The Briefing, Vol XIV, Issue 25
June 22, 2026
This week:
- Not all the polls are bad, but Republicans are trying to defy history
- El-Sayed may finally be consolidating progressive support
- Montana Democrats’ independent strategy under threat
Outlook
The basic idea behind why the president’s party typically loses seats in the midterms is simple: Presidents are elevated to power by large surges in voter turnout in their presidential year, powered by a massive campaign to elect them. In the subsequent midterms, turnout by presidential supporters affected by the campaign tends to fall off considerably. The marginal presidential-year voter loses his zeal for the president he helped elect, or at least for politics generally.
And when that tide suddenly rushes back out, and some of the members of Congress just elected to more marginal or shaky districts are left stranded on the beach. In other words, House members who barely won last time around with help from the presidential year surge are the ones most likely to find themselves defeated. House majorities propped up by the president’s popularity in the middle of his own election campaign are thus lost two years later.
Generic Ballot: In a recent segment on CNN, analyst Harry Enten pointed out that Democrats’ lead in generic ballot polling has shrunk since January. Democrats, he noted, have a mere five-point lead on the generic ballot currently (this tracks with the RealClearPolitics average), which he said is only about half the lead they enjoyed in June 2006 (11 points) and June 2018 (10 points), the last two midterm years featuring a major Democratic wave.
In fact, RealClearPolitics has four of the last five and eight of the last ten polls favoring Democrats by five points or less.
What does that mean? Probably not enough for Republicans to get excited. Even with mid-decade redistricting, Republicans’ House majority is vanishingly small and could be erased with just a couple of tiny missteps.
Consider just how close the 2024 presidential election was. Behind Trump’s strong performance in the swing states and an unprecedented turnout for a Republican candidate, House Republicans lost two seats and finished with a five-seat majority (220 to 215) by winning the national popular vote for U.S. House by about 2.6 points. Admittedly, the national popular vote is an imprecise measure (some states don’t record votes in uncontested elections), but the point is that Republicans would not have to lose the national popular vote by much to lose control of the U.S. House. Even with a few more districts made winnable by redistricting, the idea Republicans defending such a narrow majority in a midterm flies in the face of history.
Low Trump approval: Meanwhile, the party’s apparent competitiveness despite Trump’s minus-17 net approval rating average could be read either positively or negatively. On the one hand, a lot of people who voted for Trump don’t particularly care for him now, which is obviously bad for Republicans. On the other hand, the math and the polling say that many of them are apparently still leaning toward voting Republican in 2026, or at least that the party has a certain resilience despite Trump’s current ratings.
One possible explanation is that many Republican regulars are longtime Trump-scoffers who voted for him anyway in 2024 and have no plans to change their Republican-voting ways. But those are not the voters Republicans need to worry about in 2025. The real question is whether the lower-propensity “MAGA” working-class electorate turns out for the party the way they turned out for the man in 2024. The challenge is to get more of these to vote in a midterm — and unfortunately, that is the Great White Whale of American politics. It may seem strange to people who read political newsletters and have voted in four of the last four elections, but history stubbornly repeats itself: Millions of voters, despite caring enough at least to vote for president, simply stop paying attention to politics until the next presidential campaign.
Getting more presidential voters to come out for the midterms was a task that even Barack Obama could not accomplish. Indeed, his strong 2008 performance only made the receding of the tide more severe for his party.
Obama’s 2008 majority of 69.5 million voters receded to a mere 39 million voting for House Democrats in 2010 and then only 36 million in 2014. As a result, Obama’s midterm elections of 2010 and 2014 were arguably the two most dramatic midterm failures in electoral history. By January 2015, when the tide had fully sucked out from Obama’s 2008 victory, Democrats had lost a net 68 House seats and 13 Senate seats, as well as their majorities in both houses of Congress.
The lesson: In defending their House majority in the midterm, Republicans are trying to accomplish something that is historically unprecedented, and there’s a reason it is unprecedented.
Don’t look at futures markets: Enten also pointed out something he should have probably skipped: Prediction markets are not favoring Democrats as overwhelmingly as they would like. One of them was giving Democrats odds (at the time of his broadcast) of just 78 percent to take the House, and giving Republicans better than even odds to retain the Senate.
The problem with prediction markets is that they are often low-volume and they are always based on opinions of low-information traders. Recall that in 2024, a late outlier poll showing Trump losing Iowa caused Trump futures in the state to plunge to 75 cents, creating a massive money-making opportunity for anyone with common sense and even a semblance of political knowledge. The lesson here is not to treat with markets with undue reverence. They are an output based on all the same information available to you (and perhaps less than is available to you), not an input.
Senate 2026
Michigan: Support for state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) in the August primary appears to be cratering as progressives consolidate behind former Wayne County health official Addul El-Sayed (D). According to a poll by Mitchell Research, El-Sayed now leads Rep. Haley Stevens (D), 42 to 33 percent, with McMorrow falling to just 6 percent.
The poll is controversial and possibly an outlier. It apparently led McMorrow’s campaign to pressure the Michigan Information and Research Service (MIRS) to suppress the results.
However, given the trends in the Democratic Party, such a consolidation in order to block Stevens, the establishment favorite, was not hard to anticipate and is not hard to imagine.
Montana: Democrats in Montana were on their way to a run-a-faux-independent-because-our-brand-is-too-toxic-to-win strategy, already tried in Kansas and Nebraska. But now that they have held their primary and nominated a Democrat, it seems any hopes that their official party nominee would drop out in favor of Seth Bodnar (I), seem to be dashed already.
Their nominee, Alani Bankhead (D), delivered a lengthy speech explaining that she will not drop out for Bodnar because of the way he ran the University of Montana, which she blames for a $350,000 sex discrimination settlement it had to agree to in 2024. She was rather emphatic about it: “I am never dropping out,” she said. “Ever. Ever.”
