We know that, for better or worse (usually worse), midterm elections are referenda on the sitting president. The president’s party has suffered net losses in House seats in 18 of the 20 midterms since the end of World War II. President Trump’s approval ratings currently sit at 37 percent (disapproval 59 percent) in the New York Times polling average and 38 percent (58 percent disapproval) in Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, basically the lowest midterm job approval for any president since Jimmy Carter. To those who lamely argue that the election is still 11 weeks away, I would note that we have never seen a major directional change during a midterm election year in modern times.

Simply put, those who belong to or lean toward a president’s party are rarely highly motivated, and that lack of enthusiasm translates into a drop in turnout. Conversely, those in or leaning toward the opposition party tend to still be upset about the loss two years earlier, are highly motivated, and turn out in larger numbers. True, turnout drops across the board from a presidential election to the midterm two years later. But the drop-off in midterm turnout within the president’s party is significantly greater than the drop for the opposition party.

In key states where we have seen reputable polling, Trump’s approval is running between 6 and 14 points below his vote share, a big drop in two years. The gap between Trump’s share of the 2024 vote and his current approval ratings is the lowest in Alaska and Maine, and the highest in Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.

Where Democratic Senate candidates are doing best, the recipe is pretty much the same. First, they are winning a higher percentage of votes from Democrats than the GOP candidates are from Republicans. Second, Democratic candidates are getting a higher share of independent votes than Republican candidates. Third, Democrats are getting a larger share of the women’s vote than Republicans are of the men’s vote.

That Democrats are overperforming in a lot of red states is unmistakable, but they are also encountering a bumpier road in some blue, Democrat-tilting states like Maine, where Republican Sen. Susan Collins is seeking a sixth term. Some disagree, but I think it will be an uphill battle for Democrats to hold onto their open seat in Michigan, after Motor State Democrats made an unforced error in selecting Abdul El-Sayed as their nominee. In the Minnesota open seat, they nominated potentially problematic Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan.

To capture a Senate majority, and to match the midterm average of a 26-seat House gain, Democrats have to do something that neither party has succeeded in doing in a long time: They need defections, specifically convincing Republicans to vote for a Democrat. For Democrats, doing well among fellow party members and independents is not enough in many red states. This becomes critical particularly if they have to win five GOP seats to make up for losing one of their own.

According to the Pew Research Center’s invaluable Validated Voter surveys after the last three presidential and last two midterm elections, the share of Democrats voting for a Republican or Republicans voting for a Democrat has been astonishingly small. In fact, in both 2020 and 2024, 95 percent of Democrats voted Democrat for president; the same percentage of Republicans voted for Trump. In each case, defections were either 4 or 5 percent. In 2016, 94 percent of Democrats voted for Hillary Clinton (5 percent for Trump); 92 percent of Republicans voted for Trump (4 percent for Clinton). In midterm elections, the parties vote even more monolithically. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats voted 97 to 4 percent for their party’s House candidate, Republicans 98 to 3 percent. In 2022, Democrats voted for their party by 98 to 2 percent; Republicans voted 97 to 3 percent for theirs.

In top Senate races over the last two elections, the voting has been almost as lopsided. Using the Fox News exit polls, which have larger state-level samples, in the 2024 Arizona Senate race Democrat Ruben Gallego carried Democrats 95 to 3 percent; Republicans voted for Kari Lake 85 to 13 percent. In Michigan, Elissa Slotkin won Democrats 95 to 3 percent; Mike Rogers won among Republicans 90 to 7 percent. Jon Tester won his fellow Democrats in his unsuccessful Montana reelection bid, 98 to 1 percent; Republican Tim Sheehy carried his fellow Republicans 85 to 13 percent. In Nebraska, independent Dan Osborn, the de facto Democrat, won the vote of Democrats 97 to 3 percent; Sen. Deb Fischer carried her Republicans 82 to 18 percent. In Ohio, Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown carried his fellow Democrats 95 to 3 percent; Republican Bernie Moreno won his party members 86 to 11 percent.

Things were much the same in 2022. In Arizona, Democrats voted to reelect Sen. Mark Kelly by 96 to 2 percent; Republicans backed Blake Masters by 85 to 13 percent. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock won among his fellow party members, 99 to 0 percent; Republican Herschel Walker won 91 percent of Republicans to just 6 percent who voted for Warnock. In North Carolina, Democrats voted for Cheri Beasley 96 to 2 percent; Republicans voted to reelect Sen. Ted Budd, 93 to 5 percent. Ohio Democrats voted 98 to 1 percent for Tim Ryan; Republicans voted 92 to 7 percent for J.D. Vance. John Fetterman carried Pennsylvania Democrats 96 to 3 percent; Mehmet Oz won 87 percent of GOP voters to 9 percent who voted Fetterman. In Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes pulled 99 percent of the Democratic vote; Sen. Ron Johnson, 1 percent, but Johnson carried Republicans 97 to 3 percent.

