While there have been over a dozen public polls released since the earliest days of this Maine contest, only two are of high quality, both conducted in June: one from The New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena, the other by Fox News. The NYT/PPH/Siena poll of 608 likely voters showed Platner leading Republican Sen. Susan Collins by 2 points, 49 to 47 percent; the Fox News poll of 1,003 registered voters had Collins up by 3 points, 50 to 47 percent. The bottom line is that the race was fundamentally even.

But an even race in Maine, a light-blue, Democratic-tilting state, should be a hint that everything is not quite copacetic there for that party. Their presidential nominees have carried the state in nine consecutive elections. The last GOP candidate to win was George H.W. Bush, a part-time resident of the state, in 1988. In gubernatorial elections, Democrats have won four of the last eight. In two of the four they did not win, now-Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, prevailed. The only two GOP victories were Paul LePage’s wins in 2010 and 2014. Aside from Collins, who is seeking a sixth term, the last Republican to win a Senate seat in the state was Olympia Snowe in 2006.

The crosstabs for the two surveys show that while the race was tied, Platner was already facing resistance within his own party. While Collins was holding 93 percent of the vote among Republicans in the Fox poll and 98 percent in the Times poll, Platner was attracting just 86 percent of Democrats in Fox and 89 percent in the Times poll. Collins also fared much better among men than Platner did among women, which may be related to some of the baggage that Platner had accumulated prior to the rape allegation of a week ago.

For some reason, many seem to think that Collins won reelection six years ago because Democrats weren’t energetic enough. Indeed, these days, partisans on each side seem to think that any political problem comes back to turnout, bringing to mind the old joke that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The idea that a candidate was simply not sufficiently attractive to the narrow slice of swing voters in the middle is a concept many have difficulty conceiving. But six years ago, when Collins beat the Democratic nominee, then-state House Speaker Sara Gideon, by 8.6 percentage points, 50 to 42.4 percent, the same electorate voted for Joe Biden by a very similar 9.1-point margin, 53.1 to 44.0 percent. Obviously, the 2020 Senate outcome was not about turnout; if it was, both races would have gone in the same direction and by similar margins.

In that 2020 election, Biden carried the independent vote in the state by 24 points in the Edison Research exit poll and 29 points in the VoteCast survey. That same day, Collins won independents by 3 points in Edison and 11 points in the VoteCast survey.

Maine Democrats will hold a pop-up state convention next weekend to select a new nominee. The odds are pretty good that they will tap one of the three runners-up in the party’s gubernatorial primary, in which Hannah Pingree, a former state House speaker and policy adviser to Gov. Janet Mills, emerged as the victor of the ranked-choice vote.

In the initial primary balloting, former state Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Nirav Shah ran first with 26.9 percent, followed by Pingree with 23.2 percent, then former state Senate President Troy Jackson and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. Keep in mind that in Maine, the secretary of state is selected by the legislature, not a statewide elective post. Jackson and Bellows come from the party’s more progressive wing: Jackson very closely aligned with labor, while Bellows ran a bit more on cultural issues. Both would do fine among Democratic voters but may have more limited appeal among independents. Shah was a daily presence on television and radio in the state during the COVID crisis. He was non-polarizing, with a good bedside manner that would help with independents in the middle but might not exactly titillate progressives in the party base.

There are a couple of dangers here for Democrats. First, there is little time for the kind of full vetting that is needed to make sure that none of the Democrats have personal or professional gremlins in their background that could be exploited in a tough general election, where spending from all sides may top $400 million.

Many in the state suggest that Shah, Jackson, and Bellows are tested, having gone through a competitive open-seat gubernatorial primary. That is laughable given the difference in scrutiny between a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber and a gubernatorial race in a small state with no major media markets.

But another factor is that for all of Platner’s personal baggage, he was unquestionably the most charismatic statewide candidate in the country this year. While this was his first race, his raw candidate skills were very impressive and on a completely different level from any of the Democrats now mentioned for the seat. Collins, and the apparatus behind her, are on a heavyweight level, far beyond anything we’ve seen from the gubernatorial candidates this year.

Winning a Senate majority this year was always going to be an uphill battle for Democrats this cycle. The map is as tough as either party has faced in a long time. Only two races are in purple swing states—Michigan and North Carolina. Maine and the open Democratic seats in Minnesota and New Hampshire are light blue; everything else is in varying shades of red. Is it possible that Democrats can win a majority in November? Yes, but I give them maybe 1-in-3 odds, as opposed to the strong likelihood that the House will flip from Republican to Democratic. Democratic voters are extremely motivated, and Republicans are considerably less than energized. In purple states, that says, “Advantage Democrats.” But while Democrats may well get to 47, 48, or even 49 percent in red states, hitting 50 percent is a real challenge.

These are supposed to be the midsummer doldrums of this campaign year, but you sure wouldn’t know it from all that is going on. On Monday afternoon, Politico broke the story of an alleged rape committed less than five years ago by the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, Graham Platner. Shortly after the story broke, Platner issued a denial—but he also posted a video to social media saying that he would “take the time to reflect” on this latest turn of events. Given all of the previous stories about Platner’s alleged misconduct, a story like this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, undermining any argument that he is still politically viable.

Should Platner drop out of the race by July 13, the state Democratic Party has until July 27 to name a replacement on the November general-election ballot. The easiest choice would be for the state Democratic committee to replace him with Gov. Janet Mills, who finished a distant second to Platner on primary day. Another, less likely option would be for them to turn to one of the four runners-up in last month’s Democratic primary for governor. The echoes of the July 2024 Democratic presidential change of horses may well be heard again. A good case can be made that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who backed Mills from the start, has better judgment than many in the Democratic base, who seem to mistake themselves for general-election swing voters.

Just the day before, on Sunday, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow suspended her campaign for Senate in Michigan, a move that potentially could advantage the more establishment-oriented candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens, over the progressive former state health director Abdul El-Sayed. GOP Rep. Mike Rogers lost the open-seat race in 2024 by just three-tenths of a percentage point to Sen. Elissa Slotkin. Republicans believe that Rogers can get over the line this year against the leftist El-Sayed.

Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chris Van Hollen have endorsed El-Sayed, as have Rep. Ro Khanna, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other members of “The Squad.” While Stevens has been relatively unexciting as a candidate, she would very likely be able to hold the Democratic vote together and have a realistic shot at the tiny slice of swing voters in the middle, something El-Sayed would have great difficulty doing. An El-Sayed nomination would be a classic case of Democrats seizing defeat from the jaws of victory, this being the kind of year when a Democrat would have a better-than-average shot at winning this prime swing state.

So far this year, the Democratic base has picked many nominees who were the most pugilistic in their anti-Trump rhetoric, as if the decibel level of their rhetoric were a substitute for an ability to win over that sliver of swing voters that rests between the parties, voters who tend to be less ideological and don’t look or sound at all like the base of either major party. They may not despise Trump, but they have clearly grown tired of him, and they are impatient with Republicans who have enabled him.

Over the last two weeks we have seen a flurry of new, high-quality polls in battleground Senate races that paradoxically underscore both the challenges facing Republicans as the party of an unpopular president and how steep the incline is for Democrats in their efforts to win back the majority they lost in 2024.

The macro-political forces amount to a millstone around the necks of Republican candidates even in some very red states and districts that Trump won by double digits.

But, of the four Senate races that The Cook Political Report rates as “Toss Ups,” Trump carried three out of four in 2024 (Alaska, Michigan, and Ohio, losing only Maine). Of the nine races deemed competitive—those in the “Lean Democrat,” “Toss Up,” or “Lean Republican” columns, Trump won seven out of nine—the three Toss Ups, Georgia and North Carolina (both currently rated Lean Democrat), and Iowa and Texas (both now in the Lean Republican column). The only two of the nine in states Kamala Harris won are in Maine, from the Toss Up column, and New Hampshire, which leans Democratic. In other words, seven of the nine states are road games for Democrats; they have a home-court advantage in only two.

Interestingly, of the nine most competitive states with Senate races, Democrats are in the best shape in the open-seat contest in North Carolina, a state that Trump has won in all three of his White House bids, and New Hampshire, which has elected Republican governors in five consecutive elections. The last Republican to carry Maine in a presidential race was a part-time resident of the state, George H.W. Bush.

The recent flurry of Senate polls includes New York Times/Siena surveys in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas; and Fox News polls in Georgia, Iowa, and Maine. The Fox polls were conducted by a bipartisan team of pollsters from Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company (R). The AARP poll in Ohio, the first in a battleground series that AARP is commissioning from its own bipartisan team of Impact Research and Fabrizio Ward, is notable because Impact Research was the primary polling firm for the 2020 Biden campaign while Fabrizio Ward was the lead pollster in Trump’s three presidential efforts. (None of these polls were conducted in Michigan, as it is the one key state yet to hold its primary.)

New York Times/Siena polling showed that freshman Sen. Jon Ossoff had a 13-point lead over Rep. Mike Collins in Georgia, 56 to 43 percent, and former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was running 7 points ahead of former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley in North Carolina. In the other nine surveys, the races were within 4 points.

While some have suggested that the polls collectively indicate the Senate is out of reach for Democrats, I would quibble with that characterization; a Democratic majority is not out of reach, but they would need a lot of breaks. My National Journal colleague Jeff Dufour looked at this issue in his column over the weekend.

Having watched about 26 midterm elections since I first started working in, around, and covering Congress and races for the Senate and House, none come to mind that are as volatile as this one. It doesn’t look like we’ll get back to “normal” any time soon.

The next day brought the sad news that Alan Greenspan had died at age 100. I had only met Greenspan socially during his historic 19-year tenure as chair of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006. But after he left government, his assistant would call from time to time to ask if I would be interested in coming over to have lunch with him, generally soup and sandwiches from the Daily Grill, at a little table in the corner of his office overlooking the corner of Connecticut and Desales.

Greenspan had an insatiable appetite for, and mastery of, politics. For me, picking his brain on the economy and getting the off-the-record insights of someone who had advised Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Ford, then chaired the Fed during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, both Presidents Bush, and Bill Clinton, was sublime.

Not surprisingly, his office was filled with interesting photos and accumulated knick-knacks, but my favorite item was his “despatch box.” In the British government, the monarch, the prime minister, and top ministers are issued these boxes, basically briefcases made of wood, wrapped in red leather, and lined with satin, for carrying the most important and sensitive of government documents. After Greenspan left government, a high-level British government official presented him with a despatch box in gratitude for his stewardship of the world economy and the advice he had offered over the years.

Our lunches ended when his health began to fail a few years ago, but I’ll always cherish the memories, both fascinating and fun.

Two days later came more bad news: My friend of almost 40 years, Glen Bolger, died at just 63. I first met Glen when he headed the polling operation at the National Republican Congressional Committee in 1991, after a stint working with Dick Wirthlin, Reagan’s pollster. Glen and his Wirthlin colleagues, Bill McInturff and Neil Newhouse, left to start the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, now the largest in the business.

