If Republicans are smart, they will figure out why this happened and learn from it. If Democrats are smart, they will figure out why this happened and not let the victory go to their heads.

While the party holding the White House always loses seats, there were structural or technical reasons this election shouldn’t have been particularly bad for Republicans. Since late summer, however, those guardrails have evaporated, with this election very clearly headed to a very grim place for the GOP.

In the House, thanks to three decades of gerrymandering, only made worse last year, few organically competitive congressional districts remain. Republicans hold just 220 seats (after allocating vacant seats), scarcely more than the 218 narrowest possible majority in a fully occupied House. This majority is about as lean as can be, even in an era of fewer competitive districts. An ironclad law of politics is that a party cannot lose a seat it doesn’t have. The bottom line is that the GOP losing the House was expected, but the damage should have been limited.

On the Senate side, a party could hardly enter a midterm election with less natural vulnerability than Republicans did this cycle. They had to defend one seat with a natural blue tilt in Maine and an open seat in North Carolina; Donald Trump carried the Tar Heel State all three times, but by fairly narrow margins. Twenty of the 22 GOP-held seats up for election were in double-digit Trump states. Historically, the best predictor of how a state or district will vote in a general election is the most recent presidential election. Volatility in our politics has largely been confined to purple states and districts.

Despite this lopsided, GOP-friendly Senate map, Republicans are either underdogs or no better than even money in seven currently Republican-held seats—in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas—and possibly an eighth, in South Carolina. It’s hard to see over half a dozen GOP-held seats in danger on this map and think nothing big is happening.

This column has argued that this election isn’t a blue wave, but a red undertow. Voters are hardly enthusiastic about the Democratic Party’s leaders, policies, and recent accomplishments; the party’s lousy favorability ratings show it.

So why the potentially impressive Democratic showing? Donald Trump. Little more, little less.

This column has previously noted that Trump’s public image has shifted from unpopular to toxic and now radioactive. Proximity to him is a heck of a risk for almost any Republican on a ballot this year. We’re seeing quite a few Republican incumbents getting sucked down by the undertow, even in some unexpected red states and districts. It is much more obvious in Senate and gubernatorial races, simply because of the amount of public polling, even if most of it is low quality. But if this is happening statewide, it would be implausible to think it is not happening at the congressional level as well.

For the 49.8 percent of the electorate who voted for Trump in 2024, few envisioned many of the policy decisions and actions taken in this second term; this was not the cruise they signed up for. An attack on Iran with the easily predictable closure and constriction of the Strait of Hormuz has had the expected impact on gasoline, diesel, aviation, fuel oil, and fertilizer. The indiscriminate use of tariffs has had the expected impact on the broader cost of living, after inflation had been the primary driver of Trump’s 2024 victory. The litany of lesser offenses could go on for paragraphs.

An AP/NORC poll captured it well. When asked, “Do you think higher than usual prices are because of President Trump’s policies or more because of factors outside Trump’s control?” 65 percent of respondents blamed his policies, while just 33 percent cited other reasons. When asked, “Do you think President Trump’s handling of each of the following during his second term has gone better than you expected, worse than you expected, or has it been about what you expected?” 69 percent said things have gone worse than expected regarding cost of living, with 58 percent also choosing worse than expected for trade negotiations with other countries, 55 percent on foreign policy, and 48 percent on immigration. When asked, “In general, do you think Donald Trump keeps his promises to Americans, tries to keep his promises but is not able to, or does not try to keep his promises?” 54 percent said he does not try, 28 percent said he tries but is not able to, and just 17 percent said he keeps his promises.

On the other hand, one must ask: If this were a true blue-wave election, why are Democratic Senate nominees struggling in light-blue states like Maine, Minnesota, and New Hampshire, as well as in purple Michigan? In a wave year, these states should be gimme putts. In red states, Democrats played conservatively, not nominating candidates easily cast as fringe. But in some less-red states, Democrats got more adventurous in who they nominated.

