Today, Vanity Fair launches our midterm spectacular, a series of eight stories across four days—plus a couple fun extras—that take stock of our national moment and where we might go next. Throughout this week, we’ll be popping around the country to examine the hope and mire of the campaign trail and report it all back to you.
All the while, the president will make his own mad dash around the nation to rally Republicans for the upcoming midterm elections. So far, he’s been content to play the hits. You’d hardly know that he’s grappling with an intractable war in the Middle East and sky-high energy prices, or that he’s staring down an endless stream of congressional investigations as his party braces for what could be a historic wipeout in November. On the stump, he’s buoyant. And increasingly candid.
“I looked at his ass,” Trump said of Senate candidate Jon Husted last week, “and then I looked at his legs. I said, ‘His ass, shit, it’s like—it’s like a pile of muscle.’” The crowd went wild. This was the eighth time in just over a week that Trump marveled at the appearance of another man. Maybe he’s experiencing an outbreak of geriatric candor. “It’s amazing,” Trump said at another rally earlier this month. “When you stand up here, it’s just like, the love. I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.”
Outside his rallies, across the country, the mood is less permissive. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week put Trump’s approval at a record low: 31%. Sixty-six percent disapprove. For the first time in more than a decade, another poll found, Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans on the economy. Things are getting so gnarly that conservative radio host Erick Erickson has taken to comparing Trump to Jimmy Carter.
This has all but ensured that Democrats will retake the House in November, but the Senate rests on a knife’s edge. Democrats really shouldn’t stand a chance of winning the upper chamber: The party is deeply unpopular to begin with, and doing so would require flipping at least two states Trump won by double digits just two years ago. But the collapse of the president’s approval has turned even some ruby-red states into battlegrounds.
This is the primordial soup that this election cycle is swimming in, the matrix in which Vanity Fair’s midterm coverage will live over the next two weeks. We launch today with examinations of Ossoff, the short-form candidate; the Maine campaign of Susan Collins; and the LA mayoral candidate Nithya Raman. This week we’ll follow up with a dispatch from Paxton’s campaign bus as the scandal-plagued attorney general works to keep Texas red.
