Game on: November elections kick into high gear with control of Congress in the balance

When voters went to the polls in the 2022 midterm elections, all the ingredients were there for Joe Biden’s allies to suffer a wipeout. The president was unpopular, inflation was high and historical trends predicted voters would take out their frustrations by ending the Democratic party’s control of Congress.

But when the ballots were tallied, the gains Republicans expected to make did not quite materialize. They had won the House of Representatives, but only by a slim margin, while Democrats had expanded their majority in the Senate and built up their strength in state legislatures.

Four years later, those very same factors are present once again as Republicans prepare in the 3 November midterms to defend the Senate and House majorities they won two years ago, when voters elected Donald Trump president. Like Biden before him, the president is unpopular and inflation is still high, though not as high as it was under his predecessor. And though he and his allies insist otherwise, there are few reasons to believe Trump can beat the historical trend of voters using midterm elections as an opportunity punish the party holding power in Washington.

“The out party, typically speaking, is frustrated or even angry at what has happened during the previous two years, and they’re itching to register their disagreements and discontent, and 2026 is going to be no exception,” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington who previously advised Democratic presidents.

Campaigning is set to intensify following Monday’s Labor Day holiday, a milestone in election years that marks roughly two months until voters head to the polls. Recent public opinion surveys have shown Democratic candidates for House and Senate seats are either ahead of their opponents or in close contention, and major election forecasters have moved their ratings of key races in the party’s favor.

But Republicans appear to have an advantage in one important realm, and that’s cash. Though some Democratic candidates like the Georgia senator Jon Ossoff and James Talarico, who is running for a Senate seat in Texas, have posted strong fundraising figures, Trump’s Maga Inc Super Pac has $400m that could be deployed to help his allies, while his erstwhile ally Elon Musk has $50m in another Super Pac, which began spending in favor of some Republican candidates last week.

Republican-led states have likely limited to some degree the party’s losses in the House by redrawing congressional maps, with the help of a recent supreme court ruling, despite efforts by Democratic-led states to retaliate.

“I’ve been saying this over and over, but Republicans are going to defy history in 63 days and we’re going to hold this House majority,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, recently told reporters.

A little over a year after the September 11 attacks, George W Bush’s Republican allies were able to expand their majorities in the House and Senate in the 2002 midterms, but most other elections have been unpleasant to terrible for the party in power.

Bill Clinton lost both chambers in 1994, and Bush suffered the same fate in 2006. In 2010, Barack Obama famously described the major losses suffered by Democrats in his first midterm election as a “shellacking”. Democrats lost control of the Senate four years later. In 2018, Trump’s Republicans lost the House, even as they built up their Senate majority.

Biden’s first and only midterm – 2022 – stands out for the deus ex machina that appeared in the form of the supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v Wade and ended the constitutional right to abortion.

“It was very clear that women were more energized than usual, and that young people were more energized than usual because of one thing: the Dobbs decision. That’s what really changed the direction of the election,” said Larry Sabato, whose Sabato’s Crystal Ball was among the forecasters that in advance of the vote predicted two dozen Democratic losses that year in the House.

The pummeling did not come to pass: the GOP netted nine House seats to give them a tiny majority in the lower chamber, while Democrats expanded their control of the Senate by a single seat, and all their incumbents won re-election.

Though Trump was out of office during that election, he endorsed and campaigned with Republican candidates and was frequently in the news for his myriad legal troubles. But without actually being on the ballot, congressional Republicans weren’t able to benefit from his popularity, as they would in the 2024 elections. Democrats, meanwhile, seized on Trump’s continued power in the GOP to rally voters opposed to the then former president, boosting themselves in key races, said Aaron Hitefield, a political science professor at Mississippi State University who studied the 2022 election.

“Trump rhetoric benefits Democrats electorally and motivates voters, while not equally motivating Republicans,” he said. “This isn’t necessarily anything new; we always have a surge and decline comparing a president’s party in the presidential election year versus a midterm, but it is particularly more pronounced with Trump.”

Now back in the White House, Trump’s profile is as high as ever, and he recently announced plans for an unusual midterm convention later this month in Dallas where he’ll personally pitch voters on keeping Republicans in control of Congress for the final two years of his presidency.

It’s a tall order – with a majority no bigger than three seats, many things would have to go right for the GOP to hold the House. Winning the Senate is expected to be tougher for Democrats, because the party must capture at least three seats in states Trump won two years ago, including several that elected him by double digits.

Control of either chamber would let Democrats block Trump’s legislative agenda and give their lawmakers subpoena powers they can use to investigate his administration.

Party leaders have centered their pitch to voters on the issue of affordability, arguing that the president’s attack on Iran, imposition of tariffs on trading partners, refusal to extend tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans and cuts to the social safety net have all driven prices higher.

“Life has gotten far too expensive in this country, and Republicans don’t give a damn about it,” the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, told reporters last week.

Recent polls of the generic ballot – an important indicator of sentiment in congressional elections – have shown that Democrats have an edge of between three and eight percentage points. But the trend isn’t unanimous. This week, a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll taken in August showed Republicans with a slight advantage among likely voters.

In Washington, the House reconvened last week after a five-week recess, but Johnson opted to cut its schedule for September short by two weeks, which will give representatives the opportunity to return home to campaign.

But though it is typical for electioneering to intensify in the 60-some days before the election, Galston believes voters’ perceptions are “baked in”, with the only lingering question being which party can get more of their supporters out to vote.

“A lot of people have already made up their minds,” he said. “Especially for Republicans, the question is not so much whether they’re going to cross party lines and vote for Democrats, although I think some will, but whether they’ll get out of bed on election morning.”

There, the Democrats appear to be ahead. An Economist/YouGov survey from the final weeks of August showed Democratic voters with a six percentage point lead in enthusiasm, higher than it was earlier in the summer.

“It’s hard to get excited about a presidency that has been defined by a complete failure to get prices under control, coupled with a war that is looking increasingly like a fiasco,” Galston said.