Democrats Shouldn’t Get Too Optimistic About the Midterms

In May, I visited Ohio, where former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is mounting a strong challenge to current Republican Sen. Jon Husted. President Donald Trump has won Ohio by significant margins in the last three elections. As two Youngstown State professors explained to me over lunch at the Golden Dawn Restaurant, his appeal, at least in the Mahoning Valley where Youngstown is located, was both economic and cultural. “He was rough and tumble,” Paul Sracic, a politics professor, told me. “The very things that make him despised in mainstream Washington, D.C., and places like that, are why he’s loved here.” He added, “Well, and the economic message, right? I mean, even though none of it has come true.”

But now Brown has a chance to upend that dynamic. In fact, he might be the only candidate who could pull this off. He’s a genuine populist who, better than most national Democrats, understands why so many blue-collar voters have abandoned his party. “Democrats don’t talk to workers enough, and don’t listen to workers enough,” he told me in a Zoom interview after I had returned home. Brown is more widely known in Ohio than Husted — who was appointed in 2025 to fill the seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance — and has a far more compelling persona. He lost his Senate seat in 2024 by just three points, while Trump carried the state by 11. Brown and his supporters believe the national Democratic ticket cost him the election, and there is some truth to that.

I didn’t find evidence of widespread defections among Trump voters in the Mahoning Valley or in suburban Toledo; some acknowledged, in the words of one small businessman from Warren, Ohio, that Trump can be a “boorish ass,” but they still like him and don’t care for Brown. Yet I suspect that some Trump voters will decide to stay home in 2026 for lack of enthusiasm. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers regional head Austin Keyser, who is based in Youngstown, told me that members who voted for Trump “probably aren’t going to be real excited to come out and vote for a Trump-endorsed candidate.”

Brown, meanwhile, should benefit from growing Democratic support in Ohio’s suburbs like those adjoining Cincinnati and Columbus. Cincinnati’s Hamilton County was once solidly Republican, but most county officials are now Democrats. One of the last holdouts — Anderson Township, a suburb of Cincinnati — elected Democrats to two of its three Board of Trustee positions this April. “The Democrats have been motivated,” Tom Hodges, one of the two winners, told me. “Probably primarily anti-Trump. So, they have had energy on their side to get organized and get things done.”

I left Ohio convinced that Brown should be favored to win. (Indeed, a poll last month had him leading by 3 points.) And looking across the country, he isn’t an outlier. In other states where the Republicans are defending Senate seats — North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Maine, Alaska and Nebraska — Democrats (or an independent candidate aligned with Democrats) have at least a fighting chance. Many Democrats already assume, given Trump’s unpopularity, that they will take the House. Now, the surprisingly favorable storylines surrounding some of these Republican-held seats have led to predictions that Democrats could take the Senate too — a sentiment that seemed to accelerate after scandal-ridden Ken Paxton won the Republican Senate nomination in Texas. “Democrats Suddenly Have a Real Shot at Flipping the Senate,” declared a New York magazine headline. “It could change, but currently it’s setting up to be a wipeout,” said veteran political commentator Mark Halperin.

And therein lies the essential paradox of 2026 — and beyond. The strong prospects for some individual candidates like Brown are real, but they are also masking the overall picture, which is far more complicated. Democrats could win a number of upsets in red states yet still fail to take the Senate. Part of the problem is that, while they appear to be enjoying momentum in some races for seats held by the GOP, their odds in most of those contests are at best 50-50, and they are in danger of losing one Democratic seat. There is also a bigger underlying problem, which is that Republicans continue to hold insufficiently appreciated advantages in American politics. Those advantages aren’t going to make daily headlines, like the twists and turns from Ohio, Texas and elsewhere. But they may well help Republicans hold the Senate, could conceivably help them very narrowly hold the House, and — whatever the results in 2026 — are likely to forestall any Democratic dreams of a major shift toward their party in the post-Trump era.

