The Midterms Arrive With Security Detail

The Senate midterms have acquired the familiar American quality of a constitutional crisis conducted through county fairgrounds, television ads and a handful of states that apparently never get to rest. Democrats need four Republican-held seats to control the chamber, while defending Michigan, Georgia and New Hampshire. Of 35 Senate contests, Reuters identifies nine as competitive. This is not a national election so much as a federal system’s very elaborate way of asking whether executive power should encounter friction.

The map is inconveniently broad for either party’s preferred story. Democrats have plausible pickup paths in North Carolina, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, Maine and Ohio; they must also protect seats including Michigan and Georgia. Several races are rated toss-ups, and the reported three-to-four-point margins in Maine and Ohio are better understood as invitations to spend money than as forecasts. A small number of Senate seats would decide who controls confirmations, investigations and the practical limits of a president’s agenda. The Founders designed checks and balances; the modern version comes with trackers and pre-roll video.

Trump remains the central atmospheric condition even where he is not on the ballot. Reuters/Ipsos put his approval at 33%, described as the lowest of his political career. That number does not mechanically produce Senate seats—voters have a tiresome habit of living in actual states—but it helps explain why Republican-held territory is being treated as contestable. The midterm question is less whether every voter has reached a final judgment on Trump than whether enough of them have concluded that a Senate without an opposition majority is too much executive branch for one republic.

Susan Collins’s race in Maine shows how a single confirmation vote can become a political structure. Collins has long cultivated the image of an independent Republican attentive to Maine. But she is now seeking reelection for the first time since Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade, and the Kavanaugh vote has become the point at which some former supporters say the brand ceased to match the product. Reporting from The 19th, published by Salon follows older Maine women who once backed Collins and now volunteer against her.

Their significance is not that five interviews constitute a poll; they plainly do not. It is that these voters possess something campaigns struggle to manufacture: lived institutional memory. Some remember illegal abortion before Roe, others legal abortion under it, and all are evaluating what the Court’s reversal means for descendants who inherit fewer protections. As one former Collins voter put it, “My whole reproductive life was lived safely within the confines of Roe v. Wade, and my kids don’t have that.” The political force here is not nostalgia. It is a concrete before-and-after comparison, delivered by people who know the difference.

Abortion is not the only concern among older Mainers; the state AARP chapter points to financial security, caregiving, utility costs and healthcare affordability. That complicates any tidy one-issue narrative. But it also explains why abortion may matter beyond the usual partisan sorting: it has merged with healthcare access, family obligation and trust in an officeholder’s judgment. Democrat Troy Jackson was recently reported leading Collins by three to four points in some polls. Collins’s problem is not merely that opponents have found an attack line. It is that the jurisprudential consequences of her decision are now old enough to vote against her.

At a campaign stop at the Canfield Fair, Ohio authorities say a 38-year-old man forced through a crowd toward Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, knocking over attendees and injuring several people before troopers stopped him. The Ohio State Highway Patrol said he had a taser and two pistols; the sheriff’s office reported recovering two handguns and brass knuckles. He was jailed on disorderly-conduct and assault charges, which remain allegations rather than findings of guilt. The AP account is clear on both the danger and the unresolved details.

The authorities differ somewhat in emphasis, though not in the fact that an event intended to place a candidate among voters became physically dangerous. The sheriff’s office said “no weapons were ever brandished or even removed from their holsters.” That may be relevant to eventual criminal proceedings; it does not make the episode a quaint misunderstanding about personal space. Motive is not reported, the investigation is ongoing, and the injuries have not been fully described. Those limits matter, especially in a political environment with a distressing appetite for instant narrative.

So does the broader pattern. Federal political committees reported more than $40 million in campaign expenses labeled security during the 2023-24 cycle, according to the AP’s cited report. Security spending is increasingly the silent running mate of retail politics: a cost of allowing candidates to do the democratic thing of appearing in public. Republican Governor Mike DeWine called violence or threats at political events unacceptable; the Republican nominee’s campaign said candidates should be able to meet voters without such fears. This should be the least controversial sentence in American public life. Its need for repetition is the indictment.

Political power also has a cultural afterlife, and sometimes it wears animated trousers. South Park won Outstanding Animated Program at the 78th Primetime Creative Arts Emmys for its season premiere, “Sermon on the Mount”; its official accounts then posted an image mocking Trump with the trophy. The Daily Beast reported the win and the post. The show’s fifth Emmy was its first in this category since 2013, a span long enough for several political eras and one unusually durable grievance.

Trump’s relationship with the Emmys has the consistency of a legal doctrine, if legal doctrines were written in all caps at 2 a.m. He once said, “I got screwed out of an Emmy!” and later complained that The Apprentice had been denied awards despite nominations. The comic’s move is obvious, even blunt. But it works because Trump has always treated cultural recognition as a species of sovereign validation. An Emmy is not merely a statuette; in this worldview it is an election whose electorate has committed fraud.

This is not the political story that decides Senate control, nor should it be confused with one. Yet it illuminates the larger contest. Trump politics has made prestige institutions—courts, universities, newsrooms, awards shows—simultaneously objects of contempt and coveted instruments of ratification. The midterms will determine whether Congress can impose meaningful limits on presidential power. The Emmy gag registers a related fact: even the institutions being mocked still confer status. America’s argument is not only over who governs. It is over who gets to declare the winner, and which losses are permitted to count.