By Tuesday, 3 November 2026, Americans vote in the US midterm elections. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for election, along with 35 of the 100 Senate seats and 36 governorships.
The Republicans currently control the White House and both chambers of Congress, holding unified control of government. With no one else to share the blame, the vote is widely seen as a referendum on Donald Trump’s second term. Rising prices and the war with Iran, which began in February, have weighed on his popularity and the Democrats currently lead the national generic congressional ballot by about nine points. Forecasters now consider the Democrats strong favourites to win the House and narrow favourites to win the Senate.
Robert Y. Shapiro, professor of political science at Columbia University and a specialist in public opinion and polling, shares his analysis of the race.
The interview was finalized on October 17.
Historically, the President’s party almost always loses seats in the midterms. Democrats now lead the national congressional poll by about nine points, and Trump’s approval rating is in the mid-thirties. How big is this backlash compared with past midterms – 2006, 2010, 2018?
Robert Y. Shapiro: It could conceivably be comparable, but there are two mitigating factors. First, the Republicans have become much more competitive — not only for the presidency, where they always have been, but also for House and Senate seats. Elections have been much closer, so it is more difficult for the Democrats to pick up seats. Secondly, redistricting efforts may limit what gains the Democrats can make.
In the past, a lead like the one the Democrats currently have, if the polls are right, might have produced at least 20 to 30 additional [House] seats in the election. Because of these mitigating factors, it might be closer to 10 or 15.
What is driving this backlash the most – the prices, the Iran war, or Trump himself?
It is the perceived very poor performance of the Trump administration overall, and perhaps the Republicans more generally. Keep in mind that we have unified Republican government. The Republicans cannot say the Democrats control Congress and have been constraining them; the Republicans are clearly in charge. So it is poor performance, broadly defined. Above all it is prices and affordability. The Iran war has been perceived as a disaster, despite everything Trump has tried to claim about it.
Then there is the ideological perspective: the perception that the Trump administration has tried to move things a little too far to the right, particularly on immigration enforcement. Going into the last election, the public was disappointed with how the Biden administration handled the southern border. Trump got into office and has gone too far in over-enforcing what he set out to do on immigration. And you actually see that in the polls: if you look at polling data prior to the election, an increasingly large number of people wanted immigration to decrease. Now there has been a shift. The proportion who say immigration should decrease has dropped off.
Is it typical when one party controls the White House and both chambers of Congress?
It happens more so in the case of a unified government, because voters can hold the entire government responsible. But historically, it is an approximate regularity in the data. A president is usually carried into office on an ideological wave in the direction of the president and his party. So Trump was elected president during a period of increasing conservative attitudes; Biden was elected in the wake of increasingly liberal attitudes.
But what happens when the president takes office? Not too long thereafter, there’s the perception that he is moved too far to the right. And so the public moves in a liberal direction, in a kind of thermostatic way, to tamp things down.
We see this regularity as far back as we have data, to the 1950s: Kennedy and Johnson were brought into office on a liberal wave in public opinion, and then Nixon was elected after a conservative shift rejecting things the Democrats had done.
How loyal is Trump’s MAGA support today, and who has left the coalition that elected him in 2024?
The best evidence I have seen in the polls is that Trump does have a very firm level of support among the MAGA supporters – a base of support that’s probably close to 30 percent [of the electorate]. But what brought him into office was a lot of support from other Republican-oriented voters: non-MAGA Republicans and independents who lean Republican. The polls show that he has begun to lose support among these other previous supporters.
Initially, his approval among Republicans was on the order of 95 percent – and among Democrats around 5 percent – a huge partisan difference. Now the polls show that among Republicans his level of support has fallen below 80 percent. That is still very high, and it is being held up by the MAGA base.
But losing some 15 points of support could have significant electoral consequences for his party in the midterms. And the next presidential election is completely up in the air.
Could MAGA outlive Trump as a movement, or is it a personal following?
I think it is a personal following. That is my opinion: your guess is as good as mine. With Trump out of the picture, it is not clear what those voters will do. [Vice President JD] Vance wants to pick up the mantle. He seems inclined to do whatever it takes to get their support.
Is there any real opposition to Trump inside the Republican Party? In this year’s primaries, Republicans who crossed him lost.
Right now you have Republicans basically speaking out against things he’s done. Not so much criticizing Trump, but criticizing his actions.
But they’re still not willing to vote against him.
That’s right. They have been strong on words and weak on action.
If MAGA is more of a personal following, yet few Republicans are willing to stand up to Trump, what could change after him?
What we need to see is what happens after the midterm election, and to what extent Trump is substantially tarnished by the outcome.
He is trying to make the election a referendum on himself, which it is anyway. But rather than running away from that, he is basically running toward it.
What concretely changes for Americans and for the rest of the world if Democrats win one or both chambers? In what way can they be a more effective check on the president’s power?
If the Democrats get a majority in either the House or the Senate, that will basically block any legislation that Trump wants, except legislation with bipartisan support. I think that is what will happen.
