make that pale in comparison.
Yes, of course there will be. And Democrats might well win them.
But that will not suffice to stem the tide or fix what has been broken. They have demonstrated very little feck to date, and doing that will require quite a lot of feck. Until and unless they start talking loudly about legal repercussions for all that’s happened, including, for example, for Musk and his teenage cronies and all of ICE, and replacing everything that’s been broken (including the Constitution) with shiny new and improved versions, Democrats winning isn’t going to mean all that much.
Completely disagree. If Democrats win the House, that will instantly do a great deal to check Trump’s power. If they win the Senate (unlikely), they can stop Trump from wielding *enormous* power over the federal judiciary.
The stakes are high. Anyone with a fundamental commitment to the rule of law, free speech, and due process should take the midterms very seriously, even if the Democrats are significantly to your right (or left) on various other policy issues.
I’m not saying not to take the midterms seriously. I’m saying that winning is not sufficient on its own.
I think you missed the antecedent of my conditional…
Not necessarily disagreeing with that, but, should they win, it becomes a question of how much of a check on his power will they really be and will they be effective, not only as a check on Trump’s power, but as a political force themselves. The Democratic instinct is to procedure, compromise, bipartisanship. That makes them adept at wasting their victories by trying to please opponents who show little or no desire to reciprocate, but who’ve come to expect that Democrats seek out compromise regardless. Effectiveness matters for consolidating gains; otherwise they’ll end up being little more than a temporary obstacle that’ll get washed away come the election after, or sooner, if Trump decides to test constitutional limits beyond what he has already done.
That’s a fine point in the abstract, but it doesn’t apply at all to the concrete example I gave: stopping Trump from reshaping the federal judiciary.
There is just no planet on which Trump can ram his worst appointees through a Democratic Senate as easily as through a Republican one.
It’s not obvious to me that there are clear criminal laws Musk and DOGE have broken. (I can see lots of grounds to sue the government over DOGE, and indeed they have been sued, but that’s different from individual criminal liability.)
It’s also not obvious to me that there is much point the Democrats campaigning to amend the constitutional lawfully, given how formidably difficult that is to do without bipartisan support. (And I don’t think campaigning to change it otherwise would do much for the rule of law.)
Surely at the very least they broke various laws pertaining to information security, not least since they had no security clearances.
I don’t know US information-security law well enough to know.
See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/law-against-the-founding-of-new-parties
I am very confident that the Ann Arbor council elections scheduled for November 2026 will take place, and be run fairly and professionally.
Since we vote for federal and state offices at the same time as we vote for council, I’m more or less equally confident that those elections will take place, and be run fairly and professionally.
I know Ann Arbor is weird in many ways, but in this respect I think we aren’t that far from normal. It’s a striking fact about US elections that you can’t mess up federal elections without immediately messing up state and local elections. And I don’t think the powers that be in Washington have the capacity, and they barely have the will, to mess with local elections in every municipality in America.
I suspect it also matters that the big issue is what happens to the House rather than the Senate. In statewide elections in Michigan, you can make a big difference by making it harder to vote in Detroit and Ann Arbor. (Though as I said, I don’t think they’ll do that in Ann Arbor; Detroit is a little harder to predict because it might be one of the handful of places that they target.) But the swingy House seats around here swing because a lot of precincts go from 55/45 one way to 55/45 the other. You can’t just target the areas that will support Dems more, because you (a) don’t always know what those will be, and (b) you’d have to target a lot of 55/45 places to make a difference.
To be fair, I don’t know the makeup of swingy house seats elsewhere, and I’m sure there are places where some close House seats have huge parts that are 80/20 one way or the other. But I don’t think Michigan has seats like that.
I’m convinced by others that elections are likely, since even authoritarian governments often prefer them (https://www.csis.org/analysis/elected-autocrat-why-rigged-elections-matter). Another complicating factor here is the potential for foreign interference, as we saw in Romania last year, and which is a greater risk given that there is now limited facility to meet that sort of challenge; increased conflict in the US is in the interest of many other countries. But I think it is a reasonable question because such questions (“red line” questions) help to reveal our core values. Why this particular question is so important may help reveal the things you are most worried about losing, and that can be good to know about oneself. Mine would be something like: will there be reliable sources of public knowledge in the coming years? An unreasonable question in some respects, since there must be some, but it reveals a concern about a particular loss: a shared reality.
The fact that prediction markets are not betting on whether they’ll be elections implies either that the elections-related markets are conditional on elections happening or that the probability that there won’t be is already priced in. Because there’s no market on this question, the probability of the antecedent is either close to 1 or must be implied from the existing markets but I don’t know how you’d do that. Presumably, everyone thinks elections will happen in the sense that matters to the resolution of the existing markets.
I think the reasonableness of a question depends not only on the probability but also the stakes. Whatever one thinks about pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, the examples there do seem to motivate to me the idea that the question of whether the next train is really a local, and the question of whether the bank is really open tomorrow, are much more reasonable in the high stakes scenarios than the low stakes scenarios.
I can’t remember whether anyone’s ever actually put it in print, but many people have observed that high stakes don’t always threaten knowledge – if anything the high stakes of global warming seem to make it *easier* to know that global warming is happening despite possible doubts. But even in these reversed cases about knowledge (because the high stakes occur in the situation where the proposition is true rather than false), it seems plausible to me that reasonableness of the question might still be enhanced by the high stakes.
US elections are locally administered. Authorities like the mayor and the city council who have some control over local police want to be re-elected, and will generally prefer fair elections to disrupted or otherwise illegitimate ones for that reason. This creates local resistance to any plot to disrupt elections.
My overall opinions are:
-The elections will definitely take place and votes will be counted more or less accurately
-To win the midterms, MAGA knows that it needs to make lefties feel hopeless and afraid. At the moment, MAGA is succeeding in that. Many lefties do presently feel hopeless and afraid. Worries about whether the midterms will take place are symptomatic of that
-If lefties continue to feel hopeless and afraid on election day, things will go badly, and the future after that might be dim
-This is a hugely dynamic moment, full of possibility–an awesome future is very possible and can be reasonably hoped for–and most (not all) of us have little reason to be afraid
-If lefties can somehow find their way into a boldly optimistic mindset, they’ll win the midterms, and many things will go well after 2026