The 2026 Midterms Are Only 701 Days Away
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Okay, I am testing, testing, testing. My mic might be acting up. Galen is gone for one day. I mean, honestly, I'm glad that Galen isn't here because then he would be like, oh God, guys, we get to solve these problems in secret. He never needs to know about it until this becomes the cold open.

Hello, and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen... Wait, no, sorry, I'm getting a note in my ear. No, in fact, I am not Galen Druk. I'm Nathaniel Rakich. How are you guys doing today? Galen is on a very well-deserved vacation, so I am filling in as your host this wonderful Monday morning. Galen, if you are listening, please rest assured that things here are totally under control. We are absolutely not recording this podcast 90 minutes late because someone dropped their microphone in the toilet.

Anyway, with Galen gone, I was looking forward to devoting this entire episode to city council elections in Massachusetts. But as usual, the news has forced our hand. On Sunday night, President Joe Biden issued a sweeping pardon of his son Hunter, covering, quote, offenses against the United States, which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1st, 2014 through December 1st, 2024. This

This, of course, comes after President Biden repeatedly promised that he would not use his constitutional pardoning power to help out his son. Will there be a public backlash against Biden or Democrats for this? And how does it compare to other presidents' self-serving use of pardons? As Galen would say, we'll talk about it.

Plus, we'll take a look ahead to the next regularly scheduled federal election, the 2026 midterms. Despite all their hand-wringing of late, Democrats are in a pretty good position to flip the House, but the Senate looks like more of an uphill climb.

Joining me to talk about it all today are senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome, Mary. Good afternoon, Nathaniel. Good afternoon. How was your Thanksgiving? It was wonderful. Ate food, built Legos. What more could you ask for? That's a great point. That's a great point. And not a bit of football to be seen. I'm moving on. Hey, of course we do.

Also joining us today is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. How was your Thanksgiving, Jeffrey? Thanksgiving was great. Spent time with family and watched a lot of football. So and a lot of movies. The movies are great. I saw a minimum of five movies this weekend. Yeah.

Late on Sunday, as I mentioned, President Biden issued a, quote, full and unconditional pardon for his son Hunter, allowing him to escape sentencing for his federal tax and gun charges that were likely to see him serving significant jail time of a year or more. President Biden said in a statement that his son was charged, quote,

only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election, end quote. Adding, quote, no reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter's cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son, and that is wrong, end quote.

This obviously marks a reversal for Biden, who had previously stated explicitly that he would not pardon his son or commute his sentence. For example, after Hunter was found guilty on gun charges this June, President Biden said, quote, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.

Of course, after the pardon last night, Republicans are furious. They've accused the Biden White House of dishonesty. James Comer, the House Republican who led an impeachment inquiry into Biden, said, quote, Joe Biden has lied from start to finish about his family's corrupt influence peddling activities, end quote.

So, team, what was your reaction to this pardon when it came down last night? Were you guys surprised? I was a little surprised. We had statements from Biden after the election saying that he wasn't going to pardon hunters. That was the piece that surprised me. Yeah, I guess I was moderately surprised, too. If you spend all that time saying something and then go right opposite of it, it's, you know, it's inevitably a bad look. But also, Joe Biden, you know, he's

He's like, I can do a few more things before I leave office. Let me help my kid out. That part is not surprising.

You know, isn't it kind of a classic, well, you know, a politician makes a promise and then breaks it. Doesn't that just to put some devil's advocate out there? Isn't that doesn't that happen all the time? Yeah, it just seems like there was no reason to make statements after the election that you were not going to issue a pardon, obviously, if you were considering it, because these things don't happen overnight. Right. Like lawyers have to draft all this stuff. It takes some time to put together.

So his team must have known that this was in the works and still said they were not planning on on pardoning Hunter. I mean, once the election's over, truly, what does Joe Biden have to lose by being truthful? Right. Which is why we saw this obviously coming about three weeks after the election.

The Constitution obviously does grant presidents this power. They have the ability to pardon people for, quote, offenses against the United States. But it has been used in all sorts of ways over the years. So I wonder if you guys can give us some context. So how are pardons usually used and what makes this case different?

