The big issue is the economy. It’s always the economy. James Carville, though he’s grown crazy even as he’s grown irrelevant, was right 3-some odd years ago when he proclaimed, “It’s that economy, stupid.” When people feel especially precarious about money, they’re going to vote accordingly, even if that means accepting a bunch of social issue nonsense. How the Republicans do in 2026 is not going to be determined by historical trends. It’s largely going to be the result of how much money people feel like they have in their pockets and whether they feel that they’re going to continue to have money in their pockets down the road. Voters entering the voting booth always ask themselves how they feel about their economic future. If the answer is “I feel broke and can’t get a job,” the Democrats win. If the answer is, “Yahoo, good times ahoy!” yeah, we’re going to do fine, and we might even add to our majority.

Those of us who are crusty have been to this rodeo before. Ronald Reagan took a while to get his policies in place, and the economy wasn’t pumping before the 1982 elections, at which point he got kicked around. Same with Donald Trump in 2016 – his policies weren’t kicking in before 2018, and those midterms went badly. The economy picked up afterwards into a legendary juggernaut, which would have seen him reelected – even more so than he was – in 2020, if not for the black swan of Covid.

But in Donald Trump 2.0, the Republicans actually did something smart – oh, I’m sorry, I should’ve warned you to sit down before saying that. The GOP hit the ground running with the Big Beautiful Bill just six months in, got the deregulation stuff going, fired off masses of government bureaucrats/parasites, and teed up the economy for a huge boom.

In the last few months, though, people have started getting antsy. After all, you can only blame President Eggplant for the crappy economy for so long before people start looking at you and asking, “OK, what’s up?” Well, what’s up is now becoming obvious. Our 401(k)s are up. They’re up hugely. It’s kind of amazing. The stock market is hitting new heights. Now, that’s not going to be important to everybody, though many of us have retirement accounts, but it’s an indicator. If investors are paying more money for stocks, they are feeling good about the future, and investors are paying more money for stocks, hence the bull market.

But that’s not all. We’ve got rate cuts from the Fed, tentative and small ones, but cuts nonetheless. People know that in May, Jerome Powell is getting replaced by someone who doesn’t want to sabotage Trump, and that’s going to fuel the expansion. And what an expansion it is. The recent GDP projections are 4.3 percent, which is huge. Match that with inflation being way down – it’s not deflationary, but the rate of increase is down – and you’ve got a recipe for economic good times ahead.

Again, this isn’t a surprise. Conservative economics always creates booms. We saw what happened under Reagan, and we saw what happened under Trump 1.0 when they put conservative policies into effect. Of course, Trump has done nontraditional things too, like the tariffs, which have not caused the total economic disruption we were promised. Oh yeah, there was some disruption in certain sectors, like agriculture, but when one group is disproportionately affected, you can help them instead of making them bear the entire burden for restructuring the garbage international trade order that we tolerated for far too long. And Trump did that by paying off the farmers. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing. Understand that Trump is not doing superficial stuff with the tariffs. He’s fundamentally changing the way America has accepted trade disadvantages over the last 80 years to let the rest of the world recover from World War II. Of course, the rest of the world didn’t want to revert to something more equal – it was to their advantage to let the gravy train keep rolling, but World War II was nearly a century ago. America is done working hard, so Europeans can import Third World conquerors.

Speaking of Europe, we redefined NATO as an organization where the Europeans now have to play their part. And yes, Trump disrupted the old international order, but the old international order wasn’t working for us. What will replace it will be something better for America, and probably Europe too, though that’s their problem. Elsewhere, Trump has been able to bring peace in many places and may just be able to do it in Ukraine, though nothing seems to make his political opponents angrier than his preventing the mass slaughter of young Slavic men for no appreciable purpose.

Oh, and that stuff about Iran having nukes? Not a thing anymore. Remember the Israel news that was dominating everything a couple of months ago? Yeah, that’s done, and Hamas is in ruins. So are the ISIS scum who are murdering Nigerian Christians. And say adios to drug boats coming to America. Investors, go short on Maduro – that clock is ticking.

Things are getting better here inside our country. The border is closed, and we’re deporting illegal aliens left and right. Nothing makes the Democrats madder than people who shouldn’t be here not being here to replace the native population that doesn’t sufficiently like Democrats. Yes, there’s a lot of resistance from leftist judges who don’t care about the law, but they’re slowly but surely getting beaten into shape by the Supreme Court. There’s a lot of crying and whining about how mean we are to the illegal aliens and scumbag communists who interfere with ICE, but we’re still throwing them out. The numbers tell the tale. We’re at well over 2 million deported, whether they deported themselves or had deportation thrust upon them, and the BBB has enormous ICE funding to punt even more. We’re probably going to have at least 10 million invaders deported by the time Trump leaves office, hopefully to hand it off to JD Vance for eight more years of glorious, merciless remigration.

And just last week, we saw the stats showing that the murder rate is down 20 percent from last year. That’s real human lives saved, in large part, because we’re throwing out the illegal alien criminals the Democrats welcomed in. Understand that they are perfectly happy to have an illegal alien murder you if it means they can create a Third World peasant voting bloc in the future. Watch the Democrats be outraged that Trump is preventing murders. You think I’m joking? They’re going to come out against less murder – you just watch.

But these are just numbers and statistics. What matters to an electorate is the collective gut feeling about the future, and that feeling has changed even in the past several weeks. We had setbacks and made mistakes, going off on useless tangents like the Epstein files and Rob Reiner, so that our momentum stalled as we dealt with nonsense. Well, that’s over. We’re once again moving forward as the President has started to make affordability his focus. Watch for Trump to take the initiative even harder at the State of the Union speech and as he goes out on the road, talking up his achievements. No one trumpets his wins quite like Donald Trump.

There’s a new positivity in the air. The negativity is fading. You can feel it out there. People are putting their heads up and looking around and seeing that things aren’t quite as bad as they were. It’s a vibe shift, and that’s good for us. We might just vibe our way into a midterm victory.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5815216&forum_id=2\u0026show=today#49547741)