What do the midterm elections portend? Should we be prepared for a Democratic sweep? A Republican? Are big changes ahead or more of the same?

In his most recent Wall Street Journal op-ed Karl Rove analyzes the prospects for Democrats in the upcoming midterms. After noting that midterm elections tend to incline towards referenda on the sitting president and pointing out that Trump’s favorability isn’t particularly high, he points out something interesting, even paradoxical:

But Mr. Trump’s popularity isn’t the only consequential number. The RCP average has the Democratic Party at 35.8% favorable to 55.7% unfavorable. The Republican Party does better, 39.3% to 53.9%. How did the Democrats become less popular than Mr. Trump? It took many years, much hard work, wacky policy stances and plenty of missteps.

Even the RCP’s generic House ballot is a problem for the Democratic Party’s midterm prospects. Although Democrats lead Republicans, 46.9% to 42.1%, that may point to only modest Democratic gains in the House. Only a handful of districts are up for grabs this fall. Prognosticators suggest there are 17 districts that are toss-ups. Thirteen are held by Republicans, four by Democrats. On top of these are 13 seats held by Democrats and two held by Republicans that lean blue and one Democratic and three Republican seats that lean red. Finally, there are two GOP seats and one held by an independent (former Republican Kevin Kiley) that are considered solidly Democratic after recent resdistricting shenanigans.

Altogether, that isn’t a lot of targets for Democrats. If they swept all 39 at-risk seats, that would translate into a gain of 21. That’s about half the 41-seat boost they saw in 2018, when their generic-ballot advantage before the election was 7.3 points.

concluding that Democrats are acting as though trashing Trump is all they need to do. The tone of Mr. Rove’s op-ed is hortatory: he wants Republicans to get off their duffs and do something. His warning reflects the reality that even favorable structural conditions can be squandered.

The paradox to which Mr. Rove gestures isn’t particularly surprising. Indeed, it’s close to the modern norm, following the patterns of George W. Bush and the Republicans in 2006 and Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2014. Presidential approval ratings are personal rather than reflecting on their respective parties.

This also aligns with Ruy Teixeira’s recent lament about the Democratic Party’s declining standing with voters. The problem he identifies is not primarily candidate-specific but structural: the party brand itself has weakened. The polling Rove cites with Trump trailing generic Republicans, and Democrats trailing both fits that pattern. Democrats may benefit from dissatisfaction with Trump without having rebuilt broad confidence in their own party.

Larry Sabato projects the likely outcome of the 2026 midterms is that Democrats will gain control of the House by 21 seats while Republicans retain control of the Senate. That is also supported by prediction markets.

What does that mean for the next two years? If precedent is any gauge, it will mean continued gridlock and posturing by both political parties. Divided government without a strong mandate typically produces symbolic conflict rather than durable policy. If House Democrats remain true to form they will impeach Trump (again) and it will go nowhere (again). If Senate Republicans remain true to form they won’t accomplish a great deal.

John Halpin has just announced that he’s shuttering the Liberal Patriot Substack:

We tried our best to make a non-profit media model work with entirely free analysis and commentary published throughout our existence. But it turns out upsetting the partisan applecart on multiple issues is not a particularly good fundraising or business model.

He’s late to the party. I reached that conclusion more than 20 years ago.

Ruy Teixeira’s valedictory post there is a sort of lament for the Democratic Party. In it he reviews the folly of viewing what are called “trans rights” through a civil rights prism as part of the ongoing liberal project of defending and expanding personal rights.

He also proposes ten qualities of what he sees as a “realistic immigration policy”, eventually arriving at the observation that what the Democrats are presently supporting is a de facto open borders policy:

Going forward, Democrats must show voters they understand these realities and are willing to dramatically change the incentive structure for illegal and irregular immigration. That means strict border enforcement, elimination or radical restriction of immigration loopholes, and a credible interior enforcement regime that recognizes illegal immigrants, even if they stay out of trouble, are still illegal and therefore susceptible to deportation. Otherwise illegal immigrants who manage to enter the country will quite reasonably assume that they can stay here forever which of course is a massive incentive for more illegal immigration.