If the Democrats get control of the Senate, it will be difficult for Trump to appoint judges and other officials, to fill any cabinet seats that open up, or any other posts that require Senate approval – unless he selects nominees that are acceptable to the Democrats.
And if the Democrats win the House in particular, they can engage in all kinds of investigations of Trump and administration officials, and even pursue impeachment again, of Trump or other officials, for what might be called law-breaking, corruption and the like. To what extent they will do that is an open question.
Democrats are ahead, but critics say they have not offered a positive program apart from relying on the administration’s perceived poor performance, and their campaign is mostly built around the word “affordability.” Is that enough? Is there anything else they can offer?
It is pretty clear they could do well in the midterm simply by being the anti-Trump party, holding Republican congressional candidates accountable for what the Trump administration has done. The big question is: can that carry over into the next election?
What we saw in 2006: a midterm election that was a debacle for the Republicans precisely for that reason: their performance on the Iraq war. In 2008, it is hard to disentangle what drove the outcome. There was continued dissatisfaction with Iraq, but there was also the financial crisis, which occurred on the Republicans’ watch and for which they were blamed. And there was a very charismatic Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. How much was an Obama effect, and how much was voters tiring of the previous Republican administration, it is hard to say.
Going forward, it’s not clear to me that the same scenario will occur. It is not obvious that something on the scale of a financial crisis will harm Republicans even further. Nor is it obvious at this point that the Democrats will have a candidate who appears to have substantial leadership skills and ideas that would carry the day. So all we can predict about the next presidential election is that it is going to be very close.
In the primaries, younger left-wing candidates defeated long-serving Democrats, and several of them were backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Can this be considered an answer to MAGA?
We will have to see what happens in the current election, where some democratic-socialist-type candidates are running for office.
But I think the success of those candidates has been compartmentalized in particular locations – geographic areas like New York, and various congressional districts. In terms of being a winning strategy, it doesn’t look like one.
What about Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan?
I think that will be pretty telling. The problem is that there are two aspects of his campaign: the democratic socialist aspect with regard to economic policy, and his position on Palestine. It is hard to disentangle the two, and both could work pretty heavily against him. If he’s able to win, I think it is a sign that particular kinds of populistic messages can work. But we need to see what happens in some other elections around the country.
The big question is which candidates from that wing of the party will emerge. There are two relevant ones. One is unlikely because of his age, and that is Bernie Sanders. The other is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has some potential. She has a pragmatic streak: she might be perceived as a democratic socialist candidate, but she might be able to tone things down to the point where she could gain significant Democratic support. That is a function of her experience in Congress, I think.
It is one thing to run for office on ideology; it is another thing to govern.
She has been in Congress as an opponent of the Trump administration, and to go after the administration you have to do things like do your homework on issues. Of course, you can rely on your staff to do that. But if you have seen her perform in committees, she performs like a regular, conscientious politician.
Could the election change the direction of US foreign policy on Ukraine or in the Middle East?
No. Foreign policy is something that the executive – the president – is in charge of, and I don’t think the election has any consequence on that.
But Trump says that the Iran war will end after the election. Why would he time it that way?
Foreign policy rarely decides midterms, but do you think this could be an exception?
There is a difference between foreign policy in the abstract and wars – and failure in wars. And we know for a fact that foreign policy doesn’t matter until it does. So ask Lyndon Johnson [Vietnam], Harry Truman [Korea], George W. Bush [Iraq] – and Trump and the Republicans.
Is the current Democratic surge a lasting shift in American politics, or is it just a short-term reaction to one president and administration?
I think it is a short-term reaction, but the answer is we don’t know. We have not been in this situation in the United States in recent years. And I think the big question is what will happen to the Republican Party. Will it attempt to become a Trump-like party? In which case there would be a lingering threat to democracy. But what is more decisive in the current and next election is whether or not the Republican candidates will accept the outcome of the election.
Is there a chance that they won’t?
Given the way Trump is talking, he seems poised to look for any opportunity to challenge the election results, and his supporters seem willing to think that way as well. We will have to see. In the last two elections, 2022 and 2024, there was a consensus that they were free and fair. The question is whether we will have another one in a context where Trump and Republicans have an incentive to question the results.
Would Trump contest the results if his name is not on the ballot?
It would be a political and psychological blow to him if his party loses this election in a massive way.
But if it is a massive result, it becomes more difficult to claim there was fraud. If it is a close election, it becomes easier to claim that fraud made a difference.
So we will have to see.
Trump has repeatedly suggested that he would consider running for a third term. Is that possible?
He can’t run for re-election; the 22nd Amendment and the 12th Amendment prohibit that.
The only conceivably plausible scenario by which he could become president is if the Republicans win the 2028 election, control the House of Representatives, they select Trump as Speaker of the House, and then the newly elected President and the Vice President resign.
He would become President without having to run for election. But of course, that is a very weird scenario; a lot of things have to happen. And it would represent such blatant political manipulation that a lot of people would not be happy about it.