Well, look, the pardon power is something that has been used since since the first president. I would say it's it's a mix of things. It often depends on the circumstances of the area you live in. You know, if you were Andrew Johnson after the Civil War.

You pardoned a bunch of people who had rebelled against the country. If you were Jimmy Carter, you actually pardoned a number of Vietnam War draft dodgers, for instance. Or it might even be part of some sort of policy that the president's undertaken. I think Biden pardoned a number of drug offenders. But you're always going to end up with some standout cases where people might raise an eyebrow. That tends to happen as well.

Okay, so what are some of the closest historical parallels to this? Is this truly unprecedented or have we seen pardons like this before?

So I believe this is the first time that a president has pardoned a son or daughter. However, it is definitely not unusual to see a president pardon somebody who is within their family. Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother. Donald Trump pardoned Jared Kushner's father, so his son-in-law's dad, who now it looks like might be the ambassador to France.

In that sense, from a broader historical sense, this is not at all unusual. Would you guys say that this is like if we were creating a scale of like

pardons being, you know, on one end, it is kind of a pardon being used for good policy reasons or, you know, to right a wrong or something like that. And then on the other end, just like rampant corruption, like where would this compare to some of the other things? Because like Trump also, right, in addition to family members, he pardoned a lot

of his political allies, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon. My first thought was going back to Ford's pardoning of Richard Nixon, which, of course, was probably the most famous presidential pardon in history. Like, how bad is this politically in comparison to some of those, would you say?

It seems clear that this is not going to serve the greater good of America in any meaningful way, right? This is Joe Biden helping out Hunter Biden because he'd like to help him out.

That said, I don't think it matters very much in the grand scheme. Whether or not Hunter Biden goes to prison for tax issues and gun charges, I don't think is going to have like a massive impact on the American electorate writ large. I think some of the things that you mentioned, Nathaniel, some of the political actors there might be more impactful in general because, you

It allows individuals who do work in the political sphere, like your Paul Manaforts and Roger Stones, to maintain relevancy and still be active in politics rather than dealing with investigations and possible charges of crimes.

You might say that this is corrupt on the scale of corrupt because it's basically serves no purpose and it's just Joe Biden helping out Hunter Biden being a good dad. But also, it doesn't feel like it has quite the magnitude as some of the other things that you mentioned that actually could have an impact on the American political system.

Do you guys think there is a risk that this sets a precedent with especially with Trump coming in, who has shown that he's been willing to throw around the power of pardoning that Democrats no longer have the standing to criticize if Trump does another pardoning that is self-serving?

I guess I can see the case to be made that it does make it easier to just sort of say, well, they did it too. And I think that's actually been a difficult position for Democrats in regards to Trump across the board, if they do anything that seems to run contrary to sort of

What we would prefer political actors to do from just sort of a norm standpoint and what doesn't seem seedy or unbecoming, if you do anything, it opens you up to sort of, oh, it's a race to the bottom. Everyone's doing it. Everyone's corrupt. Everyone's bad. And, you know, you can get into all kinds of false equivalencies and other things at the same time. But on the other hand, we've talked about all this history. So, like, he's not really setting a precedent.

The precedent has long been set. But I do think in the context of Trump coming back into office and knowing his general disregard for tradition and norms and whatnot, it does seem like, oh, well, there you go. This will just be an easy thing for people to refer back to. Yeah. And I think it depends in some ways, like what potential future Trump pardons would be for Trump.

In this case, there's sort of two pieces to the potential issues that Hunter Biden has been facing, one of which are like these sort of personal things that I mentioned before, like gun crimes and drug crimes and things like that, which like fundamentally don't have an impact on the American political system. There's sort of a second bucket of misdeeds that have been alleged but not proven in a court of law related to political corruption and so on and so forth. That, I think, is the piece that I would be concerned about as far as setting precedent, right? That

alleged political corruption could be simply pardoned before it was like

investigated meaningfully. Now, with respect to Hunter Biden, I do think this has actually been investigated relatively meaningfully. The House did a bunch of hearings and all kinds of stuff about this and were unable to prove any definite misdeeds here. But you could imagine that being referred to in the future as justification for pardons for political corruption before we've had an opportunity to shine light on it and find out if there's any there there.

