The polls are still open in the Mountains and the West as I write this, so now is the time to point out how much of tonight was already baked in.
Democrats have spent two years beating their baseline everywhere there was a ballot to beat it on. Across 110 special elections since January 2025, they have run 12.5 points ahead of Kamala Harris and 8.4 points ahead of Joe Biden. In the 42 contested legislative specials this year, the median swing over the 2024 presidential margin is 10.4 points. The congressional specials tell the same story, with Democrats running 7.6 points ahead of the historical party average in the seven races featuring one member from each party. Wisconsin voters then expanded the liberal majority on their state Supreme Court in April, for anyone who wanted to argue it was only a low-turnout quirk.
None of this should surprise anyone who has glanced at the president’s numbers. Reuters/Ipsos put Trump at 31 percent approval in October, the lowest of either term, and the last poll before today had him at 32 percent, with Democrats ahead on the generic ballot 47 to 36. The cause is not mysterious. Inflation has surged since Trump ordered strikes on Iran in February, which sent gasoline prices up. Voters noticed. They also noticed which party was angrier: 46 percent of Democrats called themselves very enthusiastic about the midterms, against 30 percent of Republicans.
We have seen this movie. In 2017 and 2018, Democrats improved on the 2016 presidential margin by an average of 10.6 points across 119 special elections, and then they took the House. The president’s party getting hammered in a midterm is the oldest rule in American politics. Trump managed to turn it into a referendum on himself, and he is losing it.
At the same time, it is not a Democratic triumph. Democrats are winning tonight despite themselves, despite some questionable candidates, no discernible platform, and two warring factions within the party. The party’s own favorability is nothing to write home about, and Democrats are mostly winning by being “not Trump”. That was enough in 2018 and it looks like enough tonight.
If the numbers hold, the embarrassment belongs to the President, the White House political shop and a Republican conference in Congress that 55 percent of Americans told CNN was doing too much to support Trump. But it also belongs to the hardline Republican primary voters who, more often than not, nominated bad candidates in winnable races at the behest of a President who did not have their best interests at heart. They all get to explain it on Wednesday.