The media is missing the real midterm story —and it’s a GOP nightmare

18 August

U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) pushes his glasses up as he speaks to reporters outside his office on the fourteenth day of the U.S. government shutdown on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 14, 2025.

Vox writer Astead Herndon says with all the coverage the press gives the Democratic Party over its internecine battle between the centrist and progressive wing, you might have missed that President Donald Trump and his Republican Party are going down in screaming flames this year.

“Democratic infighting is distracting from the top story of the midterms,” said Herndon. “Here’s something you wouldn’t know from most of the coverage of this year’s midterm elections: The biggest electability problem belongs to President Donald Trump and the Republicans.

GOP candidates in the midterm elections currently have to contend with an avalanche of bad news, including a woefully unpopular president leading an unpopular war, $4 gas — if not higher by November. The administration has also kicked its own base like an ant mound over tariffs, then the release of the Epstein files, and now a deteriorating war of Trump’s own creation.

And the party has followed Trump into backing scandal-plagued candidates in the general election, including Texas Senatorial candidate Ken Paxton and Senatorial factory accident Max Miller in Ohio.

“To top things off, more than six years after the January 6 insurrection, any Republican who wants to remain in the president’s good standing cannot acknowledge the fact that he lost the 2020 election, an issue that helped cost the party major races in 2022 and could still bite in 2026,” said Herndon. “Tom Tiffany, the Republican Senate candidate in Wisconsin, has stood side by side with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.”

Meanwhile, Trump is doing nothing to help GOP candidates shake off this anchor with his pardons for January 6 defendants and his crusade to create a government slush fund for payouts to J-6 rioters to keep the news nice and fresh for voters.

“Yet still, the focus of Politics World (and to some extent this Substack) has often been the story that’s more dynamic: the changing nature of the Democratic Party. In doing so, ‘electability’ has become synonymous with the ideological battle between moderates and progressives, and specifically the idea that left-wing candidates … are underperformers,” said Herndon.

By overfocusing on the alleged unelectability of the progressive left, Herndon said the press is underplaying the massive rift between Trump’s policies and behavior and the voting public -- which is the real story of the midterms.

“I voted for him with his promises to the American people. And I think he’s let us down,” one Allentown, PA., voter told Herndon in a recent interview. When asked about Trump’s “biggest broken promise,” that same voter said: “The prices … it’s skyrocketed. … My main objective is a roof over our head, pay our bills, and then what’s left? There’s hardly anything left.”

“So consider this a coverage corrective,” said Herndon. “I have tracked the changes within the Democratic Party in our election coverage (and will continue to!), but I think this portion of the calendar requires us to update our language. The most toxic and consequential bromance in politics isn’t between a mayor and a Twitch streamer — it’s between the president and the party he’s reshaped in his image.”

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