On Nov. 3, voters will finish weighing in on midterm elections that are heavily colored by President Donald Trump’s unpopular presidency.
These are the final midterm elections with Trump in the White House. He’s not on the ballot, but control of Congress could swing to Democrats, as could power in some states.
Here’s where things stand, one week out.
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Democrats look set to win the House majority
Democrats need a net gain of only three seats to win back the House majority. They have a chance in about two dozen districts. Many Republicans, meanwhile, are trying to defend their seats, including in some districts the GOP gerrymandered ahead of the election to be supposedly safer for their candidates.
“Absent a pretty massive polling error, it is very hard to imagine it isn’t a done deal for Democrats at this point,” said Molly Murphy, a former polling adviser to the Democrats’ House campaign arm.
Many Republicans privately agree, saying it’s hard for candidates to outrun Trump’s unpopularity and rising prices.
If Democrats win now-competitive congressional races in places including southwestern Wisconsin, Colorado Springs or Florida’s Gulf Coast, they could secure one of their biggest House majorities of the past two decades. That would mean two of the past three blue waves would have happened when Trump was in the White House.
“Think of Trump’s 2024 coalition as a line of people boarding a plane,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson. “Young men, Latinos, suburban women — they were the last ones on, they had the least loyalty, and they bought a ticket for one thing: lower prices. They were the first to notice the plane wasn’t going where he said it would. The last voters into his coalition are the first ones out.”
But the competitive House races mostly are taking place in Republican territory, where there are simply fewer Democratic voters.
“There is little question that this is going to be a big night for Democrats, but it is impossible to know just how big,” writes nonpartisan political analyst Charlie Cook.
“Pollsters can’t ascertain which disaffected Republicans will hold their noses and vote for their team, which will stay home, and which may take the relatively drastic step of actually casting a ballot for the opposite party,” Cook writes.
The Senate is within Democrats’ reach, too
To retake the Senate majority, Democrats need to flip four Senate seats from Republicans, all while winning reelection in their own competitive races.
It means Democrats will have oust Republican senators in some states that haven’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in years or even decades.
Democrats have a good chance to flip a seat in North Carolina. And polling suggests that Democratic Senate candidates in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska and even Kansas all have a chance to win. Some Democrats say flipping a Senate seat held by Republicans for generations in Mississippi is even a possibility.
“We truly have a chance to try and flip the Senate,” senior Democratic strategist Jim Manley said in a recent interview, “but only if everything goes just exactly perfectly.”
But Democrats also will need to avoid losses in Minnesota, New Hampshire and Michigan, where Republicans are making races competitive. And the Republican senator in Maine has a chance to win reelection in a state that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.
There will be at least some litigation over the results
At Trump’s request, his administration already has filed a lawsuit contesting the Senate election in Alaska if Democrats narrowly win. There are two candidates with similar names on the ballot, which the Justice Department argues could taint the result. Alaska election officials and the courts looked at the issue months ago and let the race proceed.
The Trump administration also sued California, claiming officials are allowing noncitizens to vote. California denies this, and Democratic groups have sued the Trump administration alleging interference from the federal government into how states run their elections.
It’s impossible to say if there will be more legal efforts by the administration to challenge the results, said David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney and head of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.
But if there are, he predicted they would quickly lose in court.
“The feds have absolutely zero standing of authority to interfere with state certification,” he said. “These cases seem to be more about throwing gas on the flames of false claims about the election, rather than any actual legal strategy.”
Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.
The post What to expect in next week’s midterm elections appeared first on Washington Post.
