On the first Tuesday of November, Americans will decide whether to keep Congress under Donald Trump’s control, or hand power to the Democrats. The first national elections since the 2024 polls that brought Trump back to the White House, the 3 November midterms will be a crucial test of whether the president’s handling of top issues such as the economy and immigration have met Americans’ expectations. On Tuesday, voters will cast ballots in initial state primaries, with more to follow in the months ahead.
Up for grabs in November are all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 33 seats in the Senate, and if Republicans lose their majorities in either chamber, it will alter the course of Trump’s presidency. Should Democrats take the House, they will gain the power to issue subpoenas as they investigate his administration, and can block the president’s legislative agenda. Should they wrest control of the Senate from the GOP, Democrats could stop Trump from appointing nominees to cabinet positions and the federal judiciary, including the supreme court.
The lower chamber, which Republicans control by no more than three seats, appears to be the easiest prize for Democrats. The minority party will need to win four seats – at least three of which must come from states that voted for Trump – to regain the majority, while defending two other seats in swing states.
“The least surprising outcome in November would be the same outcome we had in 2018,” when midterms were held during Trump’s first term, “which is that Democrats win the House, the Republicans hold the Senate,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of election forecaster Sabato’s Crystal Ball. That year, Democrats won 41 House seats and retook the majority for the first time in eight years.
Kondik and other experts say that signs have already emerged of a “blue wave” building that could indicate a strong performance by Democratic candidates in November. But the scramble by red and blue states to redraw congressional maps in the ruling party’s favor remains a wild card, and even if the Democrats do well this year, it does not necessarily mean that the larger issues which cost them the presidency in 2024 are resolved.
Here are four trends to watch ahead of November’s midterm elections:
Will the coalition that elected Trump return?
Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024 sent alarm bells ringing among Democrats because of the voters who backed him. An analysis by the Pew Research Center found that, in addition to building up his margins in rural areas, Trump made inroads with groups that typically form the backbone of the Democratic base, including Hispanic and Black voters, and young people. If that coalition re-emerges in November to vote for Republicans, it will be a bad sign for Democrats’ hopes of taking control of Congress – but there is already evidence that it will not.
The first is the trend of the most engaged voters – the sort who can be counted on to turn out for off-year and midterm elections – backing Democrats rather than the GOP. That dynamic was seen repeatedly under Joe Biden, and again last year, and seems set to repeat in 2026.
“You always see a smaller electorate in midterms than you do in presidential elections. My guess is that the falloff is going to be disproportionately more Trump people as opposed to Harris people,” Kondik said.
Another red flag for Trump is his approval rating. Many surveys show him as unpopular, if not more, than he was at this point in 2018. But most worrying for the president are that his marks on the handling of the economy are even lower than they were eight years ago, said Erin Covey, US House editor for the Cook Political Report.
“Because the economy is, obviously, such a driving issue for most voters, that bodes particularly ill for Republicans, because they’re going to have to defend Trump’s handling of the economy this November,” Covey said. Despite Trump’s campaign promise of lower prices, the inflation rate has remained above normal, while hiring has been uneven.
The final headwind Republicans hoping to serve in the House or Senate are facing is the president’s absence from the ballot, meaning the unique draw he has with voters is unlikely to be present this year.
“When Donald Trump’s not on the ticket, there’s a pretty sizable shift away from his hardcore voters turning out to vote,” said Dan Sena, a political strategist who led House Democrats’ campaign arm, the Democratic congressional campaign committee, during their 2018 victories.
Will Democrats get their groove back?
The 2024 election marked a low point for Democrats, but in the months that followed, the party’s candidates swept off-year gubernatorial and state legislative elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and also managed to win seats in state legislative districts in Iowa and Louisiana that had backed Trump.
For Kondik, the evidence points to a repeat for Democrats of their performance in Trump’s first midterms, when Republicans were routed from the House. “I think the environment is going to be pretty similar to 2018, and I think we would categorize that as a wave year,” he said.
