The battle for control of the House of Representatives in 2026 will be decided primarily in Trump country.
Compared with other recent midterm elections, Republicans this year are defending an unusually small number of House seats that either voted against President Donald Trump in 2024 or backed him only narrowly, according to new calculations shared with CNN by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. That means Democrats have fewer easy pickup opportunities against obviously vulnerable targets than is typical for the party out of the White House during a midterm election.
This Trump-tilted terrain is central to the GOP’s hopes of defying the history of midterm losses for the president’s party and maintaining its slim House majority. “They are playing on our turf,” said Mike Marinella, spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “We have the fundamental advantage.”
Democrats (and most independent analysts) continue to believe the party remains favored to regain the House majority, especially because to do so they need to gain only three seats — far fewer than the opposition party usually wins in midterm elections, especially when the president’s job approval rating is as weak as Trump’s is now.
But even many Democrats acknowledge that the nature of this year’s battlefield will make it difficult to achieve the sweeping gains many party activists are anticipating — much less approach the 41 seats they netted during the 2018 “blue wave” election during Trump’s first term. In many ways, the 2026 battle for the House is shaping up as a collision between an irresistible force — the tailwind generated for Democrats by Trump’s high disapproval rating — and an immovable object — the unusually large number of Republicans barricaded into ruby-red House districts.
How presidents are shaping House midterms
One of the most powerful trends of modern US politics is that Americans are treating congressional elections more like parliamentary contests that are less a choice between two individuals than a referendum on which party they want to set the national agenda. That judgment has been shaped above all by voters’ verdict on the performance of the incumbent president. The result is a growing correlation between voters’ preferences for president and their choices in House and Senate races.
Those calculations make it possible to compare the current House battlefield with the Center’s previous studies documenting the relationship between the results in presidential elections and the pattern of losses for the president’s party in the next midterm campaign. That exercise has revealed a very clear pattern: House losses for the president’s party in midterms are now heavily concentrated in districts where the president himself lagged or only slightly exceeded his own national performance in the presidential race two years before. Even in the worst midterm environments, both parties are much less likely to suffer losses in the districts where the president ran most strongly two years before.
During the Republican midterm landslide in 2010, for instance, House Democrats lost 31 seats in districts where Barack Obama ran at least 5 points below his national vote share in 2008 and 35 seats in districts where Obama ran between 4 points below and 4 points above his national vote share. Amid all of those historic losses, by contrast, Democrats still added two seats in the districts where Obama ran at least 5 points better than he did nationally. The big Democratic gains in the 2006 midterm followed a similar, if not quite as severe, pattern, with the party mostly adding seats in districts where George W. Bush displayed relatively less strength in the 2004 presidential race.
This pattern persisted through the blue wave election in 2018. As in those earlier midterms, the Democratic gains that swept the party back to the House majority were concentrated in districts where Trump two years before had either lost or just slightly exceeded his national performance. Even by then, there were fewer of those marginal seats than in 2006 or 2010 — but the plausible target list for Democrats was still bigger than it is today. “The battlefield and the map to the majority in ’18 was substantially larger than it is now,” says Democratic consultant Dan Sena, who ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the party’s sweep that year.
How Trump shapes the Democrats’ target list
This history frames the challenge facing Democrats in 2026. Compared with 2018, the number of Republicans in highly vulnerable districts, as measured by the previous presidential vote, has continued to shrink, the Center’s calculations show. That means to score big gains, Democrats will have to advance further onto hostile terrain than parties usually have done in these recent midterms.
After the latest redistricting maneuvers, Kondik calculates, House Republicans are defending eight seats that Trump lost in 2024, and 25 more that he carried with a vote total no more than 4 points higher than his national vote share. By comparison in 2018, the GOP had to defend 25 seats that Trump lost and another 18 that he carried with a vote total no more than 4 points above his national percentage. In all, Republicans are defending 10 fewer seats this year (33) than in 2018 (43) where Trump in the previous presidential election either ran behind his national vote total or just slightly above it, according to the Center’s analysis.
The remaining 187 House Republicans this year, or 85% of their conference, are in districts where Trump ran at least 5 points better than his national 2024 percentage of the vote. That’s higher than the share of seats the majority party held in such secure terrain before Republicans suffered their big midterm losses in 2006 and 2018, and Democrats were routed in 2010.
