The 2026 Midterm Elections FAQ: A Slow Descent Into Madness
Will America survive? More importantly, will the Cheesecake Factory?The 2026 Midterm Elections FAQ: A Slow Descent Into Madness
Will America survive? More importantly, will the Cheesecake Factory?
The 2026 midterm elections are a few days away, and look—I’m not saying you’re avoiding news about them, but I also won’t blame you if you are. I watch football. I know how bad it is out there. All you want to do is see the Eagles lose in peace, but every time there’s a game break, your screen is suddenly filled by a weird, furious man who keeps popping off with stuff like “working people built this country, but Georgina Meyers wants your children to marry a beaver.” He’s wearing a disturbingly new-looking Carhartt jacket and walking around a construction site. “Where I come from,” he says, “we believe in traditional values. Which do not include breeding with freshwater rodents.” He comes from the richest suburb in your state, but he does not tell you this. The screen cuts to a bewildering mosaic of newspaper clippings with words like “beaver love hut” and “freakish, unwholesome progeny” highlighted. A voice that sounds like a podcast running at 2x speed says, “This ad is paid for by the Coalition to Trick You Into Voting for More Data Centers.” The man reappears. Now he’s standing in a meadow. “My name is Thorsten Montmorency III,” he says, “and I approve this message.”
It’s a nightmare. I follow this stuff full-time, and my life is barely worth living. I wake up every day knowing I’m going spend it watching some variant of this—
—and I go to bed each night praying for the sweet release of an oblivion that will not come. So, I get it. We may be in the midst of an ongoing political crisis that could transform the U.S. into an oligarchic police state, but you also have to get through your Wednesday. If you’re not mainlining updates about the Supreme Court’s latest thoughts on mail-in ballots (“Ugh, but whatever for now”), you’re just looking out for your soul.
Still … voting is already underway, and it’s the biggest midterm election cycle of our lives. I know that’s something people always say, but in this case, unfortunately—so very, very unfortunately—it’s true. If you have any feelings at all about key societal questions like “Do people have rights all the time, or only when it doesn’t hurt Mark Zuckerberg’s feelings?” and “Should your smart fridge have the power to revoke your citizenship?” and “What matters more, being able to afford a home or making sure some people you heard about on the radio can’t use the bathroom?” now would be a great time to clock in.
To help you save the republic, I’ve compiled a quick TL;DR guide to the hottest issues, biggest races, dumbest characters, and grossest ads of this midterm cycle. We’re going to keep it tight, easy, and focused only on essential information. Well, essential information plus a lot of extremely inessential information about the Cheesecake Factory for reasons that will become clear along the way.
Wait, the Cheesecake Factory?!
The Cheesecake Factory is not the main story here. Please don’t get hung up on the Cheesecake Factory.
But I love the Cheesecake Factory.
I love it, too! But we have bigger issues to worry about.
It’s just such a fun menu, you know?
Yes, I know. All right, look, whatever, fine. We can start with the Cheesecake Factory if you want.
A magical place. The desserts!
So Donald Trump has been, let’s say, aggressively redecorating the White House over the past two years. If you know anything about Trump’s taste, you know that means he’s slapping a lot of gold leaf and random filigree on everything and generally following the “authoritarian leader wants to live inside the SkyMall version of Versailles” playbook.
That has literally nothing to do with the Cheesecake Factory.
It didn't until a few days ago, when Barack Obama gave a speech at a rally in Ohio. In the speech, he did a bit about Trump being out of touch with ordinary voters. Regular Americans are struggling to make ends meet, he said, and meanwhile, Trump is building a $600 million ballroom and making the White House look “like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
Honestly, that’s kind of a bar?
It’s a really good joke. Republican politicians are pretending to be furious about it.
Why?
Desperation. They’re behind in the polls with Election Day coming up fast, and they’re hoping that Americans who’ve soured on them due to soaring food and energy prices, the baffling and mismanaged war with Iran, Elon Musk, Trump’s toadying to Vladimir Putin, the visceral cruelty of the MAGA agenda, the sustained assault on democratic norms, the never-ending TV freak show of the Trump 2.0 cabinet, and runaway corruption will rally around them due to a perceived slight against the Cheesecake Factory.