Trump is a huge liability for Republicans; there is no question that the GOP is going to have huge turnout problems, meaning that in a lot of races, Democrats are going to greatly exceed expectations. But converting Republican voters to actually back a Democrat—even for a day—is so much harder now. Democrats have to challenge the electoral physics that have been increasingly in place for about 20 years, especially since 2016. Poll numbers show they will have some success, but winning a majority will still be gravity-defying.

It comes down to how much weight to place on each argument.

In this case, one side of the equation centers on President Trump’s unpopularity. It’s a challenge for the GOP given that midterms tend to be referenda on the sitting president. Two national polling averages put Trump’s approval rating at around 38 percent and 39 percent. The Pew Research Center recently put Trump’s current standing in a historical context, finding it lower than any of his six predecessors at the same point in their terms, as well as lower than Trump’s rating at this point in his first. For perspective, President Carter had a Gallup job-approval rating of 39 percent in August 1978.

The common thread in midterms is that those who identify with or lean toward the president’s party are usually less enthusiastic about voting and turn out at lower rates than those who identify or lean toward the opposition party. Opposition voters are still angry over losing two years earlier, thus voting in higher numbers. Independents in the middle tend to get buyer’s remorse by midterm election time, breaking toward the opposition party in substantial numbers. That makes midterm elections a devil’s triangle for a presidential party.

Proponents of the Democratic “blue wave” case generally stop here, ignoring the other side of the equation. There is an ironclad law of politics: A party cannot lose seats it doesn’t have. Republicans are heading into this general election with the smallest House majority that either party has had in 94 years—Republicans had a single-seat advantage in the 72nd Congress from 1931 to 1933.

We have now had three elections in a row with little turnover in either direction. The victorious party emerged from each with between 219 and 222 seats; 218 are needed for a majority. The losing party finished with between 211 and 215. The country is remarkably evenly divided, and the House largely reflects that split. There is very little in the way of low-hanging fruit for either party to pick up, resulting in little electoral elasticity. Put another way, an enormous force would be required to push the outcome outside its narrow recent trading range. In the Senate, with the GOP defending only two seats outside reliably Republican-leaning red states, their vulnerability, at least on paper, seems small.

While historical averages are often cited as predictors of the next election, in citing examples from the 1970s, 1980s, and as recently as the early 1990s, one might as well be citing examples of when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Have politics and voting behavior changed that much? The shape and composition of the two major parties were dramatically different in those Jurassic times than today.

Those who were once conservative Democrats today are either dead or no longer Democrats. The same is largely true with liberal Republicans. Conservative and small-town/rural Democrats and liberal Republicans and those with urban constituencies were among the first to abandon their party in a bad year. Now, they no longer make up a meaningful segment of either party. Each side is more ideologically cohesive, reducing the downside risk for each party in a poor election cycle.

Now partisans mostly march in lockstep, and if unhappy with their own party or nominees, simply staying home is the most they will do. Defecting–that is,voting for the opposite party–is no longer something even to be considered. It is important to remember the arithmetic difference between a party identifier or leaner abstaining by simply not voting and a defector, actually casting a ballot for the opposite party. The former represents the loss of one vote, the latter means one side loses a vote while the other side gains one.

This dynamic will most likely play out in the Maine Senate race. It’s too early to accurately assess the impact of the Democrats’ candidate switch from Graham Platner to former state Senate President Troy Jackson, who will face GOP incumbent Susan Collins.

Jackson does not appear to have the personal baggage that Platner brought to the race, but neither does he possess the candidate skills that Platner had. A high-quality poll that was released last week showed Jackson leading Collins by four points, 49 to 45 percent. Hart Research, the polling company, noted that at this point during the Collins-Sarah Gideon race six years ago, the race was tied, and that while the new poll showed Collins’s job approval rating underwater–46 percent approving to 52 percent disapproving–their three polls from the summer of 2020 showed Collins approval and disapproval numbers at 48 percent. This is noteworthy because the public polling during that race six years ago consistently had Gideon well ahead, but private polling by firms on both sides for the campaigns, party committees, or super PACs showed the race considerably closer, thus the public perception of the race was quite different from what the pros were seeing.

