I Predicted Trump’s 2024 Victory. Here’s Why 2026 Looks Rough for Republicans.
VoteHub released our 2026 Midterm Forecast earlier this week, and I think most people would agree that the initial outlook is pretty strong for Democrats. As of today, we give Democrats an 84% chance to flip the U.S. House and a 48% chance to flip the U.S. Senate. Naturally, I’ve received plenty of comments calling me a Democratic hack and accusing the model of being biased. On one hand, that is completely fine. People are more than welcome to disagree with the forecast1. But on the other hand, I’ve also seen a lot of people say some version of, “you’re going to get it wrong just like 2024,” which is just absolutely not accurate. Since a lot of people are seeing my work for the first time, I want to briefly walk through my recent track record.
In 2024, I predicted Trump would win the Electoral College and finish with more than 300 electoral votes in my final election prediction on this website. My presidential forecast also called all 50 states correctly, and a few days before the election, I wrote a Trump-bullish blurb on my blog for family and friends that you can read here. To be clear, thinking Trump was favored in 2024, and then Trump winning, is a sample size of one. By itself, it does not prove much of anything about my broader forecasting or prediction ability. However, I do think it is worth pointing out that I am not someone who simply views every election through blue-tinted glasses2.
You can quibble with any individual race rating, but most of the forecast ultimately comes back to one central assumption: we are projecting a D+7.3 national environment on Election Day, which is quite blue3. I want to zoom out and talk about why we are predicting that in a macro sense.
What Democrats Have Going for Them
There is a lot of historical precedent working in Democrats’ favor. If Democrats win the U.S. House in 2026, it would continue a streak dating back to 2006 in which the president’s party has failed to win control of the U.S. House in a midterm election. The last exception was 2002, when Republicans retained the House in the post-9/11 political environment, with President Bush still holding elevated approval ratings after the attack. Before that, the last time the president’s party held the House through a midterm was 1978, under Jimmy Carter. People should not be surprised that the forecast expects Democrats to do well this November. There is a long historical pattern on their side, and that pattern is built into the model. Republicans keeping control would not be impossible, but it would be a genuinely notable historical event.
Trump’s approval rating is really poor. He is currently at -17 in VoteHub’s tracker, which is roughly six points worse than where both Biden and Trump were at this same point in 2022 and 2018. Of course, if he claws his way back to something like -12, the midterm picture would look meaningfully different, and there is obviously some chance that happens. But as of now, Republicans are heading into the cycle with an incumbent president who is not just unpopular, but unusually unpopular. It is also worth remembering that some of the same economic issues that hurt Biden during the COVID recovery are now hurting Trump. In Silver Bulletin’s issue approval tracker, Trump is at -42 on inflation, which is brutal, and probably a major reason he is struggling so much with working-class voters in the polling crosstabs. The sitting president’s party usually does poorly in midterms, and Republicans are facing that baseline problem with an incumbent president whose approval rating is historically weak.
Democrats are generally well-suited as a party to perform well in midterm elections. Midterm electorates are a subset of presidential electorates, and the voters who drop off are likely disproportionately helpful to Republicans right now. I’ll lean on two useful points from David Shor and Blue Rose Research. First, Democrats now appear to have the higher-propensity coalition, since voters who care more about politics tend to be more liberal in polling. Second, if only 2022 midterm voters had participated in the 2024 presidential election, Harris would have performed about two points better. Many of the polls we are getting are still “RV” polls, meaning they are weighted to registered voters rather than a likely midterm electorate. We have not yet seen this newer high-propensity Democratic coalition tested in a midterm with a Republican president, but it is not hard to see how the combination of Democrats’ generally higher-propensity electorate and the usual turnout and enthusiasm boost for the out party could create some very rough turnout dynamics for Republicans this fall.
