A massive midterm wave isn't forming yet. Here's why.
Given how slim the majorities are in Congress, Republicans' exposure might be limited.
This is an era not just of hyperpartisanship, but of negative partisanship, in which partisans often hate the other side even more than they love their own. Many voters thus tend to see everything on a binary basis. Any given election outcome is seen as either a landslide victory or an unmitigated disaster. There is little appreciation, or even tolerance, for gradations between those outcomes.
Republicans’ chances of losing their House majority are about as high as they could possibly be. The GOP edge in that chamber is wafer-thin, currently 218-214 with three vacancies. If you push the vacant seats in the direction they obviously will go, the advantage expands only slightly to 220-215. Almost any loss would be sufficient to change control. President Trump’s poor job-approval numbers, averaging just 41 percent (with 55 percent disapproval), ensure that he will be a serious liability in swing districts. Voters who simply wanted the Biden-Harris administration out of office in 2024 are getting far more than they bargained for, and not in a positive way.
So it’s inevitable that some Democrats, and journalists who are sympathetic to their cause, are quick to declare that a “blue wave” is coming. Yet these declarations ignore a number of factors that make it unlikely GOP losses will match the legitimate Democratic waves of 2006 and 2018.
True enough, Trump’s approval ratings among Democrats (well down into the single digits) present a nightmare situation for any Republican seeking reelection in a blue district. But hold on: Only three Republicans were elected in 2024 in districts that Kamala Harris won. Among independents nationally, Trump’s approval ratings typically are down in the high 20s and low 30s, but gerrymandering and political self-sorting by the population has shrunk the number of purple districts, thus diluting independents’ power. There are very few Republican-held seats anywhere in that much peril.
Among Republicans, Trump’s approval ratings remain in the 80s. Stories of a split in the MAGA base are not based on real data. MAGA voters are so in love with him and trust him so thoroughly that nothing—not the Epstein files nor the attacks on Venezuela and Iran—are peeling them off. So Democrats have their work cut out for them to flip many red districts.
According to the latest House ratings published by The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, only 17 GOP seats are rated as Toss Up or worse. Adding in the next level of competitive seats (“Lean Republican”) brings only three more GOP seats to the competitive pile—still well below the post-World War II average midterm outcome of a 26-seat loss for the president’s party. Even adding in the 15 GOP-held seats in the “Likely Republican” category only brings us to a total of 35 vulnerable seats. Democrats could run the table, hold on to all their own vulnerable seats, and still fall short of their pickups in 2006 or 2018.
Other highly respected forecasters, such as Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, come to similar conclusions.
When parties have suffered heavy midterm House losses, they’ve often had a higher degree of exposure. Just as someone who is heavier can lose more weight than someone relatively slight to begin with, a party holding a large number of seats can lose them more easily than one that had few vulnerable seats to begin with. With just 220 seats to begin with, and having suffered a net loss of two seats in the last election, Republicans’ exposure is well below the 241 seats they held going into their 41-seat loss in 2018, or the 256 seats that Democrats had going into Obama’s 2010 midterm, when they lost 64 seats, or the 258 that Democrats had in 1994 ahead of their 54-seat loss in Bill Clinton’s first midterm.
It’s also worth remembering that the dynamics in the House and Senate are very different. In each of the last four cycles, the party that lost seats in the House actually gained in the Senate. With just a third of the Senate up every two years and only a handful of seats competitive in most years, the upper chamber’s results tend to be more idiosyncratic, not necessarily indicative of what is happening in the country overall.
A party can have a bad election, even lose a majority, without sustaining a devastating loss. In other words, if Republican losses are confined to blue and purple states and districts, they will limit the damage. Only if they start losing in places that are ruby-red will their losses really mount. That looks really unlikely.