An oft-repeated nostrum from pseudo-psephologists is that public polls–which are polls not commissioned by the campaigns, party committees, or super PACs–are more accurate and should be given more credibility than those “internal polls” done for interested parties. This could hardly be more misguided. Most of the public polling is done on a shoestring, while the institutions with skin in the game are mostly seeing data of much higher quality. It’s true that the internal polls that are released or leaked almost invariably show favorable numbers, but only a tiny sliver of private polling ever sees the light of day, and what is seen is only released or leaked because it serves some interest.

All of this is to say that we are now finally seeing high-quality public polling. Surveys released over the past two months from New York Times/Siena, Fox News and the AARP, are comparable in quality to the polling generally available to the candidates, parties, and super PACs. It will be interesting to see whether Republicans release their own data and when additional neutral polling data becomes reliable. Whether Jackson is four points ahead or whether this is simply a margin-of-error race, watchers would be well advised to avoid obsessing over the mediocre public polls that were so wrong in Maine six years ago and, more recently, so wrong in the Michigan primary.

None of this is to argue that Republicans will escape losses in November. But despite Trump’s horrific approval numbers, the GOP losses may well fall short of the post-World War II average: a net loss of 26 House seats and four Senate and gubernatorial seats.

Overall, my gut tells me that few Republicans will actually defect, but many will stay home, resulting in the GOP losing votes without Democrats gaining many.

There is no question in my mind that Democrats in a lot of red states will be overperforming, but when playing a tough schedule of road games, beating the point spread is a lot harder than actually winning the contest.

This is a tough election to read, and it reminds me of the story about President Harry S Truman getting exasperated by hearing economic experts say, “On the one hand…” And then, “On the other hand.” He eventually told an advisor to go find him a one-armed economist.

While some states or congressional districts are characterized as red for Republicans or blue for Democrats, purple states or districts are thought of as fair fights where neither party has a distinct advantage. In those purple regions, it’s often thought that to win, a candidate must do well with voters near the ideological center.

It is tempting—and more often right than wrong—to generalize purple states and districts as roughly midway between Republicans on the right and Democrats on the left, while also acknowledging growing populism on each end of the ideological spectrum, though not necessarily on every subject or in every state.

One of the few truly blue-chip quality polling operations in the country—I am a poll snob and think most public polls are varying degrees of rubbish—is the Pew Research Center.

Last month, Pew released a study looking at the national political landscape 100 days before the midterm election. President Trump’s approval rating among 3,554 adults interviewed showed 34 percent approving his job in office and 64 percent disapproving. Forty-three percent of the 2,628 registered voters indicated a preference for Democrats for the U.S. House, to 37 percent for Republicans.

The terrific political research team at Pew was kind enough to break out their results, detailing the 1,477 adults (1,039 voters) in 24 red states, the 1,465 adults (1,122 voters) in 19 blue states, and the 606 adults (462 voters) in seven purple states.

Looking at these data, two points jumped off the page. The first was that Republicans were surprisingly weak within their 24 base red states, leading by only 4 points, 39 to 35 percent, and leaving 26 percent up for grabs. Those interviewed in 19 blue states favored Democrats by a whopping 16 points, 50 to 34 percent, with 16 points on the table. The two parties were tied at 42 percent in purple states.

Many would focus on how much stronger Democrats are in blue areas than Republicans are in red areas. But this means that Democrats are “wasting” a lot of support. In effect, they’re running up the score in blue states, where there are few GOP seats to flip, and inflating their national showing. In purple states, where Democrats want an edge in a politically favorable environment, the support levels are even.

That leads to a second and closely related finding. Across several questions, voters in purple states are more closely aligned with red staters than with blue staters.

The Pew folks note that some of the difference might stem from an oversampling of Hispanic and Asian voters as researchers look more closely at their voting behavior. But in the national numbers, they were weighted to their normal proportions in the electorate. It’s also important to note that only 462 voters were surveyed in purple states, compared with 1,039 in red and 1,122 in blue states, making the margin of error in the purple states. Maybe one or both of these factors are important; or maybe not.

Another explanation is that the makeup of the electorate in blue states is far different than the rest of the country. Blue states tend to have much larger shares of urban, major metropolitan areas and nearby suburbs, while purple and red states tend to have plenty in rural areas, small towns, and exurbs. Blue states hold a much larger share of people with college and advanced degrees, who skew increasingly Democratic. Those same blue states have smaller shares of non-college-educated whites, a group that Democrats are increasingly struggling with. And unionized workers in blue states are more likely to belong to the public sector, whose members are more likely to vote Democratic than their counterparts in construction or manufacturing unions.

