Thought I’d add some perspective to discussions about the stakes and odds of the 2026 midterms, and did so at New York.

With all the signs of a Democratic comeback arising from 2025’s off-year elections, there’s understandably some excitement among Democrats about a possible “wave” election next year that would dislodge the GOP trifecta that allowed Donald Trump to enact a legislative agenda this year without any minority-party input or support. The obvious benchmark for an anti-Trump wave is the 2018 midterms, which gave Democrats net gains of 41 U.S. House seats and a 17-seat majority in that chamber.

This week, Politico published a granular analysis of the 2026 House landscape that should curb any excess Democratic enthusiasm. It suggests the 2026 midterms are unlikely to produce anything like the 2018 wave. The landscape of winnable Republican seats is much narrower than in the first Trump midterms, for two basic reasons: (1) two rounds of gerrymandering have reduced the number of competitive districts, and (2) there’s a higher starting point of Democratic House seats. Or as Politico puts it:

“Partisan redistricting — even before this year — has allowed both parties to draw mostly safe seats, dropping the number of competitive districts that are likely to flip. And while the battlefield is smaller, Democrats also already own more of it than they did going into 2018. The very reason Democrats hardly need a blue wave to take back the House this time is that their congressional candidates largely outperformed Kamala Harris in last year’s elections.”

Putting these factors together with the underlying gradual increase in partisan polarization (which reduces split-ticket opportunities), there’s a lot less low-hanging fruit for Democrats than there was in 2018:

“In [2018], Democrats won roughly 90 percent of GOP-held House districts that had either been won by Clinton or that Trump had won by less than 5 points based on two-party vote share.

“And there were a lot of those seats. Republicans were defending 25 districts that Clinton had won two years prior. Next year, they only have three won by Harris. The number of districts Trump won by less than 5 points is similar over the two cycles.

“But outside that competitive zone, flipping seats got a lot harder in 2018: Democrats only picked up four of 18 seats that Trump had won by between 5 and 10 points.

“Next year, Democrats would have to win at least eight seats that Trump won by more than 5 points in 2024, in addition to sweeping every single highly competitive seat to come away with 235 seats as they did in 2018.”

To look at the landscape from a slightly different angle, there are 33 House districts that Democrats won by five points or less in 2024 but only 14 such Republican seats. It would take a big wave to reach beyond those opportunities.

Taking into account the current anti-Trump trend in public opinion and the historical tendency for the president’s party to lose seats, the authoritative Cook Political Report currently shows 18 Democratic-held seats and 17 Republican-held seats at stake in competitive races. Even assuming the landscape continues to shift in the direction of Democrats, that doesn’t provide much of a beachhead for a big wave. On top of that, gerrymandering is still underway, and while Republican gains won’t match Trump’s initial hopes of waveproofing the GOP’s House majority, they could perhaps pick up another few net seats if things go their way in Florida.

The good news for Democrats is they really don’t need to pick up 41 House seats to make 2026 a big victory. A gain of a mere three net seats (as compared to 24 in 2018) would flip control of the House, and that could have a huge impact on the power dynamics of Washington. Without trifecta control of Congress, Republicans could no longer enact filibusterproof budget-reconciliation bills like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. They’d lose control of the House committees that are busily digging into the alleged scandals of the Joe Biden administration; instead, these committees would be conducting politically salient investigations of misconduct and extremist policies in the second Trump administration. And given the extreme polarization in Congress, Democrats wouldn’t need much of a majority of their own to thwart Trump’s wishes. Indeed, a very small House majority might provide a good excuse for Democrats to turn down politically dubious presidential impeachment measures, like those Democrats passed in 2019 that were doomed in the Senate.

Dating back to the Great Depression, there have been only three midterm elections (1962, 1998, and 2002) in which the party opposing the president failed to win at least three net House seats, the Democratic target next year. In all three of those years, the president’s job-approval rating (per Gallup) was above 60 percent when voters voted. Trump’s latest job-approval rating from Gallup was 36 percent, and over two terms it has never even once topped 50 percent. So however small the target Democrats must hit in 2026 to bust up Trump’s trifecta, they’re very likely to hit it.