Midterm Elections Are Nine Months Away

Nine months from today, American voters head to the polls. At stake at the federal level is Republican control of Congress, and with it, the GOP’s control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. If history is a reliable guide, divided government will return to Washington next year. Control of the House, Senate, and/or White House has changed in ten of the twelve elections held this century. The political dynamics in Washington on foreign policy as well as domestic policy will obviously look much different if one or both houses of Congress go blue in November.

It will not take a big swing in voter preferences or turnout to produce divided government. Republicans currently hold a 218 to 214 advantage over Democrats in the House, with three vacant seats. In the Senate, Republicans hold a 53 to 47 advantage.

Of course, history is a good guide until it isn’t. The “Blue Wall” was supposed to elevate Hillary Clinton to the White House in 2016. Then, Donald Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and with them, the presidency. With that caution in mind, what are the numbers telling us nine months out from Election Day?

Control of the House Looks Likely to Shift

One of the “laws” of American politics is that midterm House elections rarely deliver good news to the president’s party. The midterms in many ways function as a referendum on how presidents are doing, and voters are tough graders. In thirteen of the past fifteen midterm elections, the president’s party has lost seats in the House. The average seat loss in those thirteen elections was twenty-six seats, with the largest being the sixty-three seats that Democrats lost in the Tea Party tsunami of 2010. The record isn’t much better if you look just at the six midterm elections held in this century: the president’s party lost seats five times.

With the House midterm elections functioning as a referendum on the president, presidential popularity matters. Republicans picked up seats in the 2002 midterms in good part because President George W. Bush’s approval rating skyrocketed after the September 11 attacks and remained above 60 percent in the months immediately preceding the 2002 election. Bill Clinton was also riding high in the polls in 1998 as House Republicans pushed an impeachment effort that most Americans opposed.

House Republicans do not enjoy similarly favorable political winds as 2026 starts. President Trump’s overall approval rating currently hovers in the low 40s. He is also upside down in polling on all major policy issues, including immigration. It does not help Republicans that more than half of likely voters think that the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Republicans also have reason to be worried by retirements from their ranks. Republicans constitute twenty-eight of the forty-nine incumbent House members currently declining to seek reelection. That matters for two reasons. One is that lawmakers often head to the exits when they anticipate a tough election. The other is that challengers historically find it easier to win an open seat than to defeat an incumbent lawmaker.

Can the House Defy Historical Trends in 2026?

Is there any good—or at least less bad—news in the numbers for House Republicans? Yes. One is that Biden was just as unpopular in 2022 as Trump is today, but Democrats still managed to limit their seat loss to single digits. That may, of course, be cold comfort for Republicans; Democrats just need to pick up four seats to take control of the House.

Republicans can also take comfort from the fact that Trump is not the only one struggling in the polls. Democrats are as well. In the parlance of political operatives, Democrats have a brand problem with many voters. That may explain why Democrats are not performing as well as they did eight years ago, when a blue wave sent forty-one Republican House lawmakers into retirement, on a poll question that asks voters whether they would vote for a generic Democrat or a generic Republican if the election were held today. Democrats currently have a generic ballot advantage of 4.8 percentage points. At this point in 2018, the Democratic generic ballot advantage was 6.6 points.

One response to this relative underperformance is that what voters say they will do matters less than what they are doing. On that score, Democrats have overperformed in both regularly scheduled and special elections since Trump returned to the White House. Democrats swept all thirteen statewide elections held last November, and this past weekend a Democrat won a special election for a Texas state senate seat in a district that Trump won by seventeen points in 2024. Of course, the dynamics that shape state and local elections may differ from those that will shape the congressional vote this November. But again, Democrats need to win only a handful of Republican seats to retake the House.

The third piece of good news for Republicans may be the most important: fewer House seats are likely in play in 2026 compared to past elections. Demographic sorting and partisan gerrymandering have combined in recent years to diminish the number of truly competitive congressional districts. In 2026, Republicans are defending just twenty-three seats in districts that Trump either lost or won by fewer than 7.5 percent points in 2024. In 2018, in contrast, Republicans had to defend thirty-eight such seats.

Trump has been working hard to expand that advantage by encouraging red states to redraw district lines to create more Republican-leaning districts. Although mid-decade redistricting was once rare, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas have acted on the president’s argument that Republicans are “entitled” to more seats. The result has been the creation of nine districts that are expected to swing from the Democrats to the Republicans. Democrats have not had similar redistricting success, in large part because many blue states have laws that prohibit mid-decade redistricting or require redistricting to be conducted by nonpartisan or bipartisan bodies. One exception to that trend is California, where voters passed a referendum last November authorizing the state legislature to draw new congressional districts. Until last week, Virginia looked to be a second exception. However, last Tuesday a Virginia state court ruled that the commonwealth had violated state law when it redrew its map to create as many as four new Democratic districts.

