It’s an age-old question: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? This year’s midterm elections may provide the political world’s answer.
Democrats are hoping to ride a blue wave to control of Congress. By historical standards, they should be able to. The party that controls the White House has lost House seats in all but two midterm elections since 1938. The only exceptions were during the unpopular impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The last time Republicans enjoyed a trifecta — that is, control of the presidency and both houses of Congress — Democrats gained 41 House seats. That was in 2018, President Donald Trump’s first midterm election year.
A lot has changed since 2018 and Trump’s first, nonconsecutive term, however. A wave election usually involves not just a bad national political environment for the party in power, but also one in which that party has a number of seats that are particularly ripe for takeover by the opposition.
National political conditions are certainly bad for Republicans, perhaps the worst since 2006 or 2008. The reasons are similar: an unpopular war in the Middle East and a bad economy. This time, the economic malaise isn’t a recession or financial markets meltdown but a partial reversal of progress on inflation due to a spike in energy prices caused by dueling blockades of the Strait of Hormuz as the current main front in the Iran war.
Trump’s job approval rating is at or near a second-term low in most of the available public polling, with his disapproval rating hovering around 60%. He sits at 39.6% overall approval in the RealClearPolitics polling average. He is 19 percentage points underwater, compared to 8.7 points in 2020, the year he lost his bid for a consecutive second term. On specific issues, his approval rating is even worse: He’s at 39.1% on Iran, 37.9% on foreign policy, 35.2% on the economy, and 28.6% on inflation.
Even on immigration, arguably the biggest success story of Trump’s second term, 52.1% disapprove of his handling of the issue, likely due to the optics of the deportations and anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests, in addition to generalized discontent poisoning public opinion against the president on a wide variety of fronts. In some polls, disapproval of Trump on inflation, likely the dominant issue in the fall campaign, tops 70%. His overall economic numbers are generally worse than during the COVID-19 lockdowns in his first term.
Democrats are favored by 7.7 points in the generic congressional ballot, which measures which party voters prefer to control Congress, according to the RealClearPolitics average. Their advantage was 7.3 points before the 2018 blue wave, when Democrats actually won the popular vote for the House by 8.4 points. The most recent New York Times-Siena College poll, which had a fairly good track record in 2024, showed Democrats leading by 11 points.
So why aren’t Republicans heading for the hills just yet? Well, based on the number of retirements and early resignations, some surely are. Far from bringing Senate Republicans to heel, Trump’s recent string of successful primary interventions has created a critical mass of them ready to revolt. The barely Republican-controlled House is also hardly the happiest place on earth.
But the current House Republican majority, however small, features far more relatively safe seats than those wiped out by past waves. Upwards of four-fifths of GOP lawmakers represent districts that voted for Trump by at least 12.5 points, and three-fifths hail from districts Trump carried by at least 20. Redistricting and the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais could reinforce this structural advantage.
Between gerrymandering, multiple wave elections favoring each party over the past 32 years, and the migration of voters to like-minded states or districts over a quarter century of intense political polarization, much of the long-hanging fruit has already been picked. Many political analysts, including at least one senior House Republican, told the Washington Examiner they are skeptical that wave elections are still possible.
“There just aren’t that many seats in play on either side,” the lawmaker said. “The days of a party picking up 50 or 60 seats in a single election are probably gone.”
In 2018, House Republicans defended more than two dozen seats in congressional districts Hillary Clinton won in 2016. They lost all but three of them that November. Republicans will be fighting to hold perhaps three Kamala Harris ‘24 districts this year. One of them is represented by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), a survivor of the 2018 blue wave.
When Democrats lost more than 50 House seats in 1994, the partisan realignment of the South wasn’t yet complete. Then-President Bill Clinton and his vice presidential sidekick Al Gore were both Southerners. They managed to carry their home states as the 1992 Democratic ticket. There were still dozens of Blue Dog Democrats in Congress, some quite conservative. Their ranks took heavy losses in that November’s Republican wave election, in which the GOP won its first House majority in 40 years.
Similarly, when Democrats lost more than 60 House seats in 2010, they still represented a large number of conservative, white congressional districts. Only four years separated the 2006 blue wave George W. Bush described as a “thumping” from the red wave Barack Obama called a “shellacking.” The Democratic majority at that time was artificially large. It could not survive the tea party cycle.
By contrast, in the 2022 midterm elections, the much-ballyhooed red wave largely failed to materialize. Republicans were favored in the generic congressional ballot by 2.5 points, according to the RealClearPolitics average. They ended up winning the national popular vote for the House by 2.8 points. But Republicans gained just nine seats to capture the bare majority they hold today. This GOP Congress toppled one House speaker in a virtually unprecedented motion-to-vacate vote — none had previously succeeded — and led to a protracted fight to elect a second one. This might have repeated itself in the next Congress if it weren’t for Trump’s involvement last year.
The 2022 Senate contests didn’t show a wave at all. Seven competitive races decided control of the upper chamber — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Six of them split evenly between Republicans and Democrats on Election Day, with a seventh headed to a runoff. Democrats won that runoff for a net gain of a single seat, defying the trend in the House.
