Democratic gains mount in US midterms as Trump faces bruising verdict

I want to bring in Doug Herbert, International Affairs commentator. Doug, the last time a president was this unpopular heading into a midterm election was Harry Truman. This was in 1946. His party lost 55 House seats and control of both chambers. Trump is polling in the low to mid 30s. Are we looking at a similar scenario tonight? You are ready for pub trivia. You could be on my team at any time. Listen, you know, we have said time and again that it's a truism in American politics that the party of the sitting president loses seats going into midterm elections, right? It happens invariably over the last century, going back well before Harry Truman, right? There have been three times, right, where you have had actually a sitting president during the midterms, right, that elections. A smack between both presidential elections, actually win seats. You have to go back to Franklin Roosevelt just after the New Deal, 1934. You get Bill Clinton in 1998, and then George Bush coming off of 9-11 and the rah-rah patriotic spirit in 2002. They all won seats. This is, as a lot of Republicans, not just Democrats, but even Republicans see it, in a sense, a sort of own goal by President Trump, his own midterms. Because yes, in general, the Republican Party had no illusions. They were braced. for some sort of reckoning at the polls. But let's just, for the context here, to give a sense of just how bad the picture has looked for the Republicans and the degree to which it's sunk in in recent weeks, the degree of what we're seeing so far tonight, this early Democrats looking strong in a lot of contests in deep red areas. To give you a sense of why that's happening, a year ago, if we had been sitting here, you'd say, well, how are the midterms shaping up? Would have said, well. Democrats have a pretty good chance of gaining control of the House, of taking control of the majority in the lower chamber of the House. The Senate would have been a Hail Mary pass, as they say in American football. It wasn't going to happen, really. It was such a long shot. It wasn't really worth contemplating. And what's happened since then is, and this is where the own goal comes into it, between the Iran war. Between Americans being absolutely squeezed everywhere they look and their cost of living in their daily lives, and between just this sense that Donald Trump, the man that the Republicans voted for back in 2024, is not really on their side and hasn't delivered on his basic promises, all of that has driven them away to a degree, or at least given them pause not to vote again for Trump, to a degree that the Democrats are performing well or competitively in deep red areas that formerly they'd have no business competing in. So that's going to be the story going forward in the next several hours, seeing how much more of this deep red territory Democrats can competitively run in and win. Because remember, they need to pick up four seats to get the Senate majority in deep red states. It's not an easy task. But if there's ever a midterm election where it looks like it's a possibility, this may be it.