Right. Yeah. I think one of the interesting things about this pardon was that was just how sweeping it was. It was basically like anything that happened or may may or may not have happened during this like 10 year period, which according to there was a political article in which they talked to experts about pardons. And they said basically this is the most sweeping pardon since the Ford pardon of Nixon in that respect. So that kind of goes to what you were saying. Going back to what Jeffrey was saying, though.

For me, the distinction is I don't really see this as setting a precedent for what Trump can or can't or will or won't do because he's Trump, obviously, like he's going to do his his stuff. Like, I don't I think he would feel fine about kind of using the pardons in a self-serving way, regardless of whether President Biden had done this or not.

The main kind of untested frontier, right, with pardons with regard to Trump specifically is the self-pardoning. That's the step that would certainly break norms and go kind of go a step farther than we've gone before. There's also a step that is not we don't know if it's legal or not. There seems to be some debate about that. And I don't think that, you know, obviously anything that Joe Biden does with regard to Hunter would change the legal outcome of, you know, whether Trump's

Donald Trump could pardon himself. I do think, though, that it changes the outcome in terms of Democrats' ability to criticize if and when Donald Trump does issue a self-serving pardon because they just don't have a leg to stand on anymore. That said, I do think you have seen a lot of Democrats, as Jeffrey mentioned, come out against this because they know they want to keep that leg to stand on.

Obviously, because this pardon just happened, you know, what, 12 hours ago or something like that. We don't have any polling on that specifically yet, but we do have lots of polls on Hunter Biden and even just kind of generally speaking what Americans think about pardoning. So, Mary, you are obviously our polls expert. Can you kind of run us down what Americans think about those two things? Sure. So there's sort of.

Two questions here, which is like, what do Americans think about Hunter Biden specifically? And then just like, how do Americans feel about presidential pardons? With respect to Hunter Biden, most Americans think that he should have been convicted of crimes in polling that was conducted in June, right after he was convicted of those gun-related charges. APNORC was out with a survey that had 60% of Americans, including 59% of Democrats,

approving of Hunter Biden's conviction in that case, approving of that felony conviction. And 57% of Americans saying that Hunter should serve time in prison for that conviction. That also included

49% of Democrats. So near majority support across the board, Democrats, independents and Republicans saying that Hunter should have served time in prison and that the conviction in that case, they approved of it or thought it was correct. People believed that Hunter did the thing that he was accused of doing. In

In somewhat earlier survey in September of 2023, YouGov asked if respondents would support Joe Biden pardoning Hunter if he were found guilty of committing crimes. And they found a whopping 13% of Americans supported Biden pardoning his son. Only 21% of Democrats said they would support Biden pardoning his son were he to be convicted of crimes. So this is not

looking like it's going to be a popular move with the American public.

On the other hand, it is also probably not going to be like a hugely important issue with the American public. And all the post-election surveys that we have seen, we've seen out of like Ipsos and Emerson, people are still listing the inflation and immigration, economy, all of that stuff as their top issues. I don't think a lot of people are really focused on political corruption as a top issue. I don't think this is going to be an issue where people are like, it matters a lot. Yeah.

Yeah, I think we already know from other polls, right, that people generally have a dim view of politicians and, you know, institutions and all these things. And I don't think that this I think this will kind of confirm views that already exist. Right. Rather than, you know, create a new like, oh, my gosh, this is a huge shock that politicians are sometimes self-interested. If you're thinking about the political impact of this, right.

