The real “electability” question is about Donald Trump

President Donald Trump speaks as Rep.

Lisa McClain (R-MI) claps at General Motors’ Milford Proving Grounds on July 27, 2026, in Milford, Michigan. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Welcome to The Midterms, Actually.

Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground.

Let’s get into it.

One Big Idea: The electability conversation we should be having Here’s something you wouldn’t know from most of the coverage of this year’s midterm elections: The biggest electability problem belongs to President Donald Trump and the Republicans.

GOP candidates in the midterm elections must contend with defending an unpopular president leading an unpopular war, not to mention $4 gas (if they’re lucky).

The administration has upset its own base at various moments — first tariffs, then the release of the Epstein files, now a worsening war — and the party has followed Trump into backing scandal-plagued candidates in the general election, including Ken Paxton in Texas and Max Miller in Ohio .

To top things off, more than six years after the January 6 insurrection, any Republican who wants to remain in the president’s good standing cannot acknowledge the fact that he lost the 2020 election, an issue that helped cost the party major races in 2022 and could still bite in 2026.

Tom Tiffany, the Republican Senate candidate in Wisconsin, has stood side by side with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp wrote about recently .

Just this weekend, Tiffany said he did not regret his efforts at all, even after events like the Jan.

6 insurrection.

And Trump has done nothing to help candidates move past these concerns; his pardons for January 6 defendants and ( so-far failed ) attempts at creating a government fund for payouts have kept the issue fresh.

Yet still, the focus of Politics World (and to some extent this Substack ) has often been the story that’s more dynamic: the changing nature of the Democratic Party.

In doing so, “electability” has become synonymous with the ideological battle between moderates and progressives, and specifically the idea that left-wing candidates, in particular, are electoral underperformers.