Heading Toward Midterm Elections, Democrats Not Up Off the Floor

Here’s a hint that the off-year elections in November 2026 may not unfold as conventional wisdom suggests. That conventional wisdom is that the president’s party almost always loses the House and, slightly less often, Senate seats.

There are two structural reasons for this. One is that parties in power tend to do things or produce results that some voters dislike. The second reason is that out-party candidates can adapt to local terrain, focusing on issues on which the president’s party’s stands are unpopular. But that depends on the other party being an acceptable alternative.

Which leads to the clue referred to above. Politico’s Andrew Howard reports that former Democrats Brian Bengs in South Dakota (Trump +29 in 2024) and Todd Achilles in Idaho (Trump +36) are joining former Democrat Dan Osborn of Nebraska (Trump +20) to run for senator as self-declared independents, with no credible Democrat in the race.

Osborn did so in 2024, scaring incumbent Republican Rep. Deb Fischer while losing by only six points. This was an improvement on Greg Orman’s 2014 independent candidacy in Kansas, where he lost by 11 points in a state that was +22 Republican for president two years before.

Why are these Democrats, some in states such as South Dakota and Nebraska that have reelected Democratic senators in recent years, shunning the Democratic label? Most likely because, in a country of increased straight-ticket voting, they believe the Democratic label is political poison.

After four years of the Biden administration, the Pew Research Center said the presidential electorate moved from favoring Democrats by six points in 2020 to favoring Republicans by one point in 2024, with Republicans close to equal among under-30 voters. “For months now,” Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini notes, “We’ve observed a new trend in polling: the Democratic party’s favorability ratings have fallen below the GOP’s. That’s hardly ever happened before.”

The Wall Street Journal’s July 16-20 poll shows that 63% of voters have negative feelings about the Democrats, the highest since 1990. That poll also showed Republicans maintaining their 2024 lead in party identification, in sharp contrast to President Donald Trump’s first term. And it showed pluralities of voters favored Republicans even on issues on which majorities disapproved of Trump’s most recent actions, including the economy, tariffs, immigration, foreign policy, and Ukraine.

It looks like the Democrats’ baggage, especially from the Biden years, is heavier than the loads Trump Republicans must juggle. Democrats’ credibility has been damaged as their arguments, one after another, have proven to be based on lies: the Russia collusion hoax, COVID-19 school closings, “transitory” inflation, the Hunter Biden laptop, and open-borders immigration.

All of which suggests that Democrats’ hopes of overturning the Republicans’ 53-47 Senate majority may rest more on independents running in Trump-heavy states than on purple-state Democrats. And, despite conventional wisdom, there’s a cognizable chance that Republicans will not lose the narrow 220-215 majority they won in the House of Representatives in 2020.

Once upon a time, in the split-ticket voting era, Democrats maintained their large House majority in 1972 despite Richard Nixon’s 61% landslide by winning fully half the seats in House districts Nixon carried. Those days are gone. In 2024, voters in only 16 House districts split their ticket between the president and the congressman.

The Democrats’ problem is that Republicans are defending only three districts carried by former Vice President Kamala Harris, while Democrats are defending 13 seats won by Trump. That’s one of the reasons that Steve Kornacki, to the dismay of his MSNBC audience, says Republicans could hold on to the House.

Meanwhile, Harry Enten dismays his CNN audience by pointing out that the narrow leads Democrats enjoy in House generic ballot polling leave them not nearly as well positioned for 2026 as they were at this point in 2005 and 2017 for their big gains in 2006 and 2018.

Core Democratic hatred of and obsession with Trump will certainly have them stomping to the off-year polls, and Trump Republicans’ newly biracial and young male coalition may not be similarly motivated. But Republican gains are widespread, while Democratic gains are scarcely visible. As Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen writes, “It’s currently not possible to identify any cohort of potential first-time Dem voters.”

As The New York Times’ brilliant graphics point out, Trump has gained a percentage over three elections in 1,433 counties with 42 million people, while his Democratic opponents gained three times in only 57 counties with 8 million people. “For years, the belief was Democrats have had demographic destiny on our side,” pollster Ben Tulchin said. “Now, the inverse is true.”

The veteran liberal reporter Thomas Edsall portrays in his Times online column a “realignment (with) staying power” and fears. There is a “real possibility that discontent with the Democratic party — its perceived failure to value work, its political correctness, the extremity of its social and cultural liberalism — might have become deeply embedded in the electorate.”

Meanwhile, the economic numbers are coming in more positively than those who predicted doom in April from Trump’s tariffs (I called them “lunatic”), and as analyst Nate Silver writes, “There remains a strong case that voters are concerned about the economy and the cost of living, but that everything else is priced in.” As for the fuss over the Epstein tapes, Silver writes, “It looks like we’re back to the usual pattern: the overwhelming majority of voters either already hate Trump, or are happy to shrug off his scandals.”

“The country is moving toward Trump,” says Chris Matthews, onetime staffer for Jimmy Carter and Tip O’Neill. “They want a president who is a strong figure. And he’s got it. And half the country buys it.” Nothing’s inevitable in politics, but so far, the Democrats have not gotten up off the floor.

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, “Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders,” is now available.

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