Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Republican Matt Van Epps’s victory by nine percentage points in Tuesday’s special election in Tennessee should pour some cold water on predictions of a Republican disaster in next year’s midterms. But there’s no doubt the GOP is facing headwinds in its effort to hold control of Congress in 2026.
Van Epps’s 7th Congressional District win was larger than a shocking pre-election Emerson College poll had foreseen. That poll gave Van Epps just a two-point lead, within the margin of error, in a district that President Donald Trump carried by 22 percentage points in 2024. Many pundits also forecast a close race, noting that Democrats had outperformed the presidential margin by an average of 20 points in other congressional special elections this year.
That’s why the final margin was actually reassuring for Republicans. The party was able to turn out its base, leading to a vote total almost as high as 2022’s midterms. Skittish GOP members of Congress can feel more confident that they aren’t likely to fall victim next year to an upset on the scale of Democrat Conor Lamb’s surprise capture of a normally safe GOP seat in Pennsylvania in 2018.
This doesn’t mean the result was good for Republicans. A 13-point swing from 2024 would still, if replicated across the country next year, result in a blue wave likely to produce a gain of 30 or more seats for Democrats in the House. It might even be enough for them to recapture the Senate.
That magnitude of shift is still unlikely, however. In the Trump era, midterm electorates have been larger, and more Republican, than those of special elections. In 2022, Tennessee had one of the lowest turnouts of any state. But more than 242,000 votes were cast in 2018’s midterm election in the 7th District, about one-third more than on Tuesday. If Van Epps and his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Aftyn Behn, square off in a rematch next November, expect Van Epps to win much more comfortably.
Special election shifts do, however, generally predict the direction of the following year’s midterm. CNN Harry’s Enten noted that parties that overperformed their presidential election year margin in the following cycle’s special elections have captured control of the House five out of five times since 2005. That should scare House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), despite Tuesday’s relatively good news.
There’s an obvious reason the GOP is in trouble: Trump’s job approval rating. A president’s job approval is the single best predictor of how well his party will fare in a midterm election. Right now, Trump sports an abject 42.4 percent approval on the RealClearPolitics average. He’s a bit higher than that among voters, because the average includes polls of all adults, which necessarily include noncitizens. Stripping them out improves Trump’s rating only to 43.5 percent. That’s still 1.5 points below his approval in the 2018 midterm exit poll — and the GOP lost 40 House seats that year.
The party won’t lose that many in 2026 because it holds far fewer seats won by the Democrat in the prior presidential election. House Republicans went into 2018 holding 26 seats that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016; they lost 23 of those. They will go into 2026 defending only three seats that Kamala Harris won in 2024, excluding districts that have been altered via redistricting.
Still, there are 20 to 25 Trump-carried seats outside of the states engaging in redistricting that probably will be up for grabs if Trump’s job approval remains this low. And the party’s unprecedented mid-decade redistricting efforts are not likely to offset these losses. As things stand, Democrats would almost certainly gain six House seats in California and Utah, while Republicans would net only five from Texas, Missouri and North Carolina. Democrats could lock in a few more gains if they redistrict Maryland and Virginia, enough to counter expected gains from Republican efforts in Indiana and Florida.
We’re a bit under a year away from the midterms and a lot can happen in that time. President Joe Biden had only a 42.3 percent approval rating at this point in his term, yet Democrats lost only nine House seats and gained a Senate seat in 2022. Current trends point to a gloomy year for Republicans, but not a historic shellacking, and President Trump and the GOP sill have time to turn it around.
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