With the U.S. midterm elections on 3 November 2026 fast approaching, voter sentiment has crystallised around four overlapping national fault lines: inflation, institutional trust, the Iran war, and immigration. In this episode of All Things Policy, Bhumika Sevkani is joined by Abhishek Kadiyala to examine how each of these pressures is reshaping the congressional battleground and what they collectively reveal about the state of American democratic politics in the second Trump era. The episode ultimately asks whether a second-term president facing simultaneous economic, military, and institutional headwinds can arrest the historic tendency of the incumbent party to lose Congress at the midterms.
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