‘I Give It Better Than a 50% Chance Of Passing’

President Trump is warning House Democrats of supposed consequences to come if they vote on articles of impeachment against the bombastic and shameless Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the new Congress, should they win control of the House in a few short days.

“I think it’s terrible,” Trump told the Washington Examiner on Thursday morning before heading out to another rally for Republican candidates in South Carolina who probably do not want him there. “All they do is they talk about impeaching everybody.”

“I mean, honestly, if we wanted to play that game, we could play it just as well,” Trump said. “But they’re talking about Pete Hegseth. He’s doing a great job. He’s a great warrior. I think he’s the best at his job in many, many years, and a lot of people agree with him.”

It’s not clear what Trump means by “we could play it just as well,” but he is likely referring to his intention to veto anything that comes his way should Democrats pull off an upper and lower chamber sweep. No one would expect any different.

The fault in Trump’s logic is intertwined with a problem that has plagued House Republican leadership throughout the entire 119th Congress — a problem of their own making, too: Thomas Massie.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) — who has repeatedly questioned the polls showing Democrats flipping the House of Representatives — insisted Tuesday there will be a “peaceful transfer of power” following the midterm elections.

Johnson called the question asking him to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in January regardless of what the results are “silly,” saying the Constitution will be followed.

Democrats’ prospects across the board look about as good as they have at any point in the 2026 election cycle, and about as good as could have reasonably been imagined at any point since late November 2024. House, Senate, governorships, state legislative races, really just about everything is looking pretty rosy. The point of this post isn’t to rain on any of that. But for the last week or so I’ve been wanting to write a post about just how close many of the frontline Senate races are, despite the fact that it’s plausible that Democrats could come out of this election with a majority in the low or even mid-50s. What I’m talking about here is no more than the inherent uncertainty around all polls and all elections. But it’s still worth absorbing.

Can the Democrats Really Be Doing This Well?

With three weeks until Election Day, those who evaluate the electoral landscape — race raters and prognosticators — are bringing their analyses of various contests in line with the ongoing wave of rosy polls for Democratic candidates. Toward the end of last week, one race rater, Cook Political Report, moved its assessment of 18 House contests toward Democrats. Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, another race rater, changed its assessment of Alaska’s governor and Senate races, which it had rated as “toss-ups,” to “leans Democratic,” and shifted four House races toward Democrats.

TPM also obtained a not-previously-reported memo from Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy that advises hedge funds and institutional investors about what to expect from global elections, among other topics. It upgrades the odds for Democrats in both chambers of Congress. The consultancy now places the odds that Democrats flip the House at 90% (up from 85%) and the odds that they flip the Senate at 60% (up from 55% at the end of September).

It predicts a growing likelihood (40%) of Democrats winning a 20-plus seat majority in Congress, based in part of Democrats’ growing numbers on the generic congressional ballot. That’s a far cry from the outlook for the GOP last spring, amid its post-Callais gerrymandering onslaught. And the memo predicts that Republicans’ last-minute deluge of money is “probably too late” and will not be enough to save them. “Evidence that spending has swayed voters is scant,” it reads.

This is all going on as the Democratic Party’s approval rating remains not-great, though recent polling shows it to be rising. Here at TPM, we have a theory of what’s going on there: Voters are not happy with how Democrats have fought Trump. That does not mean they are happy with Trump — in fact, the Democratic Party’s low approval, per this theory, is an outgrowth of Trump’s low approval. It leaves room for voters to rally behind new Democratic candidates while maintaining their discontent with the party writ large.

But that could, of course, be wrong, and, under other theories, it may speak to weakness in Democratic support that the polls are not otherwise flushing out.

The Eurasia Group memo sees Republicans’ best hope now as the possibility of a massive polling error. “We think that polling misses in 2020 and 2024 mostly resulted from underestimating Republican support, especially among voters without a college degree, when President Donald Trump was on the ballot, and that there is no reason to expect similar bias this year,” it reads. “However, this kind of polling error is impossible to predict in advance, and the possibility that it recurs is a major reason our odds for Democrats are not higher.”

Trump and His DOJ Go All In In Minnesota

This electoral backdrop is essential for understanding the latest travesty in Minnesota, where Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D) house was raided Monday as part of a criminal investigation that “Border Czar” Tom Homan teased a month ago.

• Reports suggest the investigation focuses on immigration paperwork Omar’s father filed on her behalf decades ago.
• The right has been agitating for awhile to denaturalize Omar, with Fox News and the New York Post even publishing explainers on why doing so would be so hard in order to keep their readers’ expectations in check.
• The November election looms over all of this. Some polling has suggested the contest between Peggy Flanagan (D) and Michele Tafoya (R) in Minnesota is close. Trump has, accordingly, been stoking anti-Somali hate in the state, as we noted on Friday. That continued over the weekend, with Trump stating in Ohio: “The Republican Party, we believe that Somalia bandits, third-world gangs, and jihadist sympathizers do not belong in Ohio, they do not belong in America. We got to get them the hell out of here.”
• The DOJ typically has a “blackout” period within 60 days of an election during which it refrains from taking steps in political cases. That was ignored here, with Attorney General Todd Blanche, per the Washington Post, signing off on the raid.
• TPM will have more on this developing story later today.