2026, the midterms when people, Democrats not named Joe Biden are even going to be on the ballot, like we're going to be it's going to be so far in the rearview mirror. 2028 to like it's going to be so far in the rearview mirror. This is not like obviously the reason that this came down at the time it did is that we're basically as far away as you can be from another election. I will be interested to see, you know, Mary, you cited those those old hypothetical polls. And we obviously know that

And hypothetical polls are hypothetical. They are subject to change once the actual event happens. I am actually curious to see if it's going to end up being less unpopular because a lot of Democrats are going to rally to Biden's side. Right. Because one thing that we have seen in other polls, so YouGov also did kind of a battery of questions asking about specific polls.

pardons, like, you know, do you approve of Donald Trump pardoning Paul Manafort? Do you support, like, Joe Biden pardoning these low-level drug offenders? And I think you generally saw, I think, two patterns from that data. One, which was that, generally speaking, the pardons were actually, like, Americans generally think that it's okay for presidents to pardon people in general. They don't think the president shouldn't have this power, but that the popular pardons were these kind of apolitical ones

like the low-level drug offenses, and the unpopular ones were when it was somebody that was kind of connected to the president. We will be back to talk about the midterms after this break. Today's podcast is brought to you by Oracle.

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There is this beam I often think about. So it's an SKCD comic, which if you don't know what that is, ask your elder millennial friends. But in this comic strip, there's a stick figure who is staring at a computer and they say, it's over. After 20 months, it's finally over. I don't have to be an election junkie anymore. I don't have to care about opinion polls, exit polls, margins of error, attack ads, game changers. I'm free. I'm free.

And then in the final panel of the comic, the stick figure then starts Googling polls for the next election. So this obviously is basically like the mascot for us here at FiveThirtyEight. So it has only been three weeks since the previous election, the 2024 election. But we've already started writing on the site about the 2026 midterms. And I figured it's time to bring that onto the podcast.

For all our listeners, 2026 polls shall be coming to the polls page this week. So keep an eye out. Get excited. You will literally be able to Google the polls for the next election and actually turn up results from 538, which is very exciting.

The 2026 midterms, they are less than two years away now. So it is time to start handicapping those races. So, Jeffrey, you have an article that's going up today on our website about the 2026 Senate map. And you write the Democrats are at a steep disadvantage in the upper chamber in the next midterm elections. Why is that?

Well, I think it's worth reminding listeners that in midterm elections, we tend to see the president's party do comparatively worse than the opposition party, the party that's not in the White House. However, with the Senate election, that's not always the case. And that's because you have to remember the Senate has 100 members, but they're not all up for election at the same time, like the 435 members of the House.

Instead, they are split into three groups and they have staggered six-year terms. So only about a third of the Senate is up every two years. And so the political environment in which an election takes place is very important, particularly for a national election like the House or the presidency, obviously.

But with the Senate, it's important, but it also matters how that's playing out in the particular set of seats that happen to be up. And for Republicans, the long and short of it is that they have gotten very fortunate in terms of the seats that are up in this election by pure chance. They had a good group of seats in 2018 and another good group of seats in 2026. So in a sense,

Trump's midterms, both of them, as it's going to play out, are going to happen to have taken place on a map where there are

In 2018, it was a bunch of seats that Democrats held that were in Trump won states that were pretty red. And so Republicans ended up flipping and gaining a couple seats net in the 2018 midterms, despite Democrats taking back the House and having a good midterm otherwise. This time around 2026, Republicans look like they'll probably be defending 22 of 35 seats that we currently expect to be up.

But only one of those is in a state that Kamala Harris carried, and that's Maine. Susan Collins represents that seat. And then only one is – one other one is in a seat that is like – that Trump carried by fewer than 10 points, and that's North Carolina where he won by about three. And Republican Tom Tillis is up. So the kinds of seats that Republicans are defending –

are the kinds of seats that in our very partisan, polarized environment are going to be a pretty tough ball of wax for Democrats to win. Like, I'm not ruling it out. You know, J.D. Vance is going to be resigning tomorrow.