In the 24 states that make up Red America, states that voted for Trump in each of the last three presidential elections, Republicans hold all 48 U.S. Senate seats and 22 of 24 governorships—Govs. Laura Kelly and Andy Beshear break the pattern in Kansas and Kentucky, respectively. About 197 (45 percent) of all House districts can be categorized as red, with presidential election patterns of voting more than 5 percentage points more Republican than the country as a whole, according to the revised Cook Political Report Partisan Voting Index (PVI), re-released last week to reflect redistricting in ten states since 2024.

Similarly, in the 19 states that constitute Blue America, which voted Democratic in each of the last three presidential elections, Democrats hold 37 of 38 Senate seats, with Susan Collins in Maine the exception, and 17 out of 19 governorships—all but New Hampshire and Vermont due to Govs. Kelly Ayotte and Phil Scott. Note that the three blue states with a Republican senator or governor are the three states that make up northern New England, where the GOP tends to be less MAGA-oriented than elsewhere. Of all 435 House districts, 161 (37 percent) could be considered blue, Democratic-tilting districts.

That leaves the seven swing states of Purple America: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In 2016, Trump carried six out of seven—all but Nevada. Former President Biden won six out of seven in 2020—all but North Carolina. In 2024, Trump swept all seven. Of the 14 Senate seats in these seven states, Democrats hold 10 and Republicans hold four. Democrats hold five of the governorships, and Republicans hold two. And 77 House districts, 18 percent, can be categorized as purple districts, voting no more than 5 percentage points in favor of either party than the country.

Since Trump was first sworn into office, there have been 21 Senate elections in those seven swing states; Democrats won 17, to Republicans’ four. In that same time, Democrats have won 10 of the 14 gubernatorial races in those seven states.

A good case can be made that since Trump took office, a disproportionate share of Republican nominations have gone to MAGA-style Republicans, ones more at home in red states and districts than in purple states and districts where less ideological candidates might run stronger. Less-MAGA Republican candidates who may have been strong in a general election may also have chosen not to run because they’d struggle against more MAGA opponents in primaries. This could become quite important, but with the shoe on the other foot. Democrats are now nominating candidates in some swing constituencies who would be stronger and more appropriate in bluer places.

The Michigan Democratic Senate primary tomorrow and the Wisconsin gubernatorial next week could become examples of this: Democrats nominating blue candidates in purple places.

Much of the macro-political analysis of the U.S. House midterms these days is driven by a focus on results of generic congressional ballot test polling, a metric that I have followed and used to an extent for more than four decades. But there would seem to be an overreliance on the findings of that question, even though the footprint of competitive House races is so much smaller than it used to be.

In an old joke, a man with one foot in a pot of boiling water and the other in a bucket of ice is asked how he felt. “Very comfortable, on average!” Generic ballot tests now serve a similar purpose, dipping into boiling-red regions and freezing-blue regions, masking as much as they reveal. A generic ballot test might be a good measurement if a district is a generic one, but these districts are increasingly anything but.

Democrats’ Cruel Senate Math

With the U.S. Senate currently split between 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats, and a Republican holding the Vice Presidency (which doubles as the President of the Senate), thus able to break a 50-50 tie in favor of the GOP, Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win a majority.

The four-seat gain threshold needed for a change in control is contingent upon Democrats not losing any of their own seats; realistically, only four of the 13 Senate seats the party has up for grabs this year have any realistic chance of being lost. The only Democratic incumbent in any jeopardy is Jon Ossoff in Georgia; the three others are open seats in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. All four of those states are competitive, but given the current political environment, “light blue” states like Minnesota and New Hampshire are seen as less likely to turn over than the purple states of Georgia and Michigan. The Red, Blue, and purple designations are generally based upon presidential voting; a good case can be made that New Hampshire is more of a purple, swing state than a blue state, having a propensity to elect GOP governors and state legislatures. Any loss for Democrats in these four or, for that matter, any of the other nine Democratic seats up would raise the number of GOP seats needed to be captured.

Of the 22 Republican seats that are up, only seven are currently seen as either competitive or potentially competitive, with just one in a blue state, Maine, where Susan Collins is seeking a sixth term in Maine, and one seat in a purple state, the open seat in North Carolina where Thom Tillis is not seeking a third term in real jeopardy. The other 20 are in states that are in varying shades of red: Florida, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Alaska, South Carolina, and Kansas. It would be difficult for Democrats to win three of these; four would be significantly harder. If Democrats had to make up for one lost Democrat-held seat, five would seem extremely unlikely. Keeping in mind that the best predictor of a general election outcome in a Senate, House, or governor race is the outcome of the previous presidential election in that state or district, those 20 seats after Maine and North Carolina were all won by Trump in 2024 by double-digit margins.

