This isn’t just a matter of Democratic fanaticism. Republicans began panicking weeks ago, spending hundreds of millions on advertising in states they once thought they could easily win and all but exiting previously hotly contested Senate seats such as North Carolina and Georgia, where Trump won decisively two years ago. On Monday, Trump will campaign in Mississippi, a staunchly Republican state where a Senate seat is now officially “at play.” As for the House, “extremely grim” Republican insiders have been telling reporters for weeks that they were bracing for a midterm election blowout.
Republican pollster Greg Streeple declared on Tuesday that “the economic center of the American electorate is falling toward the Republican Party.” He launched a new joint investigation with a Democratic colleague cook political report found Democratic Senate candidates holding narrow leads in Iowa, Ohio and Texas — states that have all voted for Trump three times. “Voters are so frustrated with the lack of leadership on lowering the cost of living that they appear willing to push Democrats to undermine wins in reliably Republican states, despite the fact that Democrats are less popular than President Trump or the Republican Party,” Streeple said. “The level of voter dissatisfaction is truly unprecedented.”
So why are so many Democrats nothing more than what Rahm Emanuel said in an interview with the New York Times? new yorkerOn the Political Scene podcast the other day, “Little ‘c’ and little ‘o’ are cautiously optimistic about their prospects of dealing a decisive blow to Trump by winning the Senate?
History shows an obvious reason. If not for the fatal overconfidence in him within the party in 2016, Trump might not have become president at all. In the final two weeks before that election, with some national polls showing Hillary Clinton a seemingly insurmountable double-digit lead, her doomed campaign didn’t even bother sending the Democratic nominee to the decisive battleground state of Wisconsin, instead seeking to expand into traditionally red states like Arizona and Utah. Even in 2018, when Democrats did bounce back from Clinton’s loss with a strong performance, the split decision — even as Democrats won the House and Republicans retained the Senate — meant Trump was unlikely to face real accountability or meaningful constraints from Congress. This was seen as a rebuke rather than a repudiation of the presidency.
The point here is that winning in US elections depends as much on expectations as on who gets more seats. Democrats taking back the House of Representatives in early 2026 and jumping across a tough field to run for the Senate could be seen as an encouraging recovery for the party from its poor run two years ago. Now, even as polls show control of the Senate still up for grabs and key races within the margin of error, the bottom line has changed. As a Democratic friend said to me the other day, “I would be disappointed if we didn’t win the Senate, which I didn’t expect to win a month ago.”
There is also the question of what lessons parties learned from the elections. In 2022, Democrats boasted about how they successfully fought off the red wave, convincing themselves that losing the House by just five seats and retaining a 51-seat majority in the Senate was a great victory. The better-than-expected performance prompted Joe Biden to announce his plans to run for re-election, and we all know how that turned out. In the wake of Trump’s victory in 2024, Republicans believe such a significant political realignment has occurred that they are conducting unprecedented mid-decade redistricting aimed at undercutting Democrats’ advantage in this year’s midterm elections. Redistricting looked like it could help them pick up as many as a dozen seats earlier this year; now, with many 2024 Trump voters turning against the president in places like South Texas and Florida, the net effect may be just one seat.