Chris Matthews is a political commentator and host of the show “Hardball” on Substack. His most recent book is “Lessons From Bobby: Ten Reasons Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters.”
Donald Trump didn’t wait for 2026 to begin the fight for control of Congress. In December, the president showed up at a ski resort in the Poconos, and he wasn’t there for the lovely Pennsylvania mountain scenery. He knows what’s headed his way.
Trump and his people are well aware that Democrats’ hopes for a big victory in the midterms start with seats they lost narrowly in 2024. Three Pennsylvania Republicans appear high on the list.
In 2024, Rob Bresnahan won his Scranton seat, just up Interstate 380 from where Trump spoke, with only 50.8 percent of the vote. Ryan Mackenzie won his seat in the Lehigh Valley, which includes Allentown and Bethlehem, with 50.5 percent of the vote. In the Harrisburg area, Scott Perry is another 50 percenter; he eked out reelection in 2024 at 50.6 percent.
Victories in those districts could set the Democrats up for the 30-plus-seat nationwide sweep that some watchers — me included — are betting is coming this coming fall.
And with it, a turnaround in the trajectory of Trump’s chaotic and damaging presidency.
There are three solid reasons to expect 2026 to bring a big win for the Democratic opposition.
The first is the narrow Republican advantage heading into the campaign.
It takes 218 seats for a party to secure a majority of the 435-seat House of Representatives. After recent vacancies, the GOP holds exactly that number. At 213 seats, Democrats need to add just five to win control. (Special elections before November will change those totals, but the majority will be razor-thin on Election Day no matter what.)
Second, there’s the history of midterm “change” elections in favor of the party that’s not in the White House. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Democrats gained 41 seats. In 2010, Republicans flipped 64 seats in the “shellacking” they gave to Democrats, as President Barack Obama memorably described it. George W. Bush and the GOP lost 31 seats in 2006. Bill Clinton and the Democrats lost 54 in 1994.
The third reason for Democratic optimism is the party’s recent string of electoral successes.
Start with Mikie Sherrill’s big victory in the New Jersey governor’s race in November. While many observers expected a squeaker, she swamped her hard-running Republican rival, Jack Ciattarelli, with 57 percent of the vote. In Virginia, gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger won an even bigger victory for Democrats. In Pennsylvania, Democrats pulled off a remarkable streak of wins of local offices in hotly contested Bucks County. They also won two statewide races in Georgia.
Then a December special election brought surprise in Tennessee. In a ruby-red congressional district that a Republican won by 22 points in 2024, the Democratic candidate came within just nine percentage points of an upset. Translated nationally, that shift of 13 percentage points could spell a 2024 Democratic House victory of 30 seats. A week after that, Miami elected its first Democratic mayor in nearly 30 years.
All that explains why the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is salivating over vulnerable Republicans — Bresnahan, Mackenzie and Perry, along with Brian Fitzpatrick of Bucks County — in purple Pennsylvania.
It also explains why three of them — Bresnahan, Mackenzie and Fitzpatrick — just backed a leadership-defying House vote on extending expiring Obamacare subsidies.
And, of course, why Trump was in the Poconos. To avoid its own shellacking, the GOP needs to find a way for the president to awaken the full MAGA base. The problem with that? The more the party works to put the fate of Trump’s presidency on the ballot, the more the Democrat base will tune in and turn out, too.
That leaves the persuadable middle. Are those who decided on Trump in 2024 happy with what he’s given them? Or are they coming to believe, like many of those long-ago investors in Trump casinos and enrollees in Trump University, that they’ve been taken for a ride?
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