Election Night Calls

Early Wednesday morning, NBC News Election United called the Michigan Senate race for Abdul El-Sayed, the former Wayne County health director; while the Associated Press, CBS News, and CNN labeled it “ too early to call,” and Fox News “too close to call.” The Associated Press called the race for El-Sayed at 9:54 am ET, with the results at 10:00 a.m.: 48.5 percent for El-Sayed and 47.5 percent for Rep. Haley Stevens.

Many ask, what is the difference between “too early to call” and “too close to call?” As much as that may sound to a layman as semantics or splitting hairs, to those at the Associated Press election night decision desk and their counterparts at ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, and NBC News, there is a distinction. The “too early to call” designation means that more votes need to come in before a determination can be made, not necessarily that the margin between the two candidates is particularly wide. “Too close means that there are an insufficient number of votes between the leading candidate and the trailing candidate(s) that either candidate could still realistically win.

A number of factors go into these determinations, including how many uncounted votes remain, where those votes are, whether there is any expectation that the uncounted vote is more likely to skew toward one particular candidate, are uncounted votes coming from areas that are epected to skew in one particular area, whether the current vote count is consistent with the results in predetermined sample precincts, if there is an exit poll, or survey results and finally, whether the vote results are consistent with the “priors:” (a Bayesian statistical term), what based on the assumptions and expectations that existed before the vote counting began, based on prior voting patterns. Are the outstanding, uncounted votes expected to skew in the direction of one candidate, and is the vote count consistent? All of these elements go into a decision of whether there are enough uncounted votes that the trailing candidate could realistically overcome the leader. This is how the Associated Press explains their process. https://apnews.com/ap-race-calls-faq

Since the 2000 Bush versus Gore election night disaster, all of the networks have become even more cautious than before, not wishing to get egg on their faces or network executives fired as a result of a bad call. After that 2000 fiasco, the word went out to the network decision desk teams that while coming in first was desired, never being wrong again was of even higher priority,

Michigan

The Motor State has a well-deserved reputation for being a swing state, along with Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But even in a purple, competitive state, a party nominating a candidate from well outside of the mainstream, can tip a state decidedly in one direction, as was seen in Arizona in 2024 with Kari Lake in the gubernatorial and Blake Masters in the Senate race, Georgia 2022 with Hershel Walker for Senate in in 2022, Tudor Dixon in Michigan’s 2022 gubernatorial race, Mark Robinson in North Carolina in 2024, in the 2022 Pennsylvania races for Governor, Doug Mastriano and Senate, Dr. Mehmet Ozin 2022. Being in a purple state does not guarantee a fair or realistic chance of winning.

Conclusion

Now, only the fight for control of the U.S. House stands between a Republican hegemony for the second half of Trump’s term and at least partially divided government. While Ossoff in the Georgia Senate race and former Gov. Roy Cooper in the open seat race for Senate in North Carolina are both doing as well or better than Democrats could possibly hope, and both open Democratic seats in New Hampshire and Minnesota doing reasonably well, the party holding onto light blue Maine and purple Michigan are huge concerns, meaning that Democrats need the political equivalent of a royal or straight flush in the vulnerable and potentially vulnerable Republican-held seat to win a majority.

Democrats remain the favorite for capturing the House majority, though it is unlikely that their majority will be particularly wide, in part a reflection of an evenly divided country (see my last column for a discussion of the utility of the generic Congressional ballot test for projecting House outcomes).

All eyes go back to the House.

Below please find:

Charlie Cook Politics Blue Chip Senate Polling

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• A compilation of 14 blue-chip quality polls in seven critical Senate races, with links to questionnaire toplines and crosstabs, or in two cases, slide decks with important information. Unfortunately, the New York Times/Siena and Fox News polls were conducted during the original Maine Senate race configuration, between Susan Collins and then-Democratic nominee Graham Platner, who has since been replaced on the ballot by former state Senate President and unsuccessful 2026 gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson. These numbers can be thought of as placeholder numbers, or for comparison, when high-quality polling comes out of a Collins-Jackson trial heat. Once the Democratic nomination is settled in Michigan, expect quality polling to be released in that contest within the next three or four weeks.