Oh, they’re behind in the polls?
Yes.
How far behind?
Trump, personally, hit his all-time-low approval rating last week. It’s the second-lowest approval rating any president has had going into a midterm election in 80 years. (Shout-out Harry S. Truman; man, people really hated you.)
Donald Trump at a rally in South Carolina ahead of the midterms
But it’s a midterm election, right? Trump isn’t on the ballot.
Trump’s name isn’t on the ballot. But Trump’s name is basically lacquered on the sky in mile-high gold-plated letters at the moment (the font: Arial; the kerning: slightly off). He’s dominated his party for a decade, and his party controls all three branches of government. The election will be a referendum on him.
Is there a single stat that sums up the state of the race, Trump-wise?
Yes. As of earlier this month, Democrats had spent $145 million on ads mentioning Trump. Republicans had spent $8 million on Trump-focused ads over the same period. Democrats are dying to talk about him; Republicans are hoping you forget he exists.
So what sort of results are we expecting?
Unless there’s something badly wrong with the polls, Democrats should win the House. The Senate, and various state races, are open questions.
Why is the Senate more uncertain than the House?
Because of the map. As you remember from eighth-grade civics, the entire House of Representatives is up for reelection every two years, but only a third of the Senate is contested over the same period. This year, there are 35 Senate seats in play, and because of where they’re located, Democrats were initially seen as a huge long shot to retake the chamber. The odds have shifted somewhat due to [waves hands at basically everything], but it’s still a very Republican-friendly map.
Can you be more specific?
Yes. Democrats are defending two seats in states Trump won in 2024, Georgia and Michigan. To retake the Senate, they’ll have to hold both of those seats and flip at least four others, which means they’ll have to win in some deep, deep, velvety-red states like Texas, Kansas, and North Carolina.
Does this have anything to do with gerrymandering?
No. Gerrymandering—state legislatures redrawing congressional districts to create safe seats for the party in power—is a huge deal in this election! But it has nothing to do with the Senate, whose members are elected by the whole state at once. There are no congressional districts in Senate races.
Wait, if gerrymandering applies only to the House, and the House is almost certain to flip to the Dems, why have we heard so much about gerrymandering this year?
Because everyone has been trying to do so much of it. Republicans have been on a multiyear, multistate gerrymandering spree in an attempt to protect their legislative majorities in this election; Democrats countered by tinkering with the map in California to give themselves five additional seats. This has led to numerous court cases and an outpouring of news coverage, even though, in this election at least, it’s not likely to sway the outcome.
Because the gerrymandering basically evened out?
No. The wave of right-wing redistricting in Texas, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee was not fully balanced by the new map in California. It led to what should have been a net Republican advantage of about 10 seats. Republicans are currently so unpopular, however, that they could lose in up to nine of the brand-new gerrymandered districts they created. It will be extremely funny if this happens!
OK, so to summarize, the House will probably go Democratic, the Senate map favors Republicans, and Trump is so politically toxic that he’s staying out of the election. Is that right?
Oh, my sweet, sweet, innocent friend. Do you really think that Trump is staying out of the election?
Isn’t he? You said that Republicans are trying to minimize his role in their campaigns.
They are. They’re distancing themselves from his policies. They’re declining his help on the trail. If it weren’t so deeply against their principles, they’d be masking up whenever his name was mentioned.
But he’s somehow involved anyway?
He’s been holding a lot of rallies where he talks about men’s asses.
I’m sorry?
Not as sorry as you’re about to be! Here’s Trump looking more focused and excited than he has in months as he describes examining Ohio Senator Jon Husted’s athletic rump.
So he talked about Jon Husted’s ass once … weird, maybe, but everybody has the occasional weird moment.
Here he is at a different Ohio rally, doing it in even more detail.