It is as if there were two elections held this year: one in Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Michigan; the other, very nearly everywhere else. In the former group, Democrats are struggling despite what should be a favorable climate; in the latter, they are doing better in places where they usually struggle. Still, a wave year should overpower any such ideological concerns.

With 22 days to go before the election, there is little time for things to turn around. As of early afternoon on Monday, figures compiled by Michael McDonald at the University of Florida’s Election Lab show that 3,269,935 votes have already been cast (630,141 in person and 2,639,894 by mail); that number will grow steadily every day.

Historically, the percentage of voters who make up their minds in the last few days before an election is in the mid-single digits; the share in the few weeks that precede that is about the same. It would be foolish to read too much into this, but in states that report the partisan breakdown of voters who have already cast their ballots, Democrats have cast 53.8 percent; Republicans accounted for 27.8 percent.

It won’t matter much to Republicans who lose elections in three weeks whether this is a red undertow, as I believe it is, or a blue wave; the outcome is the same for them. What matters is what we learn from the election and what we ignore. Republicans are likely to need to do some soul-searching about where their party is going to go over the next few years; Democrats will need to understand why they lost the House in 2022 as well as the Senate and the presidency in 2024, and not cop out by blaming it all on then-President Biden’s age.

As this column noted two weeks ago, this is not so much a blue wave as a red undertow; the Democratic Party’s brand, as measured by favorability ratings, remains badly damaged. Where President Trump is the focal point, the GOP has problems; when the Democrats’ nominees become the center of attention, it is their turn to struggle.

But the big story is the cratering of GOP prospects over the last six weeks. A glimpse of that is obvious in consumer confidence among Republicans plummeting during September, a harbinger of low GOP voter turnout next month. It’s not a question of whether the GOP will have a bad night, but how bad will it be, despite structural advantages that should have precluded them from having a devastating midterm.

In the Senate, two previously competitive races now seem to be done deals. Arguably, freshman Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia was effectively reelected the day GOP Gov. Brian Kemp decided not to challenge him, but that shouldn’t take away from the fact that Ossoff has secured his seat in a way few would have predicted two years ago. Similarly, in North Carolina, GOP Sen. Thom Tillis’s decision not to seek a third term and former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s decision to seek the open seat effectively sealed that race in Democrats’ favor. In both cases, Trump’s inability to play well with the other kids in his own party effectively cost the GOP the seat; one can also say that Trump’s lack of support for Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, and subsequent endorsement of GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton, may well have punted another seat. While Democratic state Rep. James Talarico has proved to be a skillful and impressive candidate and raised tons of money, the reality is that had Cornyn been renominated, the seat would probably remain safely in Republican hands.

Seven seats currently held by Republicans, including both North Carolina and Texas, are now top-tier targets for Democrats. Joining them are toss-up Alaska, Iowa, Maine, and Ohio, and the newest addition, Kansas. Last week’s New York Times/Siena University poll made that official, showing GOP Sen. Roger Marshall and pastor Adam Hamilton tied at 45 percent. Many had felt the race was tightening, but this was the first high-quality, reliable poll to show it. (Let me reiterate that if you’re following key Senate and gubernatorial races, focus on first-class polling, specifically The New York Times/Siena, AARP, CNN, Fox News, Marist University, Marquette University Law School, and Washington Post/George Mason Schar School. Life is too short to look at crummy and/or misleading polling. Those six entities have released about two dozen high-quality state polls over the last three months, far superior to 95 percent of the political polls bouncing around the internet.)

We’ll likely get a Post/Schar poll this week of Maine, the only GOP-held seat in a state that voted against Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. That poll may show the state moving in a way I had long suspected it would—that is, in Sen. Susan Collins’s favor. While the incumbent president is an enormous liability, Democrats have a candidate-quality problem in Troy Jackson. Collins and her allies have also waged an impressive campaign and spent tons of money. While Jackson and his side are not coming anywhere close to the level of fundraising and spending on the opposite side, this isn’t about money; it is about Democrats having an unimpressive candidate in a race that will end up costing both sides a total approaching a half-billion dollars, a good chunk of change for a state with only 1.4 million residents.