• A copy of what I call my Swiss Army knife chart, a ranking of the 50 states from most to least Republican using the major, two-party vote (third party and independent votes omitted) for the two major party nominees in 2016, 2020, and 2024. My view is that averaging and weighting equally weighting the last three elections, when state voting patterns have been fairly stable, diminishes the impact of idiosyncratic factors that can crop up in any single election. The Senate seats up this year as well as in 2028 and 2030 are included, giving hints of which races down the road are likely to be most competitive. Also included is the same chart in alphabetical order for easy reference.

  Partisanship has never been stronger in our elections, and the outcome of the most recent presidential election is the single best predictor of the outcome of any senatorial, congressional, or gubernatorial general election.

• Finally, some numbers that demonstrate just how narrow the U.S. House playing field is this year and how few competitive races there are. With so few races in either the Toss Up or Lean categories, and those that are less representative than ever, the utility of the generic Congressional ballot test as an indicator of the national House election outcome is less than it used to be; the footprint of races is just too small. The generic ballot test has long been helpful in showing which direction the political winds are blowing and, very roughly, whether they are light, moderate, or heavy, but it is of little use in determining the velocity of those winds and a likely outcome. If someone can guarantee me that a race is being held in a generic district, I would be more likely to give a generic ballot test more credence.

Charlie Cook Politics Blue Chip Senate Polling

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National polling

In terms of national polling, in my subjective opinion, the very top of the pecking order constitutes the New York Times/Siena, NBC News (and CNBC), and Pew Research Center. Not that far behind are the AARP, Associated Press/NORC, CNN/SSRC, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal. Both the Marist University, Marquette University Law School, and Quinnipiac University polls are quite competent and are the cream of the crop among academic pollsters. AARP, Fox News, NBC News, CNBC, and the Wall Street Journal use bipartisan teams of pollsters.

State-level polling

There was a time when most states had one or more major news organizations, a newspaper or television station that commissioned high-quality statewide polls, but in most states, that day is long gone, victims of newsrooms with minimal funding for doing polling the right way. Some news organizations have teamed up with polling firms or universities, with their quality generally ranging from rubbish to mediocre. Yet many, including political reporters and news organizations that ought to know better, continue to cite and quote these polls, often with little regard for the quality of the polling and methodological rigor. Life is too short to waste time looking at bad polls.

Thankfully, several major organizations have begun releasing high-quality, blue-chip statewide polls, in some cases among the only, or the only competent, polling in the public domain. The New York Times/Siena and Fox News have each published six, and the AARP has released its first two battleground state polls, in some cases. Below is a summary table and compilation of links to The New York Times/Siena, Fox News, and AARP in key Senate race states; this list will be updated as new surveys are released.

The narrow House battlefield

The United States is a remarkably evenly divided country; the U.S. House of Representatives, even with the degree of partisan sorting and gerrymandering we have today, is still, more or less, a representative institution, we should expect the House to be relatively evenly divided, as it is now and has been after the last three elections, in 2020, 2022, and 2024.

Control of the U.S. House will be mostly determined by the outcome of fewer than two dozen hotly contested races around the country; the broader battlefield of competitive races is fewer than four dozen. This is a substantially narrower House battlefield than used to be the case, when there were frequently over 100 and sometimes over 150 competitive seats in play.

There are 17 states with one or more competitive House races; seven have a combined 21 competitive contests, with California, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas each with three races rated Toss Up, Lean Democrat, or Lean Republican. Three more states have two competitive races: Arizona, Ohio, and Virginia, with Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, and Washington having one each. There are currently no competitive races in 37 states.

With the competitive race playing field so narrow and concentrated, an over-reliance on the generic Congressional ballot test question seems awfully problematic. The generic is still helpful in ascertaining a general direction of the political winds and a rough approximation of the extent of those winds, but its utilization in modeling a national House outcome seems highly problematic, more so than in the past.

Charlie Cook Politics Blue Chip Senate Polling

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Midterm elections are usually very dangerous for a party holding the White House, particularly when that occupant has very low job-approval numbers, and that party also controls both the U.S. Senate and the House.

The Senate is currently divided between 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats; the House is effectively 220 Republicans to 215 Democrats. State elections are also disproportionately on the midterm election cycle. This November ballot, 36 states (72 percent) have governorships on the ballot; the overall split of Republican to Democrat governors is 26 to 24. Also, 6,123 state legislative seats (83 percent) are up. The stakes could hardly be higher.

Given how much is on the line, one might assume that a top-of-mind concern for both parties is nominating candidates with the best chance of winning in November. Keeping in mind that the best predictor of general-election outcomes in states and districts is the result of the most recent presidential election, consider this:

In the 24 states that are most commonly considered to be “red” Republican states:

• President Trump won each of these 24 states in all of the last three presidential elections.

