David Wasserman breaks down the 2026 midterms, where Democrats need 3 House seats (53-47 Senate gap) but face legal battles in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Indiana, Ohio, and Florida’s map shift. Republicans defend 4 purple Senate states—Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan—but fragmentation in Georgia could help Ossoff, while Texas remains unwinnable for Democrats after Trump’s 14-point victory. Economic issues like inflation and ACA subsidies dominate, with 54% favoring deportations but 51% opposing ICE tactics. Wasserman warns soft Trump voters may abandon the GOP if conditions worsen, despite his base’s loyalty, while legal challenges remain limited due to state-administered elections. [Automatically generated summary]
So remind us about the balance of power in the House and the Senate, and just give us a state of play as we head into these midterm elections.
unidentified
Sure thing.
Well, Democrats are effectively at 215 seats to Republicans, 220.
There are a few vacancies, but they need three seats on net to retake the majority from Republicans in the House.
And we just shifted 18 ratings in Democrats' favor.
And today we only see 18 out of 435 races as toss-ups, but Republicans would need to win two-thirds of the toss-up column to hold their House majority.
Now, that makes Democrats modest favorites.
There are still some unresolved questions over district lines in a few states amid this mid-decade redistricting war that Republicans launched last summer in Texas, but hasn't gone according to their plans.
We've seen Democrats counter in California.
They are proposing a new map in Maryland and in Virginia, where Democrats are threatening four Republican seats by asking voters to approve a constitutional amendment.
Meanwhile, Republicans, they've passed new maps in Missouri, which is still subject to a legal and referendum challenge, North Carolina, which each gives Republicans an additional seat on top of the three to five that Texas could generate.
And in Indiana and Ohio, Republicans did not get the boost that they had hoped for from mid-decade redistricting.
So that really places the onus on Florida and Governor DeSantis, who has indicated that Florida will revisit its congressional map in April.
The end result is likely to be close to a wash or maybe even a small boost to Democrats from these new maps heading into November.
And so even if Democrats were to sweep all four of those races, that would only get Democrats to 49 seats, and they would need to win at least two of their reach states.
Democrats are hoping to compete in Iowa, Ohio, Alaska, and Texas, which are all states that Donald Trump carried by 11 points or more.
So we could be on a trajectory for a similar result to 2018 when Democrats were able to flip the House majority but fell short in the Senate.
So let's look first at some of the differences that you lay out between what we're expecting here in 2026 and what happened in 2018.
So you mentioned the inflation and geopolitical instability that we have right now, the redistricting war, more open seat, but fewer genuine takeover opportunities, as you said.
And then you also say that the Democrats' brand is weaker than it was eight years ago.
What do you mean by that?
unidentified
Well, it's true.
Back in 2018, Democrats had at least a 40% favorability as a party consistently in polls.
Most recent NBC News poll from October found that Democrats' favorability as a party was at 28%.
And so not even Democrats like Democrats these days.
But that's unlikely to be a problem for them because midterms are almost always referenda on the party in power.
And President Trump has dominated the news.
And recent events, be it in Minneapolis or Venezuela, have dominated the news to such an extent that Democrats don't need a clear leader or message to be able to overtake Republicans.
All they really need is to keep the spotlight on a president whose approval rating is hovering around 41 or 42 percent.
And that's a big reason why we saw such a swing in his favor in 2024, particularly among Latinos and other immigrant groups, independent voters, voters who are not that ideological but ask themselves, am I better off than I was two or four years ago?
unidentified
Many of those same voters are either disenchanted with both parties or snapping back to Democrats.
The fifth item on your list of the differences between 2026 and 2018 is that Republicans are on a more even financial footing.
Can you talk about sort of where the two parties are in terms of fundraising and spending?
unidentified
Yeah, this is a big concern for Democrats, and one of the advantages that Republicans could still have, particularly in the House, where they really need to localize a lot of these contests and spend an exorbitant amount trying to decimate the Democrat in the race in order to overcome this poor national environment for their party.
And there are a couple of factors here.
First of all, when Donald Trump first came into office in 2017, he didn't really have a robust political operation or fundraising apparatus.
Now, the MAGA Inc. PAC entered 2026 with $304 million in cash on hand.
But the Supreme Court could be poised to strike down coordination limits on spending between parties and candidates, which could allow Republicans to funnel some of that money into races where Republicans might otherwise be, Republican candidates might be at a cash disadvantage.
unidentified
We're also seeing that Democrats are not massively outraising Republicans as they were in past cycles.
Let's move on to the similarities that you lay out between 2018 and 2026.
