In the U.S. midterms’ murky math, economic distress is the only clear variable

Eight years ago, during the first Trump administration, U.S. voters flocked to the polls at a greater rate than in any midterm congressional election in more than a century. They took out their frustrations with the 45th President in a stunning manner, giving Democrats a 40-seat boost in the House of Representatives and knocking the Republican leadership from power.Polls suggest that may be the likely outcome again this November, in a political atmosphere that could serve as a semaphore for the future of U.S. politics: the distinct triumph of one party even as the divisions demarcating the country’s culture widen and deepen. Indeed, the chasms that characterize American life − rural versus suburban and urban, workers versus professionals, the devout versus the irreligious, all of them rough proxies for the increasingly conservative right and the increasingly progressive left − seem to be growing, even spiralling out of control. Open this photo in gallery:Americans fed up with the Trump administration can have their say on Nov. 3. Republicans, meanwhile, are mobilizing to keep their hold on power.Ken Cedeno/AFP via Getty ImagesWhile the Republicans lost control of the House in 2018, they strengthened their hold on the Senate. That’s a possible but unlikely outcome this year, as several Democrats in states that voted for Donald Trump in 2024 have a real chance of toppling the incumbents there. And though Democratic control of the House would be a severe blow to the President − he can expect a series of investigations, fuelled by the subpoena power the newly empowered lawmakers would possess − continued control of the Senate would give him an important redoubt on Capitol Hill, for it is in that chamber where agency heads and judges, including at the Supreme Court, are confirmed.“Democrats are keeping their powder dry right now and not saying much about what they would do if they were elected,” said Donna Hoffman, a University of Northern Iowa political scientist. “Right now they are talking about tariffs and the economy, but once in office they will want to rein in the Trump administration. We can expect a great increase in combativeness from the administration − and maybe a constitutional crisis if members of the administration refuse to testify if they are summoned to Capitol Hill.” Election officials are beefing up security to prepare for violence or cyberattacks in November. In Georgia’s Bartow County, voting machines are carefully locked away; to the south in Irwin County, supervisor Ethan Compton issued panic buttons to two poll workers at each precinct. Brian Snyder/Reuters The recent GOP convention in Dallas portrayed the Democrats as a rogues' gallery to defeat. Across town, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico used a statewide grocery drive to talk about cost-of-living issues. Mr. Talarico is in a close race with Texas Republican Ken Paxton. Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press; Brandon Bell/Getty Images When power in the House has shifted in a midterm election, three-quarters of the time it has occurred when the sitting president’s name has not appeared on the ballot. Generally, the 435 House elections held every two years are local contests, conducted by incumbents well known in their districts and by challengers who often have served on city councils or school boards − or in open seats contested by two candidates with no national experience but who are familiar to voters because of their local political or community involvement.A good contemporary example is Michigan’s 10th congressional district, located north of Detroit, about 33 kilometres from the Canadian border, where the Democrat, prosecutor Christina Hines, and the Republican, Army veteran Mike Bouchard, are in a very tight race. It’s widely considered a toss-up in a competitive district that voted for Barack Obama and for Mr. Trump each time they ran. But the two candidates are running in one of the rare election years when local elections have been nationalized by both sides. “Candidates will talk about what they do locally, but for a lot of people, and for a lot of candidates, this year’s congressional elections are a referendum on the Trump presidency,” said James Melcher, a political scientist at the University of Maine, Farmington. “At the same time, Trump is regarding these as elections to preserve his own skin. He’s pragmatic enough to know that to do the things he wants, he’s got to campaign across the country.” Open this photo in gallery:Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974 was a seismic political shock to, among other things, the U.S. midterms that fall.