What Are the Chances of a Blue Wave in the Midterms?

Mary Harris

Slate

33
14.01.2026

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2026 is going to be a chance to answer a pretty strange question: What if one of the most powerful and theoretically coveted jobs in the world was actually one that very few wanted to keep?

The job is that of a senator or a member of Congress. NPR is tracking the number of lawmakers who have decided to throw in the towel this year. It’s a record: By last count, we’ve got 11 senators headed for the exit and 47 House members doing the same. Some are running for a different office. Others have gotten sick. Still others, like Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, have just decided to leave without even finishing out their terms.

Political scientist David Faris has been tracking all this too.

“There’s a sense that you can’t achieve anything in the American Congress right now,” Faris says. “It’s too broken. You have standard retirements compounded by a greater sense of the institution’s dysfunction and weakness vis-à-vis the executive branch.”

The congressional chaos is an opportunity for Democrats that will come mainly in November, when all 435 members of the House and a third of the Senate face their constituents in the 2026 midterms.

One of the things that’s helpful if you’re trying to predict what’s going to happen in these midterms is that we’ve been here before. Meaning: We’ve had a congressional election like this one, in 2018, two years after President Donald Trump was first sworn into office. Back then, Democrats gained 40 seats in the House—enough to retake the lower chamber of Congress. Members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar were sent to Washington. According to Faris, the conditions leading up to that election were in some ways less favorable to Democrats than they are now.

Things are looking up for the party’s chances of retaking the House, and the Senate is in play in a way it wasn’t a year ago. But, he cautions, it’s all taking place against this backdrop of “very deep and persistent abnormality.”

On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Faris about the case for a blue wave, and how to manage expectations for the midterms. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Polling is an interesting and important part of your case for why a blue wave is imaginable in 2026. You look at Democrats’ own internal polling for the past decade or so and see how it matches up with how the election actually went. And you say there’s been a shift. Can you explain that?

David Faris: Sure. In the off-year elections in 2025, which seem like 7,000 years ago but were actually two months ago, Democrats overperformed the public polling across the board in a way that they have never done in the Trump era. [These included the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, Zohran Mamdani in New York, and smaller local contests.] These are races where we didn’t have good public polling but where Democrats clearly blew out the expectations in a pretty significant way.

How does this compare to 2017 and 2018?

Even in 2017, when Democrats won these same gubernatorial elections and we were all feeling good in roughly the same way, the candidate in Virginia did beat his polling, but the candidate in New Jersey did not. And you didn’t have a blowout victory in, say, the Virginia House of Delegates in the way that you did in 2025.

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So the results just weren’t as definitive.

In 2017 they were pretty much across-the-board good. But what’s different is that Democrats beat their polling here, so there’s some evidence that if the electorate is composed roughly the same way in 2025 and 2026, it might actually be underestimating Democrats.

Right before the holiday break, there were a couple of prominent stories that have been on my mind, and I wanted to talk to you about them. One was in Politico, and the other was in New York magazine. They basically made opposite cases about this whole blue-wave notion. The Politico article looked at the prospects for Democrats to take the House and be competitive in the Senate, and it asserted that those prospects are a far cry from 2018 because a gerrymandered map is a tighter map for Democrats. They could get a lot of votes, but those votes are going to be diluted and it’s possible they won’t translate to seats—or at least not enough seats for what they call a comfortable majority. What do you make of this argument?

I don’t care how comfortable the victory is. It’s like if you’re running for a flight and you just slip in right as the door is closing at the gate, and they’re like, “We’re going to stick you in the back by the toilets.” I don’t care.

A five-seat majority is a five-seat majority. The reality is, if we have the gavel, we can do things that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. Politico is not wrong about the obstacles to a truly historic wave happening here. I will note that if you go back to the past few cycles, these predictive analyses about what size margin the parties need to do X, Y, and Z have been very wrong. For example, there was a Brennan Center analysis in 2018 that said something like, “Democrats could win the national popular vote by 7 or 8 points and still not retake the House.” And that turned out not to be true.

One thing Republicans are really worried about right now actually does relate to the results in the Virginia House of Delegates. The way that Democrats were able to flip 13 seats in that chamber was by flipping a bunch of Trumpy districts. If Democrats could win double-digit Trump districts—in places where the president won by 10 points or more—and be competitive in those districts, then none of these gerrymanders are safe.