While he was always careful never to betray his clients’ trust, I could always count on Glen and his partners to be straight shooters about what was going on. Their firm did, and still does, so much work every week from coast to coast that if there was a new trend or a shifting dynamic, no one was more likely to see it first than those at POS. It was a combination of scale, the highest quality, and the sharpest analysis that I always found invaluable.

Beyond his analytical mind and storehouse of wisdom, Glen was also as nice a guy as you could ever meet. He and his wife, Carol Farquhar, traveled more than anyone I know, earning the moniker “The Iron Travelers” over their treks through some 40 countries, something my wife Lucy and I experienced with them on a trip to Cuba years ago. Glen and I had been on a panel about American elections, then the four of us headed across Cuba at a pace that almost killed us and would have worn out anyone half our age. Glen and Carol’s friends could vicariously travel with them through Glen’s travel blog, the last installment of which came from Seville, London, and Paris just over a year ago. When not working or traveling, Glen enjoyed kayaking along the Potomac, a quest to see as many bald eagles as he could.

For the last nine months, Glen battled a glioblastoma, with Carol and their three daughters at his side. Three weeks ago, Glen bravely attended the American Association of Political Consultants’ awards dinner to be inducted into the AAPC Hall of Fame, along with Bill and Neil on the Republican side, and David Doak, Anita Dunn, and, posthumously, Cecile Richards for Democrats.

Good news for Dems in Ohio, but the same stress in Maine

Thankfully on Thursday, things moved from sad to interesting; AARP released the first of its highly regarded battleground-state surveys for the cycle, this one among 800 registered voters in Ohio. The results corroborated the recent Fox News poll, which showed that the Buckeye State is considerably more competitive than it has been in recent years. AARP found former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown with a narrow lead of 3 points over Republican Sen. Jon Husted, 48 to 45 percent. The Fox poll also showed Brown ahead of Husted, who was appointed to the Senate last year, but by a wider margin of 8 points, 53 to 45 percent. Both surveys showed the governor’s race very close; the AARP poll put Democrat Amy Acton ahead of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee, by 3 points, 47 to 44 percent; Fox had her up by a point, 50 to 49 percent.

The common denominator across the surveys was that Democrats were not only more thoroughly consolidated behind their senatorial and gubernatorial nominees but also more enthusiastic, suggesting the likelihood of a higher Democratic than Republican turnout. In keeping with midterm election patterns, supporters of the opposition party are more motivated than those of the party holding the White House. Given the increasingly Republican trend in Ohio in recent elections, this should be yet another warning sign for Republicans that this could be a very tough year.

To the extent that there was a silver lining for the GOP, it may be found in the splits among age cohorts. Among voters 50 years of age or older, the AARP poll showed Husted up by 8 points, 51 to 43 percent; the Fox survey showed the race basically tied among those 45 or older, with Brown up by 1 point. The AARP survey showed Ramaswamy ahead of Acton by 10 points among those 50 and older, 51 to 41 percent; the earlier Fox poll had Ramaswamy ahead by 6 points, 52 to 46 percent. Keep in mind that older voters tend to vote at higher rates than their younger counterparts.

On Monday, the first high-quality survey of the Maine Senate race, a New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll of 608 likely voters, showed the race essentially tied. Forty-nine percent supported, or lean toward, Democratic challenger Graham Platner, while 47 percent favored or lean toward Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

Thirty-three percent of Mainers identified as Democrats, 27 percent as Republicans, and 35 percent as independents. When independents were asked which way they leaned, 51 percent leaned toward Democrats and 43 percent toward Republicans. As in Ohio, Democrats expressed much more enthusiasm about voting—67 percent said they were almost certain to vote, compared to 55 percent of Republicans. Unlike in Ohio, however, Republican voters were monolithically behind the Republican candidate, giving Collins 98 percent of their vote. Democrats backed Platner, 88 percent to 8 percent.

Each candidate has their own set of liabilities; Collins’s biggest is President Trump and the near impossibility of surviving as a liberal-to-moderate Republican, the same problem conservative-to-moderate Democrats have experienced. For his part, Platner must live down a rather unorthodox and controversial trail of words and actions. This is shaping up to be a very close race in a state Democrats shouldn’t have to worry about—but do.

In the 574 weeks since Donald Trump descended the golden Trump Tower escalator to announce his presidential candidacy, thousands of impressions, positive and negative, have been left with Americans. At this point, there is little volatility in his numbers; his stock trades in a fairly narrow range, with most national approval ratings currently between 37 and 42 percent. Among only Democrats, his approval ratings are in the mid-single digits; independents approve of him in the 20s, and Republicans in the 80s.

It’s a decent bet that when early votes are being cast four months from now, only the most problematic or accident-prone Democratic nominees will be in danger in the blue-hued, decidedly Democratic states and districts; there are very few defections these days, particularly in midterm elections. The combination of a home-field advantage in a favorable constituency and the strong partisan winds should make these races not-so-fair fights.

A full House with no vacancies means 218 seats is the magic number for a majority. Using the current Cook Political Report House ratings, there are 182 districts in the Solid Democratic category, 11 more are Likely Democrat, and 12 more are Lean Democrat, giving Democrats an edge in 205 seats, 13 short of 218.

On the Republican side, there are 186 seats rated Solid Republican, 18 more in the Likely Republican column, and eight that are Lean Republican, putting them at 212, six short of a majority.

Eighteen races are rated Toss Up. So Democrats must win 13 of the 18 to reach the magic 218. If they win all 18, they’ll hit 223.

With the prevailing winds, Democratic candidates in most states and districts will outperform their 2024, 2022, and 2020 counterparts. But, particularly in red districts, will they run enough ahead of the normal party performance to actually win? It is one thing to exceed the norm, maybe in some cases getting to 47 or 48 percent, or 49 percent. But for a Democrat running in a red state or district, the closer they come to 50 percent, the more natural resistance increases. Each point is incrementally if not exponentially more difficult to gain than the last.

That’s partly because in a state with a strong, natural partisan tilt, those who consider themselves independents tend to lean in the prevailing direction of the state. In other words, voters in Alabama or Texas who consider themselves independent are more likely to have a slight tilt to the right than independents in California or Massachusetts. The local political environment bleeds somewhat into the ranks of independents.

And let’s add one more relatively new consideration: Any Democrat running in a deeply red state or district can expect at least the possibility in a photo-finish race of local election officials or judges being less hospitable to the opposition party.

In the Senate, the only competitive blue-state Senate races are in Republican-held Maine, and the open, Democratic-held seats in Minnesota and New Hampshire. In a fair-fight year, or a bad year for Democrats, Minnesota and New Hampshire could easily become problems for Democrats. In this environment, they may be worth keeping an eye on but they’re not near the top of Democrats’ worries. The real blue-state problem for Democrats is in Maine, where Sen. Susan Collins is seeking a sixth term despite the state’s Democratic proclivities. The race is likely to come down to whether the focal point is Trump, who is pretty unpopular in the state, or on Democratic challenger Graham Platner. If it’s the former, Platner and Democrats should win; if it’s the latter, Collins will get her sixth term.

Just as in House races, the prevailing winds could get Democrats in red states into the high 40s in Senate contests, but maybe not higher.

Then there are the purple, swing states. Democrats are running former Gov. Roy Cooper in the open North Carolina seat. He’s a pretty strong favorite against former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley. The race Democrats need to really worry about is in Michigan; the wrong nominee can make a race that looks somewhat promising into a complete disaster.

Parties whose base is consumed with hatred toward the opposition can hold distorted perspectives, and their idea of electability may be slightly skewed. Party stalwarts can struggle to put themselves in the shoes of the swing voters needed to actually win a competitive race. This is what happened to Republicans in 2022 and has happened before. There is a danger of Democrats nominating blue candidates in purple and red states, just as there is for Republicans to choose red candidates in purple and blue states. In my mind, that is the single biggest obstacle for Democrats this year: The party’s passion may reside much further to the left than that of the swing voters who will actually decide competitive races.

The party in the White House has suffered a net loss of House seats in 18 of the 20 midterms since the end of World War II (90 percent); the exceptions were Bill Clinton’s second midterm in 1998 and George W. Bush’s first midterm in 2002. In both of those cases, the president’s job-approval ratings were in the 60s. In four of the 18 losing cycles for the president’s party—1962, 1986, 1990, and 2022—House losses were modest, in single digits. In seven, the losses were 40 or more seats. The worst were the Democratic losses of 63 and 54 seats in 2010 and 1994, respectively.

The Senate, with just a third of its seats up every two years and only a half dozen or so truly competitive, has a pattern that is less clear, with results that are more idiosyncratic. The party occupying the White House suffered a net loss of Senate seats in 13 out of the 20 cycles (65 percent), they broke even in one (1998), and actually gained in five (1962, 1970, 1982, 2002, 2018, 2022).

On a macro-political level, how stiff are the partisan headwinds Republicans are having to contend with? This is partly a function of whether President Trump’s increasingly unusual behavior and priorities remain largely about him, or whether they metastasize into GOP candidacies up and down the ballot. Last week’s column looked at a new Fox News poll in Ohio that suggested the damage was no longer confined to Trump but could affect turnout levels and the behavior of swing voters.

There are two major factors in determining how bad congressional elections can be: environment and exposure. The environmental factor concerns the political climate. With midterms generally referenda on a sitting president, or on the party in power, this is usually measured by that president’s job-approval ratings, or alternatively, the generic congressional ballot, a rough indicator of the direction and velocity of partisan winds.

The other, more often ignored factor, is exposure: How many seats are actually in the politically low-lying areas, at the most risk of flooding? A candidate of the president’s party in a safe state or district will likely see their victory percentage knocked down a few points, but there is a big difference between that and actually losing a seat.

Starting with the environment: Trump’s approval ratings are running much worse than those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama leading into their 1994 and 2010 debacles, and worse than Trump in 2018 as well, suggesting larger losses. In both the New York Times average of recent polling on Trump’s approval ratings and Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin average, Trump’s approval is a net -19, with 39 percent approving and 58 percent disapproving.

The gold-standard NBC News Poll, conducted jointly by Hart Research (D) and Public Opinion Strategies (R), released on Sunday, had Trump’s approval rating among registered voters at -15, with 42 percent approving and 57 percent disapproving.

On the generic ballot test, the numbers are bad for the GOP, but not horrific. The current RealClearPolitics average shows a Democratic lead of 5.8 percentage points. Since the beginning of this calendar year, Democrats have led in 118 polls that RCP reported, there were three ties, and Republicans led in one. Of course, the House is hardly determined by a national popular-vote winner.

That brings us to the element of exposure. Assuming no vacant seats, the narrowest possible House majority is 218. Immediately after each of the last three elections, the winning party had 222 or fewer seats. This is a function of an evenly divided country; it’s difficult for either party to get much of a majority under the current dynamics. The House is completely sorted, with no fish-out-of-water members, other than those washed ashore by the mid-decade gerrymandering.

