Democrats are celebrating signs that the tide is turning their way for the 2026 midterms. But translating dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump into an electoral tsunami, or even a wave election, will be much harder to achieve than in years past.
History, polling, a narrow Republican majority, a string of off-year victories and voter anxiety over the economy favor the Democrats, who lead in support for control of Congress by five percentage points in a Post average of November and December national polls. But the battlefield in the House is smaller than ever, according to political analysts, experts and operatives, meaning Democrats will need to compete in districts that Trump won by large margins to pick up a significant number of seats.
Of the 39 seats Democrats are competing for, 28 are in districts that Trump won by five or more percentage points.
A gerrymandering spree instigated by Trump has narrowed the number of truly competitive seats, furthering a trend that was already underway in recent elections as the nation has become more polarized. That has not affected the race for the Senate, which Republicans are favored to hold.
Just 36 races in this year’s election are rated competitive by the Cook Political Report, compared with 49 races at the same point in the 2018 cycle. Half of the seats rated competitive by Cook this year are already held by Democrats, leaving the party even less room to gain ground.
“Democrats will have a very narrow but viable path to the majority. That’s a different scenario than 2006 or 2018, when Democrats put a ton of Republican-held seats in play,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the Cook Political Report. “There’s so little elasticity in U.S. House elections these days compared to prior eras.”
Democrats won 40 House seats in the “blue wave” of 2018 during Trump’s first term, easily erasing the Republicans’ then 23-seat governing margin.
The good news for Democrats this year: They need only three seats to regain control of the House.
That is achievable, but 2018-sized “waves” are harder now given increasingly partisan maps and a more divided electorate that has become more rigidly partisan, according to Wasserman and other analysts.
Party leaders, however, argue they are well positioned to compete in heavily Trump districts. Trump’s 2024 victory was powered by a historic realignment of the electorate that upended decades of traditional coalitions. He made inroads with Latinos, young voters, first-time voters and middle- and lower-income households. Democrats say they can unwind many of those gains with a slate of less traditional, and in some cases less partisan, candidates.
One of them is Paige Cognetti, the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who won her current seat by running as an independent in a campaign called “Paige Against the Machine.” Even though Trump won her district by about eight percentage points, voters are open to her because they still cannot afford basic necessities like housing and groceries and are not “bleeding Democrats or hardcore Republicans,” she said in an interview. She noted that Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) won the same district by eight percentage points in 2022.
Cognetti is challenging Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pennsylvania), who has faced scrutiny for stock trades while he was in Congress after campaigning on a ban on stock trading for members of Congress.
“This is the exact type of public corruption and cynical behavior that people here really, really loathe,” Cognetti said. “Government should work and people want to see it at their local level and federal level, too.”
Bresnahan supported an effort last year that would restrict members of Congress from trading stocks and has said lawmakers should not profit off the information that they have. Bresnahan’s stocks are in an institutionally managed fund that is run by financial advisers, spokesperson Hannah Pope said.
In a statement, Bresnahan’s campaign attacked Cognetti’s record as mayor and as “a former Goldman Sachs banker who made the richest Americans even richer.”
Democrats have coalesced around a midterm message focused on the cost of living and health care, hammering Republicans for passing a $4 trillion budget bill that includes steep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps. They have also highlighted Republicans’ failure to extend pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies that expired Dec. 31 that will drive up premiums for millions of Americans this year.
Democratic Party leaders have been energized by off-year and special elections in which Democrats performed above expectations. In a Tennessee special election last month in a district Trump won by 22 points, Republican Matt Van Epps won by about nine percentage points.
Some Republicans have urged the party to focus more on affordability, rather than solely focusing on issues such as crime or immigration that played a significant role in their 2024 sweep. Trump kicked off a tour last month in Pennsylvania to focus on Americans’ struggles with rising prices, but veered off-script, mocking the word “affordability,” touting the stock market and disparaging Somalia.
Republicans say they also have a slate of strong candidates in the country’s most competitive districts, including Kevin Lincoln, a former mayor and pastor running against incumbent Adam Gray (D-California) in a central California district, and Eric Flores, a Republican army veteran and lawyer challenging Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) in Texas’s 34th Congressional District, near the state’s southern Gulf Coast and the border with Mexico.
Mike Marinella, spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee, agreed the battlefield is smaller than in past midterm elections. But he said Republicans hold the advantage, pointing to about a dozen Democratic incumbents who are fending off challenges in districts that Trump won narrowly.
“Fundamentally, we have the upper hand just by looking at the pure numbers, and Democrats are certainly on defense in a lot more districts than we are,” Marinella said.
Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Washington), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview that many candidates competing in Trump districts are closely connected to their communities and “independent-minded.”
“Authenticity matters a ton because you’re talking to folks across the political spectrum,” DelBene said.
Democrats believe they have effectively neutralized Republican efforts to pick up additional seats through gerrymandering in Texas, Ohio and North Carolina by gaining seats of their own in California and Utah. The Indiana Senate rejected a partisan gerrymander last month, and Democrats are still exploring whether they could pick up seats in Virginia, Illinois and Maryland. Wasserman said the post-gerrymandering landscape remains “pretty equitable to both parties.”
As Trump’s approval ratings fall — 39 percent of voters approve of the job he is doing, according to a Washington Post average of polls in early December — Democrats are working to wipe out some of the gains he made with voter groups that are traditionally aligned with them.
In South Texas, Tejano music star Bobby Pulido is competing in one of the new districts Republicans drew to try to maintain the House majority.
Key to Trump’s victory in Texas’s 15th District, which includes the Rio Grande Valley, was an unprecedented rightward swing among Latino voters. Pulido has broad name recognition in the Southwest and in Mexico in large part because of his 1995 debut single “Desvelado.” Trump’s immigration crackdown is devastating tourism and the rest of the economy in South Texas, Pulido said, creating an opening among those who supported him.
“These immigration raids are hurting a lot of these small business owners or builders where their workforce they’ve had for years is no longer either there or afraid to go to work,” Pulido said in an interview. “I understand that a lot of Democrats don’t want to get labeled open borders. I’m sure as heck not open borders. … But due in large part to the immigration policies this administration has taken, we need to fix it.”
There are still myriad questions about where the final map for 2026 will end up. In addition to ongoing gerrymandering efforts by both parties, the Supreme Court is expected to decide whether to strike down the last major pillar of the Voting Rights Act, a provision that has bolstered the power of minority voters and candidates for more than 50 years.
If the court issues a ruling early enough and sides with Louisiana and the Trump administration — which has argued that race played too large a role in the decision to create a second Black-majority congressional district in the state — some states might scramble to redraw their maps and add Republican seats.
Chris Warshaw, professor of political science at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, said it’s not clear how aggressively Republican states will respond, if at all, if the Supreme Court strikes down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Even if Republican states try to redraw their maps, he said Democrats have shown they are willing to respond.
But the cost of last year’s redistricting fights is the health of American democracy, particularly as the country had previously made progress toward less partisan maps, he said.
“The unwinding of that progress is really sad, and there’s no reason to think this genie is going to go back into the bottle,” Warshaw said.
Scott Clement contributed to this report.
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