Political data wonk Nate Silver already looked ahead to 2028, declaring that “Republicans are in a hell of a predicament” for the presidential election.
In a Silver Bulletin report on Wednesday, he compared the Democrats’ midterm House and Senate takeover this week to the 2006 midterm that had a similar result.
“The ‘smart’ conventional wisdom is: midterms don’t predict future elections,” he explained. “I’m not so sure about that for a profoundly unpopular, lame-duck president.”
Check out his full report here.
Silver noted the similar poor approval ratings for second-term Republican presidents Donald Trump now and George W. Bush in 2006, and that they both had mired the country in unpopular wars. (Bush’s was against Iraq.)
In a “crystal clear parallel,” Silver noted that 2006 “produced another landslide against Republicans two years later” when Democrat Barack Obama defeated Republican John McCain for the presidency.
If he was outright predicting a similar fate for the GOP this time around, he didn’t say so.
Silver admitted he was “cherry-picking” a few data points but still gave a cagey analysis of the race to the White House.
“How in the hell are Republicans going to go about picking an appealing candidate for 2028?” he asked, hinting that leading possibilities JD Vance and Marco Rubio were not John McCain types because Trump “excommunicates dissenters.”
Silver predicted Trump’s approval rating is not likely to change much, and that whoever the GOP nominee is “will have to navigate an incredibly treacherous tightrope: distancing themselves just enough from Trump without triggering his ire.”
His conclusion?
“Democrats have plenty of their own problems, and last night didn’t erase them,” he wrote of the so-called bluenami. “We’re in an era when most presidential elections are close. I just don’t think you can witness last night without recognizing that Republicans are in a hell of a predicament.”
If Silver’s April 2025 prediction on the Democratic nominee turns out to be true, the Republican nominee would be facing off against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).