President Donald Trump has been widely accused of planning on rigging the 2026 midterm elections, and according to a polling expert, that may be his best chance of not losing control of one or both houses of Congress.
“2 ALL-TIME lows in Trump job approval over both terms today,” tweeted polling expert Larry Sabato on Wednesday. “CNN has it at 34 [percent]. QUINNIPIAC has it at 32 [percent].”
Sabato has a long history of being an objective polling analyst. He recently argued, through his website Sabato’s Crystal Ball, that 213 House seats are safe, likely or leaning Republican while 2017 are safe, likely or leaning Democratic. That means he argues 15 seats can be considered “toss ups,” which could go either way, and that gives both parties a very slim margin to claim the House of Representatives in November 2026.
He was similarly impartial in breaking down control of the Senate. Democrats would need to hold all 47 of their seats and flip four Republican ones, requiring them to pick up some combination of Maine, Alaska, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio and other swing states.
Yet they have an advantage in Trump’s unpopularity. Speaking exclusively with AlterNet prior to the 4th of July, Sabato’s Crystal Ball managing editor Kyle Kondik pointed to Trump’s bungling of America’s 250th anniversary celebration as an example of this. Specifically he noted that — unlike President Gerald Ford, the Republican who happened to occupy the White House during America’s 200th anniversary celebration — Trump made the event explicitly partisan, and thereby squandered a chance to capitalize on patriotic good will.
“It is to some degree an apples to oranges comparison, because Ford was on the ballot and Trump is not, and the country was also a lot different,” Kondik told AlterNet. “But I do think in the midst of a trying decade, Ford’s positive messaging helped cut through the negativity and capitalized on good feelings about the bicentennial. But there were many other reasons Ford came back, including uncertainty about whether Carter was up to the task of being president.”
Elaborating on how this was a missed opportunity for Trump, Kondik argued that “if Trump is as weak as he is now or weaker at the time of the election, and Republicans have a poor showing (losing the House and losing the Senate or at least losing one or more races in red states), it’ll be easy to point to Trump’s standing as a driving force in those results.”
He continued, “If that does happen, there will have been many missed opportunities for Trump, and perhaps how he handled the Fourth would be one of those (although in all likelihood other things would have been more important, like the decision to attack Iran and the subsequent impact on gas prices along with a general inability to address the big ‘affordability’ questions driving the election).”