Thus, just 35 House races are currently rated as competitive, Toss Up, or Lean or Likely Republican or Democrat; just 28 seats are either Likely Democrat or Likely Republican, meaning potentially competitive. This makes for a very narrow battleground—hardly a target-rich environment for either party.

In the Senate, where the outcome in just a handful of key races will determine which party holds a majority next November, there are a few worth watching closely.

Michigan is the only Democratic-held seat in real danger. The GOP nomination is locked down for former Rep. Mike Rogers, the 2024 GOP nominee who lost to then-Rep. Elissa Slotkin by a third of a percentage point, 48.64 to 48.30 percent. Democrats have three Senate contenders who are roughly tied in polling. Two of the three, Rep. Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, don’t figure to be problematic for the party. The challenge for Democrats is if the third candidate, former Wayne County health director Abdul El-Sayed, were to win the nomination. El-Sayed has some mainstream support, but he’s most notably endorsed by a parade of progressives, from Sen. Bernie Sanders to Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Summer Lee, and Rashida Tlaib. In short, if El-Sayed wins the primary, Democrats have little chance of holding the seat.

Barrels of ink, both physical and digital, have gone into stories about the Maine and Texas Senate races. Democrats in the former and Republicans in the latter nominated candidates who were risky choices, as likely to create races centered around themselves than about things that might maximize their party’s chances of winning that seat. In Maine, is it still possible that Graham Platner can make the race about Trump, who is hardly popular in the state? Or will it be about himself and his personal baggage? Texas Republicans decided to go all in on the ethically challenged state Attorney General Ken Paxton; staying with the incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn, would have been a far safer choice.

So there is plenty to watch and ponder on both the macro and micro sides.

A Fox News poll of 1,015 registered voters in Ohio, released on Thursday, could well be the canary in the midterm coal mine, suggesting far greater danger for Republicans in November than was previously evident. The analysis by Dana Blanton, who heads the Fox polling unit, as well as the poll’s topline results and crosstabs, are all worth reading. When reading the numbers that follow, you should know that unreleased, private, high-quality polls conducted for both sides show similar results; this poll is not an outlier. And while Fox News has its fans and detractors, its polling is first-rate.

Interestingly, no other state has a better track record of voting for the winning presidential candidate than Ohio: it’s done so 18 times out of 20 since the end of World War II. The only exceptions were 1960, when Richard Nixon carried the state but John Kennedy narrowly won both the popular vote and the Electoral College; and 2020, when Donald Trump won Ohio but Joe Biden prevailed nationwide.

Once seen as a quintessential swing state, the Buckeye State has trended strongly Republican in recent years—Trump carried it by 8 points in both 2016 and 2020, and by 11 points in 2024. Republicans have won eight of the 11 U.S. Senate races in the state since 1994, faring even better in gubernatorial races (eight of nine since 1990). The Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index shows Ohio votes 5 percentage points more Republican than the country as a whole. In the last three presidential elections, Trump averaged 54.7 percent of the major-party vote (excluding votes for independents and third-party candidates); Democratic nominees averaged 45.3 percent.

In the U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race matchups, the Fox News survey showed Democrats more unified behind their nominees, but importantly, running much stronger among independents. Democratic voters also placed greater emphasis on their party winning a Senate majority than Republicans did, usually a sign of a likely turnout disparity. Favorability ratings, not just for the Republican Senate and gubernatorial nominees, but for term-limited GOP Gov. Mike DeWine, Trump, and native son Vice President J.D. Vance, were lower than one might have expected, more evidence of problems for Republicans. Underwhelming numbers for Republicans in Ohio suggest that other GOP-leaning states could face similar problems.

The poll showed former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown leading Sen. Jon Husted by 8 points, 53 to 45 percent. Brown was first elected to the Senate in 2006, President George W. Bush’s second-term midterm election, a tough year for the GOP. He was reelected in 2012 and 2018 before losing his bid for a third term in 2024 to Bernie Moreno, a wealthy automobile dealer.

While not exactly a household name in Ohio, Husted was certainly better known and more established in the state than within the Capitol Beltway. Husted served for eight years in the Ohio state House, the last four as speaker, then two years in the state Senate before his election as secretary of state in 2010 (Barack Obama’s first-term midterm, a bad year for Democrats) and was reelected in 2014. After he made a brief bid for the GOP’s 2018 gubernatorial nomination, the victor, DeWine, picked Husted as his running mate; the ticket went on to win. Later, Gov. DeWine appointed Husted to fill the Senate vacancy after Vance’s elevation to the vice presidency.

In the Fox poll, Brown led Husted among fellow Democrats, 98 percent to 2 percent. Husted led among Republicans, 86 to 13 percent, with independents giving Brown an 18-point lead, 53 to 35 percent.

The gubernatorial race is effectively tied. Amy Acton, who ran the state Department of Health during the COVID pandemic and is now the Democratic nominee, ran ahead of technology entrepreneur and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy by 1 point, 50 to 49 percent. Acton prevails among Democrats, 93 to 7 percent, while Ramaswamy wins among Republicans, 89 to 10 percent. Independents give Acton an 8-point edge, 51 to 43 percent.

The favorability ratings are instructive. In the Fox News 2024 Election Voter Analysis poll (what we used to call exit polls) in Ohio, Trump was at 52 percent favorable and 46 percent unfavorable for a net + 6; in this new survey, he is at 42 percent favorable and 57 percent unfavorable, a net -15. In 2024, Vance was at 48 percent favorable and 43 percent unfavorable, for a net +5; now it’s 45 percent favorable and 52 percent unfavorable, for a net -7. DeWine won reelection in 2022 with 62 percent of the vote and in 2024 was at 53 percent favorable and 41 percent unfavorable, for a net +12; now it’s dead even at 48-48. Husted is at 41 percent favorable and 50 percent unfavorable, for a net -9.

Democrats are faring better. When Brown lost, his ratings were 46 percent favorable and 48 percent unfavorable (-2 net); now they are 53 percent favorable and 44 percent unfavorable (net +9). Acton is at 46 percent favorable and 37 percent unfavorable (net +9).

Why put so much emphasis on this poll? Unfortunately, there have been very few quality polls in states with critical senatorial and gubernatorial races. Virtually no state or local newspapers or television stations are willing to spend the money to hire top-notch pollsters, and most college and university polling these days is mediocre at best. Presumably, as the midterms draw nearer, more national news organizations will step up and commission polls in states with key races. Some of the polls released by campaigns are more of the “Polls R Us” variety, not the quality research that strategists rely on, but cheap polls commissioned for the sole purpose of generating a press release and distributed to donors.

While Trump’s national numbers have been bad for some time, until now there haven’t been many indications that his political problems had metastasized and spread to infect Republican candidates on the November ballot in swing states and districts. The recipe for midterm disaster has long been diminished enthusiasm among those in a president’s party, a hyper-energized opposition-party base, and true independents moving disproportionately against candidates of the incumbent’s party. This Fox poll is the first to make clear that, with his many controversial moves, Trump may have politically “jumped the shark.”

While Trump’s problems will simply knock a few points off of the victory margins for most Republicans in ruby-red, solidly Republican states and districts, they threaten to put those GOP candidates with constituencies closer to the edge into untenable positions.

Democrats are excited about their nominee in Texas, state Rep. James Talarico, some going so far as to predict that the political strengths of the 37-year-old state legislator and Presbyterian seminarian will “turn Texas blue” amid a Democratic wave. An alternative way of looking at the Texas Senate race is that last week’s outcome sets up the largest political science experiment ever conducted, testing the thesis that no matter how flawed and politically unpalatable a Republican can be, a GOP candidate will always win a U.S. Senate general election in Texas. Keep in mind that incumbent Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 was the last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate race in Texas; the last time a Democrat won any Texas statewide office was in 1994, when four incumbents earned reelection.

Democrats’ arguments ignore several inconvenient truths. First, while a Talarico-Paxton race will surely be very competitive, few would argue that the Democrat would have had any chance against Cornyn. The determinative factor in this political equation is Paxton, not Talarico.

How weak of a candidate is Paxton? Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini made the point last week in his newsletter The Intersection that “Ken Paxton is somewhere between Herschel Walker and Roy Moore in candidate quality—and a lot hinges on where he lands on that spectrum.” Ruffini’s comparisons sent me looking at exit polls in Walker’s unsuccessful 2020 race in Georgia as well as Moore’s 2017 flop in Alabama. Moore, who was buffeted by charges of inappropriate behavior with underage girls, still won 91 percent of the vote among Republicans (to 8 percent for Democrat Doug Jones) that year. Walker, who had little business running for the Senate, still took 95 percent of Republicans (to Sen. Raphael Warnock’s 4 percent), a sign of how few partisans defect these days in even the worst of circumstances.

My guess is that, due to the state’s sheer partisanship, Paxton remains an ever-so-slight favorite, but if a Republican could possibly lose, it would be Paxton. For that matter, any randomly selected Republican in the state’s congressional delegation would probably run stronger than Paxton; the GOP base vote would be sufficient for victory. As Ruffini went on to note: “The campaign to polarize the conservative electorate against James Talarico—with comments heavy on veganism and gender ideology—has only begun. And in a state like Texas, polarization is usually enough.” At the very least, with Paxton as the GOP nominee, the state’s price tag for Republicans will be a couple hundred million dollars higher, money that would have been useful elsewhere.

The second truth is that a state is hardly turning blue if Democrats have virtually no chance of winning at least five, if not all six of the constitutional statewide offices on the Texas ballot. The GOP nominees for governor, lieutenant governor, comptroller, and the land, railroad, and agriculture commissioners are locks to win. Democrats have a remote chance of winning the attorney general’s post.

Third, both the state Senate and House look to stay safely in GOP hands; 16 of the 31 Senate districts are up this year, and it’s pretty unlikely that the GOP’s 18-to-12 majority will flip (there is one vacancy). In the House, all 150 seats are up; Republicans have 88, Democrats 62. Finally, thanks to a very aggressive and appalling gerrymander, Republicans will almost certainly in the next Congress have more than the 24 U.S. House seats in Texas that they currently hold. This is hardly a state turning blue, even if Democrats manage to pick up a Senate seat.

Down East or down the drain?

Bombshell stories Saturday in both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal on Graham Platner’s marital indiscretions rocked the candidacy of the 41-year-old presumptive Democratic opponent of Sen. Susan Collins. Platner, an oyster farmer and veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, had already been plagued by a nonstop litany of stories about inappropriate social media posts over the years and a now-altered chest tattoo that was said to be a Nazi emblem.

A year ago, the question in Maine was whether Democratic Gov. Janet Mills would challenge Collins. Mills held off, indicating that she would wait until mid-October. But in August, Platner jumped the line, tapping into a desire among Democrats for fresher faces and political outsiders. He caught on fast, raising an enormous amount of money from the national Democratic donor community.

This column in March raised the question of whether Platner’s nomination represented an unnecessary risk for Democrats, given the importance of winning the Maine seat if they were to have any chance of capturing a Senate majority this year, or arguably even in 2028. A Collins-Mills race would have been more about Collins’s frequent but not unfailing support for President Trump’s policies and nominees, while a Collins-Platner contest would more likely be about Platner.