An obvious risk with such partisan gerrymandering is that it may backfire. Mid-decade redistricting rests on the premise that the party can shift enough of its voters to change the outcome in a new district without jeopardizing its chances of winning in the old district. If voter preferences or voter turnout patterns change, however, redistricting may inadvertently put a once solidly Republican or solidly Democratic seat into play. And yes, political strategists have a term for when a gerrymander hurts the party it was intended to help: the dummymander.

Republicans Like Their Chances in the Senate

Unlike House midterms, Senate midterms seldom function as a referendum on the president. That’s in good part because only a third of the seats in the Senate are up for grabs in any federal election year. In 2026, there are thirty-five Senate elections. Thirty-three of them are to fill full six-year terms. Florida and Ohio are also holding elections to complete the terms of Marco Rubio and JD Vance, who resigned from the Senate last January to join the Trump administration.

The 2026 Senate map offers Republicans good news and bad news. The bad news first. Republicans have to defend twenty-two seats while the Democrats only have to defend thirteen. Now the good news. Twenty-one of those twenty-two Republican seats are in states in which Trump won the popular vote in 2024; twenty of them are in states in which Trump won by ten percentage points or more. Conversely, Democrats are seeking to retain Senate seats in two states that Trump won in 2024—Georgia and Michigan—and in two states that Trump lost by less than five percentage points—Minnesota and New Hampshire. In the case of Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire, the Democratic incumbent opted not to run for reelection. Again, it is generally easier to win an open seat than to defeat an incumbent.

Given such a favorable electoral map, it is not surprising that Republicans feel good about their chances to keep control of the Senate. And nine months out, the betting markets agree.

Wildcards

What might change the conventional wisdom that we are headed back to divided government? One wildcard is events. Should Americans see substantial improvements in the coming months in the economy and their own personal finances, Republicans will likely benefit. The White House looks to be hoping that the tax cuts embedded in the Big Beautiful Bill will provide just such a boost. Conversely, a slowing economy or falling stock market would likely help Democrats.

Another wildcard that could affect House races is a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the legality of the provision of the Voting Rights Act that encourages the creation of congressional districts in which minority voters constitute a numerical majority of the constituents. If the Supreme Court constrains or strikes down that provision, states will gain more freedom to draw congressional districts. In the worst-case scenario for Democrats, as many as nineteen Black- and Hispanic-majority districts now held by Democratic lawmakers could be erased. Whether that scenario materializes depends on both the particulars of the Court’s decision and when the justices hand down their ruling. The longer the Court waits to release its decision, the less likely states will be able to redistrict ahead of the 2026 midterms.

A third wildcard is whether the traditional rules for voting and vote counting will be followed in 2026. Trump continues to insist, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 election was stolen. Since returning to the White House, he has been seeking to revamp how votes are cast and counted. Last March, he issued an executive order that purported to override state election laws. Last May, the Justice Department demanded that the District of Columbia and at least forty-four states turn over unredacted voter rolls, a move the administration insists is intended to ensure election integrity and that critics argue is aimed at voter suppression. Trump has also slashed the workforce for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for the security of the nation’s election infrastructure, and hired election deniers to fill administration positions that oversee election integrity.

Trump’s election complaints words have also fueled concerns that he will attempt to tilt the midterm vote in his favor. Last month, he said he “should have” seized the voting machines after the 2020 election and that “we shouldn’t even have an election” in November. Just yesterday, he said that “Republicans ought to take over the voting, the voting in at least many—fifteen places,” though he did not name which places he had in mind.  

Whether Trump succeeds in rewriting the nation’s election laws remains to be seen. So far, his March executive order has fared poorly in the courts, and most states have refused to give the Justice Department access to unredacted voter rolls. Likewise, his talk about canceling the midterms may just be a case of him “simply joking,” as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claims. Even so, the nation’s election infrastructure remains under stress. Turnover among state and local officials has been high as workers face threats and intimidation, and many voters seem prepared to reject any outcome they find disappointing. As a result, it is reasonable to worry that if control of the House or Senate comes down to a few nailbiter races in 2026, the U.S. electoral system, and the faith Americans have in elections, could be stressed in ways seldom seen in U.S. history.

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this post.