“I looked at his ass,” the president says rhapsodically. “And then I looked at his legs. I said his ass is …” Here he pauses as if momentarily lost in a wonderful memory. “It’s like a pile of muscle!”
So he’s describing a candidate he’s campaigning for. I guess at least he’s not also obsessing over the bodies of men he’s not campaigning for?
Here he is talking about “three massive, beautiful, handsome generals” he consulted with recently.
OK, but at least he’s not going to rallies and being openly lascivious about men in the audience?
Here he is at a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, looking wistfully for the three “big, strong, handsome Oklahoma studs” he saw outside before it started.
OK, so a couple of instances of talking about men’s bodies. At least he’s not also talking about women’s bodies?
Correct. Well, actually not even a little bit correct, sorry. Here he is telling a crowd all about Nicki Minaj’s ass.
All right, yes, this is bizarre. I guess the one silver lining is that he’s not out on the campaign trail obsessively discussing asses during the same week that House Democrats released new details from the Epstein files about an account of sexual assault committed by Trump.
This week, House Democrats released a new Epstein files report detailing an account that Trump raped a 24-year-old model in a Plaza Hotel suite in 1993.
Oh my God. The rest of the administration must be doing everything in its power to keep his behavior under control.
Not really! Here’s JD Vance telling a Montana crowd how excited he was when Representative Ryan Zinke complimented his “beautiful blue eyes,” before going on to talk about how “the president has been noticing a lot about the physiques of everybody lately,” which he portrays as proof that “we're self-confident men in the Trump-Vance administration.”
So it sounds like one Republican, at least, is not trying to distance himself from Trump ahead of the midterms.
Correct. Vance has been doing everything in his power to build up his profile during this election cycle, seemingly in the hope of receiving Trump’s official blessing as his political successor in 2028. He is, for instance, the only person alive who would think to call this “the Trump-Vance administration.”
Trump must really appreciate his loyalty.
Here’s Trump publicly humiliating Vance last week by refusing to commit to supporting Vance’s presidential ambitions, just a day after Vance bragged in an interview that he thought he’d have Trump’s endorsement as soon as he announced he was running. Imagine all the awkwardness you felt during the three hours you spent watching You Can See Everything. Now compress that full, excruciating payload of cringe into one six-second wince. That’s JD Vance’s face in this clip.
OK, but it feels like we’re starting to lose sight of both the midterms and, more significantly, the Cheesecake Factory.
Fair. Which one would you rather talk about?
I’m a responsible citizen. Obviously Cheesecake Factory.
Got it. So the really funny thing about the reaction to Obama’s joke is that the entire MAGA movement is performatively angry about it, but not because Obama compared Trump to Saddam Hussein. They don’t care about that part! As Obama noted in his (also pretty funny, honestly) response to the right-wing meltdown, they’re so triggered by the mere invocation of the Cheesecake Factory that the rest of the line pales to insignificance.
Democrats absolutely must incorporate this into their 2027 legislative strategy. “No American should be without affordable health care” leads to a filibuster and a crushing defeat in a floor vote. “No Cheesecake Factory patron should be without affordable health care” leads to single-payer health insurance.
So if Republicans aren’t running on Trump’s record, what’s their overall message in the midterm campaigns?
It’s hard to say. That’s part of their problem. Republicans’ messaging has been dominated by boilerplate anti-immigrant stuff, gutter transphobia—a particularly urgent issue given that there are now “effectively zero” trans athletes competing in NCAA sports—and tired old Islamophobia of a sort that’s the right-wing equivalent of a musically washed-up band running through its old hits next to the corn dog pavilion at the county fair. (“Now play ‘Axis of Evil’!”) They haven’t managed to explain the Iran war in a way that makes sense to anyone, haven’t offered a cohesive vision for governing, and haven’t found a unifying narrative more powerful than “Jon Husted has a great ass.”
This whole thing sounds so bleak.