So, to summarize, this is not a great situation for Republicans. Midterms are historically difficult for the party that controls the White House, Trump is extremely unpopular with the American public, and he is probably even more unpopular with the roughly 32% of Americans who will actually vote in the midterms this November than he is with the country as a whole. But what mitigating factors could help Republicans avoid a blue wave?
What Republicans Have Going for Them
The Senate map is really, really tough for Democrats, and the fact that we are even talking seriously about Senate control is a sign of how bad the broader environment is for Republicans. Even if you assume Democrats win North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, and Maine, which is far from easy, the path is still brutal. They would need to hold North Carolina, a Trump-won state; hold Georgia, a narrowly Trump-won state where Democrats have major candidate-quality advantages; win Michigan, another Trump-won state with real question marks on the Democratic side; and defeat Susan Collins in Maine, a durable incumbent who has repeatedly survived difficult campaigns before. And even after all of that, Democrats would still most likely need to win two of Iowa, Texas, Ohio, and Alaska, four states Trump carried by double digits. Right now, we are projecting roughly a 9.4-point national swing toward Democrats. Trump’s net approval rating on Election Day in the 2018 midterms was -10, and at that number it seems like Democrats would have almost no chance of flipping Senate control in 2026. The good news for Democrats is that he has a long way to go to get back to -10.
Another important factor is that differential turnout is usually less extreme in the most competitive races, which helps whichever party is having a bad year. We saw this pretty clearly in 2024, and I expect we will see something similar in 2026. This will help Republicans quite a bit in the key Senate battlegrounds, where higher turnout and more attention will likely normalize some of the national wave effects. Republican turnout in places like Texas and Iowa is likely to hold up much better than it will in less competitive states like New York and California.
Democrats also have their own problems, and this comes through in the fact that their lead in generic ballot polling is not especially impressive given how unpopular Trump is right now. Honestly, knowing Democrats are (1) the out party, are facing (2) a president at -17 net approval, and have (3) a coalition that is unusually well-suited for midterms, you would probably expect them to be clearly favored to flip the Senate in a tsunami-like environment. But they are not. The fact that Democrats are only leading our generic ballot polling average by 6 points right now with a historically unpopular Trump does not reflect especially well on the party’s broader position with the American people right now.
The Iran situation seems like it could quiet down in the near future, and it looks like the Strait of Hormuz could reopen soon. This could help Trump’s approval a lot. At this point, Trump’s best path to a stronger midterm environment is probably to sit on his hands for the next six months: no major ICE escalations, no foreign policy chaos, and no self-inflicted distractions.
Republicans could gain a few U.S. House seats before the midterms with redrawn congressional maps after Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was narrowed last week. In a best-case scenario for the GOP, those redistricting gains could nearly double their chances of winning the House in our forecast.
I do want to note that our forecast still gives Republicans a 28% chance of winning 52 or more U.S. Senate seats, which almost everyone would consider a strong midterm performance for the GOP. A blue wave is absolutely not guaranteed. According to our forecast, flip a coin twice and get two heads and the Republicans had a very solid midterm.
Just a couple weeks ago, I was quite bearish on Democrats’ chances in the Virginia redistricting referendum. At the time, most of the pushback on my prediction came from Democrats who thought my projected 4.2-point YES margin was far too small and that YES would win comfortably.
YES ended up winning by 3.4 points.
If you go to our national U.S. House map, you’ll see that we are only projecting Democrats to win the national generic ballot by 6.6%. That is partly because of where the Senate battleground is. We expect especially elevated turnout in red states like Texas, Florida, and Ohio, as well as Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, and South Carolina, compared with the more typical turnout boost in purple states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona. Higher turnout in those states trims a bit more than a half point off the national House margin compared with what we would expect if state-level turnout looked more like 2020 or 2024.
Good analysis. I am wondering if the polls are heavily weighting to 2024 recall vote or turnout, and if this is going to accurately capture 2026 turnout. I remember the polls undershot 2025 NJ and VA governor elex partially for this reason.