It’s one of the old clichés ahead of US elections: the ever-looming chance of an “October Surprise“, a late-breaking scandal or disaster that either shifts or finally confirms the result. The 2026 midterms may represent the first time an American political party has October Surprised itself — and several times over.
Ahead of the US midterms, taking place Tuesday, November 3, Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ran an attack ad against his Democrat opponent Amy Acton. It wheeled out her estranged 82-year-old mother, who hasn’t spoken to her daughter since the late 1970s, to call her a “liar”. The mother, Donna Arthur, lost custody of her children decades ago, having helped Acton’s stepfather flee after being charged with raping Acton as a child. Acton’s siblings have backed her version of events.
It was grubby, mean-spirited and dishonest even by the standards of these things, just politics vacated of any positive vision — the peak of the “cruelty is the point” politics identified by American journalist Adam Serwer in Trump’s first term. It also appears to have backfired spectacularly, actively turning voters away from Ramaswamy, who’s running to replace Republican Mike DeWine as Ohio governor. DeWine, leaving office after serving his maximum allowed term, has said the ad should be withdrawn.
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It’s clear the Republican Party’s supine posture towards President Donald Trump over the past decade, and the full embrace of his political logic, appears to be dragging it down. The polls are extremely bad for the party — and Trump. In the lead-up to the 2018 midterms, where the Republicans lost the House but kept the Senate, Trump’s approval ratings were largely between the early and mid 40s in most nationwide polls. That’s roughly where he was in February this year, at which point America and Israel attacked Iran and his ratings started to plummet. They are currently ranging in the 30s — with a net approval of around negative 20 — the worst they’ve ever been.
It was always risky for Republicans to tie their long-term fortunes to a pathologically self-involved figure like Trump. Ever since he started taking over the party, injecting it with the kind of energy you get from dark web supplements, he’s expressed open contempt for it and most of what it claims to stand for. Indeed, this year he has alienated major pillars of his support: the anti-War America First right; the rural voters whose lives have been made doubly hard by the tariffs, war and inflation; the conspiratorial thinkers whom he let believe the Epstein files were his great cause before promptly abandoning it.
The Ramaswamy ad is one example of how Trump’s tactics are now being used by people who have neither his showbiz sense nor his ear for insult comedy. Case in point: on the campaign trail in October, JD Vance, the sodding vice president of the United States, was making giggly jokes insinuating that Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was gay. Indeed, as Andrew Dodd detailed for Crikey last week, the race for the Senate in Texas is a perfect prism through which to view the party’s current woes.
In Texas, Trump has supported a primary challenge by former state attorney-general Ken Paxton against longtime Republican incumbent John Cornyn. It’s clear the US president was wooed by Paxton’s attempt — one of the most desperate of any Trump loyalist — to prevent Joe Biden from taking office after the 2020 presidential election. Paxton, however, is deeply unpopular with voters and has a string of corruption scandals. It may prove a problem in an election where corruption is the only issue more important to voters than cost of living, according to several surveys including by CNBC and Fox.
The predictions of a “blue tsunami” may not pan out; polls have consistently underestimated Republican votes in midterms for decades. But if we do see one, it’s hard to imagine what the remainder of the Trump presidency looks like. His homoerotic focus on his allies’ bodies, his husky voice, his slurring as he rambles about Somalians, his bragging about oil company profit thanks to skyrocketing fuel costs — it all gives the impression of a diminished and tiring figure. Even his rallies, held in smaller venues with more empty seats, have looked increasingly shaky. He’s plagued by more and more hecklers. The tone is no longer fear and rage but mockery.
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Over the weekend, he’s been cancelling and then uncancelling trips to Kansas and Iowa. The fact he has to campaign in Kansas at all — which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932 — is another sign of his woes. Roger Marshall, the state’s incumbent Republican senator, who may not actually live in Kansas at all, was revealed in September to have sued more than 700 patients for missing payments during his pre-politics career as an ob-gyn. This included people who’d suffered late miscarriages and were facing severe financial difficulties, and eventually 81 people were arrested.
Trump has no choice but to return to the hits. His virulent anti-Muslim attacks on Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed — repeatedly calling him a “jihadist” and deliberately mangling his name in speeches — smacks of “going door to door trying to shock people”. Of course, the dreamy fascism of his 2024 rhetoric struck similarly, and he followed that with a comfortable win and a terrifyingly focused and organised start to his presidency. Even a middling result — say, losing the House and keeping the Senate — would be spun by Trump and his supporters as a great victory, against the rigged polls and fake news and radical left extremist Democrats.
But if the Democrats do achieve a result at the higher end of projections, this is a disaster for Trump on so many levels. Beyond frustrating the US president’s legislative goals, if the Democrats take control of the oversight and investigation powers of the House and Senate, that could mean the remainder of his time in office is dominated by public investigations into, among other things, the killings of American citizens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and, of course, Trump’s quite spectacular and more or less open personal corruption.
In those circumstances, does Trump go against his nature and accept a result that hasn’t gone his way? The president has said he will accept the result “if they’re honest elections“, as he did in 2020 and 2024. The fact the White House has no practical ability to overturn the results of state votes is all well and good in blue states or races that don’t end up being close. But, as shocking as it is to be reminded from the Australian context, the recording of votes in the US is done by partisan, elected officials — figures like Arizona Republican Stephen Richer faced death threats in the lead-up to 2024 on account of his dismissal of vote-rigging conspiracy theories.
Look to Alaska: the Department of Justice has already (unsuccessfully) attempted to preempt the result if anyone other than the Republican wins. Look to Texas: if it’s a close result that ends up in Talarico’s favour (highly possible on current polling), what kind of pressure does Trump’s administration exert on the Republican controlled apparatus of state to overturn that result?
And if that’s unsuccessful, where does the anger from Trump and his supporters end up this time?