There is reason to believe that Mills’s campaign expected outside groups to step in and go negative on Platner, but no cavalry arrived, and Mills’s campaign had to do the wet work themselves. They did, though certainly not as robustly as Republicans will. Mills suspended her campaign—though, importantly, she did not drop out; her name will be on the June 9 ballot with Platner and a lesser-known third candidate.

The new allegations from this past weekend were sufficiently serious that Platner bailed on a previously scheduled live MS NOW cable interview and instead headed to D.C. on Tuesday to meet with Democratic senators in what appears to be a damage-control mission. Under Maine law, if a Senate nominee drops out of the race by July 13, party officials could designate a replacement.

This is a story that is fast developing and impossible to predict. The Democratic base has its own ideas about electability, and it seemed largely unconcerned about Platner’s past—at least until the last few days.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of our country’s independence from the British, our voting has come to resemble theirs more than it did for much of the previous two centuries. Voters increasingly vote for and against parties more than individual candidates; indeed, the caliber of those whose names are on the ballot seems to matter less than the color of their jersey or the party designation next to their name.

Even while polls show mounting reservations about President Trump, if not downright opposition, that has minimal bearing on Republican voters in the red states and districts that Democrats need in order to flip the Senate or approach a wave election in the House. In this new era for our politics, voters having doubts about a president of their own party is one thing, but voting for the opposition party is something else entirely.

Partisanship, particularly negative partisanship—the tendency among many on each side to despise the opposition party’s leaders, candidates, policies, priorities, and rhetoric even more than they may like their own side—is one reason why straight-party voting has become so pervasive on both sides, and it should be kept in mind when looking at all of these polls.

Just 4 percent of Democrats voted for Donald Trump in 2024, precisely the same share of Republicans who voted for Kamala Harris; in each case, 95 percent of each side toed the party line. Four years earlier, both Trump and Joe Biden pulled the exact same 95 percent of their fellow party members, with 4 percent of Democrats voting for Trump and 5 percent of Republicans voting for Biden. In 2016, the cohesion levels were only slightly lower, with 94 percent of Democrats voting for Hillary Clinton and 92 percent of Republicans for Trump. This behavior extends to independents who lean toward one party or the other as well. Just 6 percent of independents who lean Democrat cast a ballot for Trump in 2024, and only 8 percent of independents who lean more to the GOP voted for Harris.

There are even fewer defections in midterm elections. In 2018, 97 percent of voters identifying as Democrats backed their side’s candidates; in 2022, it was 98 percent. For the GOP, it was 95 percent in 2018 and 97 percent in 2022.

That negative partisanship was on clear display in the results of the New York Times/Siena University national poll of registered voters published Monday morning. Twenty-two percent of Republicans said they disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy. On the cost of living, 33 percent disapproved. On handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 25 percent of fellow Republicans disapproved. How about handling the war in Iran? Twenty-three percent of Republicans disapproved.

But when the same poll asked how they were likely to vote in this year’s elections for Congress, just 5 percent of Republicans said they would vote for a Democrat, 92 percent for a Republican, and 2 percent didn’t know or refused to say.

Of course, Democrats should be delighted that Trump’s job approval was down to 37 percent (59 percent disapproved) and overjoyed that their party has an 11-point lead among all registered voters in the generic ballot test, 50 to 39 percent. They certainly don’t mind seeing that there are more than a few Republicans who have misgivings about Trump’s policies. That does not mean, however, that those Republicans are going to vote Democratic in November.

Hence Democrats need to win in practically every blue state and district, and in purple states and districts too. Beyond that, if they have designs on picking up more than two seats in the Senate and a dozen in the House, they’re going to need to win in some states and districts where there are more Republican voters than Democrats and independents. When Democrats target seats and states that Trump has carried three times, in some cases with double-digit margins, winning every Democratic vote and the lion’s share of independents is not enough; they need defections. In an environment like this, the national generic ballot test is of limited utility. Nationally, the outcome will be determined in a relatively small number of districts. When the battlefield was bigger, the national generic ballot test was of more value than it is today.

There is no doubt that Democratic voters are more motivated this year than those on the Republican side, and that voter turnout will be asymmetric; Democratic turnout will be substantially higher than Republican turnout. That’s more than sufficient for Democrats to win in blue and purple states and districts, and maybe even in some very light-red Republican jurisdictions. But that won’t get it done in the ruby-red states and districts they are targeting. As this column has noted, exceptions do occur, but mostly in state-level races, like gubernatorial contests, where the cleavages are not quite as sharp as those for Washington offices.

The broad dynamics that have caused the party holding the White House to lose U.S. House seats in 18 of the 20 midterm elections since the end of World War II are very much in play again. The familiar pattern of the president’s voters displaying considerable lethargy and disappointment is reappearing on schedule, this time turbocharged by stratospheric gasoline and diesel prices that are particularly unwelcome for a party with an abundance of members who drive their cars and trucks long distances. Ironically, the economy had been the most buoyant aspect of President Trump’s first term, helping him greatly when other things went sour.

In this era of hyper-partisanship, disenchantment among a party base rarely translates into defections, but it can and usually does depress turnout among the party faithful. That is the fear of Republican strategists, and most historians would nod in agreement.

The other traditional contributing factor in midterm elections is buyer’s remorse among independents, particularly that very narrow but decisive slice of true independent voters who make up less than a tenth of all voters but the lion’s share of swing voters. They place their confidence in one party, putting that party into power, only to quickly become disappointed. Their grievances toward the party they voted out two years prior are often forgotten, if not forgiven.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s approval ratings among Democrats are in the radioactive single digits. And among all independents, Trump’s numbers are in the still-quite-toxic 30s. Only among his fellow Republicans are Trump’s numbers strong, in the 80s, down some from a year ago but not nearly as steeply as many of his critics and ill-wishers claim. Taken together, Trump’s standing likely translates into an apocalyptic situation for any GOP candidates in blue, Democrat-leaning states and districts, and an extremely harsh environment in the relatively few swing purple states and districts, but it is much less of a problem in red, GOP-tilting states and districts—the very places where Democrats must score strong gains if they are to win big in the Senate and House.

So where does the fight for Congress stand today?

If the number of hotly contested states and districts corresponded to typical midterm elections before 2000, the party of a president in this predicament could be expected to sustain losses of at least the average 26-seat net loss for all 20 midterms over the last 80 years. Thirty-five or 40 seats might have been quite plausible. But the number of competitive House districts (even before this mid-decade remapping) makes the map just a fraction of what it used to be. In other words, for a party playing offense, this is not a target-rich environment. The country is very evenly divided, and the House increasingly is as well.

The current House ratings by The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter show just 18 House seats in the Toss Up column—four held by Democrats, 14 by Republicans. Adding in the 12 seats in the Lean Democrat column (10 held by Democrats, two by Republicans) and the five seats in the Lean Republican column (three Democratic, two Republican), that means that just 35 House seats are currently competitive (17 currently in the hands of Democrats, 18 for Republicans). Even adding in the not-currently-competitive categories of Likely Democrat (11) and Likely Republican (17), the universe of competitive and potentially competitive seats is just 63 seats. In other words, fewer than 70 seats are not buried in cement, with 30 already in Democratic hands. A party cannot lose a seat it doesn’t have.

The narrowness of the battlefield of competitive and potentially competitive seats, where they are, and who holds them means that things were never remotely as promising for Democrats as those proponents of the “blue wave” dreamt. Nor is the current situation as dark as they seem to believe. Democrats were favorites to win a House majority before the last two weeks and they still are, only their margin is likely to be somewhat smaller than it otherwise would have been. Too much reliance on the vibe can lead to grave disappointment.

While the average Senate outcome in the postwar era is a net loss of 3.5 seats—Democrats need four to capture a majority—the turnover there is considerably less predictable than in the House. The president’s party has lost seats in 65 percent of postwar midterms, broken even in two, and actually gained seats in five.

With only a third of the Senate up every two years, and generally only about a half dozen races hotly contested, the results are more idiosyncratic, very sensitive to the circumstances that exist in any particular midterm and the state of individual races. With only a handful of seats truly in play, the success and failures in getting just the right nominee become life-and-death matters. Look at Georgia, where Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff is seeking reelection, and North Carolina, where Republican Sen. Thom Tillis decided not to seek reelection. Had outgoing Republican Gov. Brian Kemp decided to challenge Ossoff, the latter’s reelection prospects would be at best 50-50 and very likely less. But Kemp opted not to run and Ossoff is now a strong favorite. In North Carolina, had Democrats been unsuccessful in convincing former Gov. Roy Cooper to run, their chances of capturing that seat would be relatively low.

For Democrats, taking over the Senate was always a tough challenge, and they were never 50-50 on that proposition. Those who assume that the House and Senate behave in tandem should consider that they went opposite directions in each of the last four elections, with one party picking up seats in the lower chamber while the other party picked up seats in the upper chamber.

Avoid the vibe and don’t fall for the wave.

Of course, reality doesn’t always support such conclusions, but that’s OK; there will be other events coming along that will be portrayed as cataclysmic, or maybe an existential threat. Some never bother to seek out context or nuance; it’s more fun to jump to conclusions or go along with “the vibe.”

We are constantly hearing predictions that the soaring price of gasoline and diesel will cost President Trump and Republicans much more than it has already. But how much more can it hurt?

Now that the Gallup Organization is no longer including presidential approval ratings in its monthly surveys, I’ve lost my benchmark standard. To me it was akin to the Brent and West Texas Intermediate prices on crude oil as the benchmark for energy prices.

A useful alternative measure is the “PollTracker” feature compiled by The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, which computes a moving average of Trump’s approval numbers from 21 national polls, using only the results of certain polls that meet high methodological standards. CPR subscribers are also allowed to access the moving averages of 11 subgroups.

As of Monday afternoon, the PollTracker showed Trump’s overall job-approval rating to be 40 percent, down a point from Jan. 1 and 7 points below its level of March of last year when it debuted. In analyzing approval ratings, it is useful to “look under the hood” to examine the numbers broken out by partisan affiliation. Among Democrats, Trump’s approval on Monday was at 6 percent, precisely where it was at the beginning of the year. Among Republicans, he pulled 83 percent approval, down 3 points from 86 percent at the beginning of January and 7 points below his 90 percent level of March 2025. Among independents, who make up a disproportionately large segment of the electorate in swing states and districts, Trump’s approval rating was 27 percent, down 3 points from 30 percent at the beginning of the year and 14 points below the 41 percent level in March 2025. It’s a decent bet that the vast majority of that 27 percent are independents who lean Republican and reliably vote that way. In other words, not many more independents are still likely to shift from approval to disapproval; most who still approve are closet Republicans.

A few weeks ago, this column suggested that Trump could pump free gas and few Democrats would approve of his overall performance. Meanwhile, the price could double and not many Republicans would abandon him. Identity, social and cultural issues, and negative partisanship come into play. For many Republicans, supporting any Democrat would be an act of treason. Not voting is a much more likely byproduct of disaffection.

