We’re ten days out from the mid-term elections. This podcast is the first in a series on the subject. John Heilemann lead us off. Jim Messina is next. Jack Leslie, and (if we can get it scheduled) Daron Shaw will follow. We’ll wrap the series with Charlie Cook, a friend of many decades and the founder of The Cook Political Report, which is the gold standard of non-partisan political analysis in these United States.
There will be a two-part follow-up after the mid-terms, beginning with Katherine Miller from The New York Times, who has covered the campaign from the ground up, talking to and listening in on voters throughout. It will end with…not certain. Scheduling has gotten a bit complicated, mostly because of me.
To listen to the podcast with Mr. Heilemann, click on this link. If you prefer, you can listen to it (and all of the previous News Items podcasts) on Apple, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, and many, if not most, of the other podcast platforms.
This one was produced by our new producer, Katerina Barton, who replaces the great Dale Eisinger, who landed a job at Vox, which is lucky to have him. We recorded it on Monday, 19 October 2026. For more on John Heilemann, keep scrolling.
Roughly speaking, 2026 mid-term elections analysis resides in two “schools.” The first is “macro” (the political environment), which is dreadful for Republicans. You know the menu: the president’s dismal approval ratings, a sour electorate, high prices, diminished purchasing power, corruption, diesel, tariffs, war, etc. All of that points to a “Blue Wave”.
The second is “micro”; which concedes Democrats will win the House but asserts the Senate races that matter (nine, ten or even eleven of them, depending on who you talk to) are all within or nearby the margin of error. The micro school is open to the notion that Republicans might actually keep its current margin (53-47), by holding on for dear life in Red states and picking up Michigan and Minnesota. That might seem far-fetched. It’s not.
Democrats need four seats to recapture control of the Senate. The map makes that difficult. The Senate races in Texas, Kansas, Iowa and Alaska, to pick four, are being fought in Red states that Trump carried by wide margins in the 2024 presidential election. Democrats probably need all four, or at least three of the four, to win back the Senate. It will take a “macro” election for that to happen.
John Heilemann is the chief political columnist and partner at Puck. A bestselling author and former staff writer for New York, The New Yorker, and The Economist, John is also a national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNOW. He hosts Impolitic with John Heilemann, a Puck Podcast. His books on the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, ‘Game Change’ and ‘Double Down’, which he co-authored with Mark Halperin, were deeply reported, well-written and (for good reason) critically acclaimed.