He also wishes that Democrats had some sort of coherent economic policy beyond opposing Trump or vague generalities like “affordability” or “abundance”. He concludes:

It’s time—past time—for Democrats to discard the conceit that they are on the right side of history and that therefore their positions are, and have been, noble and correct. Until they do so, I do not expect them to develop the dominant majority coalition they seek and vanquish right populism. Indeed, it could be the other way around. That’s a sobering thought.

I’ll miss Liberal Patriot. It was a pro-Democratic site with which I was frequently in agreement. I doubt we’ve heard the last of the John Halpin, Ruy Teixeira, or the other contributors there.

In my search for open source intelligence on the war in Iran one of the sources I have found is Data Republican’s Substack. To date she has produced two updates:

Data Analysis of the State of the Iranian Conflict on March 8, 2026

Data Analysis of the State of the Iranian Conflict on March 16, 2026

I’m looking forward to her next update which I expect in the next day or so. I offer these links without further comment.

Other sites offering open source intelligence on the war include:

bellingcat

Institute for the Study of War

I will add additional sites to these as I discover them.

If you have any additional suggestions, please place links in the comments.

I wanted to comment on Ramesh Ponnuru’s remarks on “Medicare for All” in a recent Washington Post op-ed before it disappeared. In the op-ed Mr. Ponnura sketches four reasons a national single-payer healthcare system modeled on Medicare won’t work. His reason are (in sequence):

• It would require a substantial increase in the taxes paid by people earning middle incomes which might or might not be made up by savings in payments of private healthcare insurance.
• Savings aren’t likely to materialize.
• The systems most similar to “Medicare for All” (Canada’s and Britain’s) have long wait times, particularly for specialists.
• It would require the abandonment of employer-subsidized and private healthcare insurance and Medicare Advantage.

I would like to propose several other issues. First, the costs of such a plan are wildly understated. The graph at the top of the page illustrates the real growth in real Medicare spending from inception to date. That is orders of magnitude faster than was estimated when it was originally enacted far exceeding the original projections, which proved not merely inaccurate but systematically and persistently optimistic. Here’s the real growth in Affordable Care Act subsidies since its inception:

Those, too, have grown considerably faster than estimated at the time.

When healthcare spending comprised 3% or 5% of spending, a five-fold increase would have been painful but, possibly tolerable. Now that it’s 16% of spending a ten-fold increase in healthcare spending, as occurred with Medicare, isn’t arithmetically possible. A five-fold increase is hypothetically possible but absurd. The implication is that for such a plan to work costs must be controlled. Growth on the scale Medicare experienced cannot be repeated without overwhelming the rest of the fiscal system and, indeed, the economy.

The second issue is that Congress has demonstrated that it is unwilling to control healthcare costs. That was proven dispositively by the experience with Medicare SGR, demonstrated repeatedly by Congress.

The third issue is that once implemented such a plan would be irreversible. There would be no alternative system to return to. Once private and employer-based systems are displaced, rebuilding them would be economically and politically prohibitive.

The relevant question is not why Medicare spending exceeded projections. The relevant question is why we should believe that future projections will be more accurate than past ones. Medicare and ACA estimates were produced by serious analysts using the best available data, yet both proved systematically optimistic. That shifts the burden of proof. Proponents of a vastly expanded system must identify concrete, politically sustainable mechanisms that will prevent the recurrence of those errors. Absent that, assurances of cost control are not evidence. They are repetition.

I don’t oppose a national single-payer healthcare system in principle. I oppose it in practice. For any such proposed system to work it must be structured to align the incentives of consumers, providers, and administrators. It is not sufficient to assert savings from administrative simplification or bargaining power. Proponents must identify specific mechanisms that (1) constrain provider behavior, (2) are politically sustainable, and (3) have not historically been reversed under pressure. As the graphs above clearly show more than blithe assurances are required. The problem is not that we lack ideas for controlling healthcare costs. The problem is that every serious attempt to implement them has been reversed when it encountered political reality.

