Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture.
As of Sunday, the midterm elections are now 100 days away. Democrats are favored to retake the House, but how many seats can they reasonably expect to win?
A lot of data is in their favor. President Donald Trump’s approval rating sits below 40%. He has renewed hostilities against Iran, a deeply unpopular war that has exacerbated inflation—voters’ most important issue. Democrats are also performing better in special elections than they did ahead of the 2018 midterms, when the party picked up 40 House seats on net.
But while Democrats need to flip only three seats on net to win the chamber, the size of a majority matters greatly, and a gain on the level of 2018 is very unlikely this year.
Following the mid-decade restricting war that Republicans began last year, Democrats are set to lose a net of up to 10 seats essentially by default. That puts them in a deeper hole, though it’s not as deep as in 2018. Democrats entered that midterm with only 195 seats, compared with 215 this year, after assigning vacant seats to the party that most recently held them. In other words, Democrats need to flip 20 seats on net this fall to match their post-2018 majority of 235 seats.
Unfortuntately, even that may prove difficult.
As of Friday, Democrats are favored in 205 House districts and Republicans in 211, according to the median race rating between the Cook Political Report, Inside Elections, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball—the three most-esteemed election handicappers. Another 19 districts are toss-ups.
To score a majority, Democrats need to win every House seat where they are currently favored, plus another 13 seats. The clearest route to do that runs through the 19 toss-ups. Republicans hold 15 of them, including New York’s 17th District, which then-Vice President Kamala Harris won in the 2024 presidential election. If Democrats hold the four toss-up seats they’re defending, they would need to flip nine GOP-held toss-ups to win the House.
Of course, toss-up races aren’t the only seats Democrats can win. The next-best batch of opportunities, those that merely “lean” toward Republicans, includes nine more seats. Democrats currently hold three of these, with early polling in two—North Carolina’s 1st District and Florida’s 14th—suggesting they may stay Democratic.
If Democrats were to sweep all the races where they are favored, all the toss-ups, and all the “Lean Republican” contests—a heavy lift, no doubt—it would still produce a smaller majority (233 seats) than the party had coming out of 2018 (235 seats). And to gain 40 seats on net, as they did six years ago, would require Democrats winning every seat where they are favored, every toss-up, every “Lean” and “Likely Republican” race, as well as five districts considered “solid” for Republicans.
As it stands at 100 days out, Democrats are more likely than not to retake the House—the most important thing here—but even an excellent night probably won’t result in a “blue tsunami” or a huge majority.
Through extreme gerrymandering, Republicans have so thoroughly broken our electoral system that there just aren’t many competitive races these days. In 2018, the Cook Political Report rated 116 seats as less than “solid” for either party. But this year? It’s closer to half that, with only 66 seats considered competitive. (Of course, Democrats also gerrymander, but it’s primarily in response to GOP overreach, and team blue’s larger goal is to ban the practice altogether.)
Race ratings are a reliable gauge for what’s possible. In 2024, Cook reviewed the accuracy of its ratings dating back to 1984. Among the 884 House races Cook rated as “likely” for either party, it missed the mark just 27 times. And for the 6,439 House races rated as “solid,” the outlet was wrong just twice. Two races, in roughly 40 years.
There is also at least one data point that is cooler on the chances of a big blue wave this fall: the generic congressional ballot. The “generic ballot” asks survey respondents whether they’d vote for a Democrat or a Republican if an upcoming election were held today. No candidate names, no districts, nothing else. It’s one of our best tools to predict the size of a wave election.
As of Friday afternoon, Democrats led Republicans by a healthy 6.3 percentage points on the generic ballot, per election analyst Nate Silver’s polling average. However, that’s down about a point since early May.
By comparison, 100 days ahead of the 2018 midterms, Democrats led by 7.7 points on the measure, according to FiveThirtyEight’s historical average. (Full disclosure: I used to work at FiveThirtyEight and have edited Silver’s work.)
That said, for control of the House to hit coin-flip odds, Democrats’ lead on the generic ballot would need to fall to around 3 points, according to analyses from Decision Desk HQ and The New York Times.
The more likely scenario, though, is that the Democrats’ lead grows from here. Historically, the generic ballot tends to drift against the president’s party as a midterm nears. And Democrats have scored some promising polls just in the past few days.
The Democratic Party also benefits from a sizable enthusiasm gap. Fifty percent of Democrats are “very enthusiastic” to vote, while the same is true for only 38% of Republicans, according to the latest YouGov/Economist poll. As a result of that enthusiasm, Democratic candidates in key races have been heavily outraising Republicans.
In the next 100 days, many other factors could boost Democrats’ chances. Inflation is expected to tick up again. Gas prices are once more on the rise, and Trump hopped back on the (deeply unpopular) tariff train. American troops are being injured and killed overseas, and Trump’s immigration gestapo is executing civilians here at home. The worse the country unfortunately gets, the more Democrats stand to gain.
However, with control of the House, the Democratic Party can start to rein in the brutal and often illegal excesses of the Trump administration.
Any updates?
- “Tell me about a complicated man.” Moviegoers certainly agree with the first line of “The Odyssey” since they flocked to see director Christopher Nolan’s adaptation, much to the dismay of Elon Musk, who got fussy about Nolan casting Lupita Nyong’o, a Black woman, as Helen of Troy. If it weren’t clear from the film’s box-office success, the latest YouGov/Economist poll shows that Americans didn’t mind the casting much at all. Only 30% find Nyong’o’s casting “inappropriate”
Vibe check
If Democrats take at least one chamber of Congress this fall, as is likely, Trump will lose much of his power to ram through policies that harm Americans. And when it comes to a president’s power more generally, Americans see the job as having wide-reaching but far from total control, according to a YouGov poll from May.
At least 70% of Americans say presidents have total control or a lot of control over military operations and tariffs. However, Americans see presidents as having far less control over more immediate issues, such as crime rates, gun deaths, and private-sector wages.
Andrew Mangan
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