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In just nine days, we’ll learn if the next mayor of Los Angeles will be a Democrat or a democratic socialist. The Iron Lady of Maine, Susan Collins, will prove once more that she cannot be beaten—or, in defeat, that some waves crush everybody. We’ll see if massive sums of tech-oligarch cash can sway the future, and just how much can one get away with as a Republican in Texas with Donald Trump’s endorsement. (Ken Paxton intends to find out.) Georgia senator Jon Ossoff, meanwhile, will seek to prove that the strength of his short-form content can power him to reelection—and perhaps, though he denies any such ambitions, to the presidency in 2028.
Today, Vanity Fair launches our midterm spectacular, a series of eight stories across four days—plus a couple fun extras—that take stock of our national moment and where we might go next. Throughout this week, we’ll be popping around the country to examine the hope and mire of the campaign trail and report it all back to you.
All the while, the president will make his own mad dash around the nation to rally Republicans for the upcoming midterm elections. So far, he’s been content to play the hits. You’d hardly know that he’s grappling with an intractable war in the Middle East and sky-high energy prices, or that he’s staring down an endless stream of congressional investigations as his party braces for what could be a historic wipeout in November. On the stump, he’s buoyant. And increasingly candid.
“I looked at his ass,” Trump said of Senate candidate Jon Husted last week, “and then I looked at his legs. I said, ‘His ass, shit, it’s like—it’s like a pile of muscle.’” The crowd went wild. This was the eighth time in just over a week that Trump marveled at the appearance of another man. Maybe he’s experiencing an outbreak of geriatric candor. “It’s amazing,” Trump said at another rally earlier this month. “When you stand up here, it’s just like, the love. I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.”
Outside his rallies, across the country, the mood is less permissive. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week put Trump’s approval at a record low: 31%. Sixty-six percent disapprove. For the first time in more than a decade, another poll found, Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans on the economy. Things are getting so gnarly that conservative radio host Erick Erickson has taken to comparing Trump to Jimmy Carter.
This has all but ensured that Democrats will retake the House in November, but the Senate rests on a knife’s edge. Democrats really shouldn’t stand a chance of winning the upper chamber: The party is deeply unpopular to begin with, and doing so would require flipping at least two states Trump won by double digits just two years ago. But the collapse of the president’s approval has turned even some ruby-red states into battlegrounds.
This is the primordial soup that this election cycle is swimming in, the matrix in which Vanity Fair’s midterm coverage will live over the next two weeks. We launch today with examinations of Ossoff, the short-form candidate; the Maine campaign of Susan Collins; and the LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman. This week we’ll follow up with a dispatch from Paxton’s campaign bus as the scandal-plagued attorney general works to keep Texas red.
Paxton’s challenger, James Talarico, is among a fresh crop of young Democrats who have mastered the new media climate that allowed for Trump’s rise in the first place, using viral short-form video as a means of catapulting their campaigns to national attention and building massive war chests in the process. Ossoff has pulled in $110 million this election cycle thanks in part to this very modern media strategy. And Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed—the subject of our upcoming video documentary, which follows the brash Democrat on a trip to the state’s Upper Peninsula—is one of quite a few progressive populists looking to prove they can ride social media stardom to victory in a swing state.
Increasingly, these younger candidates are backed by online personalities with rising power, digital commissars made for our logged-on era. As you’ll read in our dispatch from the online fever swamps, a lefty streamer like the hugely influential Hasan Piker suddenly has no corollary on the other side, as the dark and dingy precincts of the far right, led by voices like Nick Fuentes, have devolved into a kind of anti-electoral, nihilistic self-absorption that might just prove these nihilists are the true inheritors of Trump’s political legacy. Though even the president, for a time, cared about getting Republicans elected.
This election will ultimately serve, like every midterm before it, as a referendum on the man in the White House. Should Democrats win control of the House of Representatives, the next two years of Trump’s administration will look very different from the first two, when he operated with unprecedented power and impunity. November 3 will undoubtedly mark a turning point not just for this new flock of Democrats hoping to descend on Washington in January, but also for a White House that has sought to alter the fabric of the country and its relationship with the world.
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