So how is that translating into votes? In the latest ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, Democrats had a lead on the generic ballot test of 5 points, 49 to 44 percent. Among only Democratic respondents, Democrats were ahead 98 to 1 percent. Among Republicans, GOP candidates were ahead 97 to 2 percent. Among independents, Democrats led 52 to 32 percent.

The Fox News poll last month showed very similar numbers, with Democrats ahead 52-46 percent. Among Democratic voters, they led 97 to 3 percent. Among Republicans, GOP candidates ran ahead of Democrats 92 to 7 percent. Among independents, Democrats led 57-41. Basically, the partisans on each side are locked in, unlikely to move, with Democrats having about as big a lead as they can get once independents are factored in.

The variable, of course, is turnout. At least this year, Democrats have an abundance of energy; it’s Republicans this time with a lethargy problem.

This past week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais is obviously important, although not likely to be the determinative factor in this year’s fight for control of the House. It’s more likely to be consequential in the 2028 and 2030 elections. Of the 54 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, 25 hold seats in states that voted Democratic in the last three presidential elections and have Democratic governors.

Of the 25 states that voted for Trump in each of the last three elections, 13 have no Black members of Congress at all; a 14th, Tennessee, has one majority-Black district, but it is represented by a white Democrat, Rep. Steve Cohen.

Realistically, any Black members in Louisiana, as well as Florida, Alabama, and Missouri, should be worried; others, much less so.

Few would seriously argue that this won’t be a bad year for Republicans. The question is, how bad will it be? My theory is that very few Republicans running in blue, Democratic-tilting states and districts are likely to win. In purple, swing states and districts, where Trump is extremely unpopular, the electoral mortality rate for GOP candidates will be extremely high, with few survivors. But in most red, Republican-tilting states and districts, the loss rate for GOP candidates might be pretty low. Sure, a very low Republican turnout, which I think is likely, will cost some Republican candidates elections in very light red states, but past a certain point, it will take Republicans actually defecting and voting Democratic, which as we’ve already determined, does not happen much anymore.

To the extent that any appreciable number of Republicans vote for a Democrat, it is likely to be in gubernatorial races rather than contests for the Senate. Keep an eye on Iowa and Ohio. The last time Democrats won either governorship was in 2006. Gubernatorial races are a bit less rigidly partisan than federal races, so if lightning strikes, it’s more likely to hit in state races, particularly where one party has been occupying the state Capitol for, say, 20 years, and voters are in the mood for change.

It doesn’t seem to matter to these casual students of electoral behavior that they are comparing what happened in 2020, a year in which both the Democratic share of the presidential vote (51.25 percent) and the victory margin (4.45 points) were the best since 2008, with 2024 and Donald Trump’s win that saw the highest presidential GOP vote share (49.70 percent) and victory margin (1.47 points) since 2004. In the former, the election’s focal point was Trump; a weariness had set in among swing voters who just wanted things to get back to normal. In 2024, soaring inflation and interest rates, a porous border, and a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan convinced those same swing voters that the Biden-Harris administration was not up to the job. The declines in Democratic vote share came disproportionately among young, mostly non-college men of all races. These were among the most economically vulnerable voters hurt worst by inflation. Those liabilities were not offset by the abortion issue or Trump’s persistent problems with many women voters.

Therein lies both good and bad news for Democrats. The bad news is that swing voters have not forgotten nor forgiven what happened in 2021-2025. The good news is that this election is not likely to be about that; it will be about Trump and the party holding both the House and the Senate majorities. It’s important to remember that hate is the strongest emotion in politics, a far stronger driving force than love, admiration, or appreciation.

A recurring theme in this column has long been just how evenly, narrowly, and deeply divided our country has become—evenly in that both parties are basically the same size, narrowly in that there are very few actual voters in between, and deeply in that two broad-based, ideologically and geographically diverse parties have now morphed into polar opposites, with virtually nothing in common in terms of policies or even values.

Democrats have approximately 47 or 48 percent of the vote locked up, just as Republicans have their own 47 or 48 percent that they can bank on. So these elections turn on two factors. First, will either party have a disproportionately high or low voter turnout, and second, how will that 4-6 percent of voters who truly are independents break? Hint: In recent years, they break almost invariably against the party in power. They punish when they’re disappointed or angered, and they’re rarely in an appreciative mood.

Even the small shifts they create have enormous policy consequences. Since Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, we have had five consecutive presidents who took office with majorities in both the House and the Senate. When each of the five left office, their party had given up control of all three branches.

It is interesting to look at the results of the 25 presidential elections over the last 100 years, starting with Herbert Hoover’s 1928 victory over Al Smith. Ten of the 25 elections (40 percent) produced landslide victories—margins of 10 points or more. The most recent of these, however, was Ronald Reagan’s 49-state, 18-point victory over Walter Mondale in 1984. To put it differently, landslides occurred in 10 of the first 15 elections in this 100-year span; we now have had 10 consecutive elections without one.

A landslide presidential election is a clear, unambiguous, indisputable statement by the American people about what and whom they want, and about what and whom they have rejected. This clarity is useful, albeit quite painful for the losing candidate and party. A lack of landslides means that voters are not giving clear guidance on the direction that the country should go or what kind of leaders they want.

When ideological sorting began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Democratic Party became more monolithically liberal or progressive and the Republican Party more populist and conservative. Each party lost its moderating influences, moving away from that narrow but critical sliver of true independents in the middle. Increasingly, each side has lost the ability to understand and court those pure independents, leading those voters to swing back and forth, punishing whichever party is in power, which they see as having “gone too far.” That is the real trend, with far more than two data points to support it.

President Trump is now an anchor for the GOP among certain segments of the electorate. Trump’s positions aren’t just alienating many Republicans of a more centrist, less populist stripe; a sense is also building that he is in over his head and just winging it from day to day, if not hour to hour.

Notwithstanding certain over-caffeinated polling analysts on cable television, it is easy to overstate what these national trends mean for individual states and districts, given the current state of American politics. As this column has repeatedly noted, Trump’s single-digit approval ratings among Democrats virtually ensure a terrible political outlook for most Republicans running in blue, Democratic-tilting states and districts. Poor approvals among independents indicate that he is an enormous liability in purple, swing states and districts as well. Yet his approval rating in the 80s among Republicans could translate into something less than catastrophic for GOP candidates in red states and districts.

People tend to forget not only how pervasive partisanship has become, particularly now that there are no longer many conservatives in the Democratic Party nor liberals in the Republican Party. Those groups used to be the first to defect if their party was having a bad year.

In fact, we are seeing very few defections on any level in any kind of year. In 2024, 95 percent of Democrats voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris and 95 percent of Republicans voted for Trump. Four years earlier, 95 percent of Democrats voted for Joe Biden and 95 percent of Republicans voted for Trump. In 2016, 94 percent of Democrats voted for Hillary Clinton and 92 percent of Republicans for Trump.

This is true not only in presidential elections; indeed, partisans vote even more cohesively in midterm elections for Congress. In 2022, the last midterm, 98 percent of Democrats voted for their own party’s nominee for Congress, just as 97 percent of Republicans voted for the GOP candidate. In 2018, 97 percent of Democrats voted for their side’s candidate, while 92 percent of Republicans did the same.

In the most competitive Senate races in 2022, the lowest support level for a Democratic nominee was John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, who pulled 94 percent support among his party’s voters. At the high end, Mark Kelly (Arizona), Raphael Warnock (Georgia), Maggie Hassan (New Hampshire), Tim Ryan (Ohio), and Mandela Barnes (Wisconsin) all pulled 97 percent of Democratic voters in the Edison Research exit polls for ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC.

Among Republicans, the low performers in key Senate races were Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, both at 89 percent. The best were Ted Budd (97 percent in North Carolina) and Ron Johnson (96 percent in Wisconsin), with all others in between. Gubernatorial races showed a similar range.

In 2018, the lowest party support a Democratic nominee in a key Senate race received was Bill Nelson’s 91 percent in Florida. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona was tops at 97 percent. On the Republican side, at the low end was Martha McSally at 86 percent in Arizona, and the high was Adam Laxalt with 93 percent in Nevada, in a losing cause.

Democrats now targeting seats in extremely red states tend to ignore just how hard it is to actually win those. Look no further than the popular former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, who took on Sen. Marsha Blackburn in 2018. Bredesen pulled 95 percent of Democrats, higher than Blackburn’s 92 percent among Republicans. But 44 percent of the electorate that year identified as Republican, compared to just 25 percent who identified as Democratic. Even Bredesen’s overperformance among independents—he won them 55 to 43 percent—couldn’t save him.

When Beto O’Rourke challenged Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas, he pulled 92 percent of the Democratic vote, a point above Cruz’s 91 percent among Republicans. O’Rourke also carried independents by 3 points, 50 to 47 percent, but it was not enough given the disparity in the composition of the electorate—38 percent identifying as Republican, 34 percent as Democratic.

There is no question that Democrats are now and probably will continue to overperform the norm this year. But beating the point spread is worthless unless the result ends with a win and a swearing-in ceremony next January.

In terms of the Senate, what happens in some upcoming primaries is hugely relevant. Democrats will be thrilled if Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton wins the May 26 GOP runoff against Sen. John Cornyn. Democrats would have a decent shot at beating the scandal-plagued Paxton in this kind of year, but they would have no shot against Cornyn.

On Aug. 4, Michigan Democrats will select a nominee. Right now, three major contenders are effectively tied. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow would probably be the strongest Democratic candidate. Although she is a bit more liberal than optimal, she appears to be a much more talented candidate than the more centrist Rep. Haley Stevens. But if former Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed were to win the nomination, former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers would become a strong favorite to win the seat.

When a party is torqued up above a certain level, despising an incumbent president of the other party, there is a tendency to go too far in primaries, selecting suboptimal candidates. In Maine, Graham Platner has built up a huge polling lead in the Democratic primary over Gov. Janet Mills, with the winner taking on Sen. Susan Collins in November. But if you were to ask Republican strategists who they would most want to win the primary, it would be Platner by a long shot. The opposition-research file is bulging, and the race would become about him, rather than about Trump.

The bottom line is that things look pretty good for Democrats, and bad for Republicans, but it is easy to get carried away.

But anyone arguing “Trump and his party are done now” forget how many times we’ve heard this since his ride down the golden Trump Tower escalator in 2015, starting with the release of the Billy Bush tapes shortly before the 2016 election.

In my view, Democrats’ capturing a House majority is close to inevitable (the Senate is a different matter), but the extent of their gains in the House is far from clear. In President Obama’s first midterm election in 2010, his party lost 64 seats in the House, a dozen more than the 54-seat loss that Democrats suffered in Bill Clinton’s first midterm in 1994. Trump’s only midterm thus far, in 2018, resulted in a 42-seat loss. The post-World War II average midterm outcome was a net loss of 26 seats.

There are two big reasons why Democratic gains are not likely to be on that kind of a scale this time.

