In 38 days, Americans go to the polls to choose 435 Representatives (the entire House) and 35 of 100 Senate members (including two special elections in Ohio and Florida caused by the 2025 resignations of Rubio and Vance). It will be the most far-reaching election in modern US history. It will determine if Trump continues his orgy of lawlessness, corruption and grift or whether the US can pull itself back from the brink of extinction as a democratic nation. For Trump, his family, his administration and his henchmen, the election is existential. If the Republicans lose both houses, multiple impeachments will follow, some people will wind up behind bars, and Trump’s presidency will effectively end.
Republicans in traditional red states are desperately worried. One ‘professional opinionist’ with almost 300,000 followers on X is worried about Iowa, where Republicans are ten points behind in a state they normally expect to win easily. He suggests things are worse than in 2006 when the midterm elections were a disaster for Republicans. A blue ‘wave’ swept Democrats into power in both houses and in many state senates and governorships. Republicans failed to take any Democratic seat. And Trump is less popular now than George W. Bush was twenty years ago.
The big questions at the moment are what will Trump do to try to avoid defeat and if he fails and loses heavily, as many expect, what he will do after the election. It’s unimaginable that he won’t try to disrupt the process or challenge results that go against him. You can be sure he will resort to every sort of political shenanigan. Some allies of the president are even urging a declaration of martial law!
Republicans are spending colossal sums of money donated by wealthy individuals and corporations. We also know Trump’s polling continues to reach new record lows, with one - probably an outlier - dipping below 30% recently for the first time ever. This is stunning to me; about a third of American voters still intend to support him. Despite all the open corruption and insanity, despite the Constitution being trashed daily, despite the shameless ignoring of court orders, despite the chaotic foreign and trade policies and the utter stupidity on display every time the cameras are on the orange idiot, a sizeable chunk of the electorate thinks he’s doing alright, even well. It says a lot about America. None of it good.
He’s still trying to limit postal ballots even after losing 24 out of 24 Federal court cases to get states to hand over electoral rolls. The latest was in Vermont.
He is also still trying to get the US Postal Service (USPS) to block delivery of ballot papers. The US Supreme Court rejected Trump's plan to restrict voting by mail before November's midterm elections, in a setback for him. The justices upheld a federal judge's order that temporarily blocked the USPS from implementing new requirements for postal ballots. However, litigation is continuing, and some SC justices might allow it.
The same Supreme Court last Thursday allowed the government to create a vast “centralized and deeply flawed database of Americans’ personal information to initiate registration purges.” This is the so-called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement (SAVE) system, previously used to check the immigration status of people applying for government benefits but now being transformed into a sweeping tool to vet state voter rolls. This is after he failed to get the even more egregious SAVE America Act through his own Congress
States are being forced to use it to filter out potentially undocumented immigrants. Many Republican run states will use it enthusiastically. You can be sure the results will be challenged whenever and wherever Trump loses. They will use it to make it harder to vote and to cast doubt on close results where Republicans lose.
Trump is convinced the number of ineligible voters is huge, but in reality they are virtually non-existent. However, many eligible voters will be denied a ballot. In Nevada, for example, 185 citizens were all wrongly identified by the SAVE database as being noncitizens.
Nevada election officials said Thursday that 185 voters in the state who the Department of Homeland Security identified as noncitizens were all, in fact, citizens — the latest snafu in the department’s attempts to uncover illegal voters across the country. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) 26 September 2026 at 01:19
He’s banned mainstream media from the White House and started his own YouTube propaganda channel. This is five weeks before voting. There are suggestions that ICE agents will be placed in polling stations to intimidate voters, who may think they could be at risk of deportation, and won't bother to vote at all.
Meanwhile, Republicans up for election this time are trying desperately to distance themselves from Trump. Deleting references to him in campaign literature.
Republicans everywhere are abandoning Donald Trump. I’m just going to say what you’re thinking: TOO LATE. They kissed his ass, defended the indefensible, and helped build this monster. Now they can choke on the consequences.— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) 24 September 2026 at 01:17
In 2024 his name was helpful to MAGA candidates, but now it’s a millstone.
