Blame Canada!
While the prospect of Trump and the Republicans taking it on the nose on Nov. 5 may feel pleasing to many Canadians, there is far less prospect that it would provoke a rethink of the president’s anti-Canada economic and political assault on us, writes Ken Polk. / WHITE HOUSE PHOTO
Since he came down the Trump Tower escalator and entered U.S. politics in 2015, Donald Trump has never been popular with most Canadians. Now, 11 years and two elections later, outright loathing of President Donald Trump has become a new national sport.
So, like the rising energy of an approaching storm, you can feel the surge of schadenfreude rising among Canadian political obsessives, like me, at the prospect of what may be a Democratic wave in the Nov. 5 mid-term U.S. elections.
If the polls and betting markets are right — and Democrats have been serially traumatized by inaccurate presidential polls since Trump’s rise — then Republican control of the House is already lost. And what seemed improbable at the beginning of the 2026 Mid-Term cycle — Democrats winning the Senate — is looking steadily more possible.
Where are they going, and where are they spending?
It is a political rule of thumb that as elections wind down, where candidates go and where they spend is more indicative of the state of a race than what they say at their rallies.
Judging by where the president has been campaigning in recent weeks, the Republicans certainly think they are in trouble. Alabama, Oklahoma, Montana, Alaska, Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, all went strongly for Trump in 2024. They should be safe. But Trump has held rallies in each of them over the last month, trying to shore up Republican candidates facing unexpectedly tough Democratic challengers.
We also learned this week that the Republican National Committee has given up spending to support House incumbents in Iowa, New Jersey, Ohio, as well as from two House campaigns in Michigan where they thought they could knock off incumbent Democrats. Nate Silver, the poker-playing statistician who almost single-handedly invented the field of poll aggregation, rates the Democrats as having a 92% chance to win the House. I cite him because he has never hesitated to deliver bad news to both Democrats and Republicans.
The Democrats began the 2026 cycle with the Senate looking very tough, with many of their incumbents running for re-election in states Trump won easily in 2024. Even so, there is consensus among forecasters that the Democrats now have a better-than-even-money chance of taking over the Senate as well.
It must also be noted that while polling in presidential elections in the Trump era has often been wide of the mark, polling in midterm elections has not, especially for the House of Representatives. In 2018 — a shellacking for the Republicans — and 2022 they were on the money. So the Democrats can feel pretty confident about the House. But the races for the Senate remain too close for certainty
What’s next, free beer?
To the delight of Team Canada, Donald Trump has consciously sown the seeds of the Republicans’ current political predicament.
In my ever receding political youth, I used to make light of worrying poll numbers by suggesting that if things didn't improve, we could always rename the Liberal Party the “Liberal Free Beer Party.”
It is a measure of the trouble Trump thinks he is in that my old joke would be sound fiscal policy in comparison to the latest Trump effort to reverse the ebbing Republican political tide. You almost have to admire for its sheer brazenness his September promise to pay all adult Americans $5,000 each if the Republicans win the midterms.
Bribing taxpayers with their own money is a proud tradition in modern politics. If the estimated $1 trillion price tag spares him from two years of misery as the Democrats use Congress’s power to investigate often sketchy second-term deal-making, it would probably strike him as a bargain at twice the price.
I have already written about the constellation of self-inflicted wounds that have made Trump a political anchor to Republicans this fall, especially the gas price spike caused by his war on Iran. The last U.S. inflation report before the midterms was running at 3.7%, well above the G7 average of 3.1%, with gas prices being the primary inflation driver right now.
And nothing Trump and his Republican allies have tried so far has been able to change the subject, including the now-aborted plan to livestream a firing squad execution.
Complicating matters further for his party’s candidates has been the president’s repeated calls for the Republican faithful to vote like his name is on the ballot. At one level, this makes some political sense, since Republican turnout has always spiked during Trump’s presidential campaigns.
But at a time when his personal approval ratings are at an all-time low, it has played into the Democratic strategy of making the mid-terms a referendum on Trump’s Iran war, his unpopular tariff policies, and allegations of his corrupt self-dealing.
Blame Canada!
While the prospect of Trump and the Republicans taking it on the nose on Nov. 5 may feel pleasing to many Canadians, there is far less prospect that it would provoke a rethink of the president’s anti-Canada economic and political assault on us.
Indeed, the opposite seems more likely. Trump has a long-established habit of blaming others for failures. And there are signs that he is at least thinking about setting Canada up as a “fall guy” so to speak. This week, he renewed his call for us to become the 51st state.
And U.S. Ambassador to Canada Peter Hoekstra raised the possibility in a podcast interview that Canada is interfering in the midterms. Referring to Ontario’s anti-tariff ads as well as Canada’s retaliatory tariffs, which have targeted specific U.S. states, Hoekstra warned, “Keep your nose out of American politics.”
The Ambassador’s ire was no doubt raised by the fact that Republican Senate candidates in border states Michigan, Maine, and New Hampshire have called for an end to the trade war, thus taking the curious, yet thoroughly Trumpian position that Canada has no right to state the clear economic fact that the tariffs hurt Americans.
Trump’s ever more frenzied campaign schedule indicates he understands that he would take a significant hit if the Republicans lose either the House, the Senate, or both. But the fact is, he has never really used the legislative branch to drive his tariff agenda, opting instead to enact tariffs through existing statutes or executive branch authorities. So, as a centerpiece of his second-term agenda, one would expect the president to stoutly resist any attempt by the new Congress to intervene on tariff questions.
Not that he needs any more good political news, but for Prime Minister Mark Carney, the mid-terms are a kind of win-win. Every time the president targets Canada, it provides more justification for his “Build Canada” trade diversification agenda. And any chance a new Democratic Congress could end the tariff war would also be a win.
So between now and Nov. 5, Canadians can sit back and enjoy the president's evident political discomfort.
And if Trump does end up promising free beer, you can say you read it here first.
