Democrats Could Use a Cold Shower Before the Midterms

The Democratic wilderness is starting to look awfully sunny. Gone, for the most part, are the blame-casting, hand-wringing, and paralysis-by-analysis that gripped the party after Donald Trump’s reelection. Same with the constant grousing about how the party is fractured, leaderless, locked out of power in Washington, and unloved across the country.

Actually, that might all still be true. But you don’t hear about it as much. Democrats are too busy being giddy with anticipation for the midterms. Examples of this hyper-confidence began popping up at the beginning of the year (“Democrats will cruise to victory, including Senate control,” the writer Brian Beutler predicted) and have proliferated since then. Nearly every day seems to bring another Democratic overperformance in a special or off-year election, or another great poll for the party, improved House or Senate forecast, or headline about how Republicans are bracing for a brutal November. Is a blue wave coming? A blue tsunami? Or another blue mirage?

The causes for Democratic optimism are legitimate. The president’s approval ratings—historically a solid predictor of a party’s midterm outlook—have now dropped consistently into the 30s. Trump was already underwater on his two most important issues, the economy and the cost of living. Then he launched a protracted, unpopular war of choice with Iran that sent gas prices soaring, the Middle East into turmoil, and his numbers ever further south—all while he dismissed Democrats’ talk of affordability as a “good line of bullshit” and spoke nonstop about the need for an extravagant ballroom at the White House.

According to The New York Times’ polling average, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s overall performance, the highest share since right after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. A recent Fox News poll also showed that, by four percentage points, Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans on the economy, the first time since 2010 that Democrats have prevailed on that question.

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

Yet to hear some bullish Democrats talk, the idea that the party might merely win the few seats it needs to flip the House—which was widely expected to begin with—feels needlessly cautious. In many cases, Democrats have become unnervingly unrestrained in expressing their higher-end hopes. “Your viewers need to know that the Democrats are going to pick up at a minimum 25 seats,” the unnervingly unrestrained James Carville told Fox News in January. “Maybe as high as 45.”

Until recently, arguing that the Democrats could net the four seats required to take back the Senate would have been a major reach. That scenario now seems more realistic, as Democratic candidates are polling competitively (or better) in a number of states—Ohio, Alaska, Texas—that once looked far beyond reach. But some Democrats are allowing themselves to think beyond the merely conceivable. “I feel like we’re going to take back the Senate,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told NOTUS, which reported that Schumer envisioned “as many as eight seats in play.”

“This cycle very well might be more like a 1974 post-Watergate cycle, where voters are saying ‘burn the ships,’” David Jolly, a former Republican House member from Florida who is running for governor as a Democrat, told The Bulwark.

Before anyone starts burning ships, a reality check: Democrats have been left devastated by elections in the recent past that they’d also felt great about. The midterms are also still six months away. And presidents—none more than the 45th and 47th—have an unrivaled ability to make news and redirect prevailing narratives. So, for that matter, do Republican-friendly judges, such as the ones on the Supreme Court who last week tossed a grenade of uncertainty onto congressional maps by potentially jeopardizing Democratic seats in majority-Black districts.

Democrats picking up 49 House seats—as they did in 1974—would be exceedingly unlikely in this or any modern cycle. The country is too solidly 50–50, and the congressional maps have been redrawn over the years in a way that will ensure a high degree of stasis. After Democrats won a net total of 41 seats in 2018—their biggest gain since 1974—they significantly exhausted their body of “winnable” seats and thus the potential for future pickups. Only three Republicans carried districts won by Kamala Harris in 2024.

“The pool of possible defections for either party in a bad year is a very small number,” Charlie Cook, a veteran political analyst and the founder of the Cook Political Report, told me.

Dan Pfeiffer, a former top Barack Obama aide and a Pod Save America co-host, told me that even if Democrats manage this year to repeat their popular-vote margin from 2018—eight points—they would win considerably fewer than 41 seats and probably closer to 20. Cook said that Democrats are likely to have a “good” year in the House elections—“good defined between a dozen and 30 seats,” he explained. “But I have a hard time seeing that go north of 30.”

As for the Senate, Democrats face an extremely high degree of difficulty. Cook pointed out that they would not only have to take at least some states that Trump won three times (North Carolina, Ohio, Alaska, Texas). They would also have to hold Democratic seats in places that Trump won in 2024 (Georgia, Michigan) and would likely have to defeat the Republican Susan Collins in Maine, who has proved over three decades to be a unicorn of electoral resilience. Her likely opponent, the Bernie Sanders–backed oyster farmer Graham Platner, has generally been polling ahead of her. But he is a political novice who is packing heavy baggage, which pro-Collins committees will undoubtedly unpack for maximum effect.

Cook believes that Republicans are still more likely to hold the Senate, in spite of the optimistic Democratic projections. “For a lot of these folks, they’re going with the vibe and not looking at the arithmetic,” he said. Still, neither he nor Pfeiffer, both committed data gluttons, thinks that the Democrats’ buoyancy is misplaced. “I mean, the situation is quite good,” Pfeiffer said. “It does keep getting better.” He added that 2026 might be “the best political environment Democrats have had since 2006, and may be better than that.” (Democrats flipped both the House and the Senate in 2006.)

It’s worth recalling that Republicans had similarly high hopes before the 2022 midterms. A consensus of forecasters in the media and from both parties predicted big Republican wins, while a much smaller contingent of Democratic analysts argued that the election would in fact not be so bad. Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic operative, was the most visible proponent of this contrarian view—and a purveyor of what became known as Democratic “hopium.”

As it turned out, Democrats performed far better than expected that November. Republicans won nine House seats, enough to take only a small majority in Congress. Democrats also gained a Senate seat by winning a large majority of close battleground states. There was no red wave to speak of. Rosenberg was seemingly vindicated, and was celebrated as a corrective to the Democratic Party’s pessimistic impulses. He launched a popular Substack called Hopium Chronicles, which remains widely read. Yet his hopium-laced prognosis for Democratic victory in 2024 turned out to be quite off.

[Ben Ritz: Democrats learned the wrong lesson from 2024]

When I spoke with Rosenberg recently, he sounded cautiously sanguine about November but still generous with his hopium offerings. He thinks that Democrats have a genuine shot at winning the Senate. He pointed out that national GOP committees and super PACs have in recent weeks engaged in “defensive spending”—they are putting huge sums of money into states that appeared solidly red a few months ago.

“This was an admission that those states are really in play, right?” Rosenberg told me. Republicans, he said, are “really panicking.” (Republicans can spend near-unlimited sums—defensively and otherwise—because they enjoy a huge fundraising advantage over Democrats.)

As the hopium pipe keeps getting passed around the Democratic campfire, could it also carry a risk of complacency? Improved morale is great for the party, but not if it saps voters of their most vital asset: urgency. Pfeiffer did not sound concerned when I asked him about this. “No one’s going to stay home because they’re overconfident,” he said. “We are so far from that.”

The elections of 2024 and 2016 remain fresh in the party consciousness, which is its own activation energy. And Democrats turned out in large numbers in 2018, during Trump’s first term, whereas Republicans have voted less reliably in midterms. The president’s willingness to campaign could boost GOP turnout, but that’s assuming that he will be motivated to do so—and he has not seemed to be up to this point. It’s also assuming that his supporters will vote as he says.

Trump is still here, though, despite many past predictions of his demise. That alone should serve as the Democrats’ main antidote to hopium.