Photo: Allison Robbert for The Washington Post via Getty Images/The Washington Post via Getty Im
The party of a sitting U.S. president almost always loses ground during the midterms. Since all 435 U.S. House seats are up every two years, we tend to assess midterms by how each party performs in House races. And dating back to FDR’s second term, the president’s party has lost House seats in 20 of 22 midterm elections.
Whether Donald Trump can break this trend is the crucial question heading into 2026. The current math is not in the GOP’s favor; the party will start the year with no more than a two-seat House majority and Trump’s gerrymandering push is floundering. The stakes are particularly high because Trump won’t be able to enact much of his audacious second-term agenda if Republicans lose their governing trifecta in Washington.
So what are the odds that Republicans can defy history in 2026? Let’s look at the four midterms since 1938 in which the president’s party gained U.S. House seat or lost fewer than eight to see if there’s any hope of Trump’s party repeating these successes.
Perhaps the clearest outlier in midterm history was in 2002, when George W. Bush’s Republicans netted eight new House seats. Bush had won the presidency two years earlier in the closest U.S. presidential race in history (with the arguable exception of the disputed election of 1876). The GOP entered the midterms with a tiny three-seat majority in the House. But Republicans gained eight seats in 2002, and just as astoundingly, won the national House popular vote by 4.8 percent, having won it by 0.5 percent two years earlier.
What happened between 2000 and 2002, of course, was the attack on the United States on September 11, 2002. In the ensuing wave of patriotic, rally-around-the-flag sentiment, Bush’s job approval rating rocketed to 90 percent, and remained high after the invasion of Afghanistan, even though initial plans to extend the “Global War on Terror” into Iraq were not as popular. Democrats were divided on Iraq and other national security-related issues, and those issues dominated the 2002 midterms. Understanding how the GOP successfully swam against the usual midterm tide affecting the presidential party was a bit difficult because the system of exit polls crashed on Election Night. But there was much talk of the midterms being swung by “security moms,” normally Democratic-leaning women worried about terrorist attacks. More to the point, Bush’s job approval ratings remained high into the midterm campaign; Gallup had it at 67 percent in late October. To the extent midterms are mostly referenda on the president in office, Bush’s party had an advantage.
Four years before the “security moms” delivered for Republicans, Democrats gained five House seats despite holding the White House, the first time that had happened to either party since 1934. As in 2002, the incumbent president (Bill Clinton) had high job approval ratings (65 percent in late October, per Gallup). In his case, however, Clinton’s popularity appeared to stem from a booming economy, and he and his party had very definitely seized the political “center” and depicted Republicans (led and symbolized by House Speaker Newt Gingrich) as extremists. It was the same formula that gave Clinton a landslide reelection win in 1996. But in 1996 House Democrats fell short of expectations, winning the national House popular vote but only gaining three net seats after losing their majority in 1994 for the first time since the early 1950s. Part of what happened in 1998 was a delayed opportunity to knock off vulnerable Class of 1994 Republicans.
But the clincher was the persistent determination of Gingrich and House Republicans to pursue impeachment of Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal and its fallout, despite strong public sentiment opposing this step. Shortly after the midterms, Gingrich was pushed out of the Speaker’s position, and even though House Republicans went ahead and impeached the president (who was easily acquitted by the Senate), it was generally conceded to have been a major political mistake that cost the GOP seats.
In Ronald Reagan’s second midterm, he tried to make downballot elections a continuation of his 49-state presidential reelection landslide victory two years earlier, personalizing the contest. As with the Bush and Clinton midterms noted above, Reagan had high job approval ratings (64 percent, per Gallup) just prior to the elections. But while he held GOP House losses to a modest five net seats, the midterms were a calamity for his party in the Senate; Republicans lost eight seats and control of the chamber.
In retrospect, the relatively small House losses were mostly a product of a low beginning point for Reagan’s party (they only controlled 181 seats going in), which had yet to execute the sort of downballot realignment Reagan had won at the presidential level. That would come a few years later, in 1994, when the South finally abandoned its ancient Democratic allegiance and the House went Republican at last.
If there’s any midterm that resembled the 2002 post-9/11 election, it was probably in 1962, when the run-up to November was heavily overshadowed by America’s closest brush with a nuclear Armageddon, the Cuban Missile Crisis. As Rhodes Cook explained many years later, the climax of the crisis was very much on the mind of voters:
The crisis itself covered much of the latter half of October 1962 and froze the midterm campaign in its tracks as the world’s two superpowers stood eyeball to eyeball. It was the ultimate test of strength and judgment for the young president, John F. Kennedy. And he passed it. …
On Monday night, October 22 … Kennedy delivered a nationally televised address explaining the severe gravity of the situation and the quarantine option that he was adopting. “That televised address … was not the best speech of JFK’s presidency,” wrote White House adviser Ted Sorensen, “but it surely was his most important. It fully informed the American people and the world of what appeared to be the greatest danger to our country in history.”
In the court of American public opinion, Kennedy emerged a clear winner. His approval rating in the first Gallup Poll taken after the crisis was 74% – a jump of 13 percentage points from where it had stood previously. And his increased stature worked to the benefit of his fellow Democrats.
You never know what can happen, as the COVID-19 pandemic recently reminded us. But based on foreseeable conditions, there’s not much on the horizon that suggests an unusual midterm outcome in 2026. In all the cases discussed above, the sitting president had job approval ratings over 60 percent. Trump has never had anything like that; Gallup has never shown him hitting 50 percent in job approval, and he’s mostly been mired in the high 30s and low 40s. His party isn’t positioned to make gains because of its prior weakness, as Reagan’s was in 1986; the GOP is now trying to hold onto a majority, not just chip away at the other party’s majority. While Trump has had some success in the past in accusing the opposition of extremism, as Clinton was able to do in 1998, the aggressiveness of his conduct since returning to the White House and his incredibly over-the-top rhetoric in recent months makes that sort of appeal a lot less likely. And while Trump will most definitely try to define the GOP as the party of maximum patriotism, like Bush did in 2002, there’s virtually no chance he will be able to engender the sense of national unity that insulated the GOP from Democratic criticism that year.
One other factor points heavily toward big GOP losses in 2026 is the very thing Trump is struggling to preserve: his trifecta control of Washington, which makes his party totally responsible for conditions in the country at a time of chronic unhappiness with government. Each of the last five presidents who entered a midterm with a trifecta lost it, sometimes calamitously: Clinton in 1994, Bush in 2006; Obama in 2010, Trump in 2018, and Biden in 2022. This doesn’t look like the year that will break that streak.
See All
Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter
Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice
