Everything is breaking Democrats’ way. Is it enough to win the Senate?
Our midterms model finds that polls, fundamentals and history all point toward a strong Democratic year. The House is theirs to lose, but winning four Senate seats is still a tall order.
Our midterms model, which we’re now calling FLIPR 🐬 — Forecast with Leading Indicators, Polls and (Expert) Ratings — launched today! There’s a lot of detail both on the model landing page and in the accompanying methodology story. We’ll be updating the model nearly every day, and will have lots more analysis to come.
FLIPR is in the lineage of the f/k/a FiveThirtyEight election forecasts1, but we’ve also put a lot of obsessive work into refining and improving it. We greatly appreciate your patience as we’ve gotten everything ready.
Some elections fill me with a sense of existential dread. Even the most carefully designed models, which dutifully consider not only how to forecast each state but also how to calibrate the degree of uncertainty in the forecast, will have trouble evaluating the impact of a once-in-a-century pandemic like in 2020 or a major party switching candidates midstream like in 2024.
The next tier down from this are elections that seem relatively normal on the surface, but where typically reliable indicators are contradictory. In 2022, President Biden’s deep unpopularity and the long history of the president’s party performing poorly in midterm elections suggested the possibility of a red wave. Polls of individual races, however, and special election results, were much more equivocal, perhaps reflecting the degree to which the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade had galvanized Democrats. In the end, the race-by-race polls were basically right.2 Democrats pared their House losses to just 9 seats and actually gained a seat in the Senate, but it wasn’t an easy election to forecast.
The 2026 election is not in either of those categories. It looks like a pretty normal midterm, to the extent anything can be normal in American politics these days. And normal midterms mean bad news for the incumbent president’s party, especially when the incumbent is as unpopular as President Trump. Polls, historic trends and leading indicators are all fairly consistent in pointing toward Democratic gains.
There is, of course, still considerable uncertainty in the outlook. We’re still 84 days out from the election, for one thing. The uncertainty is something that inherently probabilistic models like our midterm election forecast, a.k.a. FLIPR, are specifically designed to grapple with.
In the House, Republicans basically won the war in an unprecedentedly aggressive round of mid-decade redistricting, which left the map with a mild Republican bias. That gives Democrats a hurdle to clear. Not to be overlooked: extremely partisan maps drawn by both parties have greatly reduced the number of competitive districts in the House. Even if Democrats have a great year — say, they win the national popular vote for the U.S. House by 9 percentage points, which would qualify as a landslide by modern standards — they’ll have trouble matching the 41-seat gain that they had in 2018.
In the Senate, the hurdle for Democrats is much higher. The current composition of the Senate is 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats3, and Vice President JD Vance casts the tiebreaking vote. That means Democrats need to gain a net of 4 seats to take control of the chamber.
In a roughly neutral, presidential-year-type political environment, that would be a nearly impossible task, requiring gains deep into Republican territory. Moreover, it’s plausible that Democrats will have to pick up 5 Republican seats, not 4, because Abdul El-Sayed currently trails Mike Rogers in the polling average in Michigan, a state that Democrats are defending.
But every available indicator suggests that this very much isn’t going to be a neutral political environment. The Democratic Party has a whole host of problems, which we chronicle obsessively here at Silver Bulletin. Turning out their voters in midterms isn’t one of them, however.
And for midterm election purposes, you’d rather have a little internal disarray than have a president with a 38 percent approval rating on the basis of an unpopular quagmire in the Middle East and understandable voter anxiety about spiking gas prices. Not to mention voter fatigue over an 80-year-old, lame duck president at a time when the incumbency “advantage” has turned into persistent anger all around the world toward the status quo and whoever is in charge of it.
Let’s get into more specifics about these indicators, and then we’ll discuss why FLIPR is spitting out the probabilities that it does.
Polling, history and recent elections tell the same story
Our generic ballot average, which we update every day, currently shows Democrats ahead by 6.7 percentage points. Silver Bulletin readers and other election nerds can become obsessed with every little zag in the polls, but our version of the generic ballot has been fairly stable for several months now.
However, that 6.7-point margin might actually lowball Democrats. That’s because most generic ballot polls at this not-exactly-early-but-not-exactly-late point are being conducted among registered voters rather than likely voters — and therefore, don’t account for turnout. FLIPR makes a likely voter adjustment. In line with our longstanding practices, the adjustment is based mostly on polls that release both likely and registered voter versions of the same survey. Typically in such polls, the LV version has been better for Democrats than the RV version. Thus, FLIPR’s version of the generic ballot shows Democrats ahead by 8.1 points instead.
How about the longer sweep of history? Well, FLIPR has a calculation for that, too. We estimate a “prior” based on all congressional elections since 1946, calibrated based on the president’s approval rating, the result of the previous election, and whether the election was a midterm, and adjusted for ever-increasing partisan polarization. In that calculation, Democrats are favored to win the popular vote for the U.S. House by 8.7 points instead.
Trump’s approval rating? It’s now roughly -20. And contrary to the media narrative that tends to view Trump’s support as ironclad, even some of his base is wavering; only 22 percent of Americans strongly approve of Trump’s performance in office. Republicans who feel ambivalent about Trump probably won’t vote for Democrats — but they might not vote at all.
What about polls of individual races? That story is slightly more complicated. There are a few rough patches for Democrats. El-Sayed, for example, currently trails Mike Rogers by about a point-and-a-half in our polling average for Michigan — though the more advanced versions of our forecast deem him a favorite to eventually catch up. But Jon Ossoff leads by 9 points in Georgia, a state where Democrats rarely win anything by more than a point or two. Roy Cooper leads by about the same margin in North Carolina. And James Talarico is slightly ahead in Texas. Even Iowa is currently polling as a toss-up.
Don’t trust the polls? Well, in the last major set of elections in November 2025, Democrats had basically a perfect night. Polls underestimated them, and their margins in Virginia, New Jersey and other states were consistent with a blue wave.
But isn’t the DNC having a fundraising crisis? Yes, but that’s partly because Democratic donors are finding better ways to spend their money. Among Senate candidates, the top 7 in fundraising so far this cycle are all Democrats.
To repeat: Democrats certainly have plenty of problems. I’m one of those people who thinks the empirical evidence strongly points toward more moderate candidates being more electable. In addition to El-Sayed, our polling average currently has Francesca Hong in a tossup in the Wisconsin gubernatorial race — her primary is tonight — and our model is much less confident that she’ll revert to the mean because gubernatorial races are still considerably less partisan than races for Congress.