In early 2005, during gloomy times for Democrats, Sheldon Whitehouse launched a successful bid for a Senate seat that had been solidly in Republican hands for almost 30 years.
“President Bush was very popular and seemed to have the wind at his back, and it seemed like it was an uphill struggle,” Sen. Whitehouse (Rhode Island) recalled Thursday.
And in July 2013, Joni Ernst (R) launched her Senate race as a little-known state senator from Iowa, where voters had favored Democrats in six of the previous seven presidential contests.
Those elections were held in the sixth year of a presidency, for George W. Bush in 2006 and Barack Obama in 2014. Over the past 80 years, those six-year elections have tended to produce the most brutal results in the Senate for the administration’s party.
Sens. Ernst and Whitehouse won their races by comfortable margins, with every month providing another break falling their way in a wave that propelled their party into the majority.
“It was a fun year,” Ernst recalled Thursday, part of a nine-seat gain for Republicans, the largest pickup for any party since 1980. “I just think the American people were ready for a change.”
These elections have been dubbed the “six-year itch,” a political adaptation of what marriage experts call the “seven-year itch,” when breakups most often happen.
At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, Democrats viewed 2026 mostly as a chance to regain the House majority, requiring just a three-seat shift. The four-seat gain needed in the Senate seemed out of reach.
But some Senate Democrats have noted parallels to what doomed previous administrations in years five and six: legislative overreach on health or entitlement issues, a lame-duck president focused on overseas diplomacy that voters were not interested in, and corruption allegations.
Just one or two of those factors can produce a bad midterm election, but all three can be brutal, especially if there is economic turmoil.
“I don’t know about six-year itches, but I do think that the 2006 election related to the president losing the confidence of the American people,” Whitehouse said, “and I think what we’re seeing right now is President Trump losing the confidence of the American people.”
Since 1958, Bill Clinton is the only president who didn’t suffer big Senate losses in his sixth year in office, as Democrats held even in 1998. Two years later, Clinton left office as the most popular second-term president in the modern era of polling.
Public sentiment has shown Trump in a steady dive for more than six months. In the last week, three polls showed his job approval standing with independent voters below 30 percent. Fox News found just 27 percent of independents approved of Trump’s performance, with 72 percent disapproving. That was a net drop of 22 points since March.
“I think in off-year elections, what can outweigh party loyalty, frankly, is frustration with the incumbent. You know, we’re doing almost as well with independents as we’re doing with Democrats,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said in an interview, calling himself “much more optimistic” now about winning the majority than a year ago.
Democrats acknowledge that Trump has defied odds and polls before, narrowly winning two elections that at times he seemed to be losing. They are betting that this month’s sweeping wins in state and local elections from Virginia to Pennsylvania illustrate what could happen next year when Trump is not on the ballot to draw out his most devoted supporters.
This growing confidence runs up against states that seem tough for Democrats to flip.
Democrats must first defend two seats in states that Trump won last year, Georgia and Michigan, as well as New Hampshire, a swing state. Then they must win Republican seats in Maine, where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won in 2020 and 2024, and North Carolina, where each narrowly lost to Trump.
Should they run that table, Democrats would then need to win two of roughly five states that last year decisively were in Trump’s favor, with victory margins of 11.5 to 16 percentage points: Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Texas and Kansas.
Republicans have incumbents running in four of those states. The party has also rallied behind a nominee to replace Ernst, who is retiring and remains confident her side can retain the majority.
“We’ve got high-quality candidates, which makes a difference,” she said. “I do think that the quality of candidates really does matter. Their message matters.”
Of the 25 states that voted for Trump all three times, Republicans hold all 50 Senate seats, and any path to the majority requires Democrats winning at least a couple of those.
Some Republican strategists have been sending warning signs about Trump’s lackadaisical approach on consumer prices and the strength of the economy.
“When families are paying the price for hamburger that they used to pay for steak, there’s a problem, and there’s no sugarcoating it. The same goes for housing and health insurance,” wrote David Winston, a GOP pollster and researcher with expertise on independent voters.
Winston noted that a recent Economist/YouGov poll found only 21 percent of independents approving of Trump’s handling of inflation. Exit polling showed Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger (D) won Virginia’s independents by almost 20 points in the Nov. 4 election — four years after Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) won them by nine points.
“Republicans need to understand that the coalition that elected Biden in 2020 reconstituted itself this fall because independents wanted to send the White House and Congress a blunt message,” he wrote.
And if next year turns into a six-year-itch election, Democrats could see a narrow path toward the Senate majority, in the short term, and potentially long-term competitiveness in those states.
Trump’s sixth year as president is not a typical “itch” candidate because he had a four-year interruption after losing to Biden in 2020. But Schumer sees signs of Trump turning to those lame-duck tendencies of presidents looking to lock up legacy wins.
The massive domestic policy bill that cut taxes, increased border security and boosted energy production was financed by a large cut to Medicaid. And the two parties are feuding over expiring tax breaks that help provide politically popular health insurance as Americans voice concerns about affordability.
Plus, for an “America First” disciple, Trump regularly devotes a large amount of his weekly schedule to foreign policy matters — something Bush and Obama did tending to Middle East crises and Ronald Reagan did with the fall of the Soviet bloc in his second term.
“Who would have thought he’s becoming a foreign policy president?” Schumer said. “Most of what he does is foreign policy.”
It remains to be seen whether the battles over federal investigations into the late Jeffrey Epstein — the New York financier who was convicted of sex crimes involving underage girls and with whom Trump had a social relationship decades ago — turn into the sort of scandals that Bush, Reagan and Dwight D. Eisenhower faced.
Gallup, which has tracked presidential approval every month for decades, shows Trump is already in the same politically fraught point that Obama and Bush occupied by Labor Day of their sixth year in office.
Obama had 41 percent approval from voters at that point in 2014, while Bush had 39 percent in early September 2006. Just 41 percent of voters approved of Trump’s performance this month, a full year ahead of the midterms.
Ernst offers a warning that Iowa should not be considered a safe GOP seat, despite all four House members and two senators being Republican.
“If you scratch the surface, it’s still purple. It is, and we have a large bloc of independent voters,” she said.
Obama had just won Iowa comfortably two times in a row when Ernst, then an Iowa Army National Guard member, jumped into the race. She ran a flawless campaign, while Obama’s legislative agenda on immigration and gun violence got stalled and the rollout of the Affordable Care Act turned into a logistical mess.
She won by almost 10 points. Democrats haven’t won a gubernatorial or Senate race there since 2008.
Whitehouse went up against the Chafee dynasty in 2006; he defeated incumbent Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R), who succeeded his father, John Chafee, who first won the seat in 1976.
The Iraq War started to go sideways, Bush’s push to privatize parts of Social Security was deeply unpopular and stalled, and Republicans in Congress got caught up in pay-to-play corruption allegations.
“By the time the election came, it was really a wave election,” said Whitehouse, who won by more than 7 percentage points.
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