Democrats are heading into the last month of the midterm elections campaign with ambitions going deeper and deeper into red territory, while Republicans are grim about their hopes of holding on to either chamber of Congress.
Historically, the opposition party almost always makes gains in the midterms, and President Donald Trump is less popular than ever. His support has weakened especially with independents in high-quality polls and among swing demographics that propelled his 2024 majority.
Republicans have also tended to underperform when Trump isn’t on the ballot because more consistent voters have shifted toward the Democrats. More Democrats voted in this year’s primaries – a sign that they are also more likely to turn out now, with early and mail voting already underway in 43 states leading up to Election Day on Nov. 3.
The Democrats’ lead in national and battleground polls has expanded since Labor Day. There are reasons to suspect polls could be overestimating Democrats’ strength, though surveys did not systematically favor Democrats in the last two midterms.
Republicans’ main advantage is money. GOP campaigns and allies are outspending Democrats in almost all the most contested races, thanks in large part to more than $180 million that has been pumped in from Trump’s war chest since Labor Day.
The outcome will define the remainder of Trump’s presidency – the fate of his legislative ambitions and the pressure of oversight investigations. It will also immediately set the stage for the 2028 presidential primaries, with both parties’ hopefuls reading the results for clues to the electorate’s mood.
Here are four possible ways the midterms could broadly shake out.
A blue wave
In the House, Republicans hold the slimmest of majorities, with 218 seats (and one independent who caucuses with them) to the Democrats’ 214. The GOP is on defense in 16 seats rated toss-ups by the Cook Political Report, compared with six for Democrats. On Sept. 25, Cook shifted 15 races toward the Democrats and projected them to take over the House.
Anticipating a favorable environment, Democrats went into the cycle planning to expand the House battlefield by recruiting competitive candidates to run in typically safe GOP districts held by incumbents unaccustomed to tough races or dragged down in scandals. On Friday, they continued widening their targets, adding eight districts that voted for Trump by double digits in 2024. They added six more races on Monday, including seats in Arkansas and Tennessee and a Nevada district that backed Trump by 14 points. The latest additions bring their total targets to 46.
If Democrats win the popular vote by 10 points this year – their current average lead in polls – they would pick up a projected 33 seats, according to Mindset, a Washington advisory firm. That would place this year’s gains between the Democratic pickups in 2006 (31 seats) and 2018 (40 seats).
“Democrats are on offense; Republicans are running scared – even in deep-red territory,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (Washington), chair of the House Democrats’ campaign arm. “Voters are fed up with Republicans’ broken promises and ready for change in Congress.”
In the Senate, Republicans hold a 53-47 majority and were favored to keep control earlier this year.
Now, most polls put Democrats ahead in the most contested races: Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas. They’re more strongly favored to win North Carolina, where former governor Roy Cooper (D) leads former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley, and Georgia, where Rep. Mike Collins (R) hasn’t come close to catching Sen. Jon Ossoff (D). On Friday, the main Republican Senate super PAC canceled its remaining spending in North Carolina.
Beyond the battlegrounds, Republicans have shown concern about incumbents in Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, and Nebraska, which Trump won by 20 points in 2024. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), an obstetrician, is under fire for his history of suing patients to collect unpaid bills, leading to some arrests. He faces megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton (D). Nebraska independent Dan Osborn has been slamming Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) for pardoning a man convicted of sexual assault when he was governor.
In the most extreme scenario, some political professionals imagine the wave wiping out Sen. Darline Graham (R-South Carolina) or Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Florida).
A blue ripple
The Senate does not as consistently turn against the president – Republicans added two seats in the upper chamber in 2018. This year’s map has more GOP-held seats in contention, but taking the majority would require the Democrats to hold Georgia and Michigan, pick up North Carolina and Maine, plus win two out of 12 seats in states that Trump won by at least 13 points.
In the House, Democrats need a net gain of only three seats. But across decades, partisan gerrymandering has steadily shrunk the battlefield, so even an electoral swing of similar magnitude to past cycles might not flip as many seats.