I found the “talking heads” programs yesterday remarkably vacant. On Face the Nation Margaret Brennan tried her best to get NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte to condemn President Trump’s war against Iran, rephrasing the question multiple times in various different ways, but he refused to take the bait. For example, in response to her observations about President Trump’s scolding NATO countries for being reluctant to secure the Straits of Hormuz, he more or less tut-tutted the question:

So it is only logical that European countries needed a couple of weeks to come together.

and praised President Trump’s conduct of the war heretofore:

And that is exactly why I feel in Europe, that most politicians, it resonates with them. What the President is doing here, which is taking out- degrading Iran’s capability to be, again, an exporter of chaos, sheer chaos to the region, to the world.

She was much more successful in getting the responses she wanted from Colorado Rep. Jason Crow. She just needed to turn him loose:

They started this war without congressional authorization. There’s no imminent threat. They actually have even stopped trying to pretend there was an imminent threat, which is what is necessary for the president to take action without congressional approval. So now here we are spending tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, losing American lives. Congress isn’t involved. We’ve been stonewalled. The American people are not in the driver’s seat here, right? Because Congress has been sidelined in this they are the ones that need to have the voice and whether or not they’re going to send their sons and daughters to go fight this war, whether or not they’re going to finance it. It’s time for this to end.

At ABC’s This Week Jonathan Carl followed a similar pattern. Administration representatives were broadly supportive of the war while the other guests including North Carolina Sen. Thom Thillis and California Sen. Adam Schiff were opposed to it.

Journalists have multiple strategies available to them for shaping the message conveyed about news stories. The first is which stories they elect to cover. In this case they are choosing an important story—the war in Iran. The second is explicit editorializing which, wisely, they avoided.

The third strategy is how they choose to cover the story and that is clearly what was happening yesterday. That strategy may be working. A majority of Americans think the war isn’t going well for the United States. Public understanding is largely a function of what is made salient, how it is framed, and what shortcuts people use to process it. Decades of research on agenda-setting and framing show that what is emphasized in major media becomes what the public regards as important, and how it is presented shapes how it is understood. Most people do not independently verify or seek out competing accounts; they rely on what is repeatedly surfaced.
Personally, I would rather that journalists just report the news and let us decide what to think about it.

As far as I can tell Fareed Zakaria’s thesis about the effects of relatively inexpensive unmanned drone aircraft on warfare is summed up in the closing paragraph of his Washington Post column:

In 1991, the Gulf War taught the world that advanced technology could make war precise. In 2026, Iran is teaching the world something more consequential: Precision will now be mass-produced. The countries that prevail will not simply be those with the finest platforms. They will be those that can combine small numbers of exquisite, expensive weaponry with vast numbers of cheap drones. Human judgment will over time give way to computer algorithms. That is the future of war. And it is arriving faster than most of us imagined.

His implication seems to be that drones erode or even negate the tactical advantage possessed by the United States, China, and other major powers.

Unfortunately for Mr. Zakaria’s thesis, the statistics he cites (along with some he doesn’t) actually point in a somewhat orthogonal direction. Consider the following:

• Since the beginning of the war Iran has deployed about 3,000 drones.
• That has resulted in about 30 total casualties.
• A Shahed drone costs about $25,000.
• The cost to Iran has been around $100 million.
• Ukraine’s STING interceptor drone costs around $2,000.
• Iran’s drone usage have not yet reduced U. S., Israeli, Saudi, or other Gulf state military capability or will to use it.

The available evidence does not yet support the claim that inexpensive drones negate the advantages of major powers. What it suggests instead is that drones shift warfare toward a cost-optimization problem in which defense currently appears to have the advantage. There are reasons to believe that particularly from Ukraine’s use of its fixed geography and detection in its defense. Iran’s experience demonstrates that mass without integration—without targeting precision, coordination, and doctrinal coherence—produces low returns. The future of warfare will not belong to those who simply deploy large numbers of cheap drones, but to those who can integrate them effectively into layered systems of offense and defense. In that respect, drones may reinforce, rather than diminish, the advantages of technologically sophisticated militaries.

