Conservative commentator Bill Kristol said the Republican Party enters the final month before the midterm elections saddled with "ridiculous" messaging plans and faulty strategies, warning that a 2006-style electoral wipeout is looking increasingly likely.

Kristol, a vocal anti-Trump conservative and editor-at-large for The Bulwark, appeared Friday as a guest on MS NOW's "On the Line," where he discussed the political prospects for both parties with roughly a month remaining until Election Day.

Guest host Ali Vitali highlighted recent remarks from Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, a former chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who said at a recent event that the GOP could be in for a repeat of the 2006 midterms, when circumstances surrounding and including President George W. Bush's toxic unpopularity cost the party dearly.

"There arguably could be some similarities between the '06 cycle and the 2026 cycle," Daines said. "Think about the condition of the country back in '06: an unpopular war, 6 in 10 Americans opposed the Iraq War. At that point, gas prices had doubled. Does this sound familiar? And we ended up losing six seats [in the Senate]." Democrats went on to capture both chambers that November, ending a 12-year Republican hold on the House.

Kristol, who was working for the GOP back in 2006, said he has long suspected that the 2026 midterm would end up being a similar anti-Republican wave.

"If a president's party controls Congress, a midterm election becomes a referendum on, 'do you want the president's party to continue controlling Congress and enabling what he's doing, approving what he's doing? Or do you want to put a check on the president, maybe rebuke the president a little bit?'" Kristol explained. "Midterm elections are about that. And so we focus a lot on individual candidates, and they matter at the margin. Precisely the definition of a wave is [that] it's about something bigger. It's a national phenomenon. And that's why you see all these states moving in the same direction. And we get a little too obsessed sometimes with this individual race."

He continued: "So I think it's a wave. Trump's the biggest picture. Trump's approval has gone from 49, 50 percent two years ago on Election Day, when he was running as a candidate, to what, 34, 35, 37 percent? That's a huge drop, and it's going to take his party down with him. And the only question is how deep it goes. And I now think it can go pretty deep."

The referendum dynamic Kristol describes a recurring feature of midterm politics: the president's party has lost House seats in nearly every midterm election since World War II. The 2026 contests — all 435 House seats plus roughly a third of the Senate — will set the balance of power in Washington for the final two years of Trump's term.

Later in the segment, Kristol reacted to a clip of former Bush adviser Karl Rove encouraging Republicans to engage in "positive" messaging around Trump's agenda. Kristol called the idea "ridiculous" and added that the party's current strategy of demonizing Democrats is also faulty, given the nature of midterm elections.

"This is the problem with the demonizing of the Democrat side of it," Kristol said. "That works in a presidential race: you don't want this person as president. It doesn't work very well in a mid-year election where Trump's going to be president for the next few years. As for the positive agenda, it's a little ridiculous. He's been president with a Republican Congress — a totally compliant one, I might add — for two years... What's he going to do in the next two years that is different from what he's been doing in the last two years?"

With roughly a month until Election Day, the scale of any wave — and how closely it tracks the 2006 precedent — will be settled at the ballot box.

Source: Alternet