This cycle, Republicans tilted the field further in their direction by redrawing congressional maps ahead of the customary once-a-decade redistricting. Republicans hoped to move 16 districts to the right with new maps in Texas (five districts), Florida (four), Ohio (two), Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee (one each). Democrats responded with five districts in California, and courts overturned the Missouri map and added a Democratic-leaning seat in Utah, cutting the Republicans’ theoretical edge to nine.
But many of those redrawn seats are shaping up to be less solid than Republicans had hoped. Democrats are still contesting four redrawn seats in Texas and another four in Florida. They hope to keep one or two affected districts in Ohio (held by Reps. Marcy Kaptur and Greg Landsman), plus the one in North Carolina (Rep. Don Davis).
“People want to make predictions, but there’s a lot of toss-up races that are not decided yet,” Republican pollster John McLaughlin said. “The sides are forming where the Democratic/anti-Republican vote is coming together and Republicans are losing the ability to recover swing voters. That’s concerning.”
A GOP upset
In the previous midterms of 2022, the roles were reversed: Republicans were confident the unpopular sitting president would sweep their candidates into power despite their flaws, and were dismayed when that wave failed to materialize. Now, they are hoping for a similar dynamic, only the other way around.
If Republicans pull an upset, they’ll be able to thank the Senate map that puts them mostly on their home turf and gerrymandering for padding their cushion in the House. The polls would have to be significantly off, which could be because Democrats were more eager to answer the phone, Republicans were less likely to participate, or pollsters misjudged who would turn out to vote.
Trump political adviser Chris LaCivita summed up the Republicans’ path to victory as: “money, message, motivation and the president’s ability to defy conventional wisdom.”
Republicans outspent Democrats in every Senate battleground in September and also led in future reservations though Election Day, according to media tracker AdImpact.
Republicans are also hoping to benefit in races where further-left Democrats won their primaries. Those Democrats include Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and House candidates William Lawrence in Michigan and Randy Villegas in California.
The GOP’s midterms convention and Trump’s stump speeches have sought to portray the Democrats as extreme and tie the entire party to self-described socialists who won in some areas.
And as much as Democrats want to make the race about Trump (and he does, too), at least some Republicans may be able to outperform his unpopularity. Candidates from Iowa to Florida have started removing references to Trump from their websites and breaking with the president on immigration and the Iran war.
A constitutional crisis
Elections are run at the local level, with no role for the federal government. The Trump administration has made multiple attempts to change voting procedures for the midterms, but those efforts were held up in court or died in Congress.
“It has been a roller coaster,” Eric Fey, the Democratic elections director in St. Louis, said at a recent meeting of elections officials.
Each election cycle features emergency litigation over mishaps at voting locations (often resulting in extended hours), recounts in close races and post-election audits. Administrators and law enforcement officials are also on the lookout for cyberattacks or disruptions such as bomb threats. They conduct drills and simulations to anticipate how things could go wrong and practice how to respond.
“The threat landscape, as we view it this year, is cyber, physical, logistical, reputational and somewhat emergent legal,” said Michael Moore, the chief information security officer for the Arizona secretary of state’s office. “We design exercises to give election officials the most miserable Election Day we can possibly imagine. That way, when they actually have an election day, they’re prepared for everything.”
This year, election administrators are especially concerned about interference from the federal government. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said the administration has no plans to send immigration officers to polls, while FBI Director Kash Patel would not rule out sending his agents to voting sites.
“While I anticipate that we likely will have monitors and there could be incidents at or around voting locations, we’re going to make sure that we have boots on the ground to make sure that voters are not disrupted in that process and that they can cast a ballot,” said Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder and county clerk for Los Angeles County, the country’s largest election jurisdiction.
Monica Gordon, the clerk in Cook County, Illinois (home to Chicago), added: “We’re moving forward as usual, but we plan for anything. Our contingencies have contingencies.”
Right-wing activists have called for Trump to take more severe steps, such as trying to claim emergency powers over elections. Trump has repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of elections he and his party lost. Congressional Democrats and allied lawyers have also prepared research and drills to be ready for any attempts to use federal power to interfere with the results, as Trump attempted after losing in 2020.
“A lot of people would say that we need to just go rogue and declare this radical emergency,” Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was released on parole in June after serving some of her sentence for tampering with voting equipment, said Wednesday during a meeting of online activists. “There are already orders and laws in place that allow them to do what they need to do.”
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