With hours before Election Day and close to 50 million ballots already cast, candidates and their supporters are scrambling across a political battleground broader and deeper than leaders in either party imagined even a few months ago.
Republicans are on defense in deep-red territory, including in states they have dominated for decades.
So fluid is the map that the authoritative Cook Political Report on Friday shifted its ratings of another dozen House races toward Democrats, following similar adjustments throughout the fall. The party that has been shut out of power in Washington for the past two years has a realistic possibility of winning as many as 240 House seats, Cook analyst Erin Covey wrote, their largest majority there since 2009.
Democrats are also seeing increased odds of winning at least four additional seats needed to regain control of the Senate, which was not considered a likely bet at the outset of the campaign season, and a majority of the nation’s governorships for the first time since 2010.
Democrats are showing notably more enthusiasm about voting than Republicans are, according to polls and insiders from both parties.
“What we’re seeing across the country is massive Democrat turnout,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on his podcast Friday. “If the election were over today, if just the early votes that have been cast so far were counted, Republicans would lose massively. It would not be close. We would lose both the House and Senate. It would be a bloodbath.”
At the same time, however, the GOP has a significant spending advantage over Democrats. Republicans are also hoping that the tribalism that has defined national politics for more than a decade will help them close the gap in the final stretch, when Republicans often have an advantage with voters who wait to cast ballots until Election Day.
Still, most signals indicate deep discontent with President Donald Trump and his party — traditionally, the most powerful determinant of midterm elections. Trump’s job approval has sunk to record lows, below 40 percent in most polls.
The cost of living, which voters cite as their top concern, is outpacing income growth and being driven up by the fuel price spike caused by Trump’s tariffs and unpopular war with Iran. Trump has also vastly increased his personal wealth while in the Oval Office, bringing the issue of corruption to the forefront.
This creates a tactical conundrum for the Republican Party, which relies on Trump to motivate the MAGA base, particularly the hard-to-rouse “low-propensity” voters who showed up at the polls to help him win in 2024.
In the current environment, though, unholstering the GOP’s biggest gun also has the potential to backfire. The most recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that more than three-quarters of independent voters and nearly half of Republican-leaning independents disapprove of the job the president is doing.
On top of that, Trump’s overall numbers are underwater in battleground states, including such normally red bastions as Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio and Alaska — all of which have tight Senate races this year.
Which could explain the chaos that appears to be surrounding the question of how to deploy Trump in the final days. The president had been keeping a frenetic schedule of rallies in generally friendly Republican territory, but on Thursday, his team cancelled appearances that had been scheduled for this weekend in Kansas and Iowa, saying they would do roughly 20 virtual events for candidates around the country instead. Then, on Friday, they reversed themselves and said the in-person rallies were back on for Sunday.
Individual GOP contenders have had trouble figuring out how closely to tie themselves to Trump.
When Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) announced last year that she was running for an open Senate seat in a state Trump carried three times, she promised to be the president’s strongest ally in the chamber. Hinson has appeared at a rally with Trump and featured him in her ads.
But now, as she faces the prospect of losing to Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek, Hinson is pledging to be “a thorn in his side if he’s wrong for our state.”
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