We don't mean to completely pooh-pooh all of the talk about the importance of the gerrymandering arms race that has broken out since Texas tried to lasso five more seats for the GOP.
But we should pooh-pooh it a little. Midterm elections depend on how districts are drawn, certainly, but not nearly as much as the overall political climate. Midterms are always referenda on the party in power, so how likely voters are feeling about the direction of things matters the most.
So while the red states and the blue states are busy carving their House maps into shreds like an overcooked turkey, it may be more useful to focus on the fundamentals.
One year from today will be the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, the beginning of the final push for control of Congress. Given the pace of news and the wild array of potential outcomes of any number of crises and initiatives before us, it's easy to imagine dramatically different political climates by then as persuadable voters make their final decisions.
So what we need is a dashboard to keep track of how things are going, which is what we aim to give you today.
Let's start with the expectations game. In 19 of the 21 midterm elections since the start of World War II, the president's party has lost seats in the House. The two times they didn't were in the wake of a major terrorist attack (2002) and in the midst of a failed impeachment of a popular president (1998).
Republicans won 220 seats in 2024, five more than Democrats. A shift of just three seats is sufficient for Democrats to retake the House.
The correlation between Senate elections and presidential incumbency is much weaker since not only is there more ticket splitting at the Senate level, but only a third of all Senate seats are up in a given cycle. As you'll see in the items below about the vagaries of candidate recruitment, predicting the Senate is much more of an art than the data-driven task for the House.
But we can start with this baseline: Democrats are expected to win the House and Republicans are expected to hold the Senate. That's subject to change and the margins will matter a great deal for what the last two years of the Trump presidency look like, but that is, as the bookmakers would say, the chalk.
With that in mind, here are three numbers you can watch to get a sense of which team is going to finish in the money:
Presidential job approval: As of this writing, President Trump's job approval average stands at 41 percent favorable, 53.6 percent unfavorable for a net score of negative 12.6 points.
In a word: woof.
There are few iron laws in politics, but one of them is that unpopular presidents' parties are punished in midterm elections. Those two exceptions we mentioned earlier, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, were both very popular at the time, while the biggest losers, Barack Obama in 2010, Harry Truman in 1946 and Clinton in 1994 were all badly underwater, like Trump is now.
Joe Biden proved that the correlation is directional, though, not a tight index. Biden's numbers in 2022 were similarly miserable to Trump's, and while his party got a spanking, it was not nearly the whooping many, particularly Republicans, expected.
So perhaps it's better not to think of the president's net job approval rating as an index, but something of a barometer. It's more important to know whether Trump is doing better or worse a year from now compared to his current standing than what the number is on its own.
But if he is anything like 41 percent and 13 points underwater by then, the chances that Republicans can gerrymander their way into saving their House majority will be slim to none. Conversely, a modest improvement to, say, 45 percent, could open the door to a real goal-line stand for the GOP.
Special elections: As Iowa Democrats may soon learn, the results of special elections are not predictive of regular elections. Just because you can win a low-turnout contest in an off year doesn't mean that even the exact same seat will go the same way with the regular electorate even a few months later.
But that doesn't mean that special elections don't have something to show us about what's likely to happen next year.
According to the race watchers at The Downballot, Democrats have so far this year been outperforming Kamala Harris's 2024 showing in districts with special elections by an average of 15.7 points.
In some cases that means flipping red seats, and in others, like this week's contests in Florida, it means running up the score. But whatever the outcome now, it can tell us a great deal about the all-important question for next year: Which party has the most intense core voters.
In 2021, for example, Republicans showed substantial improvements over Trump's 2020 presidential performance, particularly in the off-year contests in blue states Virginia and New Jersey. In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, the GOP brand was in the dumpster, but as time passed and an evidently dispirited and divided Democratic Party suffered from a pandemic hangover, things got better and better for the Republicans. By this time four years ago, Republicans were running well ahead of where Trump had finished in 2020.
The gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey confirmed the trend in November 2021, outpacing Trump's prior performance by about 7 points each. As time went on, though, the environment seemed to cool for Republicans. In special House elections ahead of the big vote in 2022, Democrats started to turn things around. If you were looking for signs that the Republican wave had crested too soon for that cycle, you would have found it there.
We'll track the margin for the Democrats this time around for signs of building or slowing momentum.
Retirements: This last one should always be served with a grain of salt, but it may help add some savor if the other indicators are unclear. The rule of thumb is that if a party sees a mass exodus of its members in Congress, that's a bad augury.
So far, 25 House members — 15 Republicans and 10 Democrats — have announced they won't seek reelection next year. Some are retiring, others are running for different offices. Compare that to the previous midterm in 2022, when 49 members — 31 Democrats and 18 Republicans bowed out — or 2018 when 52 headed for the exits — 34 Republicans and 18 Democrats.
In both cases, the retirement lists pointed to the eventual outcomes.
The Senate casualty list gets more attention because the decisions are more consequential in races where candidate quality matters almost as much as partisanship. But we'll be keeping a close eye on the House number because it is a kind of crowdsourced estimate of the overall political climate.
Retirements are both a result and cause of a challenging cycle for a party. Incumbents know their districts best and can be canaries in the electoral coal mines, but those retirements may also put seats in play that would otherwise have been preserved.
We would expect to see the overall number increase to at least 40, while the rough partisan gap is maintained. In a midterm year, the party in power almost always sees more retirements. There can be exceptions when the balance of power is lopsided, like the 2014 contest when Republican departures outnumbered the Democrats 25 to 16. But with the House so narrowly divided, the partisan gap should be telling.
If Republicans keep their current deficit, roughly 50 percent more retirements than the Democrats, that would be a sign of a typically lousy midterm year for the in party. Anything greater than that would be a tsunami warning while anything closer to parity could be another indicator of a strong showing for the incumbent party
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