“Republicans are worried the midterms are going to be a slaughter," is one such line from a news pundit that I have heard among many who hypothesize that the next elections are going to heavily favor Democratic candidates over Republican ones. Such opinions are probably extrapolated from polling data from Reuters (and others), which showed President Trump's approval rating has dropped 12% in one year. Though there is a ton of data which I could just list here, his approval rating or Republican approval rating isn't the core of this article. 

Instead, I would rather talk about fluctuating voters, in a sense, and unchanging Democratic policy. This is also a warning to both Republicans and Democrats who are looking to win the oncoming elections; but having general data above will supplement my arguments. Generally, Trump won his election based not just on Republican turnout, but on the turnout of independents, disenfranchised young male voters, and even Hispanics. He also won because the political Left ran articles with headlines that talked about how Kamala was a woman and was specifically not white, that she wasn’t Trump. They were arguments that wouldn’t hold up in a high school debate class.

To further cement the perspective I will be using, I will prove that I should have been in the voter block that voted for Trump. 

As a child, I never “identified" as white. The concept was entirely foreign to me. The only identifiers that I accepted before middle school were that I was A: a boy, B: Catholic, and C: short. Everyone called me short. Then I went to Bryan Middle School, and I was suddenly, for the first time in my life, near being a minority. "White” was the first word used to denigrate me by peers, and certainly not the worst. Following my unwilling foray into racism and my approach to high school, suddenly my peers began telling me that I had to apologize for being white, that my opinions were less valuable because of my race, my gender, and my sexual orientation. 

Was I wrong to be enraged by those views of my peers on the Left? Or was it the fault of my father, who always impressed upon me that all men were created equal, and that if I had an opinion, I was encouraged to share it? To further prove my perspective with hard evidence: years ago, when asking for a promotion after doing everything my previous boss asked, she told me that before considering me for that position, she would send me an email and wanted my thoughts on it. Still archived in my inbox, the email linked me to an article that said white men had no place in debate or playing the devil’s advocate. 

I shared my opinion with my boss - that the article was a poor way to get political allies. I was not promoted. 

Such was the reality for many, many young boys growing into adults; I have worked with a plethora of youth troubled and otherwise over the many years since. My story was so entirely regular and usual that if I were to have been born to a different set of parents, I could have very well been some MAGA kid. My father, however, never raised a victim. Clearly, the Democrats did not want the young male voter bloc, while also pushing agenda issues that to the common folk are truly wild: imagine, the whole world has been taught from birth (for thousands of years) that there are two genders, and now the Left wants them to accept that there can be a thousand genders. Or a man can suddenly say he is a woman and the whole world has to suddenly acquiesce? 

I’m not even offering an opinion on trans people here, but I am saying that it is entirely and incontrovertibly unreasonable to try to force the whole of the folks of the United States to first: agree that there are more than two genders, second: say anybody can be any gender at will or whimsy, third: that (potentially) whimsical or (from the perspective of others) lying men enter into girls’ bathrooms or join girls’ sports. And on that point, it was also absurd for the Left to purport that women can physically compete with men (minus ultra-long-distance swimming and running). 

There are many other political points on why I felt the Left lost, but the point is that they did. They lost so… sooo hard that the “resolution" to their political views and stances was that they lost the Presidency, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court – which also lost all of us a politically neutral FBI. So the Republicans swept up everything and are now "the” government and have been for over a year. However, there have been a ton of political mishaps and muck-ups by Republicans:

1: Their initial promise and promotion of transparency and release of the Epstein files, and then backtracking on it, and even after releasing it, Trump punished Republican Thomas Massie for forcing the issue. 

2: The Iran affair. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were fired in the form of patriot missiles with nothing worthwhile to show for it. This point is just tied to Hegseth: his banning of vaccines, and then there was an upsurge to the tune of 275 new flu cases, and a death. Then Hegseth reversed his policy. 

3: Trillions added to the debt under the Republican/Trump One Big Beautiful Bill. Tax cuts for everyone except the poorest Americans, who are now taxed more. DOGE firing and then rehiring tens of thousands of government employees. Total financial blindness from the “party of common sense.”

4: Continued assertion by Republicans that there is widespread voter fraud, though they have been in charge of the FBI and there hasn't been a single iota of proof brought forward by Kash Patel or Trump. 

5: Israel-Gaza, and generally bad foreign policy (so much so that most polls show that in a year, the U.S. is now seen more unfavorably by the rest of the world than communist-dictatorial China).

For the sake of the length of the article, I stopped short for both the health of Democrats and Republican readers. 

Onto the argument itself: 

There are a lot of people talking around the Internet and on the news about Republicans losing control of the House of Representatives…however, it is not so cut and dry. Sure, deportations seem to be causing a loss of support from Hispanic voters; there are also the young independents who have gone back to being entirely disillusioned, and there is a loss of support even from Republicans for Republicans… but can Democrats drum up the support they need? 

Have Democrats changed any of their policies? 

If their still-running policy is just “Trump bad, vote left,” then I am not so sure they can win. If they want young men to stay silent and not give opinions, that is still a voter bloc they are missing. An analogy: what sane woman would vote to have no voice? 

However, Republicans should worry, at least some. There are many people they are stepping all over to have a temporary world of their choosing that they are not paying for. Defunding Medicare, defunding our missile stockpile, irreverently kicking out even legal immigrants, Hispanic or otherwise, less taxes on the rich for now so that their grandchildren will have inherited a terrible economy. 

Which way will the midterms go? Honestly, I have no idea, nor does any other pundit who is on a screen saying one thing or the other. Hopefully this time Democrats win – it’s not like Republicans are doing a great job right now – and when they do, hopefully they won't change at all…so I will still have a job writing about how absolutely stupid they are, too. 

Aaaa—hahaha!

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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