But the wave may have limits. In 2018, the Cook Political Report rated 30 districts as toss-ups, and 44 as leaning towards either the Democrats or Republicans. This year, only 18 districts are considered toss-ups, and a combined 18 others lean towards either party. Sena characterized the diminished battlefield, which he said was a consequence of redistricting by states nationwide, as a predictor of small House majorities for years to come.
“I think we’re living in a world where the Democratic majority or the Republican majority is going to be four or five seats in either direction for some time,” Sena said.
And the momentum Democrats appear to have in taking the House may not be present in the Senate. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, said he believes the party can win back the majority by picking up seats in Maine, North Carolina, Ohio and Alaska. But of those four, only Maine voted for Harris in 2024. North Carolina is a swing state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, while Ohio and Alaska backed Trump by double digits last year.
To win those red states, Kondik said, “Democrats are going to have to not just reclaim some of the voters they lost in 2024 among non-white voters, but they also probably would have to turn back the clock with white working-class voters and reclaim some of that block, too. And that’s a block that’s been pretty solidly for Trump since 2016.”
“What could crack those states open,” he said, “would probably be real anger about the economy.”
Will redistricting upend the election?
With Trump’s backing, Texas’s Republican-controlled state legislature redrew its congressional maps last year, with the goal of bolstering the GOP’s chances of holding on to the House majority in the midterms. Democratic-led California responded by having voters approve new maps that benefited Democrats, sparking a tit-for-tat gerrymandering battle between states where Democrats and Republicans hold complete control of government. .
The end results of that battle are not yet known, and may not be for months. Among the outstanding variables are the success of redistricting efforts in Democratic-led Virginia and Republican-dominated Florida, as well as a supreme court case that could net the GOP additional seats in southern states. Thus far, Covey described the bipartisan gerrymandering spree as “a wash”.
“It’s been a lot of work for, really, not much of a seat gain for either side,” she said. “On a good night for Republicans, maybe they net like four seats from redistricting, but Democrats could also net four seats from redistricting.”
But Sena said signs indicate that Republicans may ultimately prevail in the redistricting battle, simply because they will be able to stem losses they would otherwise suffer in a wave election.
Can Trump meddle in the elections?
Trump has made little secret of his desire to interfere with how the midterm elections are run. “The Republicans should say: ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many – 15 places – the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” he said during an appearance earlier this month on Dan Bongino’s podcast. He later reiterated that the federal government should target voting procedures in heavily Democratic cities like Detroit and Atlanta.
Trump cannot unilaterally nationalize elections – the constitution grants the president no power over how elections are run, instead giving that authority to the states. Congress, however, can pass laws to set uniform standards for federal elections.
But the president has already started to undermine the election in other ways.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is leading an investigation into voting machines, and the FBI in late January undertook an unprecedented search of the Fulton county, Georgia, election office and seized ballots related to the 2020 election. . The basis for the raid was later revealed to be recycled and debunked claims about the 2020 election. Separately, Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who was at the forefront of trying to overturn the 2020 election, is leading a White House effort focused on election integrity issues, and a US attorney in Missouri is leading a voting fraud investigation, about which little is known.
The administration is simultaneously moving to stir up fears that illegal voting by noncitizens – which is extremely rare – will undermine the election. . The Department of Homeland Security recently sent a memo, seen by the Guardian, instructing agents in its investigative arm to “identify any person who registered to vote, and/or voted in any federal, state or local election, and subsequently became naturalized United States citizens”.
White House, justice department and homeland security officials are regularly meeting to discuss voting and election issues, including the possibility of sending law enforcement to the polls in November, according to a person familiar with the matter. Federal law bars the military or federal agents from being deployed unless “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States”.
Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer who also assisted Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 race, has suggested the president can declare some kind of national emergency to seize power over elections.
“The president’s authority is limited in his role with regard to elections except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States – as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have,” Mitchell said. “Then, I think maybe the president is thinking he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.”
Legal experts say the president’s emergency powers give him no authority over elections.