You mentioned earlier, again, that health care is at the center of Democrats' messaging.
Democrats have an enthusiasm advantage.
Democrats have a focus on national security candidates, but also a lack of a clear Democratic leader or identity.
And then, as you mentioned, the Senate map somewhat insulating Republicans from losses.
I want to talk about that lack of a clear Democratic leader or identity.
Why do you think that is, and how big of an issue is that for Democrats?
unidentified
Well, we saw a split screen in November between Zorhan Mamdani's election in New York City and the election of more moderate women with national security backgrounds to gubernatorial offices in Virginia and New Jersey.
And Republicans are trying to figure out the best line of attack against Democrats at the moment.
And in fact, there's a part of the Republican Party that wants to train the focus on Mamdani and some of his what they would characterize as radical socialist plans to change New York City.
But the president held a pretty chummy meeting with Mamdani at the White House.
There are some Republicans who want to train the focus on Governor Tim Walz and social services fraud in Minnesota and tie other Democrats to that.
However, the escalation of deportation efforts in Minnesota, which looks increasingly perilous politically for Republicans, could detract from Republicans' efforts to do that.
So they're really split on who to elevate as a boogeyman on the other side.
So for Democrats, having one clear leader isn't a 2026 problem, it's a 2028 problem.
And then you also talk about how the healthcare item, you know, you mentioned this a bit earlier, but this really, you mentioned Medicaid, but also with these expiring ACA subsidies that people are already feeling some higher prices there.
Well, polls in the last two months have routinely shown that Americans want to see these enhanced ACA subsidies extended, overwhelming opposition to letting them expire, which has created this coverage cliff and premium cliff that essentially writes Democrats ads for them heading into the fall.
unidentified
And yet the White House has offered very little cover, shown very little interest in brokering a bipartisan deal, even though you saw 17 House Republicans break ranks from party leadership and join Democrats on a discharge petition to extend these subsidies by three years.
And so I think increasingly you're seeing Republicans create distance between themselves and the White House and not just the usual suspects like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and some of the prominent Republican moderates in the House, but also other names that we might not have expected to voice opposition to the White House.
For example, on the war powers resolution to see Todd Young and Josh Hawley join Democrats on that, on the ACA provisions, even on overriding Trump's veto of appropriations for a Colorado water project and Florida infrastructure, members like Lauren Boebert from Colorado objecting to the White House.
So there's beginning to, we're beginning to see kind of a flex back on Republicans' part.
We're going to be taking questions for David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report shortly.
Democrats can call in at 202-748-8000.
Republicans at 202-748-8001.
And Independents at 202-748-8002.
You know, because we're talking about the comparison between the 2018 midterms and 2026, back in 2018, a couple months before the midterms, you were here on Washington Journal talking about whether or not those elections were going to be a referendum on the party in power.
Let's listen to your response back then.
unidentified
Look, that's the biggest question of the midterms, for sure.
And another question I'd argue is, how united is the Republican Party?
Because right now we see a Trump party and we see a president who's willing to take shots at his own party in Congress.
And he has certainly maintained high favorability within his own party.
But that also cuts both ways because to the extent he picks fights with Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, or people like Jeff Flake, does that depress the enthusiasm of Trump loyalists to show up at the polls in an election in which Donald Trump is not on the ballot?
And this is music to Democrats' ears because there are a lot of Trump voters, particularly whites without a college degree who formed his base, who simply aren't accustomed to voting in midterm elections.
So what does 2026, David Wasserman, think of what 2018 David Wasserman had to say?
unidentified
It's deja vu, Kimberly, because the biggest problem for Republicans is this enthusiasm gap and the fact that Republicans have not demonstrated that Donald Trump can turn out his base for Republicans other than him.
And it used to be in the Obama era that when more people voted, Democrats did better.
If you think about the millions of voters that Obama ushered into the political process, a lot of young non-white voters who had not participated before, and they showed up for Barack Obama, when they didn't vote in 2010 and 2014, Democrats got clobbered.
Today, Donald Trump has a big advantage among voters who are most peripherally engaged in politics.
unidentified
There's a big reason why Trump has gone to venues where you wouldn't normally expect to find politicians, be it UFC fights or F1 races or even sneakercon.
But Democrats excel with the voters who consider themselves the most civic-minded, who show up not just to vote in presidential years, but every midterm, every special, every primary, every race for school board.
And so when turnout goes down, Democrats have a structural advantage.
We've seen this not just in the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, but we had a special election in a pretty red district in Tennessee on December 2nd, in which the Democrat outperformed the 2024 presidential margin by about 13 points, still lost by nine, but still that gives you an indication.
