My friend Steve just sent me a piece by Garrison Keillor that was uncharacteristically political in nature. He mentioned that he realizes that I have been writing less about politics, but thought I might enjoy reading Keillor’s ramblings on the subject. If I had to liken my writing to anyone’s (only aspirationally, of course) it would be to Garrison Keillor. Keillor’s writing is warm, wry, and nostalgic, built on a folksy Midwestern storyteller’s cadence, the same voice he used narrating Lake Wobegon on A Prairie Home Companion. He writes like someone spinning a yarn at the dinner table: conversational, digressive, and unhurried. His signature elements are being deadpan and understated where his comedy emerges from flat, matter-of-fact delivery of absurd or poignant details, rather than punchlines. His is considered affectionate satire as he gently mocks small-town Lutheran/Midwestern reticence, modesty, and provincialism, but with clear love for the people and place rather than contempt. His writing is nostalgic and laced with melancholy with a wistfulness about childhood, faith, community, and a vanishing rural America, which runs under the humor. His episodic, meandering structure often reads as a string of anecdotes and character sketches rather than tight plot, mirroring oral storytelling He uses simple vocabulary and sentence rhythms that read well aloud, reflecting his radio background.
I like his style and while I am not Midwestern (despite living in Wisconsin for four years), and I am not Northeastern (despite also living in Maine for three years), I think my attempts at wry warm humor and my natural bent towards storytelling are what make me liken my writing to his. I am certainly digressive, as my readers often comment to me, and I certainly do meander through anecdotes, I sketch characters much less often, but I certainly do work hard to make my writing work well as oral stories (just ask Kim, who I often ask to listen to them rather than to have her read them). But unlike Keillor, I write far more about politics even though I have somewhat moved away from that category lately. Only seven of the last fifty stories I’ve published have had some political angle to them. I can’t be bothered to do the research be be exact, but I’m certain that a few years ago my political storytelling was far more dominant.
My response to Steve was to tell him that I found politics as a topic to be very repetitive and somewhat depressing. He apologized for sending the Keillor piece and I explained that I appreciated getting anything written by Keillor and that it was the subject matter that depressed me, not being reminded of it by him. What it has caused me to do is to sit down this afternoon and try to write a piece on my sense of the state of my political thinking as we are 11 weeks away from the all-important Midterm elections in November. In the generic ballot, Democrats hold a meaningful lead. Polling averages put it around D+6.7 to D+8.1 depending on the tracker, and one August poll had it as wide as 40% Democrats to 32% Republicans. That’s a notably larger edge than Democrats had heading into 2022. House Democrats are strongly favored to flip control. One forecasting model puts their odds at 85% to win the House majority, with a projected median outcome of 230 seats (range 211–253), well past the 5 net seats Democrats need to flip the majority. Historical midterm models tied to presidential approval and economic conditions point to similarly large Republican losses. The best evidence that this is even what Republicans think will happen is that Attorney General Todd Blanche is already making moves to make Trump and his allies less prone to censure and/or impeachment. Good luck with that, Todd.
Obviously, the Senate is more competitive, but it too is trending toward Democrats. The map is tougher for Democrats structurally (more of their seats are up for grabs than those of the Republicans), but one model gives them a 55% chance of winning Senate control, projecting a median of 51 seats (range 47–55). Key pickup opportunities include North Carolina, where Democratic nominee Roy Cooper leads Republican Michael Whatley by about 10 points, and Texas, where Democrat James Talarico narrowly leads Republican Ken Paxton in a race now rated a toss-up.
The underlying environment and the macro conditions also favor the Democrats. Trump’s approval has averaged 43–44% since January 2026, damaged by tariffs, spending cuts, Iran failures and mishaps and Medicaid reduction proposals. Consumer confidence fell to around 57 in spring 2026 amid tariff-driven stagflation concerns, a level that is historically associated with large losses for the president’s party. A few caveats to all of this is that there are still nearly three months to go and generic ballot leads don’t always translate directly to seat counts given district maps. The most worrying aspect is that we have rarely in modern times had a party more likely than than the Republicans of today that have been willing to flaunt convention and even constitutionality in order to retain power. There abuses of the past two years have been so egregious and their policies so universally unpopular that they are in the “nothing to lose” camp when it comes to extreme measures to overturn the results of a rightful election. The obvious best internment of this is the 2020 election denying “Big Lie” that Trump continues to echo at every turn. After the acts of January 6th and the subsequent pardons and attempts at reparations (still ongoing), none of us should take for granted that Trump and his henchmen will leave office without a major fight. I do believe that people are less willing to tolerate that now, having seem how much Trump has abused his position, than they were perhaps willing to in 2021 when no one was loving Joe Biden either and COVID was raging, but I still think anything’s possible as Trump and his acolytes have stopped away so much of the normative protections we’ve put in place over the years to prevent such distortions.
That all leaves me cautiously optimistic about the political environment. Trump is getting old and less able to maneuver as well as he has in the past. He is emboldened by time and success at getting away with murder, as he has. His believers are fewer and further from being willing to do anything to stay in his good graces. I’ve used the expression many times, but fewer people want to be the guy holding Mussolini’s hat when the shit eventually does go down…and it will go down.
On the opposite side of the aisle, I wish things were in better order and would make me feel more confident. The rift on the left is meaningful with the progressive far left stronger than its been in many, many years. Few of the older crowd are prepared to go that far and they tend to want a more centrist left posture that they feel is ultimately more electable, but that alone may or may not stop progressives from pushing their cause. The pendulum of history and therefore of politics tends to swing too far in each direction and the arc or the swing tends to reflect how far things have been pulled in the opposite direction. It is hard to imagine a further right tend than we have experienced these last two years, so that would imply that we should expect a more severe over-reaction to the left. That is the tendency that progressives are counting on. I am unsure if I favor that much swing, but then, perhaps we need it to balance back all that has been destroyed by the Republicans…not just during Trump, but since Reagan. I think if I can become convinced that the progressive agenda is electable, I favor it…I just so do not want any more of the right wind agenda and would hate to see Democrats defeat themselves. That’s enough about politics to last me for another 50 stories.