President Donald Trump is alarmed that Democrats may retake the House of Representatives during the upcoming midterm elections, which in turn would empower them to impeach him. Yet according to one expert, Democrats will not have an easy job gaining control of that legislative chamber, despite their seeming advantages.
“President Donald Trump’s low job approval ratings, coupled with large Democratic leads in generic congressional polling, have most analysts expecting the House to flip to team blue in November,” wrote Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, for The Washington Post on Wednesday. “That’s still the most likely outcome, but a seat-by-seat analysis reveals a tougher challenge for Democrats than the overall picture suggests.”
Olsen began by pointing out the raw numerical strength held by Republicans.
“Large midterm gains usually occur when the party in power loses seats that typically lean toward the other side. In 2018, Republicans held 25 House seats Hillary Clinton had carried two years earlier; they lost 22 of them,” Olsen wrote. “But thanks to increased polarization (and mid-cycle redistricting shenanigans), the GOP only holds eight seats won by Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024.”
He added, “Redistricting has also shifted the House map sharply in the GOP’s favor. The median House seat — the 218th seat required for House control — under the 2024 maps was Arizona’s 1st District, which Trump carried by 3.1 percentage points. Now it’s Virginia’s 1st District, which he won by 4.9 points. Winning that district plus every single House seat Trump carried by less than that will be a tall order.”
On top of Democrats needing to win these swing districts, they will also need to pull off some upsets, which Olsen characterized as unlikely.
“No party ever sweeps all the seats a baseline partisan analysis suggests it can win,” Olsen argued. “That means Democrats probably need to take a few of the seats above the median to secure control of the House. Those seats are demographically even tougher.”
Ultimately, Olsen did not discount Democrats’ advantages, but simply urged political observers to be cautious before overstating their chances of prevailing.
“Democrats have wind in their sails,” Olsen concluded. “Trump is highly unpopular, and they have every reason to believe their voters will turn out for them. But that doesn’t mean House control is assured. Their path to a House majority runs through 2024 Trump voters, and convincing enough of them to switch allegiances won’t be easy.”
Despite Republicans’ non-zero chances of retaining both chambers, Trump has made it clear that he plans on meddling in the midterms. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine refused last month to rule out the possibility of sending the military to stop Democrats from winning, instead merely saying he “has no plans” to do so, and Trump has considered many other measures to intimidate Democrats from appearing at the polls.
“I think there are two things to consider,” Pooja Chaudhuri, Senior Counsel/Deputy Legal Director at Democracy Defenders Fund who specializes in voting rights as well as election law litigation and advocacy, told AlterNet in June. “One is that the election is made up of voters, and so the outcome depends on people turning out to the polls and voting. The problem is … the chilling effect on voters.”
Chaudhuri continued, “When voters hear that ICE may be deployed to the polls, that mail-in voting rules are changing close to the election, a lot of voters might say, ‘I’m just not going to go out and vote.’ That could happen in many different ways. There are vulnerable communities — people may come from mixed-status families — they’re US citizens, but they might decide, ‘I’m not going to vote.’ So one aspect is the chilling effect on voters that all of these actions would have.” Nor is that the only card Trump may play.
“We’re going to see consequences in terms of voters saying, ‘I don’t want the FBI to get my personal ballot in the future,’” Chaudhuri concluded. “So, to sum up, I do agree that putting it all together, it does paint an ominous picture.”