Two other Senate races, in Alaska and New Hampshire, were decided by fewer than 10 points. The parties split them as their incumbents managed to hold on to their seats.
The Senate also bucked the 2018 blue wave. Republicans maintained their majority by actually gaining two seats despite taking a drubbing in the House. Democrats were forced to defend 10 seats in states Trump had won in 2016, half of them by at least 10 points. There again, the details of the map trumped the national political environment.
Democrats hope the Senate catches the wave this year. There, they have a tougher hill to climb than with the House. The Republicans’ 53-47 majority is more robust, and Democrats need to win multiple seats in states Trump carried in 2024, including Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and their perennial target, Texas.
But national Democrats feel good about their candidates in most of those races. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton bumped off Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the May 26 primary runoff after finishing behind him in the first round of voting. The result wasn’t particularly close — the Trump-endorsed Paxton won 64% of the vote.
This should, at a minimum, make the Texas Senate race more expensive. Democrats have their preferred nominee in state Rep. James Talarico, who defeated Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) earlier this year without the need for a runoff. Talarico is presenting himself as a Christian nice-guy, albeit a progressive one, in contrast with Paxton’s baggage, including extramarital affairs, a messy divorce, and a failed impeachment by the Republican-dominated state legislature.
Republicans will portray Talarico as a weirdo who doesn’t like meat — Texas is a beef state — thinks God is nonbinary, and cites the birth of Jesus in defense of unfettered access to legal abortion. The Democrat has already started walking some of those positions back, but like Harris in 2024, he expressed most of these views on camera, and his comments can be played back in ads. Talarico is polling well and is making a play for Cornyn’s voters, but state and national Republicans, including Cornyn, have closed ranks behind Paxton, who has won statewide multiple times.
While the risk for Republicans is that they will have to divert resources from battleground states to defend a Senate seat in a state Trump won by double digits, Democrats are making a similar gamble. They could wind up sinking a lot of money better spent elsewhere in their latest attempt to turn Texas blue, which has yet to pan out. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had close reelection races in 2018 and 2024 but ended up winning both times.
Another state where Republicans are going to blanket the Democratic nominee with negative ads is Maine, where Graham Platner is challenging Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) after leadership-backed Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) abandoned her quest for the nomination before any primary votes were cast. Platner had a Nazi tattoo in addition to a history of controversial statements. He also has a lead in the polls, though it’s worth noting Collins trailed throughout her 2020 reelection campaign and then won by nearly 9 points. Maybe the pollsters have corrected their mistakes from six years ago, maybe not.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) is retiring after a feud with Trump, with former Republican National Committee bigwig Michael Whatley running for the seat in his stead. Former Gov. Roy Cooper is the Democrats’ prized recruit, and he has jumped out to a healthy lead in the early polling. Democrats are hoping that Trump’s intervention in this race will backfire spectacularly, even though he narrowly won the state in 2024.
Ohio has moved away from being a swing state over the past 10 years. Obama managed to beat Mitt Romney there in 2012, but Trump has won the Buckeye State relatively easily in the past three presidential elections, racking up an 11-point margin over Harris last time around. That same election cycle, Republicans finally defeated Sherrod Brown, the longtime Democratic officeholder in Ohio, who is trying to return to the Senate this year. The poll numbers for Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) and GOP gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy have been surprisingly flat, giving Democrats hope.
A lot has to go right for Democrats to capture the Senate, but they probably don’t need a blue wave to flip the House. The current party breakdown is 217 Republicans and an independent who caucuses with the GOP, to 212 Democrats with five vacancies. Depending on how some of those shake out and whether any new seats unexpectedly open up by November, a net gain of three seats for the Democrats should probably suffice.
But Democrats are hoping the national climate is so bad that what would previously have been safe Republican seats will turn out to be competitive. If Hispanics swing back to Democrats by big margins this year, the redrawn maps in places such as Texas may not actually yield the results Republicans are looking for.
Perhaps that will be true. But the Democrats have weaknesses of their own. Polling consistently shows their brand hasn’t improved since the last election, even if the Republicans’ has deteriorated.
In Virginia, a higher percentage of voters turned out to oppose the Democrats’ redistricting plan than to support Trump in the 2024 presidential election. They narrowly lost, though the state Supreme Court ultimately tossed the Democrats’ map in a ruling that the referendum process was unconstitutional. But it did show Republicans could turn out voters with anti-Democrat messaging even in a bluish state. A lot of the midterm elections will be fought in more conservative territory.
TRUMP ENDORSEMENT TRACKER: HERE’S WHO THE PRESIDENT HAS PICKED IN GOP MIDTERM ELECTION PRIMARIES
“Cygnal’s national survey shows cost-of-living party trust at Democrats 42%, Republicans 38%, with 17% of voters trusting neither party,” Republican pollster Brent Buchanan wrote in a memo. “Among independents, 35% choose neither, and Democrats’ four-point national edge disappears entirely in the swing universe.”
That’s why Republicans, who are sitting on a big war chest they plan to spend closer to the election, still have some hope. Democrats want to ride the wave, but Republicans think they might just be able to escape it.
W. James Antle III (@jimantle) is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