In a year when Democrats are knocking on the door of deeply red seats, one would not expect the blue team to be struggling in Maine, nor struggling to hold on to open seats in Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Michigan. In both Michigan and Minnesota, Democrats have pushed the envelope with rather polarizing and risky candidates, in Abdul El-Sayed and Peggy Flanagan. Safer alternatives would definitely have more of an advantage.

Broadly speaking, however, the dynamic this year isn’t about Left vs. Right. Democrats don’t have to run with an uber-progressive agenda, risking alienating half of the electorate; they can just run on Trump not minding the store. The fact is that the priorities three-quarters of the electorate had in mind in November 2024 have little in common with where Trump has spent his time and effort. This morning, Trump’s most recent, eye-rolling focus on getting rid of Daylight Saving Time is a case in point. That comes on the heels of ballrooms, reflecting pools, an arch, the Kennedy Center, and whether our soldiers and sailors have adequate testosterone levels. This at a time when diesel is at record-high levels; gasoline, fuel oil, and fertilizer prices aren’t far behind; and interest rates are putting houses and cars out of reach.

One final word: At the risk of self-promotion, political junkies might want to watch a terrific panel discussion on the midterm elections held at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. This year the IoP is celebrating its 60th anniversary; last week’s program, after a short film on the history of the IoP and brief remarks by Caroline Kennedy, featured a panel discussion that was really quite something. Moderated by Politico’s Jonathan Martin, the panel consisted of John Anzalone, the lead pollster for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign; Betsy Ankney, the former political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and campaign manager for Nikki Haley; legendary Democratic strategist James Carville; conservative columnist Byron York; and yours truly.

Defections used to be more commonplace, when there were still conservatives in the Democratic Party and liberals in the Republican Party. Over the last 40 years, they dwindled. Indeed, for many voters, partisanship—or, more accurately, negative partisanship, hating the other party more than they like their own—is part of their identity. It informs the media they consume, what their social media algorithms steer into their feeds, and who they socialize with. Democrats can win purple states and districts, and the lightest of red ones, with just enough Republicans staying home. But once you get into states and districts that are more deeply red, that requires defections, and that is rare.

The Senate battlefield is the more explosive of the two chambers. Today there are at least seven Senate contests in which serious polls put the difference between the two candidates within the margin of error. There are five Republican-held Senate seats with margin-of-error races. Three are held by incumbents: Sens. Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Jon Husted of Ohio. The other two, Iowa and Texas, are open seats. This is not counting the open seat in North Carolina, which has become hopeless for the GOP. There, we expect a win by former Gov. Roy Cooper, which will put one seat in the Democratic column to begin with. I am also keeping a close eye on Kansas, where I would not be surprised to see it become very close.

Most polling shows Democrat Troy Jackson ahead of Collins in Maine by a few points, but Jackson is an underwhelming candidate and his advertising doesn’t seem to be compensating for that. While the original Democratic nominee, Graham Platner, had a warehouse full of personal baggage, he also was a much more talented campaigner than Jackson. I’d put Collins as a narrow favorite thanks to her superior political skills, the effectiveness of her campaign operation, and Jackson having enough baggage to keep him from fully consolidating the Democratic vote.

At the same time, my hunch is that Texas does flip. In state Attorney General Ken Paxton, Republicans managed to nominate perhaps the one possible candidate who could lose to a Democrat. Partisanship and ideology seem likely to have less of an impact on this race than character (or a lack thereof). If Democrat James Talarico wins, it will be despite his blue jersey and more-progressive views, not because of them. My advice to him if he wins: Rent an apartment, don’t buy a house.

As for the very dubious—and in many cases, amateurishly conducted—polls promoted by hope-ium dealers in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, and South Carolina, I am not buying any of them. In a couple of cases, the Democratic, or faux-independent, candidates are interesting, but the situation is nearly impossible; in others, the situation theoretically offers an opportunity for a Democrat in a gale-force political environment to make it close, but the candidate is insufficient to get across the finish line. We can expect Democrats to win in a lot of places where they usually don’t, but even in this environment, they are not going to win everywhere.

