Bloomberg Surveillance · Monday, July 13, 2026
Despite a lack of palpable 'vibes,' Democratic momentum for the midterms is strong, consistently leading in generic polling data by significant margins for over a year. This trend, observed in special elections since last November, suggests a persistent advantage for the Democratic Conference heading into the election cycle.
“Yeah, you definitely want to look at genera polling data, that is what suggests who's going to win, and the Democrats have been in the lead on that for more than a year if I'm not mistaken, and they're up by outside of the margin of air five, six, seven, eight, nine points, depending on which polls you're looking at. So the momentum is definitely squarely behind Democrats. I understand your sentiment, Paul, around not feeling the vibes right now.”
“There's a lot else going on between the interest rates and the FED and the war with Iran that's on again, off again. But I encourage you to sort of look backwards, look to last November where Democrats started to see their outsize gains twelve to twenty one point wins in various cities and states around the country, from Tennessee to New York. That's been perpetuated in every single special election since. So it would take a lot to get that to change or die down. Just because we're not feeling the vibes doesn't mean that it's not persistently there for the Democratic Conference going into an election cycle.”