We’ve Found the Midterm Elections’ Worst-Case Scenario for Democracy

The Surge is your weekly political sanity check: What matters, what might, and what’s just political theater. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. Welcome to this weekend’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter whose job is not to make predictions in battleground Senate races and refuses to do so. (Unless asked, just one time and without much pushing at all, in a live show like the one we hosted on Thursday.) In this last edition before the election, we don’t have any big, sweepy analysis to make on the State of the Elections—that’s coming in a separate piece we’ve written for Monday—but here’s the long and short of it: Polls are very good for Democrats. Polls could be wrong. Polls could be right? Instead, we look at a few of the more discrete developments in the past week. The Michigan Democratic Senate primary drama between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens, one of the summer’s most watched programs, is back with a Halloween special. And hey, Barack Obama? You can come and take these cheeseburger spring rolls from our cold, dead hands. One note of housekeeping: The Surge will be doing a sleep-deprived live show for Slate Plus subscribers at noon ET the day after the election, analyzing results and assigning blame for the things we got wrong to other people. Now let’s turn our attention to the ongoing foofaraw in Alaska. What matters now: Getting a grip on Alaska. The New York Times this week published a story detailing what everyone has long expected but hadn’t proved: that Democratic operatives associated with the Mary Peltola campaign and in Washington were behind getting a second “Dan Sullivan” on the Alaska Senate ballot to sow confusion among voters. Both D.C. groups and the Peltola campaign denied involvement to the Times, but c’mon. No doubt this is a trick designed to confuse Sullivan voters and get some of them to select the wrong Sullivan on the ranked choice ballot, without listing Sen. Sullivan as their second choice. The Alaska Supreme Court did a decent job, though, of sorting this out. While it didn’t find reason to toss Decoy Sullivan off the ballot—at the end of the day, eligible candidates are allowed to run for office—it did get Sen. Sullivan to be listed as the Republican incumbent on the ballot. The Democrats behind this aren’t as clever as they think they are. If they didn’t want to be caught, they should have pursued a spoiler strategy that didn’t involve picking a random guy with the same name: It was an instant giveaway that this wasn’t on the level. And the modern compulsion to text cheeky little jokes alluding to the scheme, once again, claims new victims. In terms of the remedy for this, though, everyone needs to get a grip. What Democrats did was recruit a spoiler candidate. That’s not new, and it wasn’t the only such effort to recruit spoiler candidates in this very race this year. The system then worked, with Alaska courts clarifying the ballot, Sen. Sullivan using the spoiler as an argument against Peltola in the campaign, and the media uncovering what had happened. If Alaska voters are so disgusted by what Peltola and Democrats did, they should vote against her as punishment. There’s a straightforward political remedy here. But that’s not the direction this is headed. The Department of Justice, which had already sued to block certification of the race should Sen. Sullivan lose reelection, is now issuing a flurry of subpoenas. Alaska’s governor has launched his own probe looking into civil or criminal penalties and is refusing to say whether he would certify Peltola as the winner. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has started an investigation too. Trump, of course, has called for Peltola to be prosecuted. And if Peltola is certified as the winner and sent to Washington, he could urge Senate Republicans to object to her swearing-in, setting up a genuine shitstorm that the Surge would prefer not to cover. We do not believe that the remedy for Democrats recruiting a spoiler candidate should be for the Senate to start exercising discretion on which election winners it chooses to seat. We hate to sound like Mr. Rogers here, but: Let’s hope for a clean winner, one way or another. Because the Trump administration’s preferred path in a muddled result isn’t democracy-enhancing. What we’re keeping an eye on: What is your game, Haley Stevens? When we visited Michigan before the Democratic Senate primary this summer, then-candidate Haley Stevens unequivocally told us that despite the nastiness of the primary, she would “absolutely” support Abdul El-Sayed if he became the nominee. She graciously followed through on that, at first, after losing the primary in a closer-than-expected result. Since then, she’s enjoyed some time off, some TMZ appearances, interviews here and there. She’s planning a wedding. What she hadn’t really said much about until this week, though, was the Senate race. And now she’s saying an awful lot. In an appearance on a CNN panel last week, she would say only that she was “still on the team” with El-Sayed (without mentioning his name), while offering a bevy of gentle criticisms about his campaigning tactics and observing that GOP candidate Mike Rogers is outhustling him in Detroit. Later in the week, it came out that her fiancé was supporting Rogers. Then, Stevens did another primetime interview with CNN, where she mentioned that she still supports “Abdul” but again lined it with criticism of his ads and observed that they might be making voters feel unsafe. What’s going on here? We don’t know—some combination of still being uncomfortable with El-Sayed’s Israel–Palestine politics, spending a lot of time with a fiancé who loathes El-Sayed, and a bit of sour grapes from the primary. It does appear that South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, who endorsed Stevens in the primary, has come to play peacemaker and get the two ex-(?)rivals to appear together over the weekend. Stevens has continued to press El-Sayed, though, to more fully denounce a left-wing super PAC ad that was criticized as antisemitic. Stevens’ interventions this week won’t soon be forgotten by progressives. The big question posed by El-Sayed’s candidacy was whether someone from the Bernie wing of the Democratic Party could win a statewide Senate race in a true purple state. His polling has been better this week. But for most of the cycle, he’s been underperforming more-moderate candidates in other battleground states and substantially underperforming Michigan’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate. Now, win or lose—but especially lose!