One message of Christopher Nolan’s hit film “The Odyssey” was that even the cleverest of men cannot avoid suffering if they ignore the will of the gods. President Donald Trump is among the world’s cleverest politicians, but his determination to ignore the god of democracy — public opinion — has steered him toward Odysseus’s painful fate. Just as Odysseus’s men were wiped out on the long journey back from Troy, so too will large numbers of Trump’s Republican troops meet electoral doom Tuesday.
You don’t have to be a prophet to see what’s coming. No serious analyst thinks Republicans will have a good night as midterm returns roll in. The open question is whether it will be merely bad, terrible or something akin to being eaten by a Cyclops.
In this column, the 12th version of my biennial election prediction memo, I’m taking the middle course: I foresee a terrible night for the GOP, with losses in the House of 20 seats and a Democratic takeover of the Senate. Team Red will also lose many governorships and state legislative chambers as the public expresses, up and down the ballot, its significant dismay at the course of Trump’s presidency.
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I could be wrong about all this, and I will explain the most likely reasons for that. But the most probable outcome should move Trump and the GOP toward some serious reflection. They face a hard question in the final two years of his term: How can MAGA impulses be reconciled with broader public sentiment? Much as with Odysseus’s harrowing journey home, navigating those crosscurrents will take time and won’t be easy.
My forecast for congressional races
Every serious poll points to a strong Democratic night Tuesday. Trump’s job approval rating among registered and likely voters — a number I’ve tracked closely in the Margin of Victory newsletter — is just 38.8 percent, lower than any president has had on the eve of a midterm election. The RealClearPolitics generic congressional ballot average had Democrats up by 8.5 percentage points on Sunday evening. None of that is good for the GOP.
It matters a lot, however, how Democratic the overall vote actually turns out to be. Aggressive gerrymandering by the GOP has created a high wall against anything beyond a moderately sized Democratic majority in the House. In the Senate, the potential cusp states for taking control — meaning states where a Democratic victory would give them their 51st seat and thus a majority — voted for Trump by 11 or more points in 2024.
Historically, it would be a great outcome for the Democrats to win the national popular House vote (a rough proxy for the national climate in the absence of the presidential popular vote) by six percentage points. But that still would probably not produce a Senate majority or give House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (New York) a majority of more than about 225 members.
Republicans believe the polls are underestimating their voters, and they could be right (more on that later). But Democrats believe the polls might be understating their level of support, and there’s good evidence to back them up. Here, Trump’s weak job approval rating is key.
As readers of my column know, job approval ratings are a strong predictor of how presidents’ parties perform in midterms. In each of the past five midterm elections, the share of the national House vote that the party holding the White House received was no more than 5.8 points higher than the president’s job approval. In two cases — Trump in 2018, Barack Obama in 2010 — it was within 1.7 points of RCP’s final pre-election approval number.
This suggests it’s possible to work backward from Trump’s job approval rating to estimate the GOP’s share of the national House vote. Based on the historical pattern, Trump’s 38.8 percent job approval rating Sunday translates to a GOP share of the vote falling somewhere between 40.5 and 44.6 percent. (I exclude Obama’s 2010 result because his job approval was easily the highest of these five, meaning there were fewer Democrats who disapproved of his tenure but voted with their party anyway.)
Historical data regarding support for independent and third-party candidates can also be used to estimate the Democratic share of the vote. Those candidates received between 3.8 and 4.5 percent in 2006, 2010 and 2014. They got 2.8 percent in 2018 and 2.7 percent in 2022.
You don’t have to be a math whiz to see how bad this looks for Republicans. Trump’s 38.8 percent job approval suggests the GOP will get no more than about 44.6 percent of the vote Tuesday. If third-party voting is as high as it was from 2006 to 2014, Democrats would get a minimum of about 51 to 52 percent, giving them a 6.5-to-7.5-point advantage. That’s a bit less than the generic ballot shows, but still quite large. If it’s more in line with the past two midterms, Democrats would get about 52.6 percent — about an eight-point margin.
That’s assuming the GOP runs as far ahead of Trump as Democrats did of President Joe Biden in 2022. The gap between Trump’s job approval and the GOP’s generic ballot average is 4.66 percentage points right now, about one point below that historical level. Applying that number would imply a GOP vote share of about 43.5 percent, and a Democratic share of between 52 percent (if third-party voting is 2014’s high mark of 4.5 percent) and 53.8 percent (if it’s 2022’s low level of 2.7 percent).
This method projects a massive Democratic win of between 8.5 and a bit over 10 points. No party has won the national popular House vote by 10 points or more in a midterm since 1982, when Democrats prevailed by 11.8 percentage points (a margin that was padded by a large number of uncontested races that year).
Republicans will want to say there’s no way this can happen, but the pro-Democratic projection, it’s worth noting, is consistent with the parties’ allocation of late spending. Democrats are pumping money into a host of House races in districts Trump won by 10 to 20 points, and in many cases Republicans are following suit. A margin this large is also consistent with polls showing close Senate races in Kansas (where Trump won by 16 points in 2024), South Carolina (18 points) and Nebraska (21 points). Maybe everybody’s polls are off, including the private polls both parties take. But maybe not.