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Democrats can take heart from the fact that in midterm elections, the party that does not control the White House usually wins seats. The party in power has increased its House majority only twice in the last century — in 1934 and 2002 — and that was when a popular president was dealing with a national crisis. Presidents and their parties invariably accumulate grievances that favor the opposition. That’s how you get results like the 2010, 2014 and 2018 midterms.

In 2026, these advantages will be amplified by Trump’s extreme unpopularity, which stems from voter dissatisfaction with the state of the economy and from his administration’s excesses in social and foreign policy. In 2018, when Democrats won back the House, though not the Senate, Trump’s approval rating was 40 percent. Now, according to Nate Silver’s average, it is 39.5 percent. That’s also close to George W. Bush’s approval rating in 2006 when his party lost the House and five Senate seats. Trump’s popularity (measured in approval minus disapproval) is negative in every state except West Virginia, North Dakota, Idaho and Wyoming. To make matters worse for Republicans, Trump has continually intruded into House and Senate elections, anointing candidates like Paxton who will have difficulty appealing to moderates and independents.

Democrats should also enjoy a turnout advantage in most states. In the North Carolina primary in March, for instance, 800,000 Democrats voted, compared to 626,000 Republicans — even though registered Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state. According to a Washington Post analysis of House primaries through mid-June, Democrats cast 12.6 million votes compared to 8.6 million by Republicans. That’s partly because of Democratic anger and waning enthusiasm among Republicans. But it’s also the result of a change in party coalitions. Democrats, once the party of the working class, have become the party of college-educated professionals and white-collar workers who live in large metropolitan areas. They are more likely to vote, especially in special elections and midterm elections, than the blue-collar, small-town and rural voters who migrated to the Republican Party over the last 50 years.

All of this, however, is countered by significant Republican advantages. Essentially, those advantages boil down to political geography: the shape of House districts and, in the case of the Senate, the places where core Republican voters live.

The story of the GOP edge in the House goes back to 2010, when Republicans won full control of a majority of state legislatures — a majority they have maintained ever since. That allowed them, on the heels of the 2010 census, to draw House districts that were largely favorable to GOP candidates. Democrats, too, engaged in partisan redistricting in a few states like Illinois, but in other states they took a good government route and opted for nonpartisan commissions.

During that decade, Republicans netted 19 seats due to gerrymandering. This created the possibility that Democrats could win more votes nationally, but Republicans would still win control of the House. And that’s exactly what happened in 2012 when Democrats outpolled Republicans by a percentage point in national House totals, but Republicans won 234 seats to 201 for the Democrats.

Republicans also gerrymandered state legislature districts — protecting the state-level control that allowed them to continue to redistrict U.S. House seats. Now, prodded by Trump and encouraged by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which limited the application of the Voting Rights Act in redistricting, Republican-controlled states have engaged in a new orgy of redistricting. The Democrats countered in California, but in Virginia, the state Supreme Court blocked their plans. The end result of the redistricting wars is that by November, Republicans will have netted somewhere between 10 and 14 additional seats.

That’s a major impediment to Democrats winning back the House. Consider that according to the Cook Political Report, Democrats would have to win 12 of 18 tossups to win a majority. Before the most recent spate of redistricting, Cook estimated that the Democrats would only have to win a single tossup to take back the House.

In the Senate, Democrats face difficulties stemming from the composition of the Republican and Democratic coalitions. Because of the Great Compromise between less-populated and more-populated states that shaped the U.S. Constitution, states elect two senators regardless of their population. That gives voters in small states more power in dictating the make-up of the Senate, and small states are disproportionately rural. There is strong overlap between the list of smallest states and the list of states with the most rural and small-town registered voters: Of the 25 smallest-population states, 18 have a higher percentage of rural voters than the median U.S. state. This situation benefited Democrats during the era of their New Deal majority, from 1932 to 1968, when they performed well with rural voters in the South and across the country. But since the 1970s, rural America — with a handful of exceptions, now largely confined to New England — has become heavily Republican. Of the 25 states with the highest percentage of rural voters, 20 are completely dominated by Republicans, with no Democratic senators. In addition, in larger states that are not dominated by huge metropolitan centers like Chicago, political geography also favors the Republicans. In Ohio, Missouri and Indiana, for instance, the pro-GOP trend among the large number of rural and small-town voters has undercut the Democrats’ appeal in cities like Cleveland, St. Louis and Indianapolis.

