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Notes -
Predictions & reasoning for the midterms (and if nobody else creates an official open thread, I'm interested in your own predictions below).
Full disclosure: I have worked on campaigns in the past (sometimes as a volunteer, and sometimes paid), first for Democrats for almost 30 years, and then in the most recent three cycles I've worked on Republican campaigns. But I'm trying to be objective in these predictions below.
These predictions are not what I want to see happen- I would prefer Republicans to win, and I dearly hope Republicans will maximize turnout in this election and prove me wrong- these are just what I think will actually happen. Bad news first, good news after!
House popular vote: Democrats +11%
House odds of Democrats winning: 99%
Senate modal outcome: Democrats 55 seats (note: this is not the average, nor is it the median, it is the mode, the most likely single outcome)
Senate odds of Democrats winning: 88%
I would advise that if you have bet a lot of money on Republicans, that you seriously consider whether the risk is worth it, especially the double-whammy of a possible emotional hit along with a possible financial hit tomorrow. But make your own best judgment.
-Almost everyone has been using 2022 or 2024 as their starting point for how this election will go. I think this is wrong.
We need to use the last midterm in which Trump was President. The 2018 midterms will have the most similar electorate to this year's election. And in 2018, Democrats won by 8.6%, and so that needs to be our baseline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections
If something had happened to drastically change the political coalitions, then we could use a more recent election. But that has not happened (and most demographic changes in the electorate have been for the worse, for Republicans).
2018 will have the most similarity to 2026 in terms of voter propensity to vote in a midterm, motivation to vote for or against Trump, education ratios, etc.
-In 2018, voters had a higher approval of Trump on the economy, than they do this time. So, we can expect Republicans to do worse this time than in 2018. I don't have much to add to this point, but it's the most important point.
-In 2018, the racial and educational situation among registered voters was better for Republicans than it is now. Republicans are in a constant race against the demographic clock. Since 2018, we have had 8 years of mostly older and whiter and more conservative voters dying off, while being replaced by younger & more racially diverse voters that have been heavily influenced by the media and school system to be liberal.
We can expect the baseline situation to be worse for Republicans in every single election going forward, unless a major change is made. Today's deportations help in the distant future, but they don't make much of a difference now.
-Side note: Republicans missed a fantastic opportunity to turn deportations into a win on economic issues. If they had sent out monthly checks to all citizens for the past 2 years, and labeled them something like "rewards check for less illegals" (which is just a true statement over the long-term, since illegal immigrants send huge amounts of money overseas, and the children and grandchildren of illegal immigrants are a huge burden in the school systems, healthcare system, and criminal justice system), Republicans would have achieved what most voters thought they would be getting with deportations.
Most voters thought that more deportations would mean less illegals on welfare, which would equal more money for everyone else. Republicans failed to deliver on the economic side of the equation of what voters thought they would be getting.
Interestingly, Trump is now trying to convert tariffs into a rewards check. And that's not a bad idea, politically speaking, especially if had been done from the start.
But it would have worked even better if Republicans had paired deportations with a clear economic benefit paid out every month. That would have kept their strongest issue front and center in the minds of the voters, and it would have simultaneously made immigration and the economy into even stronger issues for them. That probably would have been enough to turn this into a surprisingly good midterm, instead of the disaster I think we will witness tomorrow.
-The fear factor. Thanks to decades of a toxic political environment, roughly 10-20% of voters are afraid of both parties, and tend to vote for divided government when they get the chance.
This would already be bad for Republicans in this election, but it's been made even worse by the AI situation making a lot of voters more fearful than usual, and the Russian war, the Iran war, the tariffs battling, Greenland and Canada drama, etc.
A lot of people that actually dislike or are even mildly afraid of Democrats will still vote for Democrats to "keep an eye on the Republicans".
-Corruption has been costing incumbents elections since time immemorial, and certainly in recent elections, and whatever you think of the reality, Trump is perceived by a lot of voters as corrupt on numerous possible fronts (financial corruption allegations, Epstein allegations, numerous other claims, and even the Russia corruption claims are rearing their heads again).
This is a worse situation for Republicans than in 2018 when Democrats had less to work with. Democrats then were mainly focused on trying to get voters to care about Russia and Putin before the 2022 Ukraine invasion made it seem at least somewhat more relevant for Americans.
-We already have a mountain of recent evidence to confirm the base case that this election will be like 2018, but worse. Recent special elections have been atrocious for Republicans.
And the 2025 elections in Virginia and New Jersey were horrific for Republicans even though Republicans had high turnout for off-year elections.
The Republicans have actually done an amazing job of turning out their voters, and they have still been losing badly, because the Democrat turnout has been through the roof.
And the evidence suggests that Democrats are doing just as well or better in Virginia and New Jersey than in 2025, so the voter trend has clearly been to the left.
-This is a midterm in a President's 2nd term, and those usually go terribly for the incumbent party. Even Reagan and Obama had terrible 2nd-term midterms.