And in that race, 64% of Harris's voters formed the Democrats' vote total, and the Republican only got about 48% of Trump's voters.
unidentified
If you replicated that nationally, Republicans would be at risk of losing not just the House, but some of those Senate-reach states for Democrats that could put them over the top.
I think turnout will be higher this November than it was in these special elections where we've been seeing Democrats outperform, but certainly lower than 2024.
Alan is in Brooklyn, New York on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Alan.
unidentified
Good morning.
I was pleased to listen to all of your cogent points.
Thank you.
There are so many strands of news now that would make this too long.
I'm going to try to pack them together.
A lot of the Republican voters who had been anti-climate theory, who had been pro-gun control, who had been patriotic about our role in World War II and the military's honor in general, would seem to be whipsawed by recent events by Trump trying to get control of Greenland.
He's kind of admitting that the ice melt has made that more valuable, and therefore he's kind of conceding some of the climate issue.
But now we're suffering from the cold snap that is resulting in part from that ice melt and causing a lot of people who are anti-welfare Republicans in the deep south suffering a major affordability crisis on the front of energy, not just for air conditioning in the summer, but for climate-related cold snaps, bringing vastly higher heating bills throughout the country right now.
And these are a whole new constituency of people who may be interested in getting public support for this area of heating costs above and beyond the other affordability issues Trump was suffering.
My question now is: Do you think his ICE tactics are directly calculated to be excessive for the purpose of scaring Democrats from the polls in Democratic cities at a time when they've been trying to weaken the ability to use mail-in voting and weakening vaccination rules to make it look more likely people will need to use the mail-in voting?
It doesn't seem that they're being rational about this violence with the ICE forces.
It seems they're trying to scare people away as part of their tactic to try to avoid losing the next term because he doesn't want to be impeached.
And he said already, if he loses this election, he may be impeached.
How drastic are his thoughts about using excessive force to scare people away?
Yeah, there's no evidence that the White House is resorting to these escalated tactics to have an impact on suppressing Democratic turnout in cities.
If anything, it is skyrocketing Democrats' outrage and energy level to vote.
There's no question that the Democratic base's enthusiasm and outrage is quite high.
But at the same time, this effort is designed to fulfill the president's campaign pledge to deport immigrants who are here illegally.
Now, the voters who are really going to determine the extent of the swing this November and change in Washington are the voters who do believe that those who are here illegally should be deported,
which, according to the October New York Times Siena poll, 54% of respondents believe that those who are here illegally should be sent home or sent to their home country compared to 43% who oppose that position.
But in some recent surveys, I'll just cite a YouGov survey from last week, and this is before the most recent shooting and killing in Minneapolis, by 51 to 37 voters opposed the tactics or disapproved of the tactics that ICE has been using.
And so it's that voter who does believe that we that in deportations, but objects to the heightened tactics that ICE is using, I suspect that disapproval number is only going to increase in light of what's happened.
And so whichever candidates can speak to that voter in a way that will resonate are likely to succeed.
Do you think there's a likelihood that that's going to be enough of a motivating factor to help the Democrats have those level of gains?
unidentified
Keep in mind, we're only 26 days into 2026, and there's already been an absolute avalanche of news.
It's impossible to predict what we're going to be talking about in September or October, although we are likely to be discussing the instability and conflict arising from deportations.
But we know for sure that we're going to be talking about the economy and health care.
And those are really the two constants in Democrats' messaging against the White House and Republican candidates.
It could be enough to put the Senate in play.
Democrats have had a strong recruitment cycle in the Senate, getting Roy Cooper to run in North Carolina, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Mary Peltola in Alaska.
But we've really got to see whether Democrats are making progress and running ahead in some of these redder states in order to know whether they have a chance, because it's a pretty far leap from Maine and North Carolina, which are genuinely purple states at the presidential level, to Alaska.
And in Alaska, even where Mary Peltola, Democrats' strongest candidate, is running, the only candidate she's ever beaten in that state is Sarah Palin, who had a 61% unfavorability rating after ditching the state's governorship and then coming to launch a comeback.
So these are going to be very tough states for Democrats to win.
Well, if that were to come to pass, then it could mitigate what we're looking at for Republicans.
However, at the moment, voters are still fairly pessimistic about what the next year will look like.
And there are jobs reports, there are estimates that suggest that layoffs will increase even as we see the stock market hitting record highs.
And there's uncertainty about tariffs, particularly what the Supreme Court will do.