Democrats are also defending two of their own seats in races where their candidate leads within the margin of error: Michigan and New Hampshire.

Democrats took a hell of a risk nominating Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, a three-or-four yard-line candidate on the very progressive end of the field, in a state where nominating a candidate between the 40-yard lines is a much wiser course of action. Arguably, this is the most important Senate race in the country. An El-Sayed win would be seen as a green light for the most progressive wing of the party to aggressively go after nominations in swing states and districts, not just in safely blue ones. But El-Sayed coming up short even in a great year for Democrats would send the message to be careful. Maybe someone can create a political version of a dating app, to help parties and primary voters match up candidates who are, or are not, compatible with their states and districts. Actually, common sense and even a modicum of political judgment should make such an app unnecessary.

In New Hampshire, the Democratic nominee, Rep. Chris Pappas, is not badly flawed, but he faces a formidable opponent in former Sen. John Sununu. While the Sununu name is not quite as beloved as some suggest, having had a Sununu as governor, senator, or House member for 28 of the last 42 years, New Hampshire voters know that a Sununu is not a Trump. While New Hampshire is technically considered a light blue state, a good case can be made that it is more of a purple, swing state, which gives Sununu a fighting chance.

I am also keeping a close eye on Minnesota; as in Michigan, Democratic primary voters made a highly questionable choice in nominating Peggy Flanagan, making it harder for the party to take full advantage of such a favorable political environment.

In Georgia, you can call it game, set, and match. That race is over, and Sen. Jon Ossoff is effectively reelected, meaning that no Democratic Senate incumbents are in tough races.

Still, this presents a very wide range of possible outcomes, particularly because as Election Day approaches, the closest races rarely split evenly; they tend to break disproportionately in one direction.

It will take an awfully big wave for Democrats to exceed the post-World War II average seat gain for an opposition party of 26 seats in the House. A look at The Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index provides an indication of the natural partisan predisposition of each district, ranked from most to least Democratic. Basically, Democrats need to start winning districts that usually vote 6 percentage points or more Republican than the country as a whole before they reach jackpot territory, with gains of 30-plus seats. It could happen, but the small GOP majority means that they are not giving away many gimme putts.

A blue wave implies an endorsement or affirmation of Democrats and their policies. But Democrats’ brand is still in tatters from 2021-2025, particularly 2021 and 2022, when they not only had President Biden in the White House but also majorities in the Senate and House. Fortunately for Democrats, this election will in most cases not be about them.

It will, of course, be mostly about the occupant of the White House. Over the last 90 days, President Trump’s political standing has transitioned from very unpopular to toxic and now to radioactive. Yet, because of the MAGA contingent that remains loyal to Trump, many GOP candidates are reticent to put much distance between themselves and their party leader, even as the war with Iran has triggered spikes in the prices of gasoline, diesel fuel, and fertilizer, and soon, heating oil in the northern states. Tariffs and trade wars in general have driven up the cost of living, the very set of issues that cost Democrats their House majority in 2022 and the Senate and presidency in 2024; ownership of that issue has conveyed to the GOP. More broadly, Trump seems to be prioritizing redecorating the White House, renovating monuments in Washington, renaming things after himself, and starting a new round of fights with the White House press corps.

Do disaffected Republican voters stay home, or do they choose to send Republicans a message to get Trump’s attention? History over the last 40 years has seen very few partisans on either side stray and actually vote for the opposition-party candidate. But they may stay home, while independents vote overwhelmingly to change the course.

Let me offer a couple of words of caution as you parse information about the elections for the next six weeks. First off, we’re seeing a glut of sloppy, poorly designed, and badly administered polls that are more worthy of lining hamster cages than offering clues about public opinion. I see dozens of these polls every single day, and get asked about them as if they were the findings of a legitimate survey-research firm with a record of quality results. The internet magnifies the problem, as do political fundraising pitches via email and text to potential donors, urging them to “kick in” just a little more money to save or pick off a seat. Many of these flawed polls are polluting the poll averages and affecting how those races are perceived.

