This guy ain’t defecting.
Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
All along, Republicans have faced high odds in their effort to preserve a governing trifecta in Washington in November’s midterm elections. They have a fragile majority in the House — just three seats when all current vacancies are filled. Only twice since World War II has the president’s party made House gains in a midterm, and in both cases (1998 and 2002), the president was popular at a level Donald Trump has never once reached in his long career. His perpetually underwater job-approval rating has been sliding since the fall of 2025, and while his MAGA base remains loyal, the swing voters responsible for his narrow reelection win in 2024 appear to be deserting him at a steady pace. His Iran war is unpopular and is exacerbating perhaps his greatest vulnerability: his broken 2024 promises to lower prices. The congressional GOP is in disarray; its proudest achievement, last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is unpopular too. And most of what Republicans aim to do via party-line steamrolling the rest of this year (e.g., insulating ICE from reforms and massively boosting defense spending) won’t be popular either.
Trump could yet bring his Iran war to a non-disastrous conclusion and draw some lucky breaks on the economy, but all in all, there’s no discernible path to the kind of midterm upset he wants. He’s tried to tilt the U.S. House playing field via an unprecedented mid-decade national gerrymandering push, but Democrats (and some Republicans) have battled him to what is looking like a draw. Meanwhile, Democrats are overperforming in just about every off-year or special election. The most relevant question is no longer “Will the GOP lose?” but “How much will it lose?” A year ago, it was widely assumed that the four-seat Republican advantage (53 seats plus J.D. Vance’s tie-breaking vote) in the Senate was invulnerable in 2026. Now the prediction markets favor a Democratic takeover there as well (55 percent to 45 percent at both Polymarket and Kalshi).
Is a historic debacle in store for the GOP?
Maybe, but probably not. There are two major factors that limit the damage Trump and his party can do to themselves in November: a limited landscape of competitive contests and the closely related partisan polarization of the electorate.
While a Democratic conquest of the Senate is no longer at all far-fetched, the GOP still has a big geographical advantage. Again, Democrats need to flip four net seats to gain control. Of the seven contests deemed competitive by the authoritative Cook Political Report (either toss-ups or contests that lean in either direction), five are in states carried by Trump in 2024 (Alaska, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Ohio). One of the toss-up seats, in Maine, is occupied by a long-term GOP incumbent, Susan Collins, who has regularly overperformed for her party. She is, in fact, the last senator to win reelection as her party’s presidential candidate lost her state. And even as two well-known Democrats fight for the chance to take her down, Collins enjoys many opportunities to distance herself from Trump (whom she has never endorsed) and her party in the Senate, where it’s understood she is to be given “free votes” wherever possible.
Democrats would have to win all seven competitive races to flip the Senate. That’s why they have hoped to expand the battleground by making three races in deeper-red territory competitive. In Texas, a fractious and expensive battle between incumbent Republican John Cornyn and ultra-MAGA state attorney general Ken Paxton has given Democrats some hope that their own nominee, James Talarico, can spring the upset in November. But the fact remains that no Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas in 32 years. Trump carried the Lone Star State by 13 percent in 2024, and this year’s GOP ticket is headed by Republican governor Greg Abbott, who is expected to win without breaking a sweat. Trump also won by 13 percent in Iowa, where the GOP is united behind Representative Ashley Hinson for the Senate seat of Republican Joni Ernst, who might have been vulnerable had she not retired. And Trump won Nebraska in 2024 by 20 percent, where Democrats are backing independent candidate Dan Osborn, who threw a scare into Senator Deb Fischer in 2024. Osborn is credible, but his opponent, incumbent senator and former governor Pete Ricketts, looks a lot stronger than Fischer.
So Democrats would need a sweep of the closer races or an upset in a deep-red state to win the Senate. And even if they pull this off, the 2028 Senate landscape looks promising for a GOP comeback.
While Democratic House gains seem near certain, and Democratic control after November very likely, it’s doubtful, despite Trump’s weakness, that Republicans will lose anything like the net 40 seats they did in 2018, during Trump’s first term. That year, the GOP was overexposed; 23 House Republican incumbents were running in districts Hillary Clinton had carried in 2016; only 12 House Democrats were in Trump-carried districts. Entering the current midterm cycle, only three House Republicans were running in districts carried by Kamala Harris in 2024, as compared to 16 Democrats running in Trump-carried districts (yes, gerrymandering is increasing both numbers but in roughly equal measures). Democrats also don’t have the polling edge they did eight years ago, at least not yet. In 2018, they won the national House popular vote by 9 percent. Their current lead on average generic congressional ballot polls is 5.6 percent at both Silver Bulletin and RealClearPolitics.
More generally, the House battleground is smaller this year. On the brink of the 2018 midterms, Cook Political Report showed 71 competitive races. At present, Cook shows just 34, and in those, Democrats are defending 16 seats. It’s hard to build a landslide out of such slim pickings, particularly since (per Cook) there are 185 House districts that are currently “solid” (meaning safe) Republican in this election.
Underlying these shrunken battlefields is a second major reality limiting Republican losses: partisan polarization. For all of Trump’s loss of support since his narrow 2024 victory, the MAGA base remains solidly in his camp. For example, in an April 13 Economist-YouGov poll showing Trump with a very poor overall job-approval rating of 38 percent, 86 percent of self-identified Republicans and 95 percent of self-identified MAGA supporters gave his performance in office a thumbs-up. Similarly, in an April 15 Quinnipiac poll of registered voters that also gave Trump an overall job-approval rating of 38 percent, 73 percent of self-identified Republicans said they “strongly approve” of the president’s performance. For all the talk of MAGA influencers dissenting from this or that recent Trump policy or action, dissatisfaction with him has not reached his electoral base, and that places a pretty firm ceiling on GOP midterm losses.
Make no mistake: Republicans are cruising for a bruising in November, and Trump’s hold on the federal government will almost certainly be broken. A Democratic House is very likely, and a Democratic Senate is a strong possibility. But while there will probably be a blue wave, it probably won’t be a tsunami. That will leave Trump as a diminished but still very dangerous lame duck.