Don’t get me wrong; very few Democrats currently running have offered any message more inspiring than “We’re not Trump.” In this climate, though, “We’re not Trump” at least has some volts running through it, while the MAGA side of the aisle can’t even find a stealth heckler to disrupt a rally without getting rhetorically hospitalized by the candidate who’s the target of the heckling. Maybe you saw the viral video of Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, pausing his town hall to reduce a hostile questioner down to his component particles?
The heckler, it turned out, wasn’t just a normal citizen with a question; he’s a professional Republican operative. Worth every penny, I’m sure!
Don’t Democrats also have “We hate data centers” as well as “We’re not Trump”?
It’s true! At least for now. (I assume that every national Democrat who’s ever used the phrases “across the aisle” or “commonsense solutions” will be bought off by the AI industry by 2028.) Republican ads have been all about men with VERY SCARY VOICES saying things like “Katie Smith loves salad and hates severing the femoral arteries of white-tailed deer”; Democratic ads have been all about extreme close-ups of Trump’s face and little cartoon signs reading “I love data centers” placed next to stock photos of their opponents.
Surely the ads haven’t been that stupid?
Oh, wow.
They have?
You know they have, because you watch sports, and you can’t possibly be quick enough to mute everything that isn’t a Tremfya commercial.
I assumed it was worse in my area.
OK, you know what? Let’s do a quick survey of some of the worst political ads from this election cycle, just to underscore how broken our national discourse truly is.
Terrible ad no. 1
Steve Hilton, California’s Republican candidate for governor, wants teen girls to experiment with voting Republican in the same way they might experiment with … well, let’s just say this goes someplace you couldn’t possibly have imagined beforehand.
Terrible ad no. 2
This ad has a great message: People should be aware of government surveillance in Little Rock, Arkansas. Unfortunately, this ad, for Little Rock mayoral candidate BJ Wyrick, is also a giant pile of bloody, disembodied eyeballs accompanied by a darkwave-y synth-pop track that sounds like it was recorded inside a microwave. Honestly? I kind of love it.
Terrible ad no. 3
If you were a congresswoman accused of lying about your stock ownership while campaigning against insider trading in Congress, how would you clear your name? If you’re Ashley Hinson, the Republican U.S. representative from Iowa’s second district, the answer is obvious: Get a bunch of sweet old white ladies to swear like they’re in The Wire.
Terrible ad no. 4
Are you an agent of Communist China? Are you thinking of conquering the state of Tennessee in the name of your warped Maoist overlords? Marsha Blackburn says THINK AGAIN. And the Republican Senator will smash as many novelty desserts as she has to to defeat your nefarious plot.
Terrible ad no. 5
Nothing says, “I understand the public’s hatred of data centers” like this ad from Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Stacy Garrity, which tries to tie her Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro, to the AI industry by … using AI to create a fake Josh Shapiro.
Terrible ad no. 6
We now turn to the radio for an unbelievably classy spot, this time from Maine. Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson has two children with his partner of nearly 40 years, who’s said to be his second cousin. (The Jackson campaign has not confirmed or denied this.) “If he’ll fuck his own family,” runs this new jingle from supporters of Susan Collins, Jackson’s Republican opponent, “he’ll fuck yours, too.”
Terrible ad no. 7
“Liberals are the new racists,” according to this new ad from conservative group America Next. It’s narrated by a white woman who can’t show her face, she says, because she’ll receive so much hate if she does. As a white man, I’m in an even more vulnerable and marginalized group than the ad’s narrator, and I get it. Sometimes, when I’m checking out at Home Depot, they don’t even call me “sir.”
Terrible ad no. 8
Adam Hamilton, the Democratic nominee for Senate from Kansas, is a pastor. His opponent, the Republican incumbent Roger Marshall, is pretty sure he’s going to hell and has placed a media buy to spread the word.
Terrible ad no. 9
I can’t even post this one because it’s apparently been taken down from YouTube, but it airs all the time in my little Pennsylvania town. Our incumbent Republican congressman, Scott Perry, who is not a credit to the human species, in my opinion, is running against a right-leaning Democrat named Janelle Stelson, a longtime news anchor in the state. Perry is now running an ad accusing Stelson of exposing herself to children. Does he have any evidence? Does he substantiate this accusation in any way other than by making some words swirl around the screen while an ominous voice says stuff? He does not!
