Democrats have a hefty advantage in national polls. President Trump is playing defense, campaigning through deep-red corners of the country that he won by overwhelming margins just two years ago. And assumptions that Democrats will win control of Congress have become conventional wisdom in many quarters, from longtime political observers to social media to the oddsmakers in prediction markets.
But as Democratic dreams of midterm victories grow bigger, some strategists quietly worry that expanding expectations are crowding out signs of a more challenging political reality.
Control of the Senate hinges on victories in red states that favored Mr. Trump by significant margins in 2024, including some that Democrats have not won in decades. Republicans are outspending them by eye-popping amounts in key races. And after its performance in 2024, the Democratic Party as a brand still remains unpopular among voters.
All of that has left some in both parties wondering: Could the much-discussed blue wave end up looking more like a splash?
Strategists in both parties believe it is increasingly unlikely that Republicans will be able to hold on to their House majority. But among Democratic donors, activists and voters, hopes of winning control of both chambers have grown so high that some fear any other result could feel like falling short.
“I am concerned that we have an overheating of expectations,” said Molly Murphy, a pollster who worked on the 2024 campaigns of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former Vice President Kamala Harris. “People often assume in a wave you win everything, and what happens in a modern wave is you win far more than normal.”
The kind of broad wins that once defined wave elections are largely a thing of the past, Ms. Murphy said, destroyed by gerrymandering that has left relatively few House seats truly competitive.
In 2018, the most recent midterm election considered a landslide election, Democrats won 41 House seats and control of the chamber. But Republicans gained two Senate seats and expanded their majority.
This year, there’s near-universal agreement among politicians, strategists and activists that Republicans face steeper political headwinds than Democrats. Mr. Trump’s approval rating hit a new low this week, views of the economy are dismal and Democrats lead by 11 points on the generic ballot — a measure often used to gage a party’s strength.
The sharp deterioration of the national political environment for Republicans has transformed the electoral map, forcing their candidates on the defensive in surprising places. This week, Senate Majority PAC, the main super PAC for Senate Democrats, began airing $1.2 million in television ads in Mississippi — a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic U.S. senator since 1982.
That’s a striking reversal of expectations from two years ago, when Democrats began plotting a midterm strategy and winning control of the Senate seemed nearly impossible. Then, Republicans — and some Democrats — scoffed when Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader from New York, publicly discussed recruiting a Democratic candidate for Senate in Mississippi.
The question is whether the Democrats’ momentum is strong enough to lift their candidates in deep red states to victory. To win control of the Senate, Democrats must flip four Republican-held seats, and keep all of their own.
Of the 10 Senate battleground contests, four feature Republican incumbents: Senators Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Jon Husted of Ohio, Susan Collins of Maine and Roger Marshall of Kansas. And five are happening in states that Mr. Trump won by 11 points or more in 2024.
“Structurally, the Senate is built to be Republican, and the question is whether this wave can breach that levee,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “It is incredibly hard.”
Polling, early-voting turnout and the results of recent special elections suggest that Democrats are far more enthusiastic than Republicans this election cycle.
But those measures, particularly early-vote returns, can be misleading. Turnout can flip on Election Day, particularly if Republicans successfully leverage their campaign war chest and Mr. Trump’s tour through Republican strongholds to drive their supporters to the polls.
“Trump is probably going to do some good in these red-leaning states when he comes in,” said David Kochel, a veteran Republican political strategist from Iowa, where Mr. Trump held a campaign rally on Thursday. “There’s still a lot more Republicans in Iowa and Kansas than there are Democrats.”
In Sioux City, Iowa, on Thursday night, Mr. Trump offered plenty of MAGA red meat, attacking Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and urging Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor in Ohio, not to take down an ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent that has drawn bipartisan backlash. And, Mr. Trump told the crowd, he had the “right” to run for a third term.
“I’m asking you to pretend I’m running,” he said, repeating a frequent refrain. “Pretend I’m on the ballot.”
Can the polls be trusted?
This year, as in several recent election cycles, Democrats harbor considerable anxiety about the accuracy of polling. Some strategists worry that pollsters are oversampling Democrats, particularly in red states, who may be more likely to respond to questions about the election.
A historical assessment of congressional polls conducted by The Economist this week found that the more partisan a state, the more the polls have underestimated the strength of the dominant party.
If that trend held true this year, it would temper Democratic expectations in states like Alaska, Texas, Ohio, Iowa and Kansas.
And even if the polls favoring Democrats turn out to be accurate, many individual Senate races are quite close, in some cases within the margin of error.
“There will be two explanations if the wave is just a ripple,” said Howard Wolfson, a veteran Democratic strategist. “One is there is a massive polling error. The second is that the Democrats didn’t have enough money to put enough races into play and make the races that were in play sufficiently competitive.”
G.O.P. financial advantage
Republicans currently have an advantage of about $650 million in general-election advertising, according to a review of past and future ad reservations across federal and state races by AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.
Their edge is most pronounced in the Senate: In the seven races that the Cook Political Report rated as tossups, Republicans are outspending Democrats on advertising by more than $320 million, according to a separate tally by AdImpact.
The lack of Democratic funds limits the party’s ability to mount aggressive campaigns in the kind of districts that would fuel a wave, said Mr. Wolfson, a political adviser for Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, who spent about $80 million bolstering Democrats this fall.
So far, the polls haven’t shown significant shifts since more money started pumping into races.
But the spending is being felt not only in the barrage of campaign ads, said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist based in Michigan, but also in efforts to push Republican voters to the polls. Republicans have embraced a version of the strategy that helped them capture the White House in 2024, focusing on driving loyal Republican voters who typically skip midterm elections to the polls.
And just as in 2024, they have gotten plenty of outside help, including from Elon Musk, who has quietly funneled more than $276 million into building a huge turnout operation to help Republicans.
The impact of that work might not be clear until Election Day.
“I have never seen more money spent on the ground in my life — it is obscene,” Mr. Roe said. “If you are a Republican voter, you are going to get harassed to no end to turn out.”
He added: “The question is: How many of those people are so unhappy with Trump or Republicans that they don’t vote for us when they get there?”
Unpopular with voters
Some Democrats also worry that their party’s still-battered brand could hurt their support in November. Even as Democratic candidates gain support, polling shows lingering disapproval of their party overall.
Just 28 percent of voters said they are satisfied with the Democratic Party, in the recent New York Times/Siena poll, eight points lower than satisfaction with the Republican Party and the share of voters who approve of Mr. Trump’s job performance.
Republicans have tried to capitalize on that skepticism by casting Democratic candidates as far-left radicals who want to turn the country into “a socialist hellscape.”
Matt Bennett, a vice president at Third Way, a centrist think tank that presses for a more moderate Democratic approach, worries that some of the party’s more progressive candidates, including Senate nominees Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine, are underperforming Democrats competing in traditional red states.
Is there a scenario in which Democrats win in red states but squeak by in blue ones? Mr. Bennett doesn’t rule it out. Midterms, he said, can produce strange results.
“Every single one of the Senate races is on a knife’s edge,” Mr. Bennett said. “The results could be super weird.”
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