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesOften one party is eager to transform a regional contest into a national referendum. A good example is the 1974 midterm congressional elections, when Democrats, campaigning on ethics and an overhaul of the campaign-finance system, ran as alternatives to Watergate-tainted Republicans, who would have preferred that the name Richard Nixon, who had resigned in disgrace three months earlier, never be heard in their districts. The result: a 45-seat Democratic pickup and the emergence of six first-time House members who would become senators and one, James Blanchard, who would become governor of Michigan and, from 1993 to 1996, the U.S. ambassador to Canada. “That was a launching pad for many of us,” Mr. Blanchard, who was 32 at the time, said in an interview. “We went to Washington as a reaction to Nixon. The Watergate landslide could be a precursor to what is going on this year in reaction to Trump.” Open this photo in gallery:The post-Nixon midterms kickstarted the congressional career of James Blanchard, at left with New Jersey governor Christie Whitman in 1995.Tom Hanson/The Canadian PressTom Harkin, who was elected to the House as part of that 1974 wave before moving to the Senate a decade later, expected to campaign primarily on ending the Vietnam War. “But Watergate made it a national election,” he said. “I found myself mainly talking about corruption. Having a crook in the White House was out there all the time − and that will be an election issue this time.”This time, with a unusually large number of House members not seeking re-election − about one-sixth of them, a majority Republicans − the Democrats are eager to stand as alternatives to Mr. Trump while the President campaigns across the country. He plans to support his tariff and immigration policies in near-daily rallies on behalf of candidates he either has selected as next-generation MAGA combatants or has endorsed for their embrace of MAGA issues. “I’m going to be going the last 30 days before the election,” Mr. Trump said early this month. “I’ll be making a lot of stops.”Open this photo in gallery:Mr. Trump told the Republican convention to expect him on the campaign trail often this fall.Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty ImagesThat suits Democrats just fine. They welcomed Mr. Trump’s plea at the Republican midterm convention asking voters to “pretend that I am running.”In an open seat on Boston’s North Shore, former Joe Biden aide Dan Koh is campaigning as an unalloyed Trump opponent. “Right now we need a fighter … to take on the President on Day One,” Mr. Koh said, describing Mr. Trump as “the biggest threat to this country” and saying that “we don’t call out his B.S. enough.” The Democrats’ use of Mr. Trump isn’t confined to congressional races. Early this month, Democratic Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts opened her general-election campaign by saying, “You have somebody as President right now who is doing things that directly hurt the residents and the economy of Massachusetts and our businesses.”Open this photo in gallery:Governor Maura Healey – at middle, playing host to Canadian premiers in Boston last year – is now up for re-election in Massachusetts.Sophie Park/ReutersSome Republican House candidates are veering away from Mr. Trump in a reaction to the President’s low approval ratings, high gasoline prices and inflation and the stalemate in Iran. Former state senator Ralph Alvarado, a candidate in a central Kentucky district that gave Mr. Trump a 15-point victory in 2024, for example, removed references to the President from his website. A presidential political tour − known since Andrew Johnson’s disastrous 1866 effort as a “swing around the circle” − doesn’t always work. Woodrow Wilson tried it in a non-election year, 1919, to win support for the League of Nations, and even if he hadn’t suffered a debilitating collapse prior to a severe stroke, the effort was a failure.The vast majority of GOP House candidates are incumbents seeking re-election with long records of support for the MAGA agenda. They cannot hide from the Trump agenda − especially with Mr. Trump’s presence on the campaign trail reaffirming his role at the heart of contemporary U.S. politics. Left unsaid: Whether the President, not known for sharing campaign treasury, will dip into his huge (somewhere around US$1-billion) political fund to aid Republican House candidates. It would take about a billion commemorative Trump coins – recently issued by the Mint to mark 250 years of U.S. independence – to match the political fund at the President’s disposal. While wealth is central to the Trump brand, Republican House candidates are largely expected to pay their own way. Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images; Alex Wong/Getty Images Like 2026, years in which there were dramatic changes to the composition of the House occurred when there were dramatic changes in the broader politics. The 1946 midterm elections (Republicans gained 55 seats in the House) were the first since the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the end of the Second World War and were held with the Communist threat growing in Europe. Twice have health-care issues prompted large defections from the Democrats − the first time in 1994, in the wake of the fizzling of the Hillary Clinton-directed health-care plan (Republicans gained 54 seats), and then in the 2010 reaction to the approval of Obamacare (Republicans gained 64 seats). Open this photo in gallery:The Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, was a wedge issue in the midterms of 2010, the year it was introduced.Robert F. Bukaty/The Associated PressThe two largest turnovers in party control since the Civil War came in 1874 (Ulysses Grant’s Republicans lost 94 seats) and 1894 (Grover Cleveland’s Democrats lost 125 seats) − and those two elections, though conducted in a far smaller, far less powerful and far less globally engaged country, may offer some hints about the upcoming election.In both cases, economic distress was the big motivator. And of the two, 1894 may be the closer analogue. It came after Mr. Cleveland became the first non-consecutively re-elected president, a phenomenon that went unmatched for 130 years, until Mr. Trump. In 1894, as in 2026, powerful populist movements were sweeping the country. MAGA and the 19th-century movement that resulted in the People’s Party candidate James B. Weaver winning nearly 9 per cent of the vote and prevailing in five states in 1892 may have different characters, but they possess important similarities. These include a base in rural areas, a sense of rage against established ways and powerful economic interests and a broad revolt against technological advances. In 1894 it was the power of railroad magnates and the influence of social elites; today it’s the power of tech bros and the influence of university elites. Grover Cleveland, at far left with his cabinet in 1889, was the only U.S. president to be elected to non-consecutive terms – until Donald Trump’s return to power in 2025. Cleveland’s Republicans lost badly in the first midterms of his second presidency, a fate that the Trump GOP hopes to avoid. Glasshouse Vintage/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; Morry Gash/AP Power has changed hands in the Senate four times since 1980, when the Republicans gained their first majority in a quarter-century. The Democrats took over in 1986 in the Ronald Reagan era, the Republicans did so in 1994 in the Bill Clinton era, the Democrats returned to power in 2006 while George W. Bush was president, and the Republicans took over again in 2014 under Mr. Obama. Since the first Congress in 1789, 689 lawmakers have served in both the House and the Senate. It is a good bet that each one of them, including the 45 current senators who have done so, would affirm that the two bodies are different in environment, tone, procedures and traditions. So it follows that the outlook for the Senate in these midterm elections is substantially different than the outlook for the House: less clear.The Republicans’ prospects for retaining control of the chamber, where they now have a 55-45 advantage, remain the principal mystery of the autumn campaign season. In only one case, Maine, is a Republican (Susan Collins) seeking re-election in a state Mr. Trump lost. She’s not talking about him. Open this photo in gallery:Open this photo in gallery:Republican Susan Collins is up against Democrat Troy Jackson for a Maine Senate seat.CJ Gunther and Joseph Prezioso/Getty ImagesMeanwhile, the Trump states where Democrats are best positioned − though not yet favoured − to prevail are Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. The chances of them pulling an inside straight are slight but not completely out of the question. In Nebraska, their hopes rest not with a Democrat − there isn’t even one on the ballot after nominee Cindy Burbank withdrew − but with an Independent, union leader Dan Osborn, whom the Democrats hope will, like Independents Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, caucus with the Democrats and generally vote with them.Republicans do have hopes of taking Senate seats in New Hampshire and Michigan, where Democratic lawmakers are retiring. A Democratic takeover of the Senate would be an enormous blow to Mr. Trump, especially if it is paired with a Democratic takeover of the House. It would be more than an end of the easy confirmation of presidential appointees. It would sound a death knell even to the few moderate elements of his agenda, because a weakened Republican presence in the Senate would mean a weakened GOP presence in negotiations with the House. That, more than anything else, often is where the real power lies, for Mr. Trump would have no strong partner in what Capitol insiders sometimes call the “dance of legislation.” Finn Gomez/Getty Images U.S. politics: More from The Globe and MailThe Decibel podcastWhen The Globe’s Irene Galea was in Washington to cover the trade war, she saw lobbyists all over town. But what is a lobbyist? She spoke with The Decibel about the business of political influence. 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