Republicans gathered in Dallas for an unusual mid-cycle convention to shore up the base ahead of November’s midterm elections. President Donald Trump headlined the event because he has the most to lose. He is not on the ballot, but his job is.
And he knows it. In Dallas on Wednesday during his nearly two-hour speech, he declared, “Because in actuality, I really am running. We don’t really know it, but we are. I mean, we’re running together. We have to, we have to have Congress. We have to have the majorities. If we don’t have the majority, so much can be lost.”
In most systems of government, a president who loses his legislative majority loses power. In Washington, a president can serve with a Congress of his own party, or he can serve with a hostile House, a hostile Senate, or both.
The only way a president can largely do as he pleases is if his party holds the presidency, the House, and the Senate simultaneously, which political scientists call a “trifecta.” Right now, Republicans have one, but history says it won’t last. Since 1994, the same party has controlled all three institutions for just 12 of those 32 years, roughly a third of the time.
Divided government, not unified government, is the American norm, and in every trifecta since 2003, the governing party lost at least one chamber at the very next midterm: George W. Bush in 2006, Barack Obama in 2010, Trump himself in 2018, Joe Biden in 2022. That pattern is the headwind Trump faces this November.
That system of checks and balances was designed 250 years ago. America’s founders fought a war against a king, so they built a government deliberately incapable of letting any single person do everything he wants.
The stakes of losing either chamber are concrete. Lose the House, and Republicans cannot initiate a budget or a new tax law. Lose the Senate, and Trump loses the ability to fully staff his own executive branch. About 1,300 of America’s 4,000 political positions require Senate approval, and about 260 of those posts currently have no nominee.
A Democratic House or Senate also brings subpoena power and oversight hearings. Committees can demand documents, order staff to turn over emails, and drag administration officials before cameras to embarrass them. This is enormously costly in time and resources, and the risk of embarrassment and potential legal fees discourages some people from working for the administration.
With a loss of both chambers, the president faces the prospect of impeachment. Under the Constitution, the House impeaches by voting, with a simple majority, to bring charges. The Senate then tries the case, and, if it gets the support of two-thirds of senators, can convict and remove a president from office.
The House already voted twice to impeach Trump in his first term, but the Senate was Republican both times and never came close to convicting. Even if Democrats win the Senate in November, conviction is a high bar that no Senate has cleared in any impeachment. So while a Democratic Congress could impeach Trump again, removing him is unlikely.
Polling shows why Republicans are nervous. National polls have Democrats leading the generic congressional ballot, and Democrats need to flip just three seats in the House and four in the Senate to take control of both chambers. Betting markets favor Democrats retaking the House, with the Senate too close to call.
Trump doesn’t want to become negotiator-in-chief. He’d rather be the entertainer-in-chief Americans saw in Dallas. He’s spent the first two years of this term dominating the news cycle on his own terms. A hostile Congress would force him into constant deal-making, a less powerful role.
One issue could cut across party lines and decide swing races: electricity. Americans, like many others around the world, are facing higher electricity prices due to the rising costs of renewable energy in electricity generation. Trump returned repeatedly in his convention speech to the advantages of his domestic energy dominance agenda, which has resulted in lower energy prices than would have been the case otherwise.
THE SECRET 12% GROCERY TAX THAT COULD HAND DEMOCRATS THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS
Tied up in the results of the midterms is the fate of tax credits for wind and solar power, which add to the cost of electricity because they need additional backups and transmission lines. The new tax law sharply accelerated these credits toward extinction. Projects that didn’t begin construction by July 4 must be up and running by the end of 2027 to qualify, a far tighter deadline than the more generous runway granted to existing projects. A Democratic-controlled chamber would almost certainly try to restore or extend those credits.
So when Americans go to the polls on Nov. 3, they will not simply be delivering a verdict on Trump. They will be deciding whether he spends his final two years governing largely on his own terms, or learning, as other presidents have done before, to share power with people who did not vote for him.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the U.S. Transportation Department (2019-21), is a distinguished fellow at the Energy Policy Research Foundation.