Including the events scheduled for this weekend — which were canceled and then rescheduled to avoid appearing weak — Donald Trump will have held 28 rallies during the midterm election campaign, which culminates with the November 3 vote across the United States.

It is still unclear whether the operation — a record-setting maneuver dubbed “Midterm Blitz,” one of those military metaphors the Washington press corps loves — will have achieved its aim: to reverse the grim outlook in the polls for Republicans. On Saturday they trailed by eight points in generic ballot polling, and the surveys assume they will lose the House of Representatives while not ruling out the possibility that they could also cede control of the Senate, a remote prospect before the summer.

Altogether, the blitz of campaign events has added up to almost 60 hours of classic Trumpian riffing: his lies (“we don’t have inflation”), his attacks on the press, xenophobic rhetoric (pumped this time with Islamophobia), his false promises ($5,000 for everyone if his side wins), old jokes and his dance routine (“Melania hates it”) and new fixations (most notably, on an Ohio senator’s backside).

At each and every stop, the same request to his supporters: “Pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.”

It is a risky gamble that, if it succeeds, would canonize his political instinct. But many factors are working against it: a presidential approval rating at historic lows, a war with Iran with no apparent end, corruption rising on voters’ list of concerns, the administration’s brutal immigration campaign and a battered economy. The all-or-nothing move also highlights these elections as a referendum on the end of Trumpism and on whether the MAGA bubble has reached the point of implosion.

If the “blue wave” (Democratic — there’s another Washington metaphor) materializes, and if the president does not refuse to accept the results, the second half of his term, with him reduced to a lame duck president, promises to be an unpleasant coda to one of the most extravagant political careers in U.S. history.

And then, perhaps, his party will dare to defy him, following a campaign in which its candidates have been unable to voice any doubts about the negative impact an unpopular president has had on their respective races. Nor was the Republican establishment able to prevent the handpicked selection of candidates who have complicated what were once sure bets for the Senate in places like Texas (Ken Paxton) or South Carolina (Darline Graham, whose only claim to fame is being the sister of the late Lindsey Graham).

Those two states are among the nine — all Republican — where Trump’s tour has landed. The selection could indicate two things: either the star of the tour was content to make sure the already converted don’t forget to vote, or things have become so dire that he even fears defeat in those territories.

Record early voting

Early voting figures (just over 51 million citizens as of this Saturday) forecast high turnout. Again, there are two ways to interpret this. The first is that many prefer to guarantee their voice will be heard before Election Day, which arrives shrouded in uncertainty because of the administration’s constant attacks on the democratic process. Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to contest bad results with baseless lawsuits, threats of fines or prison for election officials, voter intimidation and even the possibility of an illegal deployment of troops at polling places.

The second reading bolsters Democratic hopes: it is their voters, united more than ever by a common enemy in the White House, who have traditionally favored early participation. Perhaps for that reason Trump has bombarded his supporters, in addition to rallies, with pleas to use an option he has spent years trying to make illegal.

Tuesday will also be a test for those — like The Cook Political Report, which keeps adding races to the list of toss-ups leaning toward the opposition — who devote themselves to polling in a country whose recent history in that regard is told through its catastrophic misses. That day, Democrats will also draw conclusions in their own referendum on the party’s two souls.

This will be remembered as the election in which a faction of the party dared to try progressive politics in the mold of Bernie Sanders, embodied by candidates such as Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan), who seeks to become the first Muslim senator in history (hence the Islamophobia). But also, as part of the cycle in which the party fielded candidates who could be labeled “prairie populists” in hostile territories populated by farmers angry about the price of diesel: from Kansas (Pastor Adam Hamilton) or Iowa (Josh Turek) to James Talarico in Texas (three of the seven Senate seats the Democrats hope to flip).

They present themselves as conservative and God-fearing enough to win over Republicans who are fed up with Trump (support among that group has fallen from 95% in February 2025 to 67% this month, according to the Pew Research Center). And they also appeal to those undecided voters who are alarmed by the progressive drift (which they call “woke”) on issues such as education and transgender rights.

So much change of position — expected to be decisive among Latino voters and young men, groups that boosted Trump in 2024 — does not mean the Democratic Party is immune to the same popularity problems afflicting the country’s institutions, led by Congress itself. Only 14% of Americans view it favorably after years of polarization, the collapse of bipartisanship, and legislative rot. Those numbers have never been so bad so close to elections that renew the Capitol every two years.

Beyond the future of every member of the House of Representatives and 35 of the Senate’s 100 seats, Americans are set to choose thousands of local and state officials on Tuesday. They will also answer hundreds of ballot questions on issues such as taxes on billionaires (Proposition 40 in California) or the influence of dark money in elections (Initiative 194, proposed by Montana as a precedent with the potential to change the rules of a flawed democracy).

In other respects, this campaign will go down in the annals for Barack Obama’s joke that involved the Cheesecake Factory restaurant chain, Trump’s taste, and Saddam Hussein. For the lame remarks of Vice President J. D. Vance, and for record ad spending by both parties on personal attack ads (paradoxically, in the age of short social clips, aired on local television). And for the race in which two Senate candidates with the same surname (the Sullivans; one independent, one Republican) ran in Alaska in a maneuver (legal, though certainly immoral) by Democrat Mary Peltola’s team.

These are also the midterms of artificial intelligence. Not only because voters turn to it to make their choices, but because if any issue has united the political spectrum it has been concern about the threats it poses and opposition to data centers being built or planned across the country. That unanimity did not stop Trump from defending them, nor from dismissing opponents as enemies of progress condemned to “poverty, crime and squalor.”

With their colossal size, the water consumption they require to operate, public health impacts and utility-bill increases for local residents, data centers have also become symbols of resistance to an oligarchy that not only appears to act with more impunity than ever in this second Trump presidency, but that, thanks to AI, holds humanity’s future in its hands.

One candidate who has embodied that fight is a young state representative from Memphis, Justin Pearson, who hopes to make the leap to Washington partly on the strength of his knack for picking enemies. Elon Musk is behind the construction of two data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, Pearson’s city and one of three districts where Republicans have diluted Black representation, thanks to a Supreme Court decision that overturns 60 years of American democratic rules by dismantling the Voting Rights Act in a way that favors Republicans. So the power of that bloc is also on the ballot Tuesday.

As for Musk, he has once again flooded the elections with his money while the algorithm of X, the social network he owns, has continued to influence the mood of those millions of voters whose news diet consists exclusively of videos a few seconds in length. The magnate has spent at least $267 million to support Republicans in these midterms, according to The New York Times, compared with the roughly $290 million he put in to help return Trump to the White House in 2024.

If the polls are right, Musk — like the president and his allies — faces the prospect of a hostile, Democratic-majority Congress ready to order investigations into decisions made during the first part of Trump’s second term. At least the world’s richest man has not appeared on the campaign trail for a president who has seen his fortune grow by about $2.7 billion since his return to power.

It certainly wasn’t for a lack of opportunities: 28 in total during “Midterm Blitz”: an 80-year-old tenor giving it his all to save an election that is being framed as a referendum on his presidency.

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