There are a host of reasons why rural areas and small towns have turned Republican. Many are laid out in surveys conducted by Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea for their book “The Rural Voter” and in Kathy Cramer’s reporting for “The Politics of Resentment.” Voters in these areas tend to be whiter, older and less college-educated than those in big metro areas. Many are evangelical Protestants who view the Democratic Party as ungodly. Many are gun owners. Many depend on resource extraction for a living and reject the Democratic injunction to reduce the use of fossil fuels to halt climate change. West Virginia, once a diehard Democratic state, went Republican in 2000 when Democrats endorsed the Kyoto restrictions on fossil fuels. North Dakota had two Democratic senators until 2010 when the oil and gas boom occurred.

Many of these voters reject what they see as big-city mores. They see themselves as upholding traditional views of marriage and the family, race and social mobility, and nation and flag. They recoil at the idea of illegal immigration. In Midwestern states, where much of the industrial base is in small towns and small cities, voters blamed Democrats for selling them out on trade. After the 2024 election, Art Cullen, the editor of Iowa’s Storm Lake Times Pilot, wrote, “If you have a D behind your name in Iowa it’s at least a 10% drag on performance. That’s because rural voters feel that urban, highly educated elites look down on them and do not share the spoils of wealth created by bloodied and bruised hands. The whole free love/free trade thing is for the duped. The rest of the county is waking up to the idea that the heartland is frustrated, that a great realignment is underway.”

Democratic presidential vote 1976-2024 among rural and small-town voters Graph by F. Nicholas Jacobs

The advantages Republicans have enjoyed in state legislatures and the House also trickle up to the Senate. With fewer Democrats able to win state legislature and House races, Democrats often face a difficult time finding candidates to run for the Senate who have already held office and achieved some prominence. In South Dakota, for instance — home to one-time Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle — Democrats this year are running a poorly funded state-trooper-turned-businessman against Republican Sen. Mike Rounds. In Arkansas, the home of Bill Clinton, Democrats failed to field a candidate in 2020 against Sen. Tom Cotton. This year, they are running a businesswoman-farmer with no political experience. In South Carolina, Democrats have nominated a pediatrician who has never held political office against potentially vulnerable Sen. Lindsey Graham, who, challenged within his party over his Iran war cheerleading, spent over $18 million to win his primary.

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The Senate is currently divided between 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats plus two independents who caucus with the Democrats. Democrats need to net four Republican-held seats to reclaim a majority. On the surface, that might seem doable, given that there are 22 Republican seats and only 13 Democratic seats up for grabs. But 21 of those 35 seats are in states that are among the top 25 in registered rural and small-town voters, and, according to the Cook Report, 15 of those 21 seats are either “likely” or “solid” Republican. In other words, political geography has dramatically narrowed the opportunities for Democrats to take back the Senate.

That said, if Democrats are to have any shot at a Senate majority, it would hinge on the results in Ohio, plus seven other races:

In North Carolina, Democrats have an excellent chance of winning the Republican seat being vacated by Sen. Thom Tillis. Democrats have long held their own in this state, because of support in the Research Triangle (Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh) as well as Charlotte and its increasingly upscale suburbs. Five of the last six governors have been Democrats, and one of them — two-term governor Roy Cooper — is now running for Senate against Michael Whatley, who was briefly Trump’s designated chairman of the Republican National Committee. Cooper currently leads Whatley by 14 points. Even if this were not a midterm election with an unpopular Republican president, he would be favored to win.

In Texas, Democrats saw a glimmer of hope in former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s strong showing in 2018 against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. This year, Trump is once again unpopular with Texas voters, and Republicans have nominated a scandal-ridden candidate who owes his nomination to Trump’s intercession. And Democrats may benefit from another factor too: As Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende contended in a 2021 study, Texas’s big metro areas (including the adjoining suburbs) are becoming more Democratic. At the same time, the share of the Texas electorate that lives in big cities has increased over the past two generations.

