Someday, someone will crack the most difficult code in American politics—how to win midterm elections two years after securing a governing trifecta. But based on the polling that we have right now, President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are not going to be the ones to do it. President Trump burned mindlessly through his limited political capital within weeks of taking office in January, and the Republican-controlled Congress has essentially ceded its constitutional authority—and its political fate—to the White House. Unless something dramatic changes in the coming months, that may have fateful consequences for Republicans up and down the ballot starting with November’s bellwether off-year gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey.
The numbers are already stark. The GOP has trailed averages of the generic congressional ballot—which asks voters whether they would vote for a Democrat or a Republican for the House—since March. By way of comparison, after Joe Biden took office in 2021, Republicans didn’t take the lead in Real Clear Politics averages until November of that year. The race for the House of Representatives is starting to look much more like the 2018 cycle, when Republicans trailed from pretty much the day pollsters started asking thanks to the enduring unpopularity of President Trump’s policy agenda, and more importantly, his gratuitously provocative and confrontational political style.
The betting site Polymarket gives Democrats a 70 percent chance of retaking the House in 2026, and this grim outlook certainly isn’t lost on the GOP, which is scrambling to pull off a mid-decade redistricting in Texas to squeeze a few extra seats out of an already-aggressive gerrymander that gave them 25 out of 38 seats in both 2022 and 2024. As Princeton’s Sam Wang noted, this may ultimately backfire on them even if they get it done, by creating a larger number of seats with significant but not unbreachable Republican advantages that could be overcome in a true wave election.
There’s actually a nearer-term threat on the horizon. Republican gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey are also trailing badly in races that will be decided in just a few months. In 2017, Democrats scored blowouts in both races that previewed the 2018 blue wave. And in 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin’s shock win over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, and Democrat Phil Murphy’s surprisingly narrow 3-point reelection over Republican Jack Ciattarelli were clear warning signs that Democrats had already lost the public’s trust less than a year into the Biden administration.
That recent history has to worry Republicans. Former Democratic Representative Abigail Spanberger led the last two public polls of the race against Republican Winsome Earle-Sears by 17 and 12 points. And in the only polls taken of the race between Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Ciattarelli in New Jersey, Sherrill led by 21 and 8 points. Are Democrats likely to win by those margins? Probably not, but these are already Democratic-leaning states that could tilt toward a big, blue blowout if the political environment for Trump and the Republicans doesn’t improve quickly.
The bad news for Republicans doesn’t end with the House. While Democrats are a distinct underdog in the race to control the Senate, they scored a major victory this week when Roy Cooper, the popular former Democratic governor of North Carolina, announced he would seek the seat being vacated by the retiring Senator Thom Tillis. Democrats are already favored in Maine, where 72 year-old Senator Susan Collins’ remarkable run of defying partisan polarization seems unlikely to continue even if she chooses not to retire. But even assuming Democrats win all the battleground state seats they have to defend, including Michigan and Georgia, flipping North Carolina and Maine would still leave them two seats short of a majority.
But Republican primary voters might own-goal themselves yet again. Democrats are eagerly watching the mess unfolding in Texas, where scandal-ridden extremist Ken Paxton is ahead in limited polling against incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn. While he would probably still be the favorite, a Paxton win in the primary would without question put Texas in play. Even with a Texas miracle, though, Democrats will still need to win a race in at least one state that Donald Trump carried by double digits in 2024, whether that’s Iowa, Alaska, Florida, or Nebraska. It’s an extremely heavy lift, but Republicans certainly can’t feel as secure about their lock on the Senate as they did after November’s elections unexpectedly left them with a seemingly insurmountable 53 seats.
Is there anything Republicans could do to avoid the fate that almost every president’s party has met in the midterm elections? For starters, President Trump would need to stop doing unpopular things—like building a lavishly funded internal detention gulag, securing trade “deals” that make daily life more expensive for ordinary Americans, and wasting his time whining about what D.C.’s football team is named, or what’s happening in the writer’s room of adult cartoon TV shows—and start governing in a way that isn’t designed to deliberately alienate more than half the country.
I’m no gambling whiz, but I certainly wouldn’t bet on that.
David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly, and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris and Bluesky @davidfaris.bsky.social.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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