• All 48 U.S. Senate seats in these 24 states are held by Republicans.

• In 22 of the 24 red states, the governorship is currently held by a Republican. Kansas (Gov. Laura Kelly) and Kentucky (Gov. Andy Beshear) are the exceptions.

In the 19 states that are most commonly considered to be “blue” Democratic states:

• All 19 voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and Kamala Harris in 2024.

• Democrats currently hold 37 of the 38 U.S. Senate seats in the 19 blue states (counting both independent members, Sens. Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as Democrats), with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine the lone GOP exception.

• Of those 19 blue states, 17 have Democratic governors, the sole exceptions being New Hampshire (Gov. Kelly Ayotte) and Vermont (Gov. Phil Scott). As a region, New England, more than any other, has frequently elected governors and, in the case of New Hampshire, even state legislative control of a hue opposite to the presidential pattern.

In statewide elections, the action is overwhelmingly in the seven states that make up purple America. Three are in the Frost Belt (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), with four across the Sun Belt (Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina).

• Trump carried all but Nevada of these seven purple states in 2016; four years later, Biden won all but North Carolina; in 2024, Trump swept all seven.

• Ten of the 14 Senate seats are held by Democrats; Democrats have three pairs, in Arizona (Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego), Georgia (Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock), Michigan (retiring Sen. Gary Peters and Sen. Elissa Slotkin), and Nevada (Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen). Republicans hold a pair in North Carolina (retiring Sen. Thom Tillis and Sen. Ted Budd). Pennsylvania has one from each party (Democratic Sen. John Fetterman and Republican Sen. Dave McCormick), as does Wisconsin (Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson).

• Five of the seven states have Democratic governors: Arizona (Gov. Katie Hobbs), Michigan (Gov. Gretchen Whitmer), North Carolina (Gov. Josh Stein), Pennsylvania (Gov. Josh Shapiro), and Wisconsin (Gov. Tony Evers). The remaining two states have GOP governors: Georgia (term-limited Gov. Brian Kemp) and Nevada (Gov. Joe Lombardo).

Together, these seven constitute the “fair fight” states, with outcomes driven by the relative quality of the candidates and campaigns, as well as the political environment at the time of an election.

This has been the partisan architecture over the last dozen years: a pair of almost impenetrable walls, one dividing Red and Purple America, the other dividing Purple and Blue America.

The political realities for candidates in purple states and districts are very different from those for candidates running in deeply red or blue constituencies. When winning a primary is tantamount to victory and few, if any, true independent votes are needed to win a general election, parties and primary voters have the luxury of picking almost any candidate and still be confident of holding the seat.

A MAGA-aligned or Freedom Caucus-like candidate, an election denier or highly ideological candidate can usually do fine in very red states and districts, but not so well in purple or light blue, and occasionally may even be problematic in light red ones. Similarly, Democratic Socialists, Justice Democrats, and other very progressive Democrats can be expected to do well in deeply blue constituencies but would be problematic nominees in purple or light-red ones, sometimes even in very light-blue areas.

In the elections since Trump was first sworn into office, Republicans developed a bad habit of nominating statewide red candidates in purple states, particularly in 2022, which is one reason the GOP has lost 17 of the 21 Senate races and 10 of the 14 gubernatorial races since 2017.

This year, that habit seems to have afflicted Democrats, who could potentially nominate very blue candidates in light blue, purple, and light red states. Over the next three weeks, primaries are being held in a dozen states, with particularly critical ones in Michigan (Aug. 4) and in Minnesota and Wisconsin on Aug. 11.

The Democratic primary in Michigan’s Senate race is particularly consequential in the fight for control of that chamber. Former Wayne County health director Abdul El-Sayed, backed by Sens. Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Chris Van Hollen, as well as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ro Khanna, among others, is a staunch progressive. His rival, Rep. Haley Stevens, is a less-than-scintillating candidate but is backed by less ideological Democrats and widely considered to be more electable in a general election.

When those in the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party get all puffed up about some of their most publicized wins, few bother to consider the context. For example, in Zohran Mamdani’s celebrated win in last year’s New York City mayoral race, he pulled 51.1 percent of the vote; it looks pretty puny compared with Kamala Harris’ citywide 68.1 percent in 2024. Four years earlier, Biden pulled 76.2 percent.

The ideological recipe that has worked for Sanders in Vermont (which Harris won with 63.8 percent), for Warren in Massachusetts (where Harris won 61.2 percent), or Van Hollen in Maryland (where Harris won 62.6 percent) might not work so well for their endorsed Senate candidate in Michigan, where Harris won 48.2 percent of the vote.