Second, be careful about reading too much into the generic congressional ballot test, which asks voters their preference for a Democrat or Republican for Congress. There are few if any journalists who, over my 40 years of political analysis, have cited the generic ballot question more than I have, and it is still something that I keep an eye on. But I am watching and writing about it less than in the past because the share of congressional districts that are actually competitive, or even potentially competitive, has shrunk.

Those that remain are hardly representative of the country as a whole or of the universe of all of those interviewed in a national or even statewide survey. The latest ratings by The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, Inside Elections with Nathan Gonzales, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball show, respectively, just 37, 46, and 43 competitive House races today (toss-up, lean or tilt Democrat, lean or tilt Republican), roughly a tenth of the House. Even if we widen the aperture to include the likely-Democrat and likely-Republican columns, the numbers are 70, 71, and 80, fewer than a fifth of all of the seats.

Consider that this year, the competitive and potentially competitive columns contain far redder, Republican-leaning seats than those that tilt Democratic, meaning they are hardly a cross-section of the country and thus not effectively measured by the generic ballot test. Over-reliance on this question, particularly in quantitative models, is a significant shortcoming. The pool of districts and states that will determine control of Congress does not look like the country as a whole.

It’s a strange situation indeed for the Democratic Party to be competitive in Republican bastions like Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas, while they worry about races in blue states like Maine, New Hampshire, and Minnesota, and purple Michigan.

While former Rep. Mike Rogers is a solid Republican nominee in Michigan, if Rep. Haley Stevens or state Sen. Mallory McMorrow had won the nomination, Democrats would be strong favorites to win. But nominee Abdul El-Sayed is struggling and may come up short.

In Maine, had Democrats not gone all in on their fling with Graham Platner and ended up with third-place gubernatorial finisher Troy Jackson, their nominee likely would have been Gov. Janet Mills, who would be the favorite.

El-Sayed and Jackson might hang on, but I have my doubts. The same could be said for Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who is a little far away from the center in that light-blue state; signs suggest she is encountering more resistance than a more-centrist Democrat would. New Hampshire is different; it is not that Rep. Chris Pappas, the Democratic nominee, is flawed; it’s just that people in the Granite State know that a Sununu, in this case former Sen. John E. Sununu, is not a Trump; it’s harder to pin that Trump label to him than it would be to pin it on another Republican.

The bottom line is that when Trump is the focal point in a race, Republicans underperform; when Democrats nominate candidates vulnerable to becoming the focus themselves, it diminishes the negative Trump effect on the GOP candidate

Unpopular wars—one of the kinetic variety against Iran, the other a series of trade and tariff wars against many of our longest and closest allies—have taken a terrible toll on Trump and his party. The Iran war has cost the U.S. government over $38 billion as of August and is continuing at a pace of $2-3 billion a month, but voters care much more about the skyrocketing increases in the cost of gasoline. Farmers in rural Trump country, already hit hard by tariffs, now must deal with diesel and fertilizer prices going through the roof.

You don’t have to visit farm country to see warning signs, however. They’re plenty obvious on Capitol Hill. The House canceled all remaining pre-election votes, partly to dodge a vote on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Even some of the Supreme Court justices Trump appointed are straying from the fold, most recently handing him a defeat in an attempt to have the Postal Service take steps that could severely limit voting by mail.

The midterm elections look grisly for the GOP; holding onto their House majority is all but hopeless, and their Senate majority, once secure, is increasingly precarious. The New York Times/Siena University national poll released earlier this week confirmed all the worst fears of clear-eyed Republicans. A Fox News survey showed equally bad news.

The American electorate is both angry and anxious. We now have had five consecutive presidents, starting with Bill Clinton in 1993, who took office with their party also holding Senate and House majorities; in each case, when that president left office, their party had nothing. Voters have exhibited a strong inclination to lash out at the party holding the White House, the Senate, and the House as Republicans now do, along with a majority of governorships and almost 60 percent of the 98 state legislative chambers. In many of the states where the GOP has hegemony, there is only one direction for the blame to flow, particularly in red states that haven’t voted for Democrats much since Moby Dick was a guppy.

