Sometimes watching the two major parties compete in this year’s midterm elections brings to mind a quote from the legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel, which journalist Jimmy Breslin used to title his 1963 book: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
Democrats have a historic opportunity to seize control of both houses of Congress for the remainder of President Donald Trump’s term ahead of the 2028 race for the White House. If the 2030 Census goes as expected, they might not get many more chances like this, with blue states losing population and congressional seats.
Having controlled the House for 40 years at the beginning of 1995, Democrats took a dozen years to win their majority back after losing it in then-President Bill Clinton’s first midterm election. If all goes according to plan, given recent electoral history and the current national political environment, they will regain the majority they lost under former President Joe Biden after just four years.
Republicans have a favorable map with arguably the fewest competitive House seats in modern history. They appear to have strengthened their hand through mid-decade redistricting, though the jury is still out on that, and a Supreme Court ruling curtailing the creation of automatically Democratic majority-minority congressional districts under the Voting Rights Act. The GOP is also sitting on a massive war chest ready to be spent at an opportune time, while some (though by no means all) of the Democrats’ campaign entities are strapped for cash.
The Republican House majority is small, which probably limits its ability to defy history, even with all the aforementioned assets. But at 53-47, their Senate majority is more robust, and the map there is also favorable, at least on paper. To flip the chamber, Democrats will need a net gain of four seats. Their path to doing so runs through multiple states Trump carried in 2024, some of them by double digits. The main exception to this rule is Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who substantially outran her poll numbers six years ago to beat a heavily favored Democratic challenger in her mostly blue state.
And yet there is a case to be made that both parties are doing everything they can to blow their advantages. It starts with candidate selection. Democrats have had more success shoving aside their problematic incumbents and challengers than Republicans have.
Former Rep. Eric Swalwell, who was running for governor of California when sexual misconduct allegations blew up in the media, withdrew from the race. Former Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner withdrew under similar circumstances, as accusations about his behavior toward former girlfriends grew increasingly serious with each news story. Yet Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), who stands accused of abusing his ex-wife — the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) — and his two-year-old daughter, remains a candidate for reelection.
Polls show several statewide races in Texas closer for Republicans than they would normally be, just two years after Trump won the state by nearly 14 points and more than 1.5 million votes. The GOP is actually trailing in the Senate race after incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) lost the primary to scandal-plagued state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has struggled to raise money compared to Democratic challenger James Talarico. Trump signaled he might support Cornyn, then stayed out of the race during the first round of voting, and finally endorsed Paxton in the runoff.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) declined to seek reelection after clashing with Trump. He has been replaced by former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley, who isn’t as well known as Tillis or his Democratic opponent, former Gov. Roy Cooper. Cooper has built a steady lead, as has Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) in what was supposed to be one of Republicans’ best pickup opportunities.
In Ohio, the problem may be less the Senate candidate — though Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) is not the most base-pleasing candidate and Democrats landed their prize recruit in recent former Sen. Sherrod Brown — than their gubernatorial standard-bearer. Businessman and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has underperformed in most polls and could be at least a mild drag on the whole ticket. Trump won Ohio by nearly 12 points, and Brown lost his seat to Moreno in 2024.
But Democrats don’t have a spotless record when it comes to picking candidates either. Socialists keep winning in Democratic primaries, first in deep-blue congressional districts but now increasingly in Senate primaries in battleground states. The left-wing Abdul el Sayed narrowly beat Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in the Michigan Senate primary, potentially putting a Democratic-held seat at risk.
El Sayed did not perform well with core Democratic constituencies such as black voters, working-class voters without a college degree, and Jews. His Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, is doing all he can to capitalize on any fissures within the Democratic coalition. Rogers only lost to the more centrist Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) by a slim margin two years ago, although that was while Trump was winning the state.
Democrats managed to get Platner out of the Maine Senate race in time to get another candidate on the ballot. But having won more than 70% of the primary vote with incumbent Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) still on the ballot, even if no longer actively campaigning, there was significant pressure to find a like-minded replacement. That’s what Democrats got in their new Senate nominee, Troy Jackson.
A Fox News poll indicates that the candidate switcheroo did move the race in the Democrats’ favor, but not by as much as the party might hope. Collins was up 3 points in the same survey before Platner dropped out, breaking 50% of the vote. She is now down by 3 points against Jackson, receiving 46% (they are both below 50%). An improvement, but still too close for comfort for Democrats given Collins’s history of outperforming her poll numbers. Jackson is up by 2.3 points in the RealClearPolitics average, and only Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, shows him leading by more than 3 points — and that was over a month ago.