The first reason is exposure. The more seats a majority party has entering a midterm election cycle, the greater its exposure to losses, particularly if it holds many seats that were in the opposition party’s column in fairly recent years. Democrats entered the 1994 election cycle with 258 seats and the 2010 midterm with 257 seats. Republicans began the 2018 cycle with 241 seats. But Republicans this time are going in with one of the barest majorities ever, having actually lost two seats in 2024 to claim a majority of just 220 seats. The country is very evenly divided, and the current House split reflects that; they don’t have an inordinate amount of exposure.

The second reason is that there is a clear delineation of where Trump is a real drag on GOP candidates and where he probably isn’t. A national CBS News/YouGov poll released on Sunday explains what some are missing. Trump’s overall job-approval rating of 39 percent (61 percent disapprove) is consistent with most other national polls released over the last few weeks. His approval rating is just 4 percent among Democrats (96 percent disapprove) and 29 percent among independents (71 percent disapprove). Among Republicans, however, his approval rating is 87 percent (13 percent disapprove).

What about his performance so far on issues that are thought to be liabilities? On handling inflation, his overall approval is a lowly 31 percent (69 percent disapprove), just 5 percent among Democrats (95 percent disapprove), and 79 percent among independents. Among Republicans, 71 percent approve of his handling of inflation, while 29 percent disapprove.

On handling the economy, his overall approval was 35 percent (65 percent disapprove); among just Democrats, it was 5 percent (95 percent disapprove), and among independents, 24 percent (76 percent disapprove). But among Republicans, it’s 78 percent (22 percent disapprove).

What about handling Iran, the issue that some suggest is splintering the Republican Party and MAGA world? Just 36 percent of Americans approve (64 percent disapprove), including 4 percent of Democrats (96 percent disapprove) and 27 percent of independents (73 percent disapprove). Yet 81 percent of Republicans approve (19 percent disapprove).

Trump’s best issue of the four measured was immigration, with 44 percent of Americans approving and 56 percent disapproving. Among just Democrats, approval was 8 percent (disapproval 92 percent); among independents, it was 36 percent (disapproval 64 percent). But among just Republicans, 91 percent approved (9 percent disapproved).

While handling gasoline prices specifically was not tested, it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the current price could double and most Republicans would still say they approve. On the other hand, Trump could personally dispense free gasoline and the overwhelming majority of Democrats would still disapprove.

So how does this translate into midterm-election results? In blue states and districts, where voters are disproportionately Democratic, a bloodbath could be an understatement. In the few purple states and districts that have a disproportionately large share of independents, and where Democrats and Republicans are roughly evenly split, it would still translate into a fairly ugly situation for the incumbent party. But Republicans have to defend very few House or Senate seats in such challenging environments.

At least under the lines in place in 2024, the GOP is defending only three seats in districts that Kamala Harris won; and only one Senate seat in a state that Harris carried. Even the number of Republican-held seats in states and districts that Trump won by narrow margins is tiny. This puts the odds of a blue wave, with Democrats scoring more seats than the post-war average of 26, quite low. This also makes it very difficult for Democrats to capture Senate seats in states that Trump won handily.

Consider two things. First, our elections are binary; one major party wins, the other loses. So if Democrats merely beat the point spread in a given state or district, it’s useless if they don’t actually win. Close doesn’t count. Second, for a deep-red seat to flip, how many Republicans would have to cast their ballots for a Democrat?

The Democratic Party’s base this year is energized to the point of near militancy; it is Republicans who must worry about complacency, a lack of enthusiasm, or a lack of intensity. In states that are close to the edge, that makes victory quite doable for Democrats. But a broader victory has to start near the edge, meaning purple states and districts, and the lightest of light-red states and districts.

For example, we frequently hear or read these days that President Trump’s standing with voters is “plummeting” or in a “free-fall,” and that his approval ratings are at “record lows” for this term. Yes, his approval rating has declined, and yes, it is at its lowest level yet, but we are not seeing the steep decline some suggest.

As of Monday afternoon, Trump’s approval rating is 39 percent in The New York Times average of public polls, just 2 points below his 41 percent number two months ago. In Nate Silver’s average published on the Silver Bulletin site, Trump is 3 points down from 43 percent two months ago. He stands at 41 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, one point below his 42 percent average two months ago.

As is often the case, it is helpful to look at the numbers broken down by party, which also suggests the potential for change in the foreseeable future. For that exercise, let’s look at the polls by CNN and Fox News, both of which conduct their surveys pretty regularly and publish their cross tabs.

Regular readers of this column should understand the importance of presidential approval ratings in midterm elections. Among Democrats, the CNN poll showed just 4 percent approved of Trump’s performance and 96 percent disapproving, while the Fox data showed 5 percent approving and 95 percent disapproving. These numbers would obviously translate into a radioactive situation for GOP candidates running in blue states and districts that have a disproportionate share of Democrats.

Among independents, the CNN survey showed Trump’s approval rating at 26 percent, with 73 percent disapproving, while Fox showed a very similar 25 percent approval, with 75 percent disapproving. One can conclude that, in swing states and districts with a disproportionate share of independent voters and partisans likely to offset each other, this translates into a very dangerous situation for Republican candidates in these most competitive constituencies.

Among Republicans, the CNN poll showed an approval rating of 80 percent, with 19 percent disapproving, while Fox showed 84 percent approval and 16 percent disapproval. This is certainly down from the 90 percent and 92 percent levels a month into this second term, but the low 80s is not bad at all among your own party members. It is also worth noting that in this era of hyper-partisanship, we have the phenomenon of “negative partisanship,” which describes a behavior among many partisans who hate the other party and its leaders and candidates even more than they like their own. Operationally, that often means that even if a partisan is less than thrilled with their own side at any given point, their contempt for the other party is enough to prevent them from crossing over.

I confess to scratching my head when I hear Democrats wringing their hands about the challenge of motivating their base to vote this fall. That same CNN poll showed that 96 percent of Democrats planned to vote in November, versus 90 percent of Republicans. More importantly, 67 percent of Democrats said they were extremely motivated, compared to just 50 percent of Republicans. Indeed, one could say that the chair of the Democratic get-out-the-vote operation is Donald Trump himself.

According to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter surveys—valuable because Pew checked with voting rolls to ensure that each respondent did in fact vote in these elections—in the 2022 midterm election, 98 percent of self-described Democrats voted for their party’s House candidates, versus 2 percent for the GOP candidate. In that election, Republicans voted 97 percent to 3 percent for their side’s candidates. Independents voted Democratic, 49 to 47 percent.

Four years earlier, in the 2018 midterm, Democrats voted 97 percent for their party’s House nominees; 2 percent voted for the Republicans. Among Republicans, the vote was 95 to 4 percent. In 2018, independents broke 55 to 40 percent for Democrats.

Even among those independents who concede that they lean toward one of the two major parties (and the vast majority do have those leanings), Democratic-inclined independents voted for that party’s candidate in 2022 by 91 to 6 percent. Independents who gravitate toward the GOP voted that way, 88 to 8 percent. In 2018, the numbers were quite similar; Democratic-leaning independents voted that way 91 to 6 percent, while GOP-leaning independents voted for their side 83 to 11 percent.

These numbers underscore that there are very few defections anymore in American politics as each party is more ideologically cohesive than it used to be; there are very few conservative Democrats, who might be first to defect on their side, just as there are no longer many liberal Republicans, who would be the first in the GOP to jump ship.

Keep in mind that a president with single-digit approval ratings among those in the opposite party and ratings in the 20s among independents does not have much more that he can lose outside of his own party. In short, Trump’s numbers dropping much further would depend on losing his own party members, something that is very rare these days. It also means that Republicans losing more than 25 or 30 House seats or more than a couple of Senate seats would require people voting for a Democrat who haven’t done so in a very long time.

Those who extrapolate a blue wave from generic congressional ballot polls showing big Democratic leads would do well to remember that in a sample of usually only a thousand voters, far fewer than a tenth of those polled will cast ballots in the three dozen or so House races and four or five Senate races that are most competitive and likely to be determinative. If 85 percent or so of those polled are essentially irrelevant to the outcome of an election, you haven’t learned much from that poll.

As for the generational change, it is already happening at about as fast a pace as American politics moves. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who turned 86 last week, and former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who is almost a year older, are retiring at the end of this Congress. On the Senate Democratic side, Minority Whip Dick Durbin is also retiring, and few believe that Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will stick around past 2028, when his current term expires.

This column noted last week that the 2028 presidential election will be the first since 1964 without a Nixon, Dole, Bush, Biden, Clinton, or Trump on a major-party ticket, and that 2024 was only the second since 1948 without a member of either the Silent or Greatest Generations on a major-party ticket. Nobody could stop this generational change if they wanted to, although if Democrats were really serious, they would adopt term limits for House Democrats as committee and subcommittee chairs and ranking members, as Republicans did in 1992, which explains the more regular flow of new blood into their ranks. Once GOP members lose their gavels, few choose to stick around.

That Democrats are angry should not be surprising, but is the focus of that wrath misdirected?

Democrats did not seem particularly concerned in the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency, when his job-approval rating plummeted 14 points, from 56 percent in June 2021 to 42 percent in October, never to exceed 46 percent again. And with that decline in public standing, as Biden’s age and limitations started becoming even more obvious, Democrats in both the grassroots and leadership didn’t seem that agitated in April 2023 when Biden announced he would seek a second presidential term.

Some prominent Democrats such as James Carville and David Axelrod told “truth to power,” saying that Biden should not be running again. But from the Democratic base, we heard crickets. Even after his disastrous June 27, 2024, debate, the response from the base was cautious. It took three weeks for Biden to step away—only after Pelosi all but hit Biden in the head with a baseball bat. After the party passed the baton to Kamala Harris, most in the party were relieved, many even elated.

No, the Democratic base didn’t seem to get angry until after the election, after they not only lost the presidency to Donald Trump for the second time, but also suffered a net loss of four seats and control of the Senate and came up short of retaking the House. The progressive world’s “hopium” dealers, pretending that everything was copacetic, had not prepared the Democratic base for such an outcome. No one seemed to acknowledge or even notice that the emperor was riding in his carriage through the town naked.

But then opinion swung to the opposite extreme—holding that the election had been a resounding defeat for Democrats, with Trump even calling it a landslide. In reality, the presidential race was close, with a 1.5-point margin nationally. Going into the election, the New York Times average of presidential race polls in six of seven swing states showed the leading candidate at 49 percent and the trailing candidate at 48 percent. When the votes were counted, Trump had 50.8 percent or less in six states, with Harris at 47.5 percent in the same six. In Arizona, the seventh state, Trump won by 52.1 percent to 46.5 percent. The undecided votes broke toward Trump. Game, set, match.

Democrats did lose four seats in the Senate, three of them in the ruby-red states of Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia. Two of the losing incumbents, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, were the last remaining Democrats holding statewide offices in their respective states, as was West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who opted not to run for reelection. In the five swing states with Senate elections, Democrats won four (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin), losing only in Pennsylvania, where Dave McCormick unseated Bob Casey in what turned out to be the closest Senate result in the country. In the House, Democrats gained two seats. It was a disappointment, but not a loss.