His and his seat in Ohio will come up. Looks like Marco Rubio will probably be confirmed as secretary of state. His seat in Florida will be coming up. If you're Democrats, you need four seats net to win the Senate. And so even if they were able to get made in North Carolina, which is no guarantee, they need two other ones. And so that means they have to win at least two other seats in states that Trump carried by 10 or more points. And we just know in this

And the current political environment, even in a midterm that's good for you with positive swing in your direction –

You're going to need a lot of swing. You're going to need a lot of help to win seats that are that red. Or, you know, you need things to shift in terms of coalitions. You need the political environment and something about the parties to change. And you can't rule that out by any means. And crazier things have happened. But it's just it just sort of shows the fundamental challenges that Democrats have heading into the 2026 Senate elections.

Right. So as a reminder, after these year's elections, Republicans are going to have 53 seats in the Senate and Democrats are going to have 47. So that's where Jeffrey gets that number. Democrats need to add four seats because, of course, 50-50 isn't going to cut it anymore because J.D. Vance will be the tie-breaking vote rather than Kamala Harris. For those two extra seats, what do you think are Democrats' best bets?

So taking a slightly different tack on this question, not looking at Trump's performance in 2024, but looking at the performance of the incumbent in these races in 2020, the last time this this map was up, there are six states other than North Carolina and Maine where the Republican incumbent got less than 55 percent of the vote in 2020. So.

Among those six states, I think all of them are states where you're going to need conditions to line up for Democrats to be competitive. But there's a possibility for conditions to line up for Democrats to be competitive. And those six, if you're curious, are Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, surprisingly, Mississippi, and

South Carolina and Texas. So those are six states that sound pretty tough, but all of them are states where you can imagine, given just the right set of circumstances and stars aligning, could turn into a competitive race.

I think Nebraska's experience this year taught us that, like, sometimes there will just be a weird example where nobody is on anybody's bingo card and it ends up being competitive. And that obviously is something that Democrats will hope to happen again, although obviously they didn't win Nebraska in the end or the independent Dan Osborne didn't end up winning Nebraska. But.

Of those states you mentioned, Mary, I do think some of them jump out a lot more than others. So like Mississippi, for example, that's a state with extremely racially polarized voting. And like, it's basically very easy to get a 55-45 Republican win and have it be like kind of close in that regard. It's very hard for a Democrat to kind of make that extra jump. Although obviously in 2017, we had a Democrat win Alabama, although that was under very extraordinary circumstances. It was literally a special election with a literal like

accused pedophile as a Republican candidate. Yeah. And the 2020 election in Mississippi was also one of those special circumstances where you had a Democrat running who was known to the state, has served in statewide office before, was well known in Mike Aspey. So

So those are sort of the stars aligning. And the best result you can get is Cindy Hyde-Smith got 54 percent of the vote. Yeah, exactly. But I think some of the other states you mentioned, so like Alaska, I think, is is intriguing because you have Representative Mary Peltola who lost re-election this year. She, I'm sure, has already shown up on Chuck Schumer's call sheets.

You know, Texas obviously has kind of been a white whale for Democrats in recent years. And they took a big step back there in the presidential election and in the Senate race this year. You know, it ended up after kind of incremental progress for several decades that Trump ended up winning it by double digits. I forget the exact margin, but it's also a state that you could imagine maybe it could snap back to Democrats a bit. I still think, obviously, Republicans would be favored there.

But yeah, I think some of those states stand out more to me. Jeffrey, what are your thoughts? Yeah, you know, for me, it's it's there are some moving parts here. Right. So it's not just which seats are up, but also who is going to be running in those seats. Just going off the incumbents we know of right now, you know, hard to imagine John Cornyn losing.

even in a really bad Republican environment. Probably tough for Dan Sullivan to lose in Alaska. It would have to be a really, really strong Democratic environment and Mary Peltola, someone like that, strong, unusually strong Democratic candidate to make that particularly interesting. But you are going to have in places like Ohio and Florida and who knows where else potentially,

The possibility of some hard-fought Republican primaries, potentially the nomination of less palatable general election candidates who might be able to win because their states have shifted red to a certain extent. But under these circumstances and this kind of environment, you also might have more highly capable Democratic candidates trying to run because they know that historically –

The party not in the White House tends to do better in the midterm, so they might have some people take a shot. The potential for someone to lose renomination is always a thing that could be in the mix. We talked about Susan Collins. She's never faced a primary challenger since she first won that main seat in 1996. Probably won't face one this time around, but I can't rule it out. What if she does something that really ticks Trump off?

