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Republicans are going to get destroyed in this fall’s elections. Democrats will probably take the House of Representatives and the Senate, too. It would be a surprise if they didn’t also win most governor races while taking over state legislatures.
This won’t be the biggest wave election of our lives, but it will be a wave election — far worse for Republicans than the average second-term midterm election is for the party in power.
President Donald Trump is the root of the problem. His approval ratings are historically low. He has failed on his central promise — improving affordability — and he brought that problem on himself with slapdash tariffs and an ill-advised war against Iran.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party is becoming the party of corruption and immorality, with self-dealing, philandering, and perversion omnipresent among the party’s Senate candidates and in the Trump administration.
With more than six weeks until Election Day, plenty of details will change, but already we can see some contours of this coming tsunami.
The polls
Voters generally approved of Trump when his second term started. They don’t anymore. In fact, his approval ratings are historically bad.
From 49% approval in January 2025, Trump has fallen steadily to 39% these days, according to Emerson’s polls. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans disapproving of Trump’s performance has skyrocketed from 41% last year (just barely larger than the Democratic base) to 58%.
That means millions of Americans who voted for Trump in 2024, and who were neutral or positive on him in 2025, now say he’s blowing it. His net approval has gone from positive 8 points to negative 19.
All pollsters show similarly grim numbers for Trump. Reuters/Ipsos’s September poll had Trump 27 points underwater, with 69% of independents disapproving and 25% approving.
Voters still trust Republicans more on immigration and crime, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, but they trust Democrats more on “cost of living,” which was the most important issue.
Emerson College’s pollsters ask voters in general whether they plan to vote Republican or Democratic for Congress. Throughout 2025, the parties were basically tied. Since April, though, Democrats have led the generic poll by about 10 points.
In September, Democrats posted their biggest lead of the cycle, 53% to 42% — and the trend seems to be in Dems’ favor.
The races
All this puts major wind in the sails of Democrats running for office everywhere and at all levels of government.
Republican control of the U.S. Senate is in grave danger, but it shouldn’t be, considering the election map. Republicans have a three-seat majority, and because they control the vice presidency, Democrats would need to gain four seats to take over the chamber.
Ten of the thirteen open seats are in states Trump won in 2024. Only one Republican incumbent (Susan Collins) is trying to defend in a state Trump lost, while Democrats have to defend seats in Georgia (Jon Ossoff) and Michigan (open), both of which Trump won.
Nevertheless, the polls, betting markets, and forecasters all point towards a likely Democratic takeover.
The Cook Political Report, for instance, rates the GOP-held North Carolina seat as leaning Democratic, and puts five other GOP seats in the toss-up category, along with only two Democratic-held seats (New Hampshire and Michigan). Even Kansas is within reach for Democrats, according to Cook.
Nate Silver gives Democrats a 69% chance of taking over the Senate. In his poll average, Democrats are ahead in 7 of the 9 battleground states: North Carolina, Texas, Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio. Alaska is a tossup, and Republicans are slightly favored in Nebraska.
Silver gives Democrats a 91% chance of taking over the House of Representatives. Other models give Democrats the advantage, but by slimmer margins. Decision Desk HQ gives Democrats 72% chance of taking the House, and a 54% chance of taking the Senate. The forecaster “50 Plus 1” puts the Dems’ House odds at 85% and Senate odds at 55%.
No major forecasters give the GOP even a 1-in-3 chance of holding the House or a statistically significant edge in the battle for the Senate.
The problems
What is dragging Republicans down?
A recent focus group administered by the New York Times provided a peek into voters’ concerns. When asked what issues Texans are facing nowadays, most of the answers were about affordability. “I feel like right now the buying power of middle-class America is really shrinking,” said one Democrat. “Everything’s going up except for our paychecks,” one Republican voter remarked.
Corruption was also a salient issue. Voters were asked which word came to mind when they heard the name of Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas. Paxton was impeached by his own party, cheated on his wife, and has been accused of selling political favors. Participants answered “bad, amoral, morally corrupt, disgusting, womanizer, and crook,” — and those were just the Republican participants.
Affordability and corruption aren’t the only headwinds facing Republicans, but they are probably the two biggest, along with the Iran War.
Emerson asked voters how much a given issue affects their vote. One should not take this as gospel, because voters aren’t reliable on which issues actually move them. But it’s noteworthy which issues ranked near the top: The four most salient issues were Iran, jobs, tariffs, and gas prices. Ranking lower were data centers, Israel/Gaza, and AI regulation, among others.
While 39% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, and 37% approve of his work on crime in the latest Ipsos poll, Trump is doing much worse on every other issue. Most starkly, only 22% of voters (and 16% of independents) approve of Trump’s handling of inflation.
Trump was elected in 2024 largely in response to inflation, which Biden directly caused with his overspending. (Opening the border and embracing the worst extremes of wokism also killed the Democrats in 2024.) Trump has failed at fighting inflation, and largely because he made avoidable mistakes.
High prices are inseparable from the Iran War, which has since March blocked the Strait of Hormuz, through which oil leaves the Persian Gulf. Higher gas prices directly cause higher prices for everything shipped by air, by truck, or by sea.
The Trump administration is also driving Republicans’ image as the party of corruption. In a September poll, 56% of likely voters agreed that “corrupt” was an apt description for Trump. Among moderates and independents, the number was 62%.
Trump and his family have enriched themselves in this second term in ways more similar to third-world regimes or Cook County than to any previous administration. He and his family operate a financial company that has received heavy investments from Qatar’s government. He’s sold access to himself by selling otherwise worthless cryptocurrency. The IRS he controls settled a lawsuit with him, promising to pay him $1.8 billion (this settlement was voided by a judge).
Fundamentally, the party’s problem is Trump. The problem is his policy failures (Iran, inflation), his corruption, and also the asymmetric nature of the party realignment he accelerated:
Trump activated many politically disconnected working-class voters (what political analyst Sean Trende called “the missing white voter” after the 2012 election). Picking up these voters helped Trump dominate in Ohio, and win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin twice.
At the same time, Trump pushed away many college-educated suburban white voters — accelerating that half of the realignment.
VIRGINIA’S EXTREMIST ABORTION VOTE
The difference: The voters Trump pushed towards Dems are voters who reliably show up to vote; the ones he pulled towards himself do not show up unless Trump is on the ballot.
The result will be a very bad year for Republicans in 2026 — and maybe 2028, too.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