—the progressive movement will blame the underperformance on Democratic establishment figures for undercutting him. And the first name out of their mouths will be Stevens’. What’s a bunch of FANTASTIC nonsense: We loved Cheesecake Factory Week! At a rally last weekend, former President Barack Obama joked that Trump’s “got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Life has been incredible ever since. While this joke is not offensive to anyone, many feigned offense, with the interpretation being that Obama, ever the professorial elitist, was looking down on the good folks of Real America who enjoy the Cheesecake Factory. Stunts were pulled. The administration sent Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—a near-billionaire who likely hasn’t dined at a chain restaurant since before he and George Soros shorted the British pound in the early ’90s—to pretend to enjoy eating lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. “I had a great meal, always have a great meal, and I would just tell the Martha’s Vineyard set to give it a try,” the finance tycoon told the press outside the restaurant. The White House X account released an A.I. slop video of Trump waving to the assembled masses outside a Cheesecake Factory. The Wall Street Journal editorial board published a column titled “Obama Goes Socialist, Scorns Cheesecake” (subhead: “He throws in with Florida’s Angie Nixon and condescends to Middle America”). For our younger Surge readers who may not have been politically aware during the Obama presidency: Every day was like this, for eight years. In retrospect: How charming. We’d analogize this to the moment in Trump’s 2024 campaign when a comedian joked, at a late-campaign rally, that Puerto Rico was “a floating island of garbage.” Now, that joke did actually offend plenty of people, while Obama’s joke offended zero people. But Democrats played it well beyond its worth as they tried to make something happen in the last week of a campaign they were going to lose. As you are all well aware, it did not prevent Democrats from losing that election. And—GUESS WE’RE GOING TO WRITE THE FOLLOWING WORDS—CheesecakeFactoryGate will not be the thing that prevents Democrats from doing well this year, if there is such a thing. More savory roadkill for our devil’s stew … • One key moment in Susan Collins’ 2020 reelection campaign was an endorsement ad featuring local broadcasting legend Bill Green. Green was a household name, and previously apolitical, so his endorsement carried weight. So we weren’t surprised to see Collins close with another, almost identically filmed ad featuring Green six years later. But the message Green delivers this time around is more pointed. In the ad, Green says that he knows Democratic nominee Troy Jackson, a logger by trade, but that “we’re not talking about buying a cord of wood here.” He adds that “Troy doesn’t have the tools he needs to be effective” in the U.S. Senate. That line allowed the Jackson campaign to respond that Collins’ team was condescending. Not as condescending as a joke involving the Cheesecake Factory, mind you. But nothing is. • If there’s a substantial polling error underestimating Republicans, this Washington Post write-up of its poll, which shows Democrat Adam Hamilton leading Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas by 9 points, is a great explanation of why. Excited Democratic voters are sitting by their phones, waiting for pollsters to call, while pollsters are having a difficult time getting in touch with MAGA voters and divining a representative sample. The counter to that would be that with Trump off the ballot, maybe these voters aren’t answering polls because they’re less likely to vote, so the two effects net out to an extent. We’ll see. We’ll see!!! • We haven’t gotten a lot of public polls showing how Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s grotesque ad treating the wife of an alleged rapist as a reliable narrator is playing in the state. But according to outlets that have seen private GOP polling, it has hurt Ramaswamy pretty badly. Such a shame. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy! The ad is no longer running. • After the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, which gutted protections for predominantly minority congressional districts, Tennessee Republicans quickly nuked the Democratic district in Memphis. But the race to represent what remains of Tennessee’s 9th District is drawing some attention and outside support for the Republican candidate, Brent Taylor, from Trump’s super PAC. This week, the Nashville Scene reported that Taylor “has sent unsolicited nude photos as recently as 2021.” Taylor, while not specifically confirming or denying the allegations, alluded to “youthful indiscretions” from his past that he’s worked through with his wife. Here’s the thing about those “youthful indiscretions,” though: Brent Taylor is 58 years old, and 2021 was five years ago. • Not to be a downer (totally to be a downer), but if Republicans lose both chambers of Congress next week because they’re yoked to an incredibly unpopular president, how does he respond? How does he change the subject? The answer may be right there in front of us: a resumption of the war in Iran. We’ll see you next week, treasured reader. There will be much to discuss. Democrats Department of Justice Donald Trump Elections Republicans Senate The Surge Alaska 2026 Midterms