So Americans' outlook towards the economy could improve, but their perceptions of their spending and purchasing power are down by about a quarter since Donald Trump took office last January.
And I just think he's trying to gem up enough stuff where you just say, hey, I need an insurrection in here, cause an insurrection in here to get things going.
We can't have a midterm election.
And it's just really amazing how, you know, they're pretty much, it kind of reminds me of 1984, George Orwell.
So, Doug, I do want to give David a chance to respond.
And sorry to go after you again, but also the detail about the training being shortened to 47 days also turned out to not be true.
It was reported with an anonymous source in the Atlantic, but the Department of Homeland Security later denied it.
I'm just going to read you a little bit from Snopes.
The day after the Atlantic story came out, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, denied the claim to the Washington Examiner and stated that training to become an enforcement and removal operations officer is eight weeks long.
But what was the specific question that you wanted David Wasserman to respond to?
The median voter does want to see immigration laws reformed and updated and enforced, but they don't want to see Americans' civil liberties violated or right to protest infringed.
unidentified
And they do want to see due process and investigations that are coordinated between federal and state authorities.
And so this is where it's gotten really dicey for the administration politically.
And whereas in the 2022 midterms, Democrats were able to focus on the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade to take some of the focus off of inflation that the Biden White House was struggling to deal with.
This time around, we've seen President Trump try and lean into the culture wars to take the edge off some of the economic challenges plaguing him and his party.
And yet, this seems to be exacerbating his problems.
I do want to flag that later on we're going to have on C-SPAN.
We're going to be covering the Illinois Senate Democratic debate later on tonight.
So if you want to get an up close and personal look at how some of these Democrats are shaping up their narratives, this is going to be the Illinois Senate debate primary tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern.
You've got the top Democratic candidates running for Senate in Illinois, and it's sponsored by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
There will be Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, Representatives Robin Kelly, and Raja Krishna Morthy, who are all competing for that Democratic nomination.
You can watch the debate as part of C-SPAN's campaign 2026 coverage at 7 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, and online at c-span.org.
Let's go now to Bill in Lou's Delaware on our line for independence.
I've been watching C-SPAN forever, and a couple of, I would say like two weeks ago, three weeks ago, they had the anniversary of, I think it was the guy, Democrat, he ran for President Dean.
I think it was Howard Dean.
And when he was like, I think he won one of the primaries and he started going, you know, very ebulent, very excited, and he started screaming a little bit.
And that got, and then he had to resign because that was the end of his campaign.
I'm thinking to myself, man, I mean, if that ended a campaign, I cannot believe what Donald Trump, I mean, the things that he's done, the things that he says, nothing ever, ever, ever affects him.
In fact, he responds with these tweets right as it's happening.
I just want to hear what your guest will say about that.
unidentified
Not all Trump voters are Trump admirers.
And in fact, there was a critical share of the electorate in 2024 that personally disliked Donald Trump and voted for him anyway and saw him as the lesser of two evils.
In our research in 2024, what we found when we narrowed down the electorate in the seven key battleground states to just the roughly 7% of voters who were purely undecided or not firmly committed to either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump was that they had overwhelmingly negative views of both candidates.
They thought that Kamala Harris was way too liberal to serve effectively as president.
They thought Trump was too erratic and out of control to serve another term as president.
But by a 55 to 26 margin, they believed that Trump was better positioned to bring inflation and the cost of living under control.
And these voters who dislike his leadership style, but see his erratic rantings, be it on truth social or in more formal settings, They believe that it's tolerable as long as it intimidates our negotiating partners into accepting a better deal for the U.S.
And just as we see broad disapproval in public opinion polls for tariffs, we also see a plurality of voters in most surveys who believe that Trump is using tariffs not as a permanent strategy, but as a bargaining chip to improve the U.S. position in the long term.
unidentified
And so it's these voters who are very soft Trump vote or were very soft Trump voters in 2024 who are risk who are at risk for Republicans of falling out of their coalition.
Okay, Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Waltz, Governor Walks, requesting their voting voter voter rolls.
Okay, I understand now.
Okay, David, did you want to respond to that one?
unidentified
Democrats are raising concerns and filing suit to prevent the administration from gaining access to state voter rolls.
There are fears among Democrats and a number of impartial election observers about the tactics that the White House or Department of Justice or FBI could use to try and raise objections to the results of the midterm elections after November.
And some of those are going to be litigated in court before November.
Some could be litigated afterwards during the certification period.
But it's important to remember that our elections are administered at the state and local level, and that provides somewhat of a safeguard from any one president or administration ordering sweeping changes, such as a preference to do away with mail-in voting.