What Democrats should be mad about is that they had all of the power, then blew it. Five years ago today, Democrats held the White House and a 52-48 seat majority in the U.S. Senate, along with a four-seat majority in the House. Today they have nothing, standing outside the White House fence looking in, with just 47 seats in the Senate (counting independent Sens. Angus King and Bernie Sanders as Democrats) and three seats down in the House.

But instead of trying to figure out how they lost power, how they enabled Trump to get back into office, Democrats aren’t thinking about the underlying positions and policies that expedited their eviction from power. They didn’t seem to notice inflation soaring as soon as the American Rescue Plan Act checks began hitting mailboxes and bank accounts, followed by interest rates being hiked to try to subdue inflation that had been largely dormant for four decades.

The rate for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage had been 2.8 percent when Biden took office, but it climbed to more than 6 percent by the end of his second year in office, then to 7.4 percent by the time he left office, and it has not dropped below 6 percent since, making home-buying impossible for many, particularly younger Americans.

A 48-month auto-loan rate was 5.1 percent when Biden took office, it was 8 percent when he left office, and it is around 7.5 percent today. The interest rate for credit cards averaged 14.75 percent when he took office and 21.37 percent when he left office, and it remains around 21 percent. If Democrats want to get mad, maybe they should be mad at themselves for blowing it.

As for the working-class appeal, there is more to winning elections and attracting swing voters than having candidates wear L.L. Bean work boots and Carhartt apparel on the campaign trail. They ought to find authentic candidates who have successfully run for office before, and some who will make the campaign about something other than themselves.

Swing voters in 2024 were not voting to bulldoze the East Wing, decimate the vaccine regimen, take out the leader of Venezuela, bomb Iran, send immigration agents running amok in communities across the country, or take a chainsaw to federal programs. I doubt if many were thinking about renaming the Kennedy Center or minting coins with Trump’s picture or adding his signature to dollar bills. They just wanted things to go back to normal. Actions have consequences, but some elements of the Democratic Party want to point fingers rather than look in the mirror.

Two years from now will almost certainly be our first presidential election since 1964 without a Nixon, Dole, Bush, Biden, Clinton, or Trump on a major-party ticket, a span of 64 years. The generational change is just as stark; the presidential election two years ago was the first since 1948 without a member of either the Greatest or the Silent generations on either major party’s national ticket. That Greatest Generation, those born between 1901 and 1927, produced seven presidents; John Kennedy (born in 1917) became in 1960 the first Oval Office occupant to be born in the 20th century, followed by Lyndon Johnson (1908), Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (both born in 1913), Jimmy Carter (1924), Ronald Reagan (1911), and George H.W. Bush (1924). Joe Biden (1942) was the sole president representing the Silent Generation, born between 1928 and 1945.

The subsequent Baby Boom generation supplied three presidents; curiously, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were all born in the same year, 1946, which also happened to be the first birth year of the Baby Boomers. The only all-Boomer election came in 2016, when Trump (1946) selected Mike Pence (1959) as his running mate on the GOP ticket; and Hillary Clinton (1947) chose Tim Kaine (1958) to join her on the Democratic ticket. The 2024 election was something of a cusp or transitional election, in which Boomer Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance, the first millennial to be on a major-party ticket. Both Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, were born in 1964, the last year of Boomer births.

How people see and approach things is framed in part by their shared experiences. A look over the two fields of potential 2028 contenders reveals mostly members of Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980, with a few millennials (1981-1996) and several residual Boomers mixed in for good measure.

All of this is occurring alongside enormous changes in congressional leadership in both parties and on both sides of the Capitol dome. A historic number of retirements in Congress will translate into scores of fresh faces who will soon occupy the Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings. When the 117th Congress convened just over five years ago, the congressional leadership included on the House side Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy; and in the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Now, McCarthy is no longer in Congress and Pelosi, Hoyer, and McConnell will leave at the end of next year. Only Schumer will remain, amid speculation that he will not seek a sixth term in 2028 or that he could be pushed out of leadership. Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin is retiring at the end of this year, prompting still more change. If Republicans lose their House majority, as looks very likely today, it is doubtful that Speaker Mike Johnson would stick around as well.

The 2028 Democratic presidential field is as wide open as it could possibly be, raising the question of whether the Republican side is as locked in as it would on the surface appear to be. Just weeks ago, it looked like a fait accompli that Vice President Vance would be the Republican standard-bearer in two years, but then President Trump began talking up Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vance has faded a bit, thanks to his vocal opposition to the U.S. getting involved in more conflicts abroad. Now, the prospect of Trump playing Vance and Rubio off of each other, a political version of The Apprentice, looks increasingly possible. At the very least, that would allow Trump to keep the spotlight on himself as long as possible, with a Republican convention that would be more about him than about the nominee. A friend theorized to me this week that Trump would not tolerate any opposition to his anointed successor. Primaries could be mere pro forma exercises.

That led me to wonder whether there will be a non-MAGA alternative, and for that matter, if it’s possible for things to get so bad that neither Vance, Rubio, nor any major figure in the Trump administration is politically viable by the time 2028 rolls around. Just as it might be questionable whether Democrats should nominate someone closely identified with the Biden administration, a GOP constituency could develop for something parallel but separate. The demographic composition of the Republican Party has changed enough that there is little chance of the GOP producing a nominee in the lineage of Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. But is there a difference to split, and what would that person look like?

If you don’t like the status quo, stick around; everything on both sides and each end of Pennsylvania is likely to look a lot different five years from now.

Republicans’ chances of losing their House majority are about as high as they could possibly be. The GOP edge in that chamber is wafer-thin, currently 218-214 with three vacancies. If you push the vacant seats in the direction they obviously will go, the advantage expands only slightly to 220-215. Almost any loss would be sufficient to change control. President Trump’s poor job-approval numbers, averaging just 41 percent (with 55 percent disapproval), ensure that he will be a serious liability in swing districts. Voters who simply wanted the Biden-Harris administration out of office in 2024 are getting far more than they bargained for, and not in a positive way.

So it’s inevitable that some Democrats, and journalists who are sympathetic to their cause, are quick to declare that a “blue wave” is coming. Yet these declarations ignore a number of factors that make it unlikely GOP losses will match the legitimate Democratic waves of 2006 and 2018.

True enough, Trump’s approval ratings among Democrats (well down into the single digits) present a nightmare situation for any Republican seeking reelection in a blue district. But hold on: Only three Republicans were elected in 2024 in districts that Kamala Harris won. Among independents nationally, Trump’s approval ratings typically are down in the high 20s and low 30s, but gerrymandering and political self-sorting by the population has shrunk the number of purple districts, thus diluting independents’ power. There are very few Republican-held seats anywhere in that much peril.

Among Republicans, Trump’s approval ratings remain in the 80s. Stories of a split in the MAGA base are not based on real data. MAGA voters are so in love with him and trust him so thoroughly that nothing—not the Epstein files nor the attacks on Venezuela and Iran—are peeling them off. So Democrats have their work cut out for them to flip many red districts.

According to the latest House ratings published by The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, only 17 GOP seats are rated as Toss Up or worse. Adding in the next level of competitive seats (“Lean Republican”) brings only three more GOP seats to the competitive pile—still well below the post-World War II average midterm outcome of a 26-seat loss for the president’s party. Even adding in the 15 GOP-held seats in the “Likely Republican” category only brings us to a total of 35 vulnerable seats. Democrats could run the table, hold on to all their own vulnerable seats, and still fall short of their pickups in 2006 or 2018.

Other highly respected forecasters, such as Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, come to similar conclusions.

When parties have suffered heavy midterm House losses, they’ve often had a higher degree of exposure. Just as someone who is heavier can lose more weight than someone relatively slight to begin with, a party holding a large number of seats can lose them more easily than one that had few vulnerable seats to begin with. With just 220 seats to begin with, and having suffered a net loss of two seats in the last election, Republicans’ exposure is well below the 241 seats they held going into their 41-seat loss in 2018, or the 256 seats that Democrats had going into Obama’s 2010 midterm, when they lost 64 seats, or the 258 that Democrats had in 1994 ahead of their 54-seat loss in Bill Clinton’s first midterm.

It’s also worth remembering that the dynamics in the House and Senate are very different. In each of the last four cycles, the party that lost seats in the House actually gained in the Senate. With just a third of the Senate up every two years and only a handful of seats competitive in most years, the upper chamber’s results tend to be more idiosyncratic, not necessarily indicative of what is happening in the country overall.

A party can have a bad election, even lose a majority, without sustaining a devastating loss. In other words, if Republican losses are confined to blue and purple states and districts, they will limit the damage. Only if they start losing in places that are ruby-red will their losses really mount. That looks really unlikely.

Democrats need a net four-seat gain for a majority. If they win the 2028 presidential election, they would need to net three over the next two cycles, with a vice president breaking a tie. It’s difficult to see how they get there in either 2026 or 2028 without winning the North Carolina seat opened up by the retirement of Republican Sen. Thom Tillis and also beating Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the only Republican in the Senate representing a state that voted Democrat in each of the last three elections. Maine and North Carolina really are must-win states for Democrats.

Maine Democrats face a fateful decision in their June 9 Senate primary to select a nominee to take on Collins, who is seeking a sixth term. The primary pits Graham Platner, a 41-year-old Iraq War veteran-turned-oyster farmer and the harbormaster in Sullivan, Maine, against 78-year-old Gov. Janet Mills, who is term-limited.

The public polling is over the lot in this primary, most showing the race quite competitive. Unfortunately, Maine has a record of notoriously bad polling, as demonstrated in the 2020 Senate race between Collins and then-state House Speaker Sara Gideon. Public polls showed Gideon ahead for 10 months. At the same time, private polling by major national Democratic and Republican firms showed the race far closer, with Gideon struggling more than the public perceived even while outspending Collins by a wide margin. In a year when Joe Biden won the state over Donald Trump by almost 9 points, Collins defeated Gideon by a similar margin.

Basically, the combination of the Collins Senate campaign, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund dismembered Gideon with attack ads that she never effectively answered. The Gideon campaign, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC tried to return fire, to no avail. The advertising against Gideon was brutal, much of it not particularly fair, but in politics at this level, if you are denying, defending, and explaining, you are losing. Gideon never knew what hit her; witness the leftover money in her campaign account after the election.

Technically speaking, Gideon was not exactly a political novice; she had been elected to the state House four times before her Senate bid. But in her four state House general elections, the most votes she ever received was 4,002 in 2018. The largest total turnout in her races was a not-exactly whopping 6,044 in 2016, when both Trump and Hillary Clinton were on the ballot as well, boosting turnout. These were small-potato races, and Gideon in the Senate race was like a single-A baseball team heading into the World Series. To say it was a mismatch is an understatement.