One major reason for this is that a lot of the President's base loses motivation to fight for the President and his party, because a 2nd-term President can't run for any more elections. This is an especially huge problem for Republicans, since so many Trump voters are low-propensity voters.
This is where ironically the intense hatred of Democrats towards Trump probably helps to turn out the Republican base, to some extent.
Bill Clinton was a rare President who had an OK midterm in his 2nd term, and I think part of it was because Republicans tried to remove him from office. The impeachment fight motivated Clinton's supporters to fight for Democrats as thought it was a Presidential election, and that made a big difference.
.....
Alright, the bright spots for Republicans, to explain why I'm not projecting a +16% win for Democrats:
-The electorate in 2026 appears to be older than in 2018. And older voters have less reason to change their votes, and more reasons to like the Trump economy.
The stock market helps them the most, they don't drive as much and don't care as much about gas prices, they often own their own homes, their pensions are usually pegged to inflation, their healthcare is usually covered by Medicare or some other plan, etc.
Even though there are a lot of liberal boomers, an elderly electorate will help blunt the Democrat advantages. The older the better.
-The financial balance between the parties is better than in 2018 (perhaps mostly thanks to Elon Musk). That can help to improve Republican turnout somewhat.
-If Republicans can manage to win 49+ seats, Fetterman might choose to caucus with them and save the Senate for the Republicans.
On the other hand, Murkowski in Alaska might switch and caucus with the Democrats. This is one reason why I think the modal outcome is for Democrats to finish with 55 seats.
The other reason is that Darline Graham in South Carolina is an inexperienced candidate hand-picked by Trump. And political swings tend to be stronger when your neighboring states are swinging, and North Carolina and Georgia are swinging left in this midterm, so South Carolina is also in danger.
-Republicans have some genuinely good candidates in some states. Collins in Maine, and Sullivan in Alaska, and Rogers is a much better fit for Michigan than the incredibly antisemitic and Palestine-focused El-Sayed. And the Stevens endorsement of Rogers might swing the election, if it's close enough.
And Peltola is a good candidate in Alaska but shot herself in the foot by gaming the RCV system with a fake Dan Sullivan candidate. I wonder if that drama might be enough to not only cause Peltola to lose, but also to cause ranked-choice voting to be repealed, which might also doom Murkowski in the next election.
-Most important of all, Republicans can save the Senate if they can simply do a good job of turning out their voters. There is a real chance that Democrats will have amazing turnout in those red states, and then simply run out of room, as long as Republicans can turn out their base.
Democrats obviously have a ton of possible voters they can turn out in blue states like Virginia and New Jersey, but Republicans have the larger turnout universes in states like Texas and Kansas and all the other red states.
So if Republicans turn out their voters in red states as well as or better than they did in Virginia and NJ in 2025, they have a fighting chance.
This theoretically should be doable if the Republicans understand their base well enough, and the fact that these are federal elections helps a lot. Voters are often more comfortable voting for the minority party in state government, but not for federal elections. Federal elections nationalize the issues and make more conservative-leaning voters fall back on Republican instincts.
-The social media situation, and some aspects of the overall media landscape, aren't as bad for Republicans as they were in 2018. This helps somewhat.
-Last but not least: while I think 2018 is the base case, 2020 and 2022 and 2024 can't be discounted entirely. There are large quantities of voters that have now voted Republican in three straight elections. Voting is a habit, so there might be enough habitual Republican voters to prevent complete disaster, even with excellent Democrat turnout.
I tend to think MAGA will over perform here as well. Trump has done something that is pretty rare in American politics — he has visibly kept most of the promises he made in the campaign (with a minor problem of the Iran war). This, I think is going to cover up some problems for the MAGA right, because no matter what you think about the MAGA agenda, you can absolutely see that it’s being done. Democrats don’t have such a record of visible accomplishment. Biden was supposed to “build back better” and have a bunch of infrastructure improvements. Nobody can point to a stretch of road or power stations or a renewable energy plant and say “Biden did that and kept his promise.” But with Trump, you have tge EU finally starting to take care of its own affairs, you have mass deportations, you have the government working to make abortions and transed kids rarer, you have trade protection for US manufacturers. Whether or not you agree with his agenda, he’s keeping his promises. Most politicians in my lifetime have been basically saying what the polls told them to say, and then quietly make excuses as to why you can’t just do that.
Secondly, the Democrats have no serious agenda. They don’t have an economic agenda, a foreign policy agenda, a social agenda, their entire political agenda seems to be “Prevent Trump from doing things, and hate on Israel.” Most people are probably not anti-Israel and even if they were, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as other issues that actually touch them personally. More people are affected by the laws allowing men into their daughter’s locker room and her sports team than are personally impacted by anything going on in Gaza.
Trump campaigned on tariffs as a means of boosting US manufacturing employment. Everything not connected to data centers is doing horrible. Keeping this campaign promise seems like it was bad.
Manufacturing has been growing steadily with record foreign investment.
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