I see many left-wing commentators who suggest some sort of reckoning is coming for Trump and these MAGA Republicans, but this, in my opinion, fails to take account of how utterly lawless the administration is and what is personally at stake for many of them. If the Democrats take both houses, and the polls indicate it’s a real possibility, the “high crimes and misdemeanours” mentioned in the US Constitution will become all too real. And they know it.
Even if the Democrats win big in both houses, does anyone think that Trump, his deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, et al., will suddenly become model adherents to the same Constitution that they have spent the last two years trashing?
There is no doubt Trump wants to rig US elections in the same way that Putin rigs Russian ones. Putin’s party won 80% of seats in the Russian Duma last week. The remaining 20% were held by ‘opposition’ parties Putin controls anyway. They naturally support him, offering token opposition on trivial, irrelevant policies to give a thin veneer of democracy, Russian style.
This happens already in America to a certain extent. John Fetterman is the Democratic senator for Pennsylvania. He regularly votes with Republicans for Trump. Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican representing Maine, sometimes votes against Trump - but only when her vote doesn’t affect the outcome. Incidentally, you might want to read this story about Collins since it shows how corruption and greed work and how US governments use taxpayer dollars in federal contracts to oil political wheels and reward their own supporters in Congress.
Trump is reckless, shameless and easily the most amoral US President in history. He doesn’t understand the Constitution or even the basic concepts of democracy. He is the supreme narcissist and would abandon his friends and colleagues or even his family to save his own skin. If he loses, the Epstein files will be published in full. That alone makes him dangerous.
After his first term, he made sure all the traditional guardrails have been dismantled. It will be up to Congress and those with some backbone among Republicans to rein him in. If he wins and they can’t or won’t restrain him, then America is lost.
Associate EU membership
The announcement about Canada and a new, yet-to-be-defined relationship with the EU known as ‘associate membership’ has triggered a lot of speculation on both sides of the Channel in the hope that Britain could get the same thing.
Personally, I believe the EU will never offer the UK anything close to associate membership, for the same reason that the Canadians, enjoy a mutual recognition agreement (MRA) and we don’t. They are 3000 miles away. We are directly adjacent, even with a land border in Ireland. Brussels will say, quite reasonably, if you want the benefit of the single market, like virtually every other European country, you should either be in it or be a candidate for membership.
The EU does not want Britain as an offshore alternative to full membership, enjoying benefits without the obligations. This would lead inevitably to other members like France under a Le Pen government or Italy, demanding to be downgraded to a looser arrangement. It isn’t going to happen.
A senior unnamed diplomat told Politico: “Unlike Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Norway and the U.K., Canada is not in Europe. It cannot join the EU. Norway shouldn’t be looking at this and thinking ‘oh we want more.’ This isn’t for them. Their route to that is to join the EU. Same for the UK”
Others take a different view. Sandro Gozi, described as an ally of President Macron, says that dropping Labour’s red lines would “absolutely” open up associate membership or “something new” to the UK, according to Gozi, who is co-chair of the EU-UK Parliamentary Partnership Assembly.
It could combine existing deals, such as on security and defence, the coalition of the willing on Ukraine, and the Brexit trade deal, along with the new Brexit reset agreements currently being negotiated by the two sides on food and drink trade, youth mobility and electricity cooperation, alongside an “association agreement.”
“What is happening globally should push us to think out of the box,” Gozi said.
Fabian Zuleeg, Chief Executive and Chief Economist at the European Policy Centre, has a nice explainer (HERE) on the UK in a Changing Europe website. He does not think it would work for the UK.
The Guardian disingenuously reports that France is “moving to exclude” us from some EU legislation. It isn't. We did that to ourselves in 2016.
France leading push to exclude UK from Made in Europe legislation. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s...— Lisa O’Carroll (@lisaocarroll.bsky.social) 25 September 2026 at 09:30
Farage
Reform’s polling continues its downward slide, slipping behind Labour and vying with the Tories for second/third place, according to a recent MRP poll. With tactical voting, they may even drop to fourth. I don’t think Farage has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever becoming PM, but it would be deliciously satisfying if he became leader of the opposition.
It's the most thankless task in British politics. Hard work, under constant scrutiny and with little reward. If anything could drive him out of politics for good, it's that.
