There is a rhythm to midterm elections, and it does not favor the party in power. The president’s party plays defense. Offense is a rumor. Over nearly five decades, in the five full-scale House wipeouts a White House party has suffered, that party has never flipped more than four of the other side’s seats: not under Ronald Reagan in 1982, not under Bill Clinton in 1994, not under Barack Obama in 2010, not under Donald Trump in 2018. In 2006, while losing the House under George W. Bush, Republicans captured not a single Democratic-held seat. In 2022, amid modest Democratic losses under Joe Biden, the party flipped four Republican seats. History, in other words, sets a low bar.
Republicans believe they can clear it. Their redistricting offensive has created more pickup opportunities than a president’s party typically enjoys, and the National Republican Congressional Committee is officially targeting three dozen Democratic-held House seats. In the Senate, the GOP is seriously targeting four Democratic-held seats. The party’s financial advantage is large, CNN notes, large enough to force Democrats to spend money defending what they already hold — a victory of a kind, even where the seat itself stays blue.
The core of the opportunity is 22 Democrats running in districts that voted for Trump in 2024. About two-thirds of them are in states where Republicans have redrawn the congressional maps. After that gerrymandering, the number of Democrats in Trump-won seats will roughly equal the 23 Republicans who ran in 2018 in districts that had voted for Hillary Clinton. Democrats beat 20 of those 23. That is the precedent on which Republican hopes rest.
“In 2018, Democrats took back their own turf,” said Mike Marinella, the NRCC’s press secretary. “Now, in 2026, it’s almost the exact same situation on the other side as Democrats are the ones renting districts in Trump country, and we’re going all in to bring Republican voters home in November.”
The analogy has its limits. The GOP is strongly favored in the six seats where new lines force Democrats to run in districts that gave Trump about 57% of the vote or more, though Democrats and some independent analysts do not entirely rule out the incumbents Shomari Figures in Alabama and Darren Soto in Florida, or an open seat around Houston. The other 16 — Democrats in seats Trump won with 55% or less — are proving more competitive than many analysts expected.
The 2018 mirror had a tailwind. Democrats running in Clinton districts that year were pushed along by national discontent with Trump. Republicans running in Trump districts now face the same wind in their faces. CJ Warnke, communications director for House Majority PAC, says that in the Democratic super PAC’s polling, Trump’s approval rating “is underwater across the board, to varying degrees, in every district across the battlefield.” Which means that even where voters chose Trump in 2024, association with him in 2026 may be more anchor than sail. His approval is tumbling toward its lowest point ever. This is not a neutral political environment.
Nowhere is the problem cleaner than South Texas. The gerrymander there reconfigured the Rio Grande Valley seats of Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, along with a Democratic seat south of San Antonio, into districts where Trump carried about 55% of the vote in 2024, amid sweeping gains among Latino voters. But recent polling by Texas Southern University found that about 55% of voters now disapprove of Trump’s performance in both the Cuellar and Gonzalez districts; the poll did not include the San Antonio-area seat. “It’s pretty obvious to anybody that does a poll that…the president’s popularity in South Texas is surely not what it was two years ago,” said Wayne Hamilton, the Republican consultant who runs Project Red TX.
Trump’s border policies still poll well across South Texas. His deportation drive has generated bitter backlash, and probably more damaging still, per CNN’s reporting, is the rise in fuel prices driven by the Iran war. Hamilton’s prescription is to remind voters why they rejected Democrats in 2024. “People do not want to go back to that,” he said. “Republicans have to work to…show (voters) your life is better because Republicans restored law and order on the border and promoted economic development.”
Mark Jones, the Rice University political scientist who helps run the Texas Southern poll, thinks the gerrymander was built on a mistaken premise — that Trump’s 2024 numbers in South Texas were a new baseline rather than a high-water mark. “What we are seeing now across Texas is a reversion to where Republicans normally are with Latino voters, which is winning about 40% of the vote,” he said. On that reading, most independent analysts make Cuellar and Gonzalez favorites, with the Democratic nominee in the San Antonio-area seat holding a plausible underdog’s chance.
Florida tells a similar story. The GOP remains favored against Soto and may hold a small edge in another redrawn open district, but Democratic incumbents Kathy Castor and Jared Moskowitz are proving stubbornly competitive in territory Trump won comfortably. “The Republicans made a bet…that the Florida of 2022 and 2024 is the Florida that exists in a permanent state,” said Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist. If Republican support holds at that level, he concedes, the GOP could pick up three or four targeted seats. “If you believe, and I do, that the reality is in the middle — in a normal condition, Florida is definitely a different state than it was in 2018 and 2020 but not as Republican as it was in 2024 — then a lot of these districts are really mushy.”
Mushy is a word for a map drawn on frozen numbers that have begun to thaw. The San Antonio-area Democratic nominee, a Bexar County sheriff’s deputy named Johnny Garcia, has his own way of describing what the thaw feels like. For many Latino men, he said in an interview, a “fancy troquita, with their 30-inch jacked-up tires and their loud mufflers,” is a point of pride. “And now,” he added, “we’re seeing, under this administration, that troquita is being parked in the driveway, and they’re being forced to drive their wives’ minivans, because they don’t have the money to afford to fill up that gas tank.”