Thus, Republican Senate seats are now in danger in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Ohio, and Texas; a year ago, only Maine and Ohio looked like plausible targets for Democrats.

The latest dose of bad news for Republicans came from a survey of 800 likely voters in Alaska, released Thursday by a bipartisan team of pollsters, showing former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola leading Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan by 5 points, 46 to 41 percent. When the race is tabulated using the state’s ranked-choice voting method, Peltola hits 53 percent to Sullivan’s 47 percent. The poll, commissioned by AARP and conducted jointly by the Democratic firm of Impact Research and the Republican firm of Fabrizio Ward, found that 49 percent of likely voters have a favorable opinion of Peltola (43 percent unfavorable), with 40 percent viewing Sullivan favorably (44 percent unfavorably). Thirty-three percent of the sample identified as Republicans, 18 percent as Democrats, and 49 percent as independents.

The Democratic nominee for governor, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, led the field with 40 percent of the vote, while Republican Bernadette Wilson had only 20 percent, Republican Dave Bronson was at 14 percent, and another Republican, Treg Taylor, at 7 percent, leaving 18 percent undecided. In the ranked-choice tabulation, Kreiss-Tomkins led Wilson 55 percent to 45 percent. Democrats last won a Senate seat in Alaska in 2008; their last gubernatorial victory was in 1998. As in other surveys conducted this year, affordability and the rising cost of living is the dominant issue for most voters, though among older voters, concerns about Social Security, the cost of health care, and the future of Medicare also top the list.

This Alaska survey is the sixth in a series of battleground-state surveys released by AARP, with several more expected before the midterm election.

A case can be made that two or three Senate races the GOP may lose might well not have been lost if either a generic Republican or Democrat were in the Oval Office instead of the pugilistic Donald Trump. Would Sen. Thom Tillis have run for reelection in North Carolina were it not for Trump, with whom he has a testy relationship? Would popular Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp have challenged freshman Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff if not for his own bad relationship with Trump, dating back to when Kemp refused to help Trump “find” more votes in his state in the 2020 election? Had Trump not encouraged, and eventually supported, the successful primary challenge by scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, would Sen. John Cornyn be cruising to an easy general-election win? Food for thought.

Obviously, we don’t yet know what will happen in the Nov. 3 midterms or what will be going on in the minds of Republicans in Congress, but if this election is as bad for Republicans as it might be, one wonders what Trump’s standing in the party will be when it is over.

It would be an overstatement to call it a dilemma, but two contradictory things seem to be at work. There are unmistakable reasons to believe that Republicans would suffer a net loss of House and Senate seats. President Trump’s awful job-approval ratings heading into a midterm election make that virtually inevitable, but there are also persuasive reasons to think that the losses would be no worse than average, maybe even a bit less than that. Republicans, at this moment, have 220 House seats (including one vacancy plus the seat held by Rep. Kevin Kiley, technically an independent who caucuses with Republicans) to Democrats’ 215; this is about as lean a majority as you would ever find, far narrower than the 295 seats that Democrats had going into the 1966 midterm under President Lyndon Johnson, or even the 225 seats that Democrats had under Bill Clinton in 1994 before that debacle or the 224 they held going into Barack Obama’s disastrous 2010 midterm. Republicans had 241 seats going into Trump’s 2018 midterm and 232 before George W. Bush’s 2006 midterm loss. As this column has noted before, you can’t get blood out of a turnip: A party cannot lose a seat it doesn’t have.

The best predictor of the outcome of any senatorial, congressional, or gubernatorial general election is the outcome in the previous presidential election. Republicans entered this Senate election with two seats that Trump won in 2024 by at least 40 points, six that he won by 30 to 39 points, five that he won by 20 to 29, and seven that he won by 10 to 19, meaning that Trump carried 20 out of 22 GOP seats by double-digit margins. The only exceptions are Maine, where Trump lost by 7 points, and North Carolina, where he won by 3. That would seem to severely limit Democratic opportunities to capture GOP-held seats.

But that’s the theory; let’s now talk about the reality of Sept. 17, 2026. Presidents with an approval rating as low as Trump’s are going to have midterm-election problems, and for several months now, all of the lights have been flashing “danger, danger, danger” for the GOP.

Sifting through all of the available public polls—we are talking hundreds here since Memorial Day—21 very high-quality polls in key Senate and/or governor battleground states have been released: seven by the New York Times/Siena, eight for Fox News, four commissioned by AARP, and last week, CNN released its first of hopefully a large number of statewide polls, in Maine and Michigan, both with key Senate and governor races. Both the Fox and AARP polls (of all likely voters, not just seniors) were conducted by bipartisan polling teams, while the NYT/Siena and CNN polls were done by nonpartisan pollsters. Trump’s approval ratings in these surveys have ranged from as low as 31 percent (CNN in Maine) to as high as 48 percent in the New York Times poll back in June. His approval rating has ranged from as low as 7 points below his 2024 vote share to as many as 17 points below in the June New York Times/Siena poll.

Suffice it to say that the president is a major liability for GOP Senate candidates. By my count, nine Senate races are now genuinely competitive: six in GOP hands (Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Ohio, and Texas) and three held by Democrats (Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire). Only four of the nine have incumbents still in the hunt, all Republicans: Sens. Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Susan Collins of Maine, and Jon Husted of Ohio. All three Democratic seats on this very competitive list are open. Out of all nine, the one real surprise to me is Kansas; I was dismissive of such talk until the last few weeks.

Arithmetically speaking—and I emphasize this is purely theoretical—the range of outcomes could be anywhere from a net loss by Democrats of three seats to a net loss for Republicans of six. The two extreme outcomes are almost impossible, but it does make the point that there are nine very tight races and the range of outcomes is mind-boggling. It should be remembered that in the end, the tightest races rarely split down the middle—half going to one party, the other in the opposite direction. The breaks tend to go overwhelmingly in one direction.

Twenty of those blue-chip polls asked about Senate races. The Democratic candidate led in 15 surveys, the Republican in four, with one poll showing a tie. In 19 governor-race polls, Republicans led in two: an Ohio Fox poll from June and another Fox poll in Texas from July.

Almost all of these leads were tiny, generally within the margin of error. The point of this is not to say that one side is doing really well in the polling, but the polling is showing some extremely close races, ones that could break in either direction.

Generally speaking, with the exception of Texas and maybe Kansas, GOP problems are almost all Trump-related. In those vulnerable GOP-held seats, a substantial share of the electorate live in rural areas and small towns. They’re among the most negatively impacted by tariffs and the various trade wars the administration is engaged in, to say nothing of high gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer costs. In Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas, Republicans are struggling in both Senate and governor’s races, and all four states have long been dominated by the GOP. Ken Paxton of Texas and Sen. Marshall of Kansas have their own problems that exacerbate the political atmosphere.

For Democrats, in two of the three states that they should be most worried about, Maine and Michigan, they have suffered self-inflicted injuries. The other, the open seat in New Hampshire, should not be that much of a surprise. The Granite State has elected Republican governors in five consecutive elections, along with pretty consistent GOP majorities in both state legislative chambers. The GOP also has a solid candidate in former Sen. John E. Sununu. Granite State voters know the difference between a Sununu and a Trump, diminishing the presidential undertow in that state a bit.

This is a very different situation than what existed at the beginning of this election cycle, even different from the beginning of this year. The worst-case scenario for the GOP and best for Democrats today would have sounded ludicrous eight months ago; the most plausible today resembles Republicans’ nightmare scenario at the beginning of the year.

Let’s start with the most likely scenario: that this is a “really bad” election for Republicans, losing between 26 and 35 seats in the House, and either four or five seats in the Senate. That’s the average outcome for post-World War II midterm elections in both cases. Either one would end the Republicans’ governing trifecta.