And Trump backs somebody to run against her and that catches on and becomes an actual thing. You just don't know. And so there are a lot of moving parts here also with the appointments in Ohio and Florida. Assuming Florida, it does become vacant because Rubio gets confirmed as secretary of state. Who is chosen for those and what kinds of – who is that individual? Does that individual turn out to not be the strongest candidate?

Does that individual lose to somebody who ends up having a lot of problems like Roy Moore in 2017, the Alabama case? So that's the thing where there are obviously a lot of unknowns that could make some of these races that right now it's hard to see them being competitive become much more competitive. I would also note for that 2017 Alabama example, it was a special election, particularly low turnout. But it was also the point when Trump's approval was basically the lowest of his entire time in office in his first term.

And so I think that's the other condition, obviously, that's important here is where is Trump standing? We know that he is a very polarizing figure. We know that most Republicans will approve of him. But if he's in like the high 30s or something or mid to high 30s in approval –

That could create opportunities for Democrats that currently don't seem as plausible as at this particular moment. And I think there's also like a lot of factors that we can't know about yet that could influence this. So one of the states that I mentioned that was decided by less than 10 points in 2020 was Iowa, Jenny Ernst.

You might think it's impossible for this to be all that competitive. But if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets confirmed and starts pushing regulations on corn syrup and really pissing off farmers in Iowa, that was a six point race last time. We have possible statewide candidates like Rob Sand, the current state auditor in Iowa as a Democrat, popular, well-known that could turn that into a competitive race.

What I thought you were going to say about Iowa was that, you know, if Pete Hegsat doesn't get confirmed as secretary of defense, Joni Ernst is a name that has been bandied about for secretary of defense. And that could end up being an open seat as well to Jeffrey's earlier point. Yeah, I just think there's political factors that could influence this, that we simply don't know what's going to happen during the Trump administration.

To get back to just the tough map aspect of this, it gets into like kind of a larger structural issue for Democrats right now, which is that there's just simply more red states, more red-leaning states. And if Senate seats and presidential results are more aligned, which they have tended to be – I know we just had four split-ticket results in the Senate in this – between president and Senate in this past election. But generally speaking –

the vote shares are still getting more closely aligned. Right. It wasn't states like Texas and Iowa that were splitting their tickets. It was Wisconsin. Yeah. And Arizona. Yeah. It took states that were super close to get a split ticket outcome. And so if those are more aligned and there are more red leaning states, this is just a lose lose for Democrats if that's going to happen. So Republicans just don't have

that much turf in their possession right now in terms of seats. In fact, they have 52 of the 53 seats that they're going to have at the start of the next Congress are in states that Trump carried. Now, some of those are places like Pennsylvania that are very close or Wisconsin.

But most of those seats are pretty red leaning now. And so that just really limits the ceiling for Democrats and means that they have to win all the purple state seats. Like that's how they have to get to a majority. So if they lose some of those like they did and say like Pennsylvania and this last election, that really makes things tougher for them. All righty. Well, we're going to talk about the House in a minute. But first, another break.

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Well, let's switch gears and talk about the House next. So that is looking a little bit better for Democrats. So as things stand, Republicans have won 220 seats in the 2024 election and Democrats have won 214. There is one race that is still unprojected in California's 13th district. However, the Democrat, Adam Gray, is winning there currently, and it looks like he's

probably going to hold on. So let's assume also special elections could change this, but let's assume that Republicans go into the 2026 midterms with a 220 to 215 majority. I wrote an article a few weeks ago saying that I think Democrats won't really have a problem flipping the literally three seats that they would need in order to take control of the House in that scenario. What do you guys think?

