Elections are always split in their results; Tuesday’s could be the same
By Bill Eddy / Bill’s Substack / Nov 01, 2026
Over the past few weeks, we have seen a flurry of rallies by President Trump around the country, including this weekend, in desperate support of his troubled Republican candidates. It’s tempting to see this effort as futile for him since his approval ratings have now sunk to 30% according to some polls. However, I believe quite the opposite: by making urgent intense emotional attacks on Democrats he will claw back some of his reluctant followers to turn out the vote and dampen any Democratic wave. Remember that his power is based on right brain emotions rather than left-brain logic. (See last week’s blog: Right Brain Politics II.)
How Splitting Works
In 2012, a psychologist friend, Don Saposnek, and I wrote a little book titled: Splitting America: How Politicians, Super PACs and the News Media Mirror High Conflict Divorce. I was working as a family lawyer at the time and we were struck by the similarities of people with high-conflict personalities in high-conflict divorces to some politicians who were entering politics. People with high-conflict personalities tend to have four key characteristics: blaming others, all-or-nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, and extreme behaviors. “Splitting” is a psychological term for seeing some people as all-good and others as all-bad, which is common for people with high-conflict personalities. As we wrote then:
“Splitting is unconscious and contagious – just like the effects of advertising. It gets past your radar and you come to believe it – unless you realize what is happening. The reason is that high-conflict emotions are highly contagious. If you’re in a high-conflict emotional environment, you will ‘catch’ this splitting tendency and start to view people as all-good or all-bad, as well. Children are especially vulnerable to absorbing splitting, but adults do as well – especially in high-conflict divorce and, as we are now observing, in high-conflict politics.” (Splitting America, page 32)
By March, 2016, before Donald J. Trump was the official Republican candidate, I predicted that he had a good chance of becoming President Trump. I already suspected that he had a high-conflict personality and that he was engaging in splitting, especially at his rallies where he promoted Us-against-Them emotions. As I wrote in my 2016 book: Trump Bubbles: The Dramatic Rise and Fall of High-Conflict Politicians:
“Ironically, high-conflict disputes often end up splitting in a very similar way—almost half the group emotionally supports the high-conflict person and almost half the group says they’re absurd for the following logical reasons, which they then explain with as much intensity as the emotional supporters. It almost seems like magic, how this 50-50 split occurs around so many high-conflict people whom I and others have observed. We cannot assume it will be any different with Trump.” (Trump Bubbles, page 77)
Fear Factor
Remember, splitting is unconscious and contagious—and emotionally persuasive for half the people listening. Trump views political power as entirely about emotions, as he told Bob Woodward in 2016 during an interview for his book Fear: Trump in the White House: “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”
Fear is what he is trying to ramp up now. In the past two weeks at rallies, according to Axios, here is a small sampling of what Trump has said with passion and repetition:
- In Kansas: “When you see burning steeples and raging fires in France, just remember that is what the radical Dumocrats want to do to America.” He blamed the riots in France on immigration, suggesting that border policies under Democratic Party leadership would unleash the same chaos in America.
- In Tennessee: “If the Democrats win you will have a 1929-style economic depression. I hope I’m wrong on that.”
- In Arizona: ““They can take your child out of school and do whatever they hell they want. Your son leaves as Jimmy and comes back home in three days as Janet, and they don’t even ask you.”
- In Kansas: “The Dumocrat agenda is a plan to extinguish Western civilization. They want to open the borders.”
- In Montana: Democrats will “take away your guns” if they control Congress. “Some of the wild animals you have up here that like eating you…. They would gain a lot of weight.”
- In Kansas: Trump said that Democrats would “decimate Kansas farms.”
Election Day: Tuesday, November 3, 2026
Almost everyone is predicting a “blue wave” for Democrats in taking the House of Representatives. Nate Silver, the highly regarded pollster, predicts a “momentous” chance that the Democrats will also take the Senate, possibly up to 79% likelihood.
My prediction (and I’ve had a pretty good record) is that the blue wave will succeed in the House, but not by as large a margin as Democrats have hoped, and that the Senate will end up at 50-50, after Trump’s manipulations. In a 50-50 Senate, the Vice President, JD Vance, gets to break the tie.
This prediction of the dampening of the blue wave comes from an understanding of the right brain emotional power that Trump and his media allies have in America. If I’m right, it means that more people need to expose Trump’s right brain emotional and unconscious communication style.
But perhaps reality has set in enough that the tide will, in fact, turn. Perhaps people’s left brain fact-finding has finally shown them that gas prices, ICE raids, tariffs, election tampering, and all the other Trump manipulations are not what America wants or needs.
On Tuesday, the voters will decide.
Bill Eddy is a retired attorney who resides in Ocean Beach.