Terrible ad no. 10
For too long, this country has been terrorized by Mongolian immigrants imposing their culture on the rest of us. Rick Jackson, Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, says GO BACK TO ULAANBAATAR, GENGHIS.
Quite possibly the most terrible ad of all time
There are very few red lines in contemporary politics, but you’d think a candidate would stop short of releasing an attack ad targeting the sexual abuse his opponent suffered as a child, which was committed by her own stepfather. To Vivek Ramaswamy, however, this is fair game. The Republican candidate for the governorship of Ohio actually dragged out the elderly mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, to appear in one of the most ghoulish marketing efforts ever to appear on TV. I’m not going to post the video, because (a) fuck these people to the nuclear core of the sun, and (b) it’s pure filth. But it happened. Trump and Vance both loved it.
My God. Who’s paying for all this?
Mostly Elon Musk. I’m not kidding. Musk is by far the largest donor in the midterms; he’s plowed nearly $300 million into Republican campaigns, trying to single-handedly counteract plummeting enthusiasm for the MAGA movement. As Wired put it earlier this month, “He has taken over the get-out-the-vote effort for the party and created something of a shadow Republican National Committee.”
Jesus, this is dark.
And that’s not even the bottom of the barrel. Tech companies, which went all in on Trump in 2024, are worried about what will happen if Democrats regain power. For reasons that are surely unrelated, social media platforms have basically dropped any attempt to police misinformation ahead of the vote. (This includes Musk’s X, which was never super worried about policing misinformation to begin with.)
AI-driven fake-news slop is now saturating feeds. Spend an hour on Facebook, and you’ll come away believing that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris are currently invading Idaho at the head of an army of killer ants. Meta may also be doing a little light censorship of content perceived to be harmful to Republicans; the No Kings Instagram account, for instance, was arbitrarily suspended during the latest wave of No Kings protests earlier this month.
James Talarico during a rally at the University of Texas in Austin
OK, let’s get serious. Can you list the big votes I should be paying attention to?
I can. The number of results that could plausibly be described as “big” in this election cycle is enormous, but these are the seven races and one ballot measure that I’m personally most interested in.
1. Dan Sullivan vs. Dan Sullivan in Alaska. A Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, faces two challengers in what could be a close Senate race: a Democrat named Mary Peltola and an unaffiliated small-town fisherman named … Dan Sullivan. Republicans believe that the second Dan Sullivan was placed on the ballot by underhanded Democrats trying to siphon votes away from the better-known Dan Sullivan. Dan 2 says he’s running of his own accord. Either way, it’s incredibly funny. The Trump administration has filed a preemptive lawsuit asking to have the election results thrown out if the Republican loses, which may be the most Trump administration move ever. It’s unclear whether the lawsuit mentions the ass of either Dan Sullivan, or whether the phrase “like a ham squeezed into an athletic sock” is used at any point.
2. Could Susan Collins finally lose in Maine? Maine is a relatively liberal state—Kamala Harris won it in 2024—that simply loves reelecting its undead Republican Senator Susan Collins, who may be the single most annoying person in American politics. (Why do they love reelecting her? It’s a mystery.) She’s currently locked in a tight race with Troy Jackson—you remember him as the cousin screwer from that charming radio ad above, produced to help Collins’s campaign. And while it seems impossible that Collins could ever lose anything but the few remaining shreds of her integrity, this may be the Dems’ best chance to flip the state before the heat death of the universe, about which Collins will inevitably pronounce herself “deeply concerned” before casting the deciding vote in its favor.