Graph by Nicholas F. Jacobs

Texas Democrats suffer, however, from the Republican dominance of high offices, which dates to the redistricting strategy of former House leader Tom DeLay in the early 2000s. The Texas Democratic Party is “in a shambles,” famed Austin-based community organizer Ernesto Cortes told me. For a Senate candidate in 2026, the Democrats could not come up with a former governor or even longtime House member to run against Paxton. Instead, they chose a state representative and aspiring Presbyterian minister, James Talarico — a charismatic politician who generates enthusiasm among his supporters, but who also espouses views on gender and white supremacy that put him at odds with many, if not most, Texas voters. That includes Texas’s Hispanics and Tejanos, many of whom, as Democrats should have learned when they ran abortion rights crusader Wendy Davis for governor in 2014, are conservative in their social outlook. Talarico “just has too much culture war baggage,” Trende told me via email, “but then I look at Paxton and YIKES! An absolute mess.”

In Iowa, where Republican dominance is relatively recent, Democrats nominated a Paralympics champion, state Rep. Josh Turek, to face Rep. Ashley Hinson for a seat vacated by Republican Sen. Joni Ernst. Turek has celebrity on his side, plus Iowans’ farm woes, which many voters blame on Trump’s tariffs and on the rise in gas and fertilizer prices in the wake of the Iran war. Trump is at minus-19 disapproval in Iowa. Andrew Green, a political scientist at Central College in Pella, Iowa, told me that 2026 could look a lot like 2018 — when Democrats won three of Iowa’s four House seats. In one poll in April, Turek had a 1 point edge over Hinson. Still, Republicans enjoy a significant advantage in voter registration.

In Alaska, Republicans dominate all the main state offices, but by registration, 64% of voters are independents. Broadly speaking the state’s voters are more libertarian than conservative. This year, Democrats have nominated Mary Peltola — who served one term as the state’s lone representative in the House — to face incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. Peltola lost her seat in 2024 by only 2 points while Trump won Alaska by 13 points. In contrast to Alaska’s other Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, Sullivan has fully embraced Trump’s agenda. That has earned some voters’ ire and could contribute to an upset.

In Nebraska, former union official Dan Osborn is making his second attempt to unseat a Republican incumbent. As before, he is running as an independent with tacit Democratic support. In 2024, he lost to Deb Fischer by 7 points while Trump won the state by 20 points. Trump is currently at -11 in Nebraska, and Osborn could benefit. But his opponent, Sen. Pete Ricketts, is a popular former two-term governor who, as the son of a billionaire, will have unlimited wealth at his disposal. And Republicans, University of Nebraska political scientist Kevin Smith reminded me, have “an overwhelming advantage in party registration.”

In Maine, the Democratic Senate candidate, Graham Platner, is running slightly ahead of incumbent Republican Susan Collins in the polls, though I would regard this election as at best a tossup. Maine has supported Democratic presidential candidates since 1992, but it has also elected a succession of moderate Republicans, from William Cohen to Olympia Snowe to Collins. And Collins has proven to be a formidable candidate. In 2020, after running behind in the polls, she defeated her Democratic opponent by 10 points. According to exit polls, 58% of Maine voters disapproved of Trump that year, but Collins got 23% of their votes. Platner, an ex-Marine and oyster farmer, is highly articulate and has a hardscrabble directness that could play well in Maine’s small towns, where voters tend to be more independent than conservative. But Platner has also been plagued by scandals over a tattoo, old social media posts, and now allegations of abuse and sexting. He also has his share of critics within the Democratic establishment.

