Why Democrats’ blue wave might not be as big as expected

The 2026 election will be decided where the wave meets the wall.

Signs are accumulating that the blue wave of Democratic support this year may be even higher than in the 2018 election, when a backlash against President Donald Trump’s tumultuous first term carried the party back into control of the House of Representatives. But the defensive wall that Republicans are constructing against that Democratic tide also looks bigger than in 2018.

The height of the wave gives Democrats legitimate reasons to expect they can win races deep into previously reliably Republican territory. The depth of the wall gives Republicans plausible reasons to hope they can contain their losses to a modest level.

For Democrats, the wave is being powered primarily by turnout and Trump: clear signs that their partisans are more energized than Republicans about voting this year and that voters are now more negative on the president’s performance than not only in 2018, but also in other modern midterms that broke sharply against the party holding the White House, such as 2010 and 2006.

For Republicans, the central bricks in the wall are money and the map: a financial advantage magnified by crucial recent decisions from the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, and an electoral battlefield that is playing out almost entirely in places Trump carried in 2024.

“This election is home field advantage for Republicans, and they’ve got to exploit that,” says former Republican Rep. Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee. “On the other hand, this is a referendum on the president, and he’s had a confluence of very bad things coming together.”

A wide assortment of measures suggests the electoral environment this year is more perilous for Republicans than it was in 2018 — and during other recent midterms that produced significant losses for the party holding the White House.

Those warning lights begin with attitudes about the economy. Compared with 2018, Americans today are much more negative about current economic conditions and much more pessimistic about the future. Inflation has become an inescapable strain on daily life: AAA, for instance, reported that gas prices last week reached $4.28 per gallon, compared with $2.75 on Election Day in 2018 (that’s $3.65 in today’s dollars, factoring for inflation). In the latest CNBC poll this summer conducted by a bipartisan Democratic-Republican pollster team, just 27 percent of Americans described the economy as excellent or good, compared with 73 percent who viewed as fair or poor. In CNBC’s October 2018 poll, 58 percent described the economy in positive terms and only 40 percent in negative ones.

Micah Roberts, a Republican pollster who conducts the CNBC survey with a Democratic partner, says far more Democrats, independents and even Republicans are negative on the economy than in 2018. Just as striking, he says, the share who are not only down on today’s conditions but pessimistic about tomorrow’s is twice as large now as then. “That’s a radically different environment,” Roberts says. “Everybody everywhere is feeling an economic pinch.”

Today’s economic assessment is also gloomier than the results measured in CNBC polls before the midterm election that produced historic losses for Democrats in 2010, and in the exit polls when Republicans lost control of both chambers in 2006.

The Democrats’ 2006 gains were fueled as well by widespread disillusionment over the Iraq War that then President George W. Bush launched in 2003. In the 2006 exit poll, 59 percent of voters said the war had not improved American security — and over three-fourths of those skeptics supported Democrats for the House. Today, the Iran War is facing comparable public opposition in most polls.

Some of Trump’s other initiatives have been more popular, such as his efforts to regain control of the Southern border and the provisions in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” temporarily reducing taxes on tips and overtime. But to a much greater extent than before the 2018 election, Trump has pursued a wide range of other specific policy choices that have provoked opposition from a significant majority of Americans, including his tariffs and the Medicaid cuts in that reconciliation bill.

All of this — especially the economy and the war — has predictably eroded Trump’s support. The negative views of Trump’s economic management “didn’t really exist in 2018,” said Democratic pollster Nick Gourevitch. “2018 was like: ‘He’s a bad guy, crazy guy, but the economy is good.’ Now it’s: ‘He’s a bad guy, crazy guy, and the economy is bad.’”

The latest CNN poll of polls found just 35 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance, with 63 percent disapproving. If those levels hold among this November’s electorate, they’ll be much worse than Trump’s standing in the 2018 exit poll, when 45 percent of voters approved and 54 percent disapproved. Trump’s approval rating is also much weaker than that of other presidents in recent midterms when their party suffered losses, including Joe Biden in 2022, Obama in 2010, George W. Bush in 2006 and Bill Clinton in 1994.

Trump’s decline poses a clear and present danger for Republicans: During his first term, Democratic House candidates won 90 percent of voters who disapproved of him in 2018, and 93 percent in 2020, per the exit polls. Likewise, in Senate races over those elections, every Democratic incumbent or challenger except Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins’ opponent in 2020 won at least 89 percent of voters who disapproved of Trump.

Probably the most worrisome sign for Democrats this year is that many of their candidates are not yet matching those benchmarks among Trump disapprovers. But so many voters now disapprove of Trump — not only in swing states but even such red-leaning places as North Carolina, Texas, Ohio and Georgia — that Democrats can reach 50 percent even with support from fewer of them.

Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg says that in her surveys and focus groups, red-state voters are often the most disenchanted with Trump’s return. They point above all, she says, to inflation, the Iran war and Trump’s focus on his own preoccupations — from making money to gilding the capital with his construction projects.

“In the red states… it feels like independent voters, Hispanic voters, White non-college women to some degree, are really, really angry at Trump,” Greenberg says. “And, in guilt by association, with Republicans. When you do focus groups … they feel betrayed and lied to.”

Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster, says that Trump’s hold remains undiminished on voters who identify as part of his Make America Great Again movement. But he notes, about half of Republican voters don’t identify with MAGA. And among those non-MAGA Republican voters — a group that includes both traditional country-club Republicans and the new, mostly younger and nonwhite, voters Trump attracted in 2024 — Trump “has slipped a lot,” Ayres says.

Some of those disillusioned 2024 Trump voters (especially people of color) may cross over to vote for Democrats, Ayres and other strategists say. But as American politics have grown more polarized, fewer voters are willing to cross that line. Roberts says that in the CNBC polling, the share of non-MAGA Republicans who say they are still voting for Republicans this fall is about 20 points higher than the portion who approve of Trump’s performance.

“There are a lot of people who may think, ‘I don’t like Trump but … I don’t agree with the policies of the other party and where they would take us,’” Roberts says.

Most analysts agree the biggest risk for the GOP among disillusioned Trump supporters is that they will not vote at all. “That’s one of the major challenges for Republican candidates,” Ayres says. “Democratic enthusiasm is substantially higher than Republican enthusiasm at the moment.”

That potential turnout gap represents the other major component of the possible Democratic wave. Not only do polls consistently show that more Democrats say they are very motivated to vote than Republicans, but more Democrats are voting since 2024.

Political data analyst John Couvillon has calculated that through last week’s New Hampshire contest, 56 percent of all the votes in primaries nationwide this year have been cast in Democratic contests. That’s an even bigger share than their 54 percent in 2018. By contrast, Couvillon found that in 2014 and 2022 — when Republicans made midterm gains — they cast at least 53 percent of primary votes nationwide.

Similarly, Democrats are performing even better in special elections leading into this midterm than they did before 2018. The Downballot, a political website, calculates that in 110 state and federal special elections since 2024, Democratic candidates on average have run 12.5 points better than Kamala Harris did in the same jurisdiction; in 2017 and 2018, Democratic candidates ran 10.6 points better than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

Two other factors could widen this year’s potential Democratic turnout advantage. One is that across almost all the key battleground states, racial minorities and/or White college graduates, two generally good groups for Democrats, have increased their share of eligible voters since 2018, while Whites without a four-year college degree, the core Trump constituency, have diminished, according to census figures analyzed by demographer William Frey. And while people of color usually make up a smaller share of the vote in midterms than presidential years, the opposite is true for college graduates. These shifts will likely matter only at the margin, but that could be enough to tip some very close races.

Amid all these forces churning against them, the Republican wall begins with the map of states and districts at play this year.

Heading into the 2018 election, House Republicans held 23 seats that voted for Clinton two years before and ultimately lost 20 of them. This time, before the redistricting wars, Republicans were defending just three seats that voted for Harris. Looking more broadly, Republicans this year must defend 30 seats that narrowly voted either for or against Trump in 2024, compared with 36 in 2018, according to calculations by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. And the GOP’s redistricting drive has left 13 House Democrats defending districts where Trump ran at least 5 points better than his share of the national vote, compared to just four in such districts in 2018. Moreover, fewer House seats overall than in 2018 remain competitive — which leaves Democrats, while still strongly favored to capture the majority, with less room to overcome idiosyncratic stumbles (such as scandals or otherwise vulnerable nominees).

On paper, the Senate map is even more forbidding. Of the Republican-held seats Democrats are most seriously contesting, Maine is the only one in a state that supported Harris; North Carolina is the sole other state on the Senate map where Harris even came close. Trump prevailed by double digits in every other state whose Senate seat Democrats are targeting — Alaska, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, much less Kansas and Nebraska (where Democrats are supporting an independent candidate.)

Even in these states, Trump’s approval has generally fallen into negative territory, which provides Democrats their opening. But to win on this stony soil, Democratic candidates must overcome years of alienation from their national party. In these red states, Democrats “have to establish yourself as a really unique candidate who is going to change the way things are,” says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “It isn’t going to be the party that wins; it is going to be a vote for change that wins.”

After the map, money is the next major component of the GOP wall. In 2018, Democratic House and Senate candidates significantly outraised their Republican opponents, according to OpenSecrets.org. And while Republican party committees and independent expenditure groups raised more than their Democratic counterparts that year, that advantage was dulled by federal election rules which limited their direct coordination with campaigns and allowed broadcasters to charge those groups more for ads than they charged candidates.

But two rulings by the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority this year have swept away those constraints, which will allow Republicans to maximize the big financial advantage their party committees and outside groups have established over their Democratic rivals.

Also working for Republicans is the decline in the Democrats’ own image. In Pew Research polling, favorability ratings for the Democratic Party have hovered in the high 30s for the past three years, a downtick from 2018. But the GOP image is no better-and historically attitudes toward the president in the White House have shaped midterm results much more than views of the party outside it.

Trump’s efforts to tilt electoral rules toward the GOP represent the final section of the GOP wall — the spikes on the battlements. That effort began with his successful pressure on multiple red states to gerrymander their House districts. Still looming are his attempts to restrict mail voting and possible deployments of federal law enforcement at polling places in Democratic areas.

All of this could limit Democratic gains. But strategists in both parties agree that attitudes toward the incumbent president have become the most powerful force influencing midterm outcomes. No wall may be high enough to fully contain the wave of public disenchantment cresting through Trump’s storm-tossed second term.