The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Congressional Midterms: Electoral Bloodbath or More of the Same || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

There has been plenty of public frustration over Trump's policies and actions, but that doesn't necessarily translate to political momentum.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4neSMWC

Hey, all, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. Today, we're taking a question from the Patreon crowd, and specifically, are we going to have an electoral bloodbath in the midterms? Let me go with a partial no and a big, I don't know. First, the partial no. Keep in mind that if you want to change the math on the big issues, like, say, impeachment, it's not the House of Representatives that matters. It's the Senate, and only one third of senatorial seats are up for election every two years.

So even if we have just a swing massively in the direction of the Democrats, it doesn't necessarily mean that Donald Trump is facing a third impeachment attempt to that, or I guess it would be the first one that would be successful, third times of drama, whatever you want to call it. Anyway, so unlikely. Second and far more importantly, the Democrats are a mess. Let me put a few things into context. If you are, not just a Democrat, but an independent like me,

or maybe a moderate Republican or an old school Republican on national defense and business issues, there's a lot going on right now for you to be more than a little annoyed with. We basically have a breakdown in the military in terms of its functionality because the defense secretary's purges. We have a Russian agent in the White House that's running the intelligence system. We have a guy at the FBI who's basically destroying domestic law enforcement. We have a guy of health and human services, which is breaking down the vaccine system, which keeps us all safe and healthy.

And we have a policy that has basically been in. and out and in and out and in and out of tariffs and trade wars ever since day one of this administration, especially since April 2nd. And so our expansion of our industrial plant has come to a screeching halt. And we're seeing attacks on higher education that are basically shutting down the pipeline for skilled labor into the country that comes from, that used to draw the best and the brightest from the world over. And we're in the early stages of seeing significant rises in labor costs, which are making the construction of things like new homes almost impossible. And we have 50% tariffs on copper and aluminum and steel, which are the things you need if you want to build housing or industrial plant more generally.

And we're setting up for a significant economic downturn over the course of the next year in an environment where we should be experiencing boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There's a lot for a lot of people to be angry about. And yet none of it has resonated politically. Trump's not like dominating the polls or anything, but he's hanging in there. and he's continuing to do things that piss off a lot of people and facing absolutely no meaningful blowback. In that sort of environment, only one issue has risen to the point that it actually seems to concern him,

and that's the Epstein scandal. This seems to be the only issue that the Democrats are getting any traction on, and if this is as good as it gets for them, It is difficult for me to imagine a world 18 months from now where we have a significant shift in political views in this country. Now, Americans are fickle in their politics. I don't consider this a forecast. But all of the normal things that we have seen during my entire life of watching politics just don't seem to apply right now. The Democrats are rudderless.

They're leaderless. They're unable to mobilize anything in Congress, despite the fact that, that we almost have a 50-50 split in both houses. And even at the state level, we just don't see anyone rising to the occasion. Now, if you've been following me for a while, you know I've been talking about the disintegration of both political parties for some time. The Republicans have basically degraded into a one-man cult of personality, of which the business community and the national security community and the law enforcement meeting are not part of. And the Democrats have basically just become a circus without a tent. In that sort of environment,

The opportunity for a broad reset of the American political system is inevitable, but inevitable does not mean imminent. And building parties in the United States takes time. The way the Constitution reads is each of the 50 states has their own party that can, in coalition, form a national party. We haven't started to build an alternative to today's Trump Republicans or today's chaos Democrats. And until that process happens, the midterm. will be basically a redux of what we've seen the last three election cycles, which is very, very

Buh. So, electoral bloodbath, I don't see it. Broad electoral reset over the remainder of the decade, that's a different question.