I’m going to be cautious and take the midpoint between the two measures. My final prediction on the Democratic margin in the national House popular vote is 9.25 percentage points. It could be more than that, and an extra couple of points would matter. At 9.25 points, my simple House model favors Democrats in 230 seats, and they would probably take a few seats more. At 10.3 points, it has them favored in 237.
This is why I am projecting Democrats to win 235 House seats, a gain of 20 from 2024’s level. If the optimistic Democratic scenario comes to pass, they will probably win between 240 and 250.
The national environment is also why I’m so bullish on Democrats’ chances to win the Senate. They lead in the RCP Senate polling averages in every state they hold, plus six Republican seats. I expect their candidate in Kansas, pastor Adam Hamilton, to come up just short: Kansas polling has a long history of overestimating Democratic Senate candidates. But I think they will win the other five, putting them at 52 seats total.
In Michigan’s close Senate race, Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens’s last-minute endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers could throw a monkey wrench into my prediction, as could the report last week that members of Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign worked to get retired teacher Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the Senate ballot in Alaska in an effort to confuse backers of Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan. In both cases, I’m betting that views on all candidates are so hardened — and that so many early votes have already been cast — that each Democrat squeaks through.
Now for some of the reasons I might be wrong. Maybe I’m giving too much weight to the GOP vote share imputed from the presidential job approval rating. If so, that could drop the Democratic national House margin back to around seven points. At that level, Democrats would win between 220 and 230 House seats and probably no more than 51 Senate seats. And they could easily fall short in any or all of Maine, Alaska and Michigan, giving Republicans control with either 50 or 51 seats.
Of course, I could also be seriously wrong if all the polling, including the private polls that both parties are basing their spending and travel decisions on, is undercounting Republicans.
GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini makes a strong case for why that might be so, which is probably why his firm’s latest poll only has Democrats up by five points on the House generic ballot. If he’s right, that will show up on election night in two ways.
First, Trump’s job approval rating in exit polls will probably be 41 or 42 percent, as more Trump-friendly Republicans vote. Second, the GOP’s share of White voters without a college degree will probably be closer to the norms of the past 10 years than what polls currently show. This was one of the tells that 2020’s pro-Democratic polls were off, as pre-election polling had Trump winning this key demographic by only 21 points but exit polls showed him prevailing by 35.
If this happens, Democrats will only narrowly take the House and probably not capture the Senate. The GOP could be expected to hold its seats in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and South Carolina — and probably Maine and Alaska, too. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico would have a tough time finding a path to victory, despite Republican Ken Paxton’s difficulties, and even Sherrod Brown in Ohio would be in a very tight contest. A Democratic advantage of five points could leave Republicans with 52 or 53 Senate seats, a testament to how skewed this year’s Senate map is toward the GOP.
The Republican in me wants to embrace this possibility. The analyst in me does not, and that’s why I think Tuesday will be terrible — possibly horrific — for the GOP.
That doesn’t mean the Trump era is over. The GOP has supposedly been on its deathbed at least twice in my lifetime, after 1976 and 2008, and both times it rose not only to win but also to fundamentally shift American politics in its direction. There’s no reason it can’t do so again. American politics shifts as quickly as the winds on the open sea, and savvy mariners know how to take advantage of those changes to steer their ships to port.
After he surrenders to the will of the gods, Odysseus does eventually make his way home. Once there, he slaughters the evil suitors for his throne with the help of his loyal son, Telemachus, and saves his kingdom. In Nolan’s retelling, he then sails off to the west with his wife, Penelope, leaving Ithaca in Telemachus’s care.
What if Trump took the same path? He could choose to center the final two years of his presidency on what his voters wanted from him to begin with: an end to the economic, geopolitical and cultural chaos of the previous two decades. That would involve focusing on raising real wages for all social classes, ending U.S. military involvement in wars of choice, cementing a secure border and reviving a definition of American patriotism that rejects the excesses of woke without abandoning the advances of the past 60 years.
Most of all, it would require him or his heir to explain this project to the American people. Trump’s background as the owner of a private company has guided his public life. He asserts rather than persuades, commands rather than cajoles. This 80-year-old dog may not be able to learn new tricks, but he has at least two potential successors — Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who are very capable of picking up that mantle.
A midterm trouncing does not imply presidential defeat two years later: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are proof of that. Republicans would love to see Vance or Rubio dispatch America’s suitors from the left.
That is for the future, however. Today, the Republican Party faces the prospect of becoming a minority in both houses of Congress while being led by a battered president badly in need of a new way forward. Perhaps the Republicans, like Odysseus, will find their way home. Or perhaps they will remain stranded on an island somewhere, filling their bellies with lotus and pretending the midterms debacle was just a nightmare. The suitors would like nothing more.
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