I couldn't agree more. You know, Nathaniel, didn't you write after the 2020 election an article about the House? It's like, congratulations, Republicans, on your 2022 House victory. You wrote that article. I did. Did I write it or did you headline it? I did a tweet along those lines. You wrote the article. I don't remember anything. It's all just cobwebs now. But the point that with the national election, which is what the House is, unlike the Senate, 435 seats up.

There are a large number of Republican seats or at least a sizable number that are in seats that Trump narrowly carried or that the Republicans narrowly won reelection and that you can imagine. It doesn't have to necessarily be even that many given the margins involved. Right. So if you got like 10, 15 seats like that.

If Democrats can flip most of those, they win the House. Yeah, in reading your article, Nathaniel, the thing that jumped out at me is that there's only been two times since the mid-1940s where the president's party gained seats in the House in the midterms, and both of them occurred in sort of very special circumstances. So one was 1998. That was Bill Clinton's second midterm. He was in the middle of the impeachment scandal. And notably,

The Republicans held both chambers of Congress at the time, and the American people were annoyed with what they viewed at the time as Republican overreach in the impeachment hearings. And so they were nicer to Clinton in the midterms than they usually were. So the other time was George W. Bush, 2002, his first midterm. He also didn't have a trifecta at the beginning of his presidency. Democrats controlled the Senate.

And this was the first post 9-11 midterm when Americans were in a generally pro-Republican mood. And those are the only circumstances that we've seen the president's party gain seats in the House during the midterms. So both of them were pretty special.

Right, exactly. And in fact, on average, in midterms since World War Two, the president's party has lost 25 House seats, which and as I mentioned, Democrats only need to pick up three. So basically, it's any amount of loss. And even in these midterms where which were generally seen as like a disappointment for the out party. So Republicans in 2022, for example, didn't really win, quote unquote, those midterms, but they still picked up a handful of House seats. And if they pick up if Democrats pick up the same number of House seats, which was nine that were

that Republicans picked up in 2022, they win the House, even if it's just by a narrow margin. And if you look at kind of the typical swings in just kind of the vote share, right, so Republicans actually won the House popular vote in 2024 by more than Donald Trump won the popular vote. They won it by about three points. If you look at the 2018 midterm, which I think is a pretty decent starting point for what you might think that the conditions might look like in 2026.

Democrats won the House popular vote by nine points. So that's like a 12 point swing. And there were a couple dozen House races this year that were decided by 10 points or less by like single digits. And so it's just very easy for me to see Democrats taking back control of the chamber. You're talking about like basically the roughly 15 seats that Republican candidates won by five or fewer points in the 2024 House elections and

There's your starting place for what is going to be the most endangered turf for the GOP in the 2026 midterms. And Democrats, if it is 220, 215 –

They need three seats for bare minimum majority. So that gives them a lot of options to get there. They would obviously prefer more than 218, but if just the simple math of control, it's pretty clear that they're in a decent position. Now, this, of course, assumes that Trump –

ends up being somewhat unpopular, like many presidents before him, including himself, going into a midterm election. And we obviously don't know for sure how that's going to pan out. But I would say that, you know, Trump is starting his presidency with a favorability rating that's slightly underwater still. And, you know, he didn't have a net positive approval day in his entire first term, if I'm not mistaken. In that kind of environment and being a midterm where Democrats can be more motivated and

It will take something special like it did in 98 and 2002 for Republicans to fend that off, at least on the House side. Yeah, we're also in what looks like a new kind of day and age in which Democrats are the ones who tend to turn out better in lower turnout elections like midterms and special elections. And so I would expect that that would help them as well as it did in 2022.

Well, great. I think that does it. Well, thank you guys for another lovely, productive conversation, Jeffrey and Mary. Thanks, Nathaniel. Thank you, Nathaniel. Good job hosting. Thank you.

My name is Nathaniel Rakich. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Kamra Chertavian. To everyone's relief, Galen Druk will return as host later this week. You can get in touch by emailing us at [email protected]. You can also tweet at us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store. It really does help us, so I really want to emphasize that point. Or you can always tell someone about us. As we know from voting, the best way to get somebody to do something is to hear it from a family or friend.

Thank you for listening, and we'll see you soon.

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