With 64 days before Election Day (although the first mail-in ballots will go out in a matter of days), Republicans should brace themselves: The three most plausible outcomes are that it will be bad, really bad, or truly horrible. Conversely, a Democrat should at least briefly consider that the good fortune they may have in November will come compliments of the president, not as a result of much that they have done.
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.