“Unless the bottom drops out a bit more for Republicans, it may be difficult for Democrats to realize gains anywhere close to what they had in 2018,” said Geoffrey Skelley, chief elections analyst for Decision Desk HQ, a political website. “That’s because it matters a lot who holds what districts.”
If anything, heading into the midterm House Democrats hold more politically tenuous seats. Partially as a result of the redistricting wars, 16 of them now hold seats in districts that Trump carried and another three dozen or so are in districts he lost narrowly to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Democrats are not worried much about their incumbents in the districts that Harris narrowly carried. The Democratic assumption — generally supported by independent analysts — is that if Republicans couldn’t beat those Democrats in 2024, when Trump was at high tide, they are unlikely to do so in a midterm, when the president’s party typically recedes. “Beating a Democrat in a Harris seat that you lost for president … historically that’s a heavy lift” in the next midterm, Kondik said. “You would not expect many of those incumbents to lose.”
No one is as confident about the fate of the 16 Democrats in districts that Trump carried last time.
Given Trump’s sagging approval ratings, some of them seem relatively safe (such as Reps. Tom Suozzi in New York and Susie Lee in Nevada). But how many of their other incumbents can survive in these seats — particularly those that have been redrawn to tilt further toward the GOP in states including Ohio, Texas and North Carolina — remains a critical variable for November. The more Democratic-held seats that Republicans win, the deeper into Trump territory Democrats will have to push to establish any majority, let alone a comfortable governing cushion.
As in the past, the lowest-hanging fruit for Democrats should be the eight Republicans in districts that voted for Harris. Though two of those incumbents (Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania and Mike Lawler in New York) have frustrated them before, Democrats are strongly favored to capture the remaining seats (four of which were redrawn to benefit Democrats during the California redistricting, and another of which is the product of a court-ordered redistricting in Utah).
The clearest opportunities for Democrats are the 25 Republicans in seats that Trump won relatively narrowly. The DCCC is officially targeting almost all of those Republicans, including multiple seats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Arizona and Colorado. “Democrats have a pretty defined path to the majority in these districts Trump won by single digits,” said David Wasserman, senior elections analyst at the Cook Political Report. Because there are so few Republicans defending districts that Harris won, Wasserman said, the “tipping point” for House control will likely come in seats such as those now held by Republican Reps. Zach Nunn in Iowa and Tom Barrett in Michigan, where Trump prevailed by small margins.
Beyond that, the DCCC also is targeting 16 of the Republican-held seats where Trump ran at least 5 points above his national showing in 2024 (which means he captured at least 55% of the vote in them). As the 2006, 2010 and 2018 experiences showed, the party out of the White House has won relatively few of such seats even in very good midterms.
Marinella, the NRCC spokesperson, said the party isn’t worried about holding those districts-especially after Democrats, even in the very favorable environment of 2018, failed to win many comparable places. “They couldn’t do it in probably the best political environment they had in years,” he said. “If they couldn’t go into those districts back then, how could they possibly do that now?”
But Democrats see several reasons to pursue such longer-shot opportunities. Viet Shelton, a DCCC spokesperson, says Trump’s declining job approval rating has opened the door for Democrats in these places. “We are seeing a massive drop off in public support for Trump, which tells us voters want someone to be a check on the president,” Shelton said.
Sena points to another rationale. Republicans, he notes, are building a big fund-raising advantage over Democrats, and widening the congressional battlefield is crucial to preventing the GOP from focusing that firepower solely on the few, more marginal, seats Democrats need to tip the majority. “The way you counter that money is you force them to have to spread the resources and go deeper into the map to defend themselves,” Sena said. “It makes it much harder for them to figure out exactly where to go, and exactly how to defend themselves, particularly when the national environment is moving against them.”
Skelley is skeptical that Democrats today can flip many seats deep in Trump country. But, like Wasserman and others, he believes the range of plausible targets will grow if Trump’s approval rating declines even slightly more. That, he said, could create a larger Democratic wave that “hits the (Republican) floodwall and spills over.”
Even in 2018, when Trump’s approval rating was several points higher on Election Day than it is in most polls now, Democrats unexpectedly captured a few Republican House seats that Trump had handily carried two years before in states including South Carolina, Oklahoma and Maine. For all the protection that the map now provides the GOP, if Trump can’t rebuild his public support, Republicans still face a greater risk than Democrats of waking up to unpleasant surprises in November.
