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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.

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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.”

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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........

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