The 2026 midterm elections are being driven by fear.
On the Republican side, it is mostly manufactured fear. Since the GOP-controlled Congress has no legislative record to brag about, and since Republican candidates for the Senate and the House are saddled with an unpopular war, a tariff-battered economy and a president who is less popular than measles, their only hope is to frighten voters about the alternative.
In Michigan, Republicans are branding the Democratic Senate candidate, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, as an anti-American jihadist.
In Texas, the Democrats’ Senate nominee, James Talarico, has been variously maligned as a wimp, a homosexual and a vegetarian.
In the Ohio governor’s race, GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is running a scurrilous TV ad featuring the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton. The mother, who accuses her daughter of being a liar, ran off with the man accused of raping Acton when the girl was 12 years old.
In most races — even in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, where the Democratic incumbent, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, is disparaged by many progressives for being too middle-of-the-road — the standard attack against Democratic candidates is that they are socialists, or even closeted communists, who hate America and want boys hanging out in girls’ bathrooms.
This election will decide whose fears are the greater motivator because the Democrats are also running on fear: the justifiable fear of a cowardly and complicit Republican Congress granting President Donald Trump a calamitous two more years of free rein.
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