3. Can Democrats actually win in Texas? How much of a weird, scandal-plagued creep is Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate to join Ted Cruz in the Senate? Members of the Bush family are openly supporting Paxton’s Democratic opponent, James Talarico. Paxton is a terrible candidate, one dogged by years of corruption allegations and flagrant misbehavior, but the Republican stranglehold on Texas has been unbreakable for a generation. Polls give Talarico a shot! I’ll believe it when I see it!
4. Can Democrats win a Senate seat in Kansas? No. Obviously no. But … maybe??
5. Taxing billionaires in California. One of the biggest problems with American tax codes at all levels is that extremely rich people, who often derive their wealth from stock and other forms of capital ownership, tend to pay very little in income tax, which is based mostly on salary. (Musk, for instance, draws a salary of just $54,080; his hundreds of billions come from allocations of stock, which aren’t taxed until they’re sold.) The superrich can also take advantage of untold loopholes unavailable to mere mortals. Prop 40 in California would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the net worth of the billionaires living in the state. Is that enough to achieve economic justice? No, not nearly. But a vote for the idea that billionaires ought to pay their fair share, or anything close to it, would set an important precedent.
6. The Texas attorney general’s race. An election for state attorney general may not seem like the most glamorous race in the country. But as The Atlantic recently pointed out, the Texas AG has enormous power to act as a sort of culture warrior–in–chief for Republicans, helping to set legal policy across the nation by pressing right-wing causes and filing lawsuits with the weight of America’s second-biggest state behind them. The Republican candidate to succeed Paxton is a 45-year-old oil executive named Mayes Middleton II—and boy, does he look like his name—who calls himself “MAGA Mayes.” He’s in a dead heat with a Democratic state senator named Nathan Johnson. As minor as it may seem, the race will have enormous downstream effects on American law.
7. Will Michele Tafoya—yes, that Michele Tafoya—win a Senate seat in Minnesota? Minnesota is a reliably blue state, but the Democratic candidate, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, has been dogged by a fraud scandal that’s given the Republicans a rare opening to pick up a seat. The Republican candidate is former sports reporter Michele Tafoya, whom you probably remember most clearly as a sideline reporter on Sunday Night Football. Late in the fourth quarter, Flanagan is up by a touchdown. Yes, I’m giving myself a 15-yard roughing-the-English-language penalty for making that joke.
8. Will AES beat a flagrantly racist opposition campaign in Michigan? Abdul El-Sayed—the guy who demolished the heckler in the video earlier in the piece—has been targeted by Republicans with some of the grossest Islamophobic shit stirring in recent memory. How gross? Trump and other national Republicans keep calling him by his middle name, Mohamed, and accusing him, baselessly, of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. He’s dealt with this nonsense head-on and is currently leading in the polls. If he knocks off Mike Rogers, it might—maybe? perhaps? if this is even possible?—convince Republicans that anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t the winning strategy they think it is.
Does any of this even matter? Won’t Republicans just refuse to abide by the election results if they lose?
They may well try. Trump is already doing everything in his power to delegitimize the election, including seeding his beloved stolen-election narrative before it even gets underway. He’s making a big show of offering a $1 million reward to people who report voter fraud. (If you think you’re going to get that money, I’d like to offer you $1 million to shovel my sidewalks this winter.) He’s directed the Justice Department to stage theatrical investigations of alleged noncitizen voters in Nevada and California and to subpoena voting records in at least 13 states. These efforts have failed to produce results, but the mere act of announcing any investigation generates a flurry of headlines and creates the vague impression that something must be wrong. He’s threatening to station ICE officers at polling places to intimidate voters; this is illegal, but when was the last time ICE was bound by the law?
So yes, it’s likely that MAGA actors will try to overturn election results they don’t like. Given how weakened the movement appears, though, it’s less likely that they’ll be successful. If filing a legally absurd preemptive suit in the Dan Sullivan vs. Dan Sullivan race is the sort of move they’ll be making elsewhere, we may be looking at something closer to a screwball comedy than a coup. But the prospect of the next few weeks is still a little terrifying. I plan to spend at least some of it nursing my anxiety over an Oreo Dream Extreme Cheesecake in the most reassuring interior I know.