I thought that Nate Silver’s take on President Trump’s war against Iran is worth bringing to your attention. Here are some key passages:

On the foreign policy front, Trump didn’t face any particularly adverse consequences for nabbing Nicolas Maduro under cover of night. On domestic policy, the Supreme Court sometimes bails him out.

Indeed, “you can just do things” is often a sound approach when you’re playing on a low difficulty level. In poker, we’d call this an exploitative strategy. Game theory will tell you that, if your opponent is playing optimally, you have to make some effort to balance and disguise your strategy. You can’t always bluff or the other guy will wise up. But some guys do always fold.

and

TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) has become the slogan for the “Trump put” thesis that I described above. Trump does something that imperils the United States’ economic interests, whether tariffs or threatening to invade Greenland. The Dow sheds 1,000 points, and he reverses course. This doesn’t seem like a very stable equilibrium, however. If traders know that Trump is going to chicken out, they shouldn’t sell off in the first place; otherwise, you could always profit by “buying the dip”. But if markets don’t panic a little bit, how does Trump get the signal that he needs to TACO?

A game-theory equilibrium would almost certainly reveal that both sides are supposed to employ mixed strategies. In other words, sometimes they might be bluffing, but they can’t always be bluffing or there would be no deterrence. Some percentage of the time, they have to follow through with their threats: Trump to do the thing that markets don’t want, and the markets to actually get past the “freak out” stage into sustained, full-blown panic that might cause irreversible damage.

That’s a possible explanation for President Trump’s actions and a prediction for what may happen. Nate treats this as a signaling equilibrium problem; I think that underweights structural constraints. This isn’t poker.

I see it slightly differently. There is no shortage of reasons for the United States to go to war with Iran. Iran’s theocracy has been at war with the United States for almost fifty years. Seizing our embassy, near-daily demonstrations of “Death to America”, support for terrorism, the list is almost endless. But I also think that grievances have an expiration date and, as I’ve said before, there are no “do-overs” in foreign policy.

Israel’s situation is quite different yet. Iran’s theocracy poses an existential danger to Israel as long as it’s in power. But our interests are not identical to Israel’s and we didn’t place Israel in the same neighborhood as a mortal enemy. Those are the considerations that give credence to the hypothesis that Israel pushed President Trump into war. I don’t agree with that theory but those are among the reasons it’s credible. I simply don’t think that Netanyahu or anyone else has that kind of influence on Trump.

You only need look at the present situation to see a sufficient reason for the president’s attacks on Iran. Can we allow the Iranian theocracy to hold the world economy hostage at will by blocking the Straits of Hormuz? The issue is not that Iran can permanently close the Strait of Hormuz but that it can impose repeated, unpredictable disruptions on a passage that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s energy supply, creating intolerable economic risk. That would be the implication of “Trump chickening out”.

In yesterday’s primary elections no candidate for whom I voted got even a plurality of the vote other than the only incumbent for whom I voted, Rep. Mike Quigley. In the fall Democrat Juliana Stratton will face Republican Don Tracy in the race for retiring Sen. Richard Durbin’s seat.

The newspapers are referring to her as “progressive Juliana Stratton” but when I look at her I don’t see progressive, moderate, or any ideology other than “footsoldier”. And, honestly, that characterizes Don Tracy, a former chairman of the state Republican Party, too. IMO either of them will vote reliably for whatever their respective party’s leaders tell them to. The real distinction in this race is not ideological but institutional: both candidates are reliable agents of their parties rather than independent actors.

That reliability is not working for Illinois. Both parties take it for granted. Illinois’s population has decline about 2% over the last 10 years and its decline is only that small because of a sharp increase in the foreign-born population, at least some of whom are in the country illegally. The rapid growth of populations outside normal tax and regulatory systems complicates the state’s fiscal picture, particularly on the cost side.. When Illinoisans can’t depend on the state and they can’t depend on the federal government, some of them leave the state.