I mentioned that there were two articles. The other, in New York magazine, basically makes your case: The Democrats don’t need to do much to retake the House. They need to win a handful of seats. What I took away was that even if the party does well this cycle, it may still feel tight in Congress, and so the question becomes: How comfortable with acting aggressively in a tight environment are Democrats? Because, historically, they have not been comfortable in that situation, acting aggressively, right?

I think that this is a bigger problem in 2029 than in 2027. Say we have a new Democratic president with, like, a 10-seat majority in the House and a one-seat minority in the Senate. That’s when I would be worried about this narrative of “Wow, we didn’t do as well as we had hoped” or “This isn’t really that big of a repudiation of Trump, and maybe we better move to the center.” For taking one or both chambers of Congress as the opposition party, I’m not sure that those dynamics are as important for the next couple of years.

Can we look at the math here? If this blue wave is going to happen, Democrats need to flip three seats to claim a majority in the House, and four seats to win control of the Senate. That doesn’t seem like a lot when I say it out loud, but it can be, and I know that in the Senate it’s harder than in the House. Can you explain that a little bit?

The Senate is tricky because it is elected in three classes. Every two years, a third of the Senate is up for reelection.

And sometimes there are more Republican seats, and sometimes there are more Democratic seats, right?

Yes. So it’s an artifact of the map and the partisanship of the states at any given time, how good or bad your Senate map is for you. In 2018, when Republicans gained seats in the U.S. Senate, even in a Democratic-wave year, that was a famously horrific map for Democrats.

Is the map horrific this year?

It’s not as horrific as 2018, but it’s not great. There’s Maine, where Susan Collins is like a zombie who keeps surviving election after election after election in a pretty blue-leaning state. In 2020 she beat her polls by, like, 9 points to hold that seat. I mean, it was unbelievable.

But it’s where Democrats are focusing. It seems as if there’s some navigability here. Where else are they focusing? Thom Tillis is retiring in North Carolina. Does that seem like a place Democrats are eyeing?

Yeah—every cycle we’re within 2 points of winning North Carolina, and every cycle we lose it by 2 points. But North Carolina was very close in 2024. And Democrats are playing defense in a bunch of Trump-voting states. Michigan and Georgia are probably the most important ones. Those are going to be tough races. And in Minnesota, Democratic Sen. Tina Smith is retiring. If we lose any of those seats, we’re not taking the U.S. Senate. The optimistic case is that we hold those seats.

And then we get some kind of fantasy wish-cast Barbie Dream House candidates.

Yes, and this is the same position we were in in 2024, when we had to hold all the tough races, then we had to get a win in a couple of places where we haven’t won in a long time. And there was a brief moment in the summer of 2024 when it looked as if that might be possible. And then things ended up turning out very badly, including Bob Casey losing his seat in Pennsylvania. It complicates the math for Democrats in the Senate for the next six years, right? That was one of the worst outcomes of the night, in my mind, aside from, of course, that we elected a fascist who’s destroying the country.

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Is there anything I’m leaving out here that we need to consider?

I do think that all the pieces of the optimism case tied together—like the big shift among Latino voters—will come into play in a really serious way. And young people. They did not drift right in the same way that the popular imagination says they did. But to the extent that they did, they flipped way back to 2018 levels of support for Democrats.

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What Are the Chances of a Blue Wave in the Midterms?

Gen Z men have never been as far right as people say they are. They’re still far more liberal than their elder counterparts. It’s just that what’s happening is that the young men who are on the right are, like, psychotic. The young men who vote Republican tend to be part of this shitposting internet culture—but the numbers aren’t there for them. Gen Z is still a far more liberal generation than Gen X–ers or boomers. But the people who are on the right are significantly more to the right than we would maybe like them to be.

This conversation feels less like “Get ready for a blue wave” and more “Get ready to feel the pain in some way.” Whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, whatever, pain is coming.

Our whole politics is painful right now. I sometimes feel embarrassed to walk into my political science classrooms. The students that I’m talking to, this is their whole conscious adult life. College freshmen right now were 8 years old when Trump walked down the escalator. And so their whole conscious experience of politics as a sentient, quasi-adult human is this nightmare politics that never ends. People don’t necessarily want to study politics under those conditions, and I can’t blame them.

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