Victor Davis Hanson: Democrats Think They’re About to Win Big

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.    

I’m speaking about 10 days before our Nov. 3 midterms, the second midterm in the second term of the two Trump administrations. We thought, given historical precedents, that it should be a shoo-in for the Democrats. 126 years since 1900, to take the modern era, 90% of the parties that were holding the White House at the time of the second-term midterms lost. 

And of all midterms, the in-party only won on three occasions: FDR in the ’34 election, Bill Clinton in the ’98 election, and George W. Bush in 2002. And they all had extenuating circumstances. Especially a force multiplier is the president of the United States has about a 39% rating. He’s about where George W. Bush was in 2006. He’s a point less than Barack Obama was in 2014, when both of them suffered severe midterm corrections. 

So it should be a no-brainer that the Democrats should pick up 20 to 30 seats in the House and take over the Senate with a one- or two-seat margin. But they are more worried about the midterms than the Republicans are. 

Why is that? And the answer is, to use that phrase of Donald Rumsfeld, there’s too many known unknowns in this particular year. The first is redistricting. Nobody’s talking about redistricting. But if you look at the districts that have been changed by the red state legislatures, which outnumber the blue state legislatures, and those that are affected by the Supreme Court ruling, the Republicans might pick up five to six seats they otherwise would not have. 

If they were running against a John Fetterman Democratic Party or an old Schumer-Pelosi party before they went far radical, or a Bill Clinton Democratic Party, then there’s no way the Republicans are going to win. 

But the second unknown is, for some reason, and we’ve talked about that before, the Democratic Party doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been absorbed by, or it itself absorbed, the socialist-Islamist movement. And whether it’s Mr. Abdul El-Sayed or whether it’s Ilhan Omar in the news or whether it’s Hasan Piker in the news or whether it’s Mr. James Talarico, these are people way out of the mainstream, and they scare people. 

And the Republicans are making the argument that you may not like the temporary spike in gasoline. You may not like that we did not correct the 21% inflation under Joe Biden, aggregate over four years. They may not buy the argument that the first year of the second term we only had about 2.3% inflation. Now we’re going to be about 3.5%. That’s much less, less than 5.1%. They don’t want to hear that. 

But on the other hand, they’re starting to think, maybe I don’t want to vote in anger at all of that for socialism or Islamism, and that seems to be on the ballot. 

The other thing is, we were told that the Democrats in each particular race, that is, direct contributions to a particular candidate, far, far outpaced the Republicans, and that’s absolutely true. But when you look at the PAC money, the PAC, the political action committees’ monies, the Republicans have such a huge lead in that factor, and sometimes the PAC commercials are far more effective than the actual candidates’ efforts. 

And if you add PAC money and direct money that each candidate has at his own expense, his own volition to expend, the Republicans actually have a $200 million to  $300 million advantage, and that will come into play in the last eight to nine days. 

The price of gas is very high, but as I speak, for the last three days, 24 million barrels of oil have passed out of the Persian Gulf, either through a now-liberated Strait of Hormuz or through the Red Sea pipelines or through the Gulf of Oman. 

Why is the price of gas still high, then? It won’t remain high, but right now there is a refinery crisis in Saudi Arabia and in Russia, where refineries have been hit during these respective wars. And in addition to that, insurance costs have climbed. The United States has not built enough refinery capacity. 

But the point I’m making is that we’re pretty much, as far as crude oil production and availability, where we were before the war, and the refineries will respond to that. So the voters should know that already things are not set in stone, that the oil situation will get better. It already has got better. It just hasn’t got better on the refining end. 

There’s another known unknown, and that is no one really has confidence in the polls because they were wrong in the 2024 election. They had been wrong in the 2016 election, and they had been very wrong in the Democratic primary election. 

And it’s becoming increasingly clear to the Democrats themselves that the public polls are more or less dominated by left-wing entities who feel that a poll is not just a reflection of popular opinion, but it’s a political tool. It’s a method to create false momentum and increase voter participation, the idea you want to be on a winning team, and greater donations. 

And so, to counteract that, candidates have private polls where they hire private pollsters who cannot be paid to lie to them. Why would you pay somebody in secret, and then he would lie to you? You want him to tell you the truth. You don’t want to disclose the truth, but you want to know actually where you are, and we’re not getting any of that information. 

Let me conclude. History says the Left, the Democrats, whatever we want to call this new group of Islamists, socialists, etc., etc., should win big. But there’s enough known unknowns that it’s still uncertain. They mock Donald Trump because he’s barnstorming the country, and he’s saying something that they feel makes no sense. He’s saying, “Consider that I’m on the ballot.” And they’re saying, “I hope you do, Don, because you’re 38%, 39%, and our people are voting against you.” 

Yes, they are, and that could be almost all the Democratic Party, and that could gain people traction to go to the polls. Vote against Trump, no problem. But what he’s saying is that if the MAGA movement turns out about 75% or 80%, as it did in 2024, the Republicans can stop this blue wave. 

So all of these rallies are not intended for the Democratic Party. They’re not intended even as much for the independents. They’re intended for the Republican MAGA base, which traditionally has not come out in midterm elections and sometimes did not come out in force in 2020.  

If they come out in force and they’re whipped up by 20 or 30 of these rallies, then that is an unknown unknown that might make a difference. 

Final warning: The Republicans were very haughty in 2022. Joe Biden had suffered a humiliating August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. We were hitting 9.1% inflation. The war in Ukraine had happened in February 2022, partly because Joe Biden said his reaction would depend on whether it was a major invasion or not. 

People didn’t like him. His approval rating was very low. It was down in the 40s, would get to 38. And yet the Republicans were very confident that it didn’t really matter. The party in the White House would lose seats. They thought they were going to just sweep the Congress, and they didn’t do it. They didn’t do it. 

Why? Because Joe Biden emptied half of the petroleum reserve and got the price of gas stabilized. Why? Because he promised student loan relief, which was illegal. The Supreme Court overruled it. Why? Because he said he was going to stop all prosecutions of marijuana. I could go on and on, but in the last minutes, he offered all of these things to the Republicans, and they did not have candidates that they had nominated who were as competitive as they could have been because they thought it would be a sure thing. 

Somewhat similar, isn’t it, to the Democrats? So, yes, they should win. History says they should win, but there’s enough known unknowns that they might not. 

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