The Big Picture: Deserve Victory

by Rick Wilson - October 17

We’re eighteen days out, and Democrats are looking at their best numbers in a decade. The latest NPR/PBS/Marist poll has them up 12 on the generic ballot. Trump’s approval is under 30% in several polls, breaking the 2006 Bush line. Cook projects a Democratic House gain of five to fifteen seats, which is modest in my view.

Trump just spent an evening rallying in Alaska, and the main GOP Senate super PAC dropped another $8 million into Nebraska. When you’re defending Alaska and Nebraska in mid-October, your map has become a hospice brochure.

I’ve been in this business long enough to fear polling like this more than I fear bad polling. Good numbers make people comfortable. Comfortable people find reasons to skip a Tuesday. And a narrow House majority with a Republican Senate buys you two years of subpoenas the administration ignores and bills that die on John Thune’s desk.

That’s a consolation prize. Aim higher. Much higher. Demand a landslide.

Start with your candidate. The Democrats winning this cycle quit apologizing and started swinging on prices, on the Iran war, on corruption you can see from low Earth orbit. If a campaign has spent its closing weeks getting sanded smooth by consultants, it should hear from its own voters that caution is how you lose a wave year. Fighting is working in 2026. Keep fighting.

Then look closer to home. Find two or three people in your life who sat out 2022 or 2024 because “both parties suck,” and get them to an early voting site. That’s worth more than every post you’ll write this month on Facebook, on Twitter, or (yes) on Substack.

Go big for the country’s sake, too, because the margin is the message. A squeaker gets litigated and spun for months. A blowout gets understood on election night.

That means the whole ballot. This administration has threatened local election officials with prison. It has sued states to hand over their voter rolls and sent federal agents into a Fulton County election office to carry out ballots. The people standing between that machine and your vote are the secretaries of state, attorneys general, and governors. Even Fox News concedes Republicans could lose their majority of governorships for the first time since 2011. Make it happen, and make it big enough that the 2028 election is run by officials who count votes instead of inventing reasons to throw them out.

Then comes the part Democrats usually blow: what to do with power once they have it.

The temptation in January will be an emergency relief package. Checks in the mail, something fast and visible. Resist it. Trump put his name on the pandemic checks in 2020, and he’ll find a way to take credit for money a Democratic Congress sends out. Relief that leaves the machinery untouched gets eaten by the next tariff. Fix the machinery.

The first bill out of the gate should be the tariff bill. The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, so he hopped to other statutes. Then Congress, with plenty of Democratic votes, handed him a fresh weapon in the Graham sanctions act, which cleared the Senate 86 to 11. The new majority should repeal those delegations outright. No president should impose a tariff without a vote of Congress, and that vote should carry a hard expiration date. Cato’s polling has 70 percent of Americans on board, including 56 percent of Republicans. Tariffs are a tax (no matter what the White House calls them), and taxing is Congress’s job. Take it back.

Second, pass Hawley-Warren. The Break Up Big Medicine Act would bar one parent company from owning both the insurer or pharmacy benefit manager and the doctors and pharmacies it pays. Three PBMs handle 80 percent of prescription claims; nearly 4,000 independent pharmacies have closed since 2019. Josh Hawley’s name on the bill is a gift. Make every Republican explain a vote against it.

Third, end congressional stock trading for good. The version the House passed in July exempts the president, the vice president, and the entire executive branch. It lets members keep the stock they already own. It also came stapled to a voter ID provision designed to make Democrats vote no. Meanwhile, advisers trading in the president’s accounts logged 3,600 trades in the first quarter of 2025 alone. A real bill bans individual stocks for members, their spouses, and the president. It makes trading on nonpublic information picked up in office a felony, and it writes into House and Senate rules that a conviction triggers an immediate expulsion vote. Trump’s own pollsters told Republican senators this summer that a trading ban was a 44-point issue for them. They still couldn’t bring themselves to pass a clean one.

None of this finishes the job. Accountability for these years will take the next decade: hearings, prosecutions, structural reform, and more elections after this one. November 3 starts the clock.

Trump’s most corrosive achievement has been convincing ordinary people they’re spectators in their own country, where the guy with the loudest megaphone always wins. MAGA has spent a decade promising to take the country back from enemies who mostly live on cable news. We’re about to take it back for real, at the ballot box, from the people who actually took it.