The U.S. Capitol on the evening of Sept. 30, 2025. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
Democrats have used President Donald Trump’s unpopularity to expand the midterm map, and analysts project the party carries momentum heading into the final two weeks of the election cycle, even as Democrats are expected to flip fewer U.S. House seats than wave elections this century.
The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter predicts Democrats will gain a net of 10 to 20 House seats in the Nov. 3 elections, Erin Covey, the top House analyst at CPR, said Monday during a panel discussion hosted by the Brookings Institution.
The party needs to pick up just three seats to gain control next year.
The Senate is closer to a pure toss-up, with the likely range of Democratic pickups between two and six seats, experts believe. A net gain of four would give Democrats a majority in that chamber.
The landscape is more favorable for Democrats at the end of the 2026 cycle than many people expected at the outset. Trump’s dismal approval ratings, especially on the economy and the war in Iran, appear to outweigh Republicans’ advantages in the Senate map and outside spending.
That has put Democrats on offense, pushing the battleground map further into traditionally GOP states and districts.
“It’s still not clear exactly how deep into the map Democrats can play,” Covey said. “They have fewer resources to invest in some of these reach seats. But regardless of how far they can expand the map, I think they are going to be in a very good position to win the House, and the Senate perhaps as well.”
The president’s party almost always loses House seats in midterms as its base voters are less motivated to turn out and those without strong partisan allegiances tend to opt to balance out the president’s power.
That happens “even when the president’s popular, even when there’s a good economy,” Christopher Warshaw, a professor at Georgetown University’s school of public policy, said on the Brookings panel. “And today the president, of course, is unpopular, and we have a relatively poor economy.”
Promises not kept
Driving Trump’s unpopularity is the administration’s failure to rein in inflation and to stay out of foreign wars, which was core to his appeal in the 2024 election, William Galston, a senior fellow in Brookings’ governance studies program, said.
Galston was also an official in President Bill Clinton’s White House and has staffed Democratic presidential campaigns.
Trump also blew a public-opinion advantage on immigration with an aggressive crackdown in the country’s interior that resulted in shooting deaths of U.S. citizens by federal agents, overshadowing his administration’s success at limiting illegal immigration at the southern border, Galston said.
“Trump has not done what he said he was going to do, that is, focus relentlessly on prices and bring them down,” Galston said. “He has done what he said he wouldn’t do, and that is start yet another difficult war in the Middle East … and third, he has taken what should have been his big winning issue, namely immigration, and turned it into a jump ball.”
As a result, the president’s approval rating is at record lows, with a Reuters/Ipsos poll Monday showing only 31% of voters approve of his job as president.
His record on the economy is generally viewed even more unfavorably, often polling in the 20s, Galston said.
“Other than core MAGA supporters, it is very difficult to find any appreciable pool of voters who think that the president has done a good job managing inflation, high prices, affordability,” Galston said.
Some regions, particularly rural areas, have been especially hard hit by Trump’s economic policies. That has put House districts in Iowa, southern Minnesota, Upstate New York and South Texas that had trended toward Republicans in recent decades back in play for Democrats, Covey said.
House elections: wave or ripple?
Still, even the upper limits of Democrats’ House gains would be well short of what both parties have seen in recent midterm elections.
Democrats gained 41 seats in Trump’s first midterm in 2018 and Republicans gained 63 seats in President Barack Obama’s first midterm in 2010. And in 2006, Democrats capitalized on an unpopular Middle East war to net 31 seats during George W. Bush’s presidency.
In part that’s due to Democrats’ “higher floor” this year, Covey said in an interview. Because they’ll enter Election Day with 214 of the chamber’s 435 seats, plus a vacancy in a reliably blue Florida district, they have less far to go to gain a majority and also less potential to expand.
To reach the same 235-seat size Democrats had after the 2018 elections, they need to gain half as many, Covey said.
Fewer competitive House districts, after redistricting and geographic sorting, also factor into potential gains, she said.
Long-term effects of redistricting
Starting with Texas Republicans in August 2025, state leaders redrew several House districts this cycle in rare mid-decade redistricting. In a neutral year, the redistricting arms race should have netted Republicans between eight and 10 House seats, Warshaw said.
But this year, the GOP will likely gain around three seats from redistricting, Covey said.
“That is not a lot,” she said. “There is a world in which the environment is so bad for them that they don’t net any at all, and that’s because the bulk of these districts that were redrawn were redrawn under the assessment, I think, that it would be a better or at least less terrible political environment for Republicans than what has panned out.”
That environment will shift in the next two election cycles, while the district lines are less likely to move. Democrats are likely to have trouble keeping those seats past this cycle, Covey and Warshaw said.
“In a midterm environment in 2026, that’s not going to stop Democrats from taking control of the House,” Warshaw said. “But in 2028 or 2030, I think the mid-decade redistrictings will have a much more important impact.”
Spending gap greatest in Senate races
Spending by super PACs and other outside groups has heavily favored Republicans this cycle, though individual Democratic candidates have often outraised their Republican counterparts.
The spending in House races is relatively even, Covey said, but Republican groups have poured money into competitive Senate races.
That may indicate the GOP campaign groups view the Senate majority as still up for grabs, and concede the House is likely to flip.
“Republicans came into this cycle with a massive spending advantage on the super PAC side,” she said. “What has happened is that Republicans have definitely used that spending advantage in the Senate races to try to attempt to shore up their majority there, even as they largely concede that the House is probably gone at this point.”