The same is true for El-Sayed endorsers in the House: Ocasio-Cortez in New York-14 (Harris won 64.9 percent), Omar in Minnesota-05 (Harris won 79.6 percent), Tlaib in Michigan-12 (Harris won 66.6 percent), and Khanna in California-17 (Harris won 67.3 percent). In many of those constituencies, a Democrat would have to work very hard to lose a general election and still might not succeed. In a swing state like Michigan, a Democrat running statewide can be a great candidate with a terrific organization and still come up short.

Given the stakes of the 2026 election in swing states and districts, this would hardly seem to be the time to prioritize symbolism, message-sending, or self-indulgence over maximizing chances of winning. That may be fine in other years or in safe states and districts, but not in swing areas this year. Picking candidates who are appropriate for the given constituency should be of paramount importance.

Platner was a big package, with plenty of big assets and bigger liabilities. On the asset side of the ledger, his skills as a candidate and the campaign behind him were unlike any that I have ever seen. In a one-on-one meeting I had with Platner on June 25, 11 days before a former girlfriend accused him of rape in stories running in Politico and on CNN, he seemed surprised when I commented that his campaign had taken off faster than any Senate candidacy I had ever seen. It was as if it went from a dead stop to 100 miles per hour in the blink of an eye.

It has been at least 20 years since we have seen a Senate candidate as charismatic; for the record, Barack Obama won his Senate seat in 2004. Platner recounted how his life changed in less than a month last July, between the time he was first approached to run for the Senate and his Aug. 19 candidacy announcement that went viral. Obama was 20 months into his Senate term before he first appeared on the cover of Time magazine (Oct. 23, 2006); Platner was only nine months into his candidacy before he made it (May 20, 2026).

Platner indicated that during the period after he decided to run and before his announcement, he was worried that Gov. Janet Mills would jump into the race and make his candidacy a moot point. But Mills didn’t indicate that she was going to run for another two months and, at that point, he was unstoppable.

The flip side was not just that he was a first-time candidate, untested and effectively unvetted, but also a problematic one. A string of warning signs popped up. Ill-advised Reddit posts and hints of inappropriate behavior should have been a sufficient warning sign for Maine’s Democratic base, but they were head over heels in love and not looking at the downsides of nominating Platner. They were not in the mood to listen to, let alone heed, warnings from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other national party figures that they were engaging in a risky business.

Prior to the last bombshell landing, the Senate race appeared dead even. But a close look at the crosstabs revealed warning signs: Collins was doing better among Republicans than Platner was among Democrats, and she was carrying the vote among men more strongly than Platner was among women.

In the June New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll, Platner led Collins by 2 points among likely voters, 49 to 47 percent. Among non-college whites, Collins led by 23 points, 59 to 36 percent; among college-educated whites, Platner was up by 37 points, 68 to 31 percent. Platner’s strongest region was the Portland area, where he led 67-29 percent.

In the only other quality poll taken in the state this cycle, the Fox News poll, also from June, the numbers among registered voters were pretty similar. Collins had a 3-point lead, 50 to 47 percent; Collins was up by 15 points among non-college whites, but Platner was up among college-educated whites by 37 points, 68 to 31 percent.

Platner was what many college-educated whites mistakenly thought non-college whites would like—a decent sign of how Democrats are out of touch with a group that they profess to represent.

When Collins was last up for reelection in 2020, her campaign, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the Senate Leadership Fund super PAC were vastly outspent in the state by Democratic nominee Sara Gideon, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the Senate Majority PAC. Collins still won by 9 points on Election Night, even as the same electorate chose Joe Biden by 9 points.

The difference was primarily among independents. Collins won them by 11 points, 50 to 39 percent, in the Fox News/Associated Press, NPR, PBS, and Wall Street Journal Exit Poll, and by 3 points in the Edison Research Exit Poll for ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC, 46 to 43 percent. Biden carried independents handily in both polls.

Democrats are obsessed with turnout among their base when they should be more focused on persuasion of independents.

Watching the field of Democrats maneuvering to win the state party vote to replace Platner on the ticket, one got the sense that it was a group of middleweight contenders jockeying for a shot at a heavyweight. Now that Collins is chairing the Appropriations Committee, a big deal for a senator from a small state, she is a certifiable heavyweight.

Jackson, who came in third place in the gubernatorial primary, is extremely popular within organized labor, though this is not one of the stronger states for unions. While he does not have Platner’s personal baggage, he also doesn’t have Platner’s candidate skills. This does not mean that Jackson can’t beat Collins in November, but it will be a real upset if he does.

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.