Neither of those candidates captured a majority of the votes in any county—they were plurality winners. And Juliana Stratton primarily prevailed because of the city of Chicago’s primary voters, 40% of whom voted for her. Although the media are reporting heavy turnout the present statistics are telling a somewhat different story. There are 8.4 million registered voters in Illinois. About a million votes were cast for Senate candidates in yesterday’s primary. 40% of 12% is not overwhelming support.

In Illinois Democrats, mostly in Cook County, outnumber Republicans 2:1 so it is assumed that Ms. Stratton will win in the general election. While primary turnout is always limited, to win in November, she will need to build a coalition far broader than the narrow, Chicago-centered base that secured her the nomination.

My wife and I went to see Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly at Lyric Opera on Saturday evening and I’m sad to report that it was probably the one of the most misguided stagings I’ve ever seen. The performances were good enough with soprano Karah Son’s Cio-cio-san (Butterfly) and baritone Zachary Nelson’s Sharpless (the U. S. consul) particular standouts. The costuming was lovely. The orchestra was great. Puccini’s music, as usual, was glorious.

What made this production awful was director Matthew Ozawa’s revisionist high concept production. I’m not opposed to revisionist productions on principle. I’ve seen some good, e.g. As You Like It set in the 1890s, Rigoletto—staged in a men’s club, and some bad, e.g. Flying Dutchman in which Senta does not sacrifice her life for the Dutchman.

In this production a T-shirt clad modern Pinkerton escapes from his less-than-perfect marriage into a virtual reality 19th century Japan and VR Butterfly. Only Pinkerton is aware of this. My objection to this device is that it completely eliminates the stakes involved for the characters. Butterfly has no agency—her actions are meaningless; there is no pathos. Pinkerton becomes a victim rather than the cad he is. This design concept literally tore the heart from what is normally a very moving opera.

I’m not entirely sure what Mr. Ozawa was trying to accomplish. Did he object to Puccini’s lack of knowledge or connection with 19th century Japan? That is suggested in the Director’s Notes in the program. That would be to reject art itself. Every work of art springs from the imagination of the artist. Wagner had never been to Valhalla (Die Walküre). Verdi knew little of ancient Egypt (Aida). da Vinci did not witness The Last Supper. That did not diminish any of their works. This production doesn’t reinterpret the opera. It negates it.

Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

Of course, who is to say what is real and what is fantasy in any “Madama Butterfly” at any point in the opera’s history? The production will strike some as having one’s cake and eatingt it, or, if we want to mix metaphors, as bait and switch. But this is, to my mind, a consistently potent and challenging evenging, which I mean asa compliment.

Lawrence A. Johnson, Chicago Classical Music Review

Ozawa claims his “boldly relevant” production “rescues the opera’s narrative” by employing “an entirely female [and] Japanese design collective,” which solves the problem of the story being seen “through the lens of a white man, Pinkerton.” Finally Ozawa professes his love for Puccini’s opera yet modestly states that the opera has “made me, as an Asian American, feel ostracized, and I have felt a duty to reclaim its narrative.”

It takes a certain brand of jaw-dropping hubris and solipsism to cast oneself in the role of the courageous hero who will “rescue” an operatic masterpiece from itself. How did millions of audience members ever enjoy Puccini’s opera before Matthew Ozawa came along?

I hate to break it to the director, but It’s not about you!! Nobody buys a ticket to see Butterfly because the stage director is half-Japanese or to see him work out his personal identity issues onstage. And no one in the audience cares about your background, biography, where you grew up, or why an opera makes you feel sad and neglected.

Thank goodness for Mr. Johnson’s review. I was beginning to think that opera criticism was dead. Today I have seen multiple articles on multiple subjects, the common theme of which is that everything is a videogame, nothing has any consequences, choices are not important. I don’t think this is an accident.