While Mills has won two gubernatorial races by 7.7 points and 13 points, respectively, Platner has never sought so much as a seat on his town’s Selectboard. In the 2020 race, Collins and Gideon faced off in five general-election debates. Mills had three in her 2018 gubernatorial race and four in 2022. Platner has never been in one. This is the big leagues—no place for beginners.

Platner has already had to deal with news accounts of regrettable comments he has made on Reddit and other social media venues, and an infamous (but since removed) tattoo with a symbol commonly associated with Nazi Germany. Yet none of these attacks have been delivered in paid advertising yet. He can expect incoming fire on these and other issues from every direction. How will he handle it? Who knows?

The two sides spent a reported $200 million in that 2020 campaign, an astonishing amount in a state with fewer than 1.4 million people and just two congressional districts. This time it is likely to be far more, probably in the $300-400 million range.

Can Democrats afford to take a risk on a first-time candidate with a very problematic background and questionable judgment? Sure, he is an interesting person and the profiles of him are good reads, but if the Senate is on the line, either this year or in 2028, is this the horse they want to bet on?

Yes, Mills is 78 years old, though you wouldn’t know that from seeing or talking to her. Anyone who thinks her record as governor isn’t reasonably strong is not likely to be someone considering voting for any Democrat for the Senate.

Based on what happened in the 2020 race, Collins would likely run multi-track messaging against Platner. First would come a positive message like, “I have delivered for Maine and now, chairing the Senate Appropriations Committee, I can deliver even more,” suggesting that the state can’t afford to lose her. In a small and relatively poor state, that is not insignificant. But the second message, with the most money pushing it, would ask whether Platner is the guy Mainers want representing them in the U.S. Senate, then hammer his questionable statements and actions.

A Collins-Mills race would feature Mills talking about what she has done for the state before making the pitch, “Somebody has to stand up to President Trump and for Maine. Senator Collins hasn’t, and I will.” For Democrats still upset about having lost both the presidency and the Senate in 2024, that message will probably resonate well.

In 2020, during the COVID lockdown, I watched the Maine Senate race on Portland television and in the papers. I don’t know and have never met Sara Gideon, but I felt sorry for her and her family getting pummeled the way she was, just as I would feel sorry for a Republican under such circumstances. It wasn’t a fair fight, but as President Kennedy once said, “Life is unfair.” That is where our politics are today: Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, if you are in a competitive state or district, you have to be ready for everything up to and including the kitchen sink being thrown at you, from every direction and 24-7. Democrats, do you feel lucky?

The election season formally begins Tuesday as Texas, Arkansas, and North Carolina hold their primaries; if necessary, runoffs will be held on May 26, March 31, and May 12, respectively. After a month or so, we will have a better idea of just how self-indulgent each party’s primary voters are this year, and importantly, whether one party’s base is more myopic than the other—nominating candidates who reflect the anger, energy, and intensity in their respective bases but who are not necessarily focused on the same issues and priorities that independent voters care about.

In blue states, it usually doesn’t matter that much who Democrats nominate; they will still win general elections with only the votes of fellow Democrats. The same goes for Republicans in many red states: A nominee can win a general election just on the backs of fellow Republicans, and support among independents or Democrats isn’t necessary. But, by definition, in swing states and districts a nominee must also capture a disproportionate share of independent voters to win; those independents don’t often agree with those in the base.

At the time of the 2010 midterm election, President Obama’s job-approval rating in the Gallup Poll was just 45 percent. Yet while Republicans scored a net gain of 64 seats in the House, they nominated a pair of exotic and problematic candidates in Senate races in both Delaware and Nevada, energized by the tea-party movement, who went on to lose winnable races to Chris Coons and Harry Reid, respectively. What could have been a seven- or eight-seat gain ended up at six, and a Senate of 51 Democrats to 49 Republicans, two seats short of a GOP majority.

Two years later, Obama’s approval ratings had improved by about 7 points to 52 percent. But the GOP made the same mistakes again. In Missouri, their tea-party-aligned candidate squandered a winnable race against vulnerable Sen. Claire McCaskill. In Indiana, another problematic candidate defeated longtime GOP Sen. Richard Lugar, only to lose the general election to Joe Donnelly. Only in 2014, when GOP primary voters demonstrated more pragmatism, did Republicans finally win a majority in the Senate to match the House majority they secured in the 2010 midterm.

The tea-party wing of the GOP has morphed into the MAGA movement, but the self-destructive behavior continues. This was certainly the case in the 2022 midterms, when, despite President Biden’s anemic 40 percent job-approval rating, GOP primary voters managed to blow about two dozen races for Senate, House, governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. In the Senate races that year, Republican primary voters squandered their party’s chances in Arizona (Blake Masters), Georgia (Herschel Walker), New Hampshire (Don Bolduc), and Pennsylvania (Mehmet Oz). Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, Maggie Hassan, and John Fetterman should all be quite appreciative. As a result, instead of losing two or three seats, Democrats actually gained one seat.

In the pre-Trump era Republicans certainly held their own in the most competitive states, but since he first became president, not so much. In the 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024 elections, Democrats have won 17 of the 21 Senate races in purple states to Republicans’ four. A similar dynamic exists in purple-state gubernatorial races, with Democrats winning 10 of 14. My guess is that the kind of Republicans who do best in purple states have either not been running or did and were not able to get past increasingly MAGA-dominated primary electorates. Secondly, in higher-visibility contests, Trump has been a huge drag on GOP candidates in hotly contested areas.

What must concern Democratic strategists is that, particularly since their 2024 presidential loss, the central organizing principle of the party base is opposition to Trump—in other words, anger and hate rather than policy and strategy. While that has helped them win key statewide races, it has not carried down to state Senate and state House races. Stoking anger at Trump may feel good among base voters, but lower on the ballot, there is not much for Democrats to run on.

The seven purple states have 14 legislative chambers. Republicans hold majorities in 10, and only in Nevada do Democrats hold comfortable majorities in both the state Senate and state House chambers. In the other two purple states where Democrats hold a chamber, it is by only a one-seat edge. They control the Michigan state Senate 19-18 and the Pennsylvania House 100-98. In New Hampshire, which is widely seen as a blue state, the GOP has not only controlled both the state Senate and House after each of the last three elections but has won the governorship in five consecutive elections (two-year terms), leading me to wonder whether it should be considered a blue state at all.

Over the last 20 years, Republicans have invested significantly greater sums of money in party-building on the state and local level. It has paid off. Not only has Democrats’ lack of investment hurt them in policy fights, but it has deprived them of a strong bench. These lower-level offices are the farm teams, the seed corn for the future; political careers can be accelerated or prematurely ended at these levels, impacting U.S. House, U.S. Senate, and gubernatorial elections in the future.

In short, the feeling that “if it feels good, do it” isn’t the best strategy to winning elections.

Off the top of my head, the only truly memorable one was that of President Clinton’s in 1998, just six days after The Washington Post broke the story of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Like drivers rubbernecking while passing a car wreck, an estimated 53 million Americans tuned in that year, almost 12 million more viewers than the year before.

Historically, few Americans tune in to watch or listen to SOTU addresses, not surprising for a tedious wish list of policy priorities, boastful claims of what great things the president has done, and perhaps an aspirational flourish thrown in at some point along the way. My guess is that the percentage of people still tuned in after 10 minutes is far lower than at the beginning, and even fewer stick with it to the end. A share of sets still tuned in at the end surely belongs to those who fell asleep or left the room while it was underway.

Viewership skews toward members of the president’s party, tuning in to cheer their leader on; next would be followers of the opposition party, jeering just as vociferously. Few are pure independents, who don’t often read, watch, or listen to news or follow current events, anyway.

Ask yourself this question: Do you know anyone who does not hold firm opinions of President Trump, positive or negative? When President Biden was preparing to deliver his 2024 address, did you know anyone even slightly ambivalent about him? For nine or 10 registered voters out of 20, the question isn’t how they will vote, it is whether they will vote. The Pew Research Center’s Validated Voters Surveys show this very clearly. The 2022 midterm-election survey showed that those voters who identified as Democrats voted for their party’s House candidates over Republicans by 98 to 2 percent, while Republicans cast their ballots for the GOP House candidates over Democrats by 97 to 3 percent. When Democrats and those independents who lean more toward the Democratic Party were combined, the vote for Democrats was 96 to 3 percent. Similarly, when GOP identifiers and independents who leaned more Republican were combined, they voted 94 to 5 percent for Republicans.

In terms of motivation, voters for the party out of power are more motivated than those for the party in power. In 2018, during Trump’s first-term midterm, Republican identifiers made up 31 percent of the electorate, 4 points fewer than the out-of-power Democratic identifiers, who made up 35 percent (32 percent were independents). When partisans and leaners were thrown in together, Republicans made up 45 percent of the electorate, while Democrats and their leaners made up 51 percent.

This was also the case in 2022 when the shoe was on the other foot. The in-power Democrats constituted 32 percent of the electorate, the out-of-power Republicans 37 percent. When leaners were tossed in for each side, Democrats were at 47 percent, Republicans at 52 percent. This is one of the things that prove that the 2022 election wasn’t about a backlash against the Dobbs decision. If it were, it would have shown up in Democrats’ enthusiasm and turnout. Rather, the underwhelming showing for Republicans was more about their primary voters picking MAGA-oriented, exotic, and/or problematic nominees in about two dozen critical races, rather than picking nominees who had some potential to reach beyond their party’s base in purple states and districts.

As much as campaign operatives like to pat themselves on the back or stress their own importance, the truth is that ticked-off people vote at higher rates than people who are satisfied, complacent, or disappointed.

The biggest remaining variable in this election is the primaries. In the two or three dozen House races plus a half-dozen Senate races that really matter, if a party is self-indulgent and picks nominees who know only how to massage the erogenous zones of the party’s base rather than reach the 5 percent or so of voters who are pure independents, that will cost them critical races.

The CNN national survey released Monday morning tells the story of where voters’ heads are right now. Republicans approve of Trump’s performance so far by 82 to 18 percent. Democrats disapprove by 95 to 5 percent (mind the gap!). Critically, independents disapprove by 73 to 26 percent.

As of the deadline for this column Monday afternoon, the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll had not released Trump’s approval ratings, but from data already released, the same conclusion can be reached. When respondents were asked whether the direction in which Trump is moving the country is a change for the better, a change for the worse, or no real change at all, 37 percent of registered voters said it was a change for the better, 56 percent said it was a change for the worse, and 6 percent said it was no change at all.

Among just Republican respondents, 82 percent said Trump had brought about change for the better (13 percent said it was a change for the worse); among Democrats, 89 percent said it was a change for the worse (7 percent said it was a change for the better), and among independents, 64 percent said things were worse, while just 27 percent said they were better. Keeping in mind that independents are the voters who will drive outcomes in most purple states and districts, those independent numbers are key. Any Republican in a blue state or district should focus on the number among Democrats. But conversely, because Republicans are hanging in with Trump to the extent they are, Democrats should expect no tailwind in red states, no matter the results in low-turnout, state legislative special elections.

Watch the State of the Union if you must, but if you have anything better to do, you might get an extra hour and a half or so of your life back.