Even if Democrats were to win most of these races, their hopes of taking the Senate could be upended in Michigan, where they need to hold the seat of a retiring Democrat. Three candidates are engaged in a bitter battle to win the Democratic primary, which won’t take place until August. The race has strong ethno-religious undercurrents that could make it difficult for the nominee to unite and energize the party in November. Rep. Haley Stevens has advertised herself as a strong friend of Israel in contrast to her main opponent, public health official Abdul el-Sayed, a Muslim and harsh critic of Israel’s war in Gaza. The third candidate, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, has attacked el-Sayed for accepting support from social media influencer Hasan Piker, whom she calls an antisemite because of his criticisms of Israel. The primary has opened wounds from Kamala Harris’ failure to win Michigan in 2024. Whoever wins the primary will face Mike Rogers, a popular former congressman who came within a half percentage point of defeating Democrat Elissa Slotkin in the 2024 Senate election. He could very well win — in which case Democrats will have a difficult time taking the Senate, no matter what happens in other states.

Ultimately, Democrats’ chances in November — in both the Senate and the House — may depend on whose fallibilities overshadow whose. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats did well where voters were angered by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court’s Dobbs abortion decision, while Republicans did well where voters fretted about Biden-era inflation. If the elections this year are about Trump’s blunders and misdeeds and about rising prices, Democrats are likely to win the Senate tossups. They may also win House seats that are currently seen as “lean Republican.” But if the elections are about Talarico’s belief that God is nonbinary or Platner’s tattoo or past Democratic calls to “defund the police,” they could lose winnable races.

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Whatever the results in November, Democrats face daunting challenges in the years ahead based on political geography. I am not running a political consultancy for Democrats, but there are several things the party can do to address this challenge. First, they must pursue aggressive redistricting themselves. They can dream about passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which prohibits partisan gerrymandering, but in the meantime, gerrymandering is legal. And to set themselves up for redistricting success, they must find a way to compete effectively in state legislature and gubernatorial elections across the country.

Democrats may get a boost in November from winning Republican-held governorships. In the Ohio gubernatorial race, Democrats are running Amy Acton, the former director of the Ohio Department of Health. She carries the stigma of having been in charge of the state’s COVID-19 lockdown, but her opponent — former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — was foisted by Trump on the state’s Republicans after being ousted from DOGE. Ramaswamy will have to explain to Ohioans why he moved his business from Columbus to Dallas. In Iowa, Democrats are running their only statewide elected official, auditor Rob Sand, who is popular in the state. If the Democrats win these governorships, they can begin rebuilding their state parties.

It’s particularly important that Democrats regain at least a partial foothold in Texas and Florida, the second and third most populous states, which are also primarily urban and suburban rather than rural. The decimation of Democrats in Florida was not inevitable: In 2018, they had a very good chance of winning back the governorship by nominating a moderate candidate to run against the then-little-regarded Republican candidate, Ron DeSantis. But two out-of-state billionaire donors intervened to boost the candidacy of a scandal-implicated left-wing candidate, who won the nomination but lost to DeSantis. In Texas, Democrats were victimized by DeLay, but also by national Democratic stands on fossil fuels and the border. In 2026, however, Democrats have an opening in Florida’s governor’s race as well as in Texas’s Senate race.

But the most difficult task ahead for Democrats may be to find a way to win back a significant share of rural and small-town voters. To do that, the party probably will have to change its national reputation from the top. One need only look at what Trump’s candidacy did for Republicans. In states like Iowa, Missouri and Ohio, the most dramatic shift in geographical voting patterns occurred in the wake of Trump’s successful campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. That campaign reinforced and expanded the geographical gulf between Democrats and Republicans — to the Republicans’ advantage. If Democrats want to alter the national identity of their party so that candidates who share their views can run as Democrats instead of as left-leaning independents in Nebraska or Montana, they must nominate a presidential contender who can campaign and then govern in such a way as to bridge the geographical divide.

Trump, to be sure, has handed the Democrats a major gift by governing so incompetently. His unpopularity may well help them retake the House this year, and the Senate is not out of the question. And in 2028, Democrats could certainly win the White House by tarring their Republican opponent with Trump’s failures. But if Democrats want to build an enduring majority — one that outlasts whatever resentments voters feel towards the current administration — they will have to solve the problems posed by political geography.

John B. Judis is the author of “The Politics of Our Time: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism” and, with Ruy Teixeira, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?”