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Hey reader! Here’s a quick note before jumping in on two events you need to know about as we approach Election Day, and that I’ll be reminding you of over the next few weeks:
I will be doing an election-night live stream here on Substack (and simulcast on YouTube) with David Nir of The Downballot and some other election nerds starting around 7:00 PM on Tuesday, November 3, 2026. We’ll be running some models live and processing results as they come in, and we invite you to join an intimate and low-budget but high-information-throughput hang as we make sense of it all. This will be open to all readers, for free, but paying subscribers will have chat functionality to send in questions all night.
And Founding Members are invited to a private pre-election briefing with Strength In Numbers and The Downballot on Tuesday, October 27, at 6:30 p.m. ET. Details here.
Here’s the weekly roundup!
1. “Blue wave” or “red undertow”?
I was hesitant to write about this subject at first, but unfortunately it keeps coming up. I have read/heard this argument referenced several times online, on TV, and in person now, which clears the bar for issuing A Take.
Here’s Charlie Cook in a piece this week:
“As this column noted two weeks ago, this is not so much a blue wave as a red undertow; the Democratic Party’s brand, as measured by favorability ratings, remains badly damaged. Where President Trump is the focal point, the GOP has problems; when the Democrats’ nominees become the center of attention, it is their turn to struggle”
Cook is making two claims here. The first is that, since the Democratic brand is badly damaged (in nominal terms, it is unpopular), people must not be voting “for it but “against” the Republicans. In this view, an unpopular party cannot win; it can only fail to lose. The second claim is that Democratic candidates struggle in head-to-head matchups where Trump isn’t the story.
Let’s look at the data.