Democrats did dodge a bullet when they narrowly declined to nominate socialist state Rep. Francesca Hong for governor in Wisconsin. The Democratic establishment, led by incumbent Gov. Tony Evers (D-MI), mobilized to consolidate support behind Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who had previously suspended his campaign. Hong’s peak woke social media posts were widely circulated in the closing weeks of the campaign, and she flailed trying to distance herself from defunding the police, criticizing whiteness, and canceling Thanksgiving.
Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) chose not to endorse Hong, both claiming they were more interested in Congress than gubernatorial races. But Hong was clearly the proximate cause of Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to laugh off the wokeness of 2019-2024 on ABC News’s This Week as she plots a run for higher office in 2028.
The larger problem is that the Democratic Socialists of America, who pace AOC and are as radical on deeply polarizing cultural issues as on economics, are affecting the Democratic Party’s already unpopular brand. The DSA is throwing Republicans a lifeline. While headlines emphasize how popular Mayor Zohran Mamdani is in New York City, the same Siena poll showed his favorability declining statewide in what remains a very blue state. He is underwater with union households, suburbanites, those with incomes below $50,000 a year, whites, Catholics, and Jews.
Nevertheless, Republicans have largely discarded the affordability issues that helped them win in 2024 and are instead defending a war in Iran that has spiked energy problems and partially reversed progress on inflation. This is, in turn, keeping interest rates high, much to Trump’s chagrin, even with a new Federal Reserve chairman appointed by the president.
The Iran war isn’t popular, and Trump seems to want to end it. But Iran has continued to press its advantage on the Strait of Hormuz, with a global economic impact that might be its only source of leverage. There is no easy way out by November, after promises that the conflict was only going to last a short time.
The president has at times said the Iran war aims, such as stopping Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, are more important than the midterm elections. The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said Iran was worth losing his seat over in an interview before his untimely death from a heart ailment. His sister, Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC), who is currently filling that seat and would like to keep it for a full six-year term, isn’t talking much about Iran, however.
Minnesota Republican Senate candidate Michele Tafoya has made comments that seem to prioritize the war over prices. These will be endlessly quoted by her Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (D-MN), and the socialist’s supporters.
Trump is naturally annoyed that affordability, touted by socialists and other Democrats who back inflationary policies, has become an albatross for him. The worst of the price increases happened between his two nonconsecutive terms. But inflation is cumulative, and he was never going to satisfy voters who believed he could bring prices back down to 2019 levels, which is impossible without an economic collapse.
Congressional Republicans haven’t passed much of the Trump agenda apart from the huge reconciliation package known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Of particular annoyance to both Trump and the GOP base, the Senate hasn’t been able to pass the SAVE America Act, an election integrity measure, and seems unlikely to do so before the midterm elections.
Whatever you think about the efficacy of this legislation when it comes to stopping voter fraud, the Senate GOP’s failure to pass it has impacted the midterm environment in other ways. It was a big reason Cornyn lost his primary to Paxton (and also why Cornyn’s poll numbers against Talarico didn’t look markedly better). It also kept Trump from signing the bipartisan housing affordability law. He allowed it to become law without his signature rather than vetoing it, but it further complicated Republicans’ affordability messaging.
Then there are the polls, which are bad for Republicans. Trump is at a second-term low in the RealClearPolitics average, below 40% with even worse numbers on the economy, inflation, and Iran. Democrats are up 7.1 points in the generic congressional ballot, which measures which party voters prefer to run Capitol Hill.
But the polls also showed big primary leads for socialists el Sayed and Hong that failed to materialize. Hong would probably have suffered an even greater loss if it weren’t for early voting. A pre-primary Marquette poll found the eventual victor with just 7% (he did nearly 33 points better than that). El Sayed’s allies flooded the averages with favorable internal polls that overestimated his advantage.
This has deepened Republican skepticism of the polling, after Trump outperformed his poll numbers in three straight presidential elections. The GOP also did not do as well as some polls predicted in the 2022 midterm elections.
Many of the problems with the primary polls might not apply to a general election. But if response-rate bias is causing pollsters to hear too much from young progressives and miss other voting blocs, that could be an issue in November.
TRUMP TOUTS LARGE WAR CHEST FOR MIDTERM ELECTIONS WITH OVER $400 MILLION ON HAND
Democrats still have to feel better about their position, given how midterm elections have generally gone since 1938. The only times the party holding the White House has gained rather than lost House seats were 1998, amid the Clinton impeachment, and 2002, after 9/11. The GOP House majority is vanishingly small, with no blue wave necessary to wash it away, just modest Democratic gains.
That is, if, while in the midst of a socialist revolution, Democrats can do better than Stengel’s 1962 New York Mets.
W. James Antle III (@jimantle) is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.