The second scenario, merely a “bad outcome” for Republicans, would be a loss of between 15 and 25 House seats. This would still lose them their majority in that chamber, but it would be short of the average, mostly because each side holds so few seats in competitive districts; the floors for each party now are higher and the ceilings lower. After each of the last three elections, the majority party had 222 or fewer seats, the minority at least 211. Going back a bit further, in the seven elections held after President Obama’s first midterm election, the only time either party has lost more than 13 seats was the other Trump midterm election in 2018, when Republicans lost 40 House seats.

The unprecedented mid-decade redistricting slightly increases the number of districts no longer in play; whatever losses the GOP incurs in November will be about 10 seats fewer than would have happened had the 2024 maps remained in place. An ironclad law of politics is that a party cannot lose a seat it doesn’t have. With the barest of majorities, GOP House exposure should theoretically be fairly limited.

In the Senate, the “bad scenario” also means a loss of four or five seats for Republicans, bringing Democrats to 51 or 52 and Republicans to 48 or 49. Given that only two GOP-held seats are up in non-red states—the one held by Sen. Susan Collins in Maine and the open seat in North Carolina—all other Democratic gains would have to come from states in varying shades of red.

Given the number and nature of seats up this year, the “truly horrible scenario” for Republicans would be a net Senate loss of at least six seats, along with 26 to 35 seats in the House. The dynamics that had kept this GOP doomsday scenario extremely unlikely were that the map looked likely to offset much of the drag that President Trump was having on his own party’s candidates. Like a sports team with most of its schedule made up of home games, the GOP benefits from the fact that many of the states Democrats are targeting are organically Republican states, where for most voters, even independents, voting for a Democrat is a somewhat unnatural act.

For any who doubt whether things have gotten this bad for the GOP, it’s fine to ignore the flood of two-bit, shoddily conducted polls that too many journalists have been quoting. My advice is to focus on the name-brand, top-shelf polls and avoid the noise. In the last three months there have been 18 very high-quality polls released in states with critical Senate and/or gubernatorial races— eight by The New York Times/Siena College, seven by Fox News, and four by AARP.

The Times/Siena polls are second to none; the Fox and AARP surveys are conducted by bipartisan teams of pollsters, all of significantly higher quality than 99 percent of the state polling floating around the internet and on the pages of publications that should know better. The bottom line of the current reliable polling is that Republicans are having to fight tooth and nail for seats that should be gimme putts.

Why does this election look so bad for Republicans? Why has the worst-case scenario become so much worse, and the best case pretty unlikely? Simply put, the sum and cumulative impact of Trump’s second-term baggage seems now to match or exceed those of Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama.

Tariffs and soaring fuel and fertilizer costs are slamming farmers and rural areas hard, and those people have constituted the backbone of Trump’s support. In a terrific piece for Bloomberg, National Journal alum Ronald Brownstein focuses on the impact of gas prices on those with pickup trucks, big gas tanks, and lousy mileage, pointing to research showing that 87 percent of pickup-truck owners are men, 74 percent are married, and 63 percent identify as Republicans. Spending a hundred bucks to fill up the tank on their truck will get their attention. While few are likely to actually defect and vote for Democrats, many more will just stay home.

Ditto those Republicans who may be put off by Trump’s ill-fated attack on Iran, or even by his demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build an opulent ballroom, trying to rename the Kennedy Center, and renaming gulfs and lakes that aren’t really ours to rename. (And that’s far from an exhaustive list.)

Having an approval rating of 81 percent among those in your own party is fine, but it doesn’t offset the 24 percent approval among independents. The latest University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment saw consumer confidence among Republicans, which was 96.8 percent in January, drop to 82.

It appears to me that the president has now reached a critical mass of problems that are threatening to take this election to a place that the 2026 map and the small number of competitive districts and Senate seats should not allow it to go. I confess this is a lot bigger than I expected, but here we are.

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.