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With less than two weeks until the midterm elections, things look bad for President Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Generic polls show significant movement away from Republicans and toward Democrats since Trump defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris by 50% to 48% two years ago.
Republicans seem doomed to lose their exceedingly narrow House majority, although redistricting by both parties over the past two years has reduced the number of competitive seats and will likely limit their losses.
More surprisingly, in view of the 2024 results, Republicans’ Senate majority seems in jeopardy, as Democrats have been leading in polls in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and Texas, states that Trump carried easily three times.
And Democratic leads in two Southern states that have been seriously contested in each presidential cycle, Georgia and North Carolina, are so solid that Republicans have written them off as irretrievably lost.
Two questions remain unanswered. The first will be settled by the election results, although that could take weeks given Alaska’s ranked choice voting system and California’s breathtakingly slow counting of ballots in contested House races. The second will shape election analysts’ forecasts for at least the next two years.
The first question is whether polls are understating Republican support, as they did in the presidential cycles of 2016, 2020 and 2024. The second is whether the move away from Republicans and toward Democrats will turn out to be a realignment away from the rough partisan parity that has prevailed for more than 30 years.
Starting with the presidential election of 1992 and the congressional election of 1994, Democrats have won the presidency five times and Republicans four, while Republicans have won House majorities 12 times and Democrats five.
Only one presidential nominee, Barack Obama in 2008, has won more than 51% of the popular vote, and neither party has held more than 257 of the House’s 435 seats. Democrats held the 60 Senate seats needed to overcome a filibuster for just seven months, from July 2009 to February 2010; Republicans never reached that threshold.
But it’s also possible that polls are misleading. In past years, RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende has argued, polls have overstated Democrats’ chances in Republican states and vice versa. This year, the close races are on Republican turf, and if the polls prove to misfire that way again, Democratic gains may turn out to be minimal.
Republicans could hold on to a Senate majority in that case. That means Trump appointees to federal courts, including the Supreme Court, could be confirmed, and impeachment trials would likely go nowhere.
What about the consequences further out, specifically for 2028? Minimal losses for Republicans might lead to a presidential endorsement and nomination of Vice President JD Vance. But a “thumping” - George W. Bush’s term for his party’s repudiation in 2006 - could leave many Republicans wondering whether the party needs, after a decade of domination by Trump, to take a different course.
Democrats can be counted on, however great or minimal their gains, to pepper Trump and those around him with investigations, to stage votes for impeachment, and - if they have a Senate majority - to block confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee or any federal judge at all.
But they also face their own sharp divisions. Their lack of any articulate domestic platform leaves them open to members of the Democratic Socialists of America pushing radical and potentially unpopular measures.
Starting in the 1990s, the South became the electoral heartland of the Republican Party, and the Northeast and Pacific coasts became the electoral heartlands of the Democratic Party. Starting in the 1990s and accelerating after Trump’s first run, Democrats have made gains among the affluent and college educated, and Republicans among blue-collar workers and non-college graduates.
Few predicted these trends, established politicians tried to buck them, and many thoughtful citizens haven’t absorbed them yet.