Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

The GOP’s Incredible Shrinking Senate Map

Trump has so badly damaged the Republican Party’s brand that strategists are contemplating bitter fights—and losses—in races they’d been banking on as sure things.

President Donald Trump at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas earlier this month.

If you obsessively read or write about politics, you’ve probably lost track of the number of times that political reporters happened upon major-party operatives in “panic mode.” Just this week, Democrats were said to be sounding an “alarm” because of a single poll in the New Hampshire open-seat Senate race showing a dead heat. But the struggle ahead for the GOP this year more than justifies the panic framing. Republican strategists are starting to see the birds head out to sea and the faint outline of an inbound tsunami. When the wave hits in early November, Republican Senate candidates—even in deep-red states like South Carolina, Kansas, and Florida—could be frantically bailing their way out before a Democratic surge without precedent in the past two decades.

Media attention to this development is overly focused on individual polls. And yes, there have been a handful of eyebrow-raising Senate surveys showing Democratic candidates like Florida’s Angie Nixon running even with their opponents in Republican strongholds. But Democrats are dreaming about these races not just because they’re high on hopium and a smattering of polls show their candidates within striking distance of a win. They’re taking their cues from broader structural shifts in the national political environment.

If recent polls are to be believed, this could be, in raw popular vote totals, the biggest blowout national election of the 21st century—one that has at least a chance of delivering the kind of victory Democrats have spent more than a decade hoping for. Last week, the comparatively staid New York Times/Siena College poll pegged the Democrats lead on the generic ballot at nearly nine points. Remember that in the two big GOP midterm waves of this century—2010 and 2014—Republicans won the national House popular vote by 6.8 and 5.7 points, respectively. The Democratic wave of 2018 was 8.6 points, the high-water mark for any midterm election this century.

Neither party has won a double-digit popular vote victory in a midterm election since Democrats in 1982, halfway through Ronald Reagan’s first term. But this pattern looks very much like it could change this year. In data guru Nate Silver’s generic ballot model, Democrats have opened up their biggest lead of the cycle at 8.6 points.

And there’s still worse news for Republicans: The GOP’s average reading in this measure is down since the spring—a sign of real erosion in support that lines up with the big drop in President Trump’s approval rating over the same period. Given this overall trend, there’s also ample space and time for the Democratic lead to grow—especially in light of the president’s apparent determination to inflict as much damage on his own party as possible. When you get past a 10-point lead on the generic ballot—which a number of surveys already show happening—the firewalls start to break.

The reasons for Democrats’ optimism are not a mystery. The president spent 2025 burning through his political capital on a nationwide ICE reign of terror, an indiscriminate slash-and-burn evisceration of the federal government, a slapdash tariff war, and an orgy of unapologetic self-dealing that would make Mobutu Sese Seko blush. Trump’s record was so bad that a record number of Democrats had emerged as favorites to claim a House majority by the end of last year. At that point, Trump maintained a high enough approval rating to make GOP control of the Senate a........

© The Nation