Don't overestimate Venezuela's impact on the midterms
Yes, the mission was impressive. The aftermath is fraught with challenges. And neither will matter much nine months from now.
I don’t bet on politics, but if I did, I would wager that the U.S. strike in Venezuela and the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife will not have any material effect on what happens in this year’s midterm elections.
Veteran election watchers know that midterms are almost always referenda on a sitting president. Partisans who identify with or lean toward the party of the sitting president may be satisfied, complacent, or even disappointed. They are rarely energized and highly motivated to vote. Conversely, those who align with or lean toward the opposition party are almost invariably unhappy with the outcome of the previous election and always anxious to ensure that the next election yields a different result.
The pure independents who comprise the remaining 5 percent more frequently vote against the incumbent party than for anything else.
Those factors almost always stack the deck against a president’s party in congressional elections (losers of 18 of 20 midterms since the end of World War II, an average setback of 26 seats). The two exceptions occurred when presidents had unusually high approval ratings—George W. Bush’s 63 percent in 2002 and Bill Clinton’s 66 percent in 1998.
The pattern in the Senate exists as well, only not as strongly, because only a third of Senate seats are up every two years and usually only about a half dozen of those are competitive. That’s why there are more exceptions—since World War II, the sitting president’s party has lost seats in 14 of 20 midterms.
Some talking heads suggest that the attack and capture of Maduro was the easy part; “running” Venezuela for the foreseeable future will be more challenging. In my mind, the first part of that sentence is too dismissive of the skill of the men and women who planned and executed this highly challenging mission, one that arguably no other military in the world could have accomplished as well. However, the argument implicit in that latter part is valid, particularly given the U.S.’s ignominious record of nation-building over the last 50 years. Iraq and Afghanistan were a long way from the Marshall Plan. A further complication is that there are clearly powers that might find it in their interest to make our experience in Venezuela as costly and painful as possible.
When pollsters ask the “ballot test” question in surveys, it invariably starts with, “If the election were held today, how would you vote?” But the election isn’t today; it is nine months from Tuesday and not likely to turn on the success or failure of the mission. In President Trump’s remarks on Saturday, he talked of the benefits of having access to Venezuela’s oil. Still, energy experts all say that it will take a decade or more to bring the Venezuelan energy infrastructure to the point where production at scale would be meaningful, and that this does not account for any reluctance the industry might have to invest billions in such an unstable situation.
It has been said that when Donald Trump is president, a decade’s worth of events occur in a single year. Nevertheless, over 59 months in office Trump’s approval ratings have fluctuated less than those of any other president over the three-quarters of a century of modern polling. In Gallup polling, Trump’s overall approval rating has remained within a narrow 15-point range, never below 34 percent nor above 49 percent. In December, it was 36 percent.
The hyper-partisanship of the country today constructs floors for presidents that they almost cannot fall below and ceilings that they cannot exceed. For President Biden, his range was just 21 points, always between 36 and 57 percent. The previous eight presidents had substantially wider ranges of between 31 and 65 points, reflecting periods of less partisanship and polarization. Attitudes about Trump, both positive and negative, are so baked-in that his approval ratings are unlikely to move out of that 15-point range and to a place where he will not be a liability for his party.
While nearly everyone has an opinion on whether the strike was a good or a bad idea, it is more likely that things that affect swing voters’ daily lives will have a greater political impact than something that happens nearly 1,400 miles southwest of Miami. It is pretty unlikely that events in Venezuela will be favorable enough to enable Republicans to hang onto their precarious, five-seat majority in the House. While the smaller number of competitive districts makes it unlikely that GOP losses will match or exceed the 26-seat average loss, it doesn’t make minor losses any more likely.
Conversely, it is unlikely that Venezuela will be sufficiently unfavorable to the GOP for them to lose four or more Senate seats and cede control to Democrats. Let’s assume for a moment that Senate Democrats have a great night, unseating Sen. Susan Collins in the blue state of Maine and holding onto their own open blue-state seats in Minnesota and New Hampshire. Next let’s say that Democrats sweep the three purple states hosting Senate races, reelecting Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia, retaining their own open seat in Michigan, and capturing the open GOP seat in North Carolina. That would be a fantastic night for Democrats—and yet it would give them only 49 seats.
Democrats would still need to capture two GOP-held seats in red states. They haven’t grabbed so much as one in the last eight regularly scheduled Senate elections—the last time in 2008, when Mark Begich upset Ted Stevens in Alaska. Stevens was indicted shortly before the election and lost his reelection bid before the conviction was eventually dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct. In terms of capturing a Republican seat in a red state with an opponent not under indictment, you have to go back two years earlier, to 2006, when Democrats defeated three GOP incumbents in red Missouri, Montana, and Ohio.
My money would be on the outcome in November being the same as the one that appeared likely in November of 2025.