Next up is Richard in Augusta, Georgia, on our line for Democrats.
Good morning, Richard.
unidentified
Good morning.
Mr. Weisman, good talking to you again.
Good morning, C-SPAN, Washington Journal.
April 2024, I said dictator will be in office, and now it comes true to light.
My question, comment is: do you see any polling in Texas that would show that Jasmine Crockett could still win the Senate seat, even though the districts were gerrymandered, and that the people will turn now on the Republican Party?
And also, any comments you want to make about the Senate race in Georgia of Oscar?
And one other final comment about his comment about the European soldiers didn't support us in Afghanistan.
Could you elaborate on all three if you can, please?
Well, let's disentangle that for a second.
So, Jasmine Crockett, who is running in the Democratic primary against state senator James Tallarico for the nomination to face whichever Republican emerges from the primary that John Cornyn, a three-term senator, is locked in and struggling to survive.
Jasmine Crockett, her theory of the case is that there are millions of Texas citizens who are sympathetic to Democrats' position who do not turn out to vote from year to year and that she can activate them with a very progressive message.
And that is a rather farcical claim, in my opinion.
The reason why Democrats have backslid in Texas of late is that we've seen Hispanic voters shift right and shift away from the Democratic Party, particularly along the border, not just on border issues and the perception that Democrats have not been able to control the border when they were in charge, but also on inflation.
And so Democrats might have a rare opportunity in Texas if Republicans nominate Attorney General Ken Paxton, who had been impeached by his own party and acquitted in the state Senate, but has a ton of personal baggage.
Even so, Texas is a state that Trump carried by 14 points in 2024, and there aren't a whole lot of truly persuadable voters.
And so it's going to be very, very difficult for any Democrat to win that seat.
Now, Georgia is a different story.
In Georgia, there's a Republican primary that could work to Democratic Senator John Ossoff's benefit.
In Georgia, the governor, Brian Kemp, has elevated former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley, who has had a rocky rollout to his campaign.
He's a first-time candidate, has not demonstrated yet that he has a full grasp of the issues.
And then two Republican congressmen, Buddy Carter from the Savannah area and Mike Collins from outside Atlanta, who are vying for MAGA support and vying for the president's endorsement.
And it's unclear what President Trump will do here.
And if Republicans spend millions against each other, that could detract from their opportunity to beat Osoff in the fall.
James is in Plano, Texas, on our line for Republicans.
Good morning, James.
unidentified
Yeah.
Hi, thanks for having me on.
I'm curious how you can suggest that the Democrats can improve the economy when they ran it into the ground under the last administration.
And then, two, your other comment about health care and what's being done with that.
The only thing the Democrats have done is run the cost of our premiums into the ground through Obama cure, which has increased the cost so significantly.
So how could you suggest that either one of those two items could help the Democrats in the midterms?
Well, I'm not suggesting that Democrats are in a position to turn around the economy if they do well in the midterms.
In fact, Democrats would still hold relatively little power.
They would hold a check on the White House, but they wouldn't be in a position to make sweeping changes to the economic policy being implemented by the White House.
Now, on these subsidies, I do think there would be more of a significant policy outcome from Democrats reclaiming control of the House even by a narrow margin.
Democrats could hold up White House priorities on a number of issues over health care, and not just in a shutdown sense, but they'd have more leverage, more negotiating power.
And I do think you would see the White House be forced into taking more interest in bipartisan support.
Keep in mind, there were 17 Republicans who voted to extend enhanced ACA subsidies for three years, and millions of Americans who are on the edge of this premium cliff where if their income is above a certain level, they're paying exorbitantly more for health care.
And so, politically, I think a number of Republicans do acknowledge that this is a liability.
Ann Marshall is Associate Professor of History and Executive Director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University.
Her book is Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Anti-Slavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform.
Clay lived to be 92, had two wives and 11 children.
Kentucky was his home state.
As an anti-slavery reformer, Cassius Marcellus Clay is often remembered as a knife-wielding rabble-rouser who both inspired and enraged his contemporaries.
Abraham Lincoln made him minister to Russia.
And yes, the boxer Muhammad Ali was originally named after him, but decided he wanted his own original name.
Ann Marshall will discuss all this with us.
unidentified
A new interview with author Ann Marshall about her book, Cassius Marcellus Clay, The Life of an Anti-Slavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform.
BookNotes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb, is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app.
If you watch on C-SPAN, you're going to see me physically across the aisle every day, just trying to build relationships and try to understand their perspective and find common ground.
And welcome forward to everybody watching at home.