Democrats upbeat as unpopular Trump imperils Republican midterm hopes | US midterm elections 2026

Thirty days remain until the midterm elections, and Donald Trump and his Republican allies are pulling out all the stops to maintain control of Congress.

Super Pacs aligned with the GOP have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and voter outreach in races expected to decide the majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, and plan to spend even more before the election is over. The president, vice-president JD Vance, and other top Republicans are fanning out across the country to stump for vulnerable lawmakers.

So far, there are no signs the money or the rallies have improved what appears to be a grim state of affairs for Republicans, less than two years after their resounding victories in the 2024 election. Recently released polls continue to show the party’s candidates trailing their Democratic challengers in the Senate races that will decide the majority and control of the chamber.

“Candidate quality is beating gobs of Republican money,” the Senate’s Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer quipped over the weekend, when the New York Times released the latest in a series of closely watched polls that confirmed the momentum behind their bid to retake the Senate.

The surveys, conducted with Siena University, found Democratic Senate candidates leading in Alaska, Ohio and Texas – all states Trump won by double digits two years ago. In Kansas, which has not elected a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years, the party’s candidate Adam Hamilton was neck-and-neck with Republican senator Roger Marshall, while in Iowa, Democrat Josh Turek is narrowly trailing the Republican candidate Ashley Hinson. Democratic candidates for governor were also leading in many traditionally Republican states, the Times and Siena found.

“If the election were held tomorrow, all state wide races [would] go blue,” Briscoe Cain, a Republican state representative in Texas wrote on X Monday. The Democrats’ Senate candidate James Talarico and gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa were both leading in the Times and Siena survey.

“Republican voters feel too comfortable and are not as intense about this election as they should be. We have more voters than the left in Texas, but we have to vote,” Cain added.

Last Friday, the news outlet Semafor reported that the Senate Leadership Fund, a major GOP Super Pac, planned to pull money from the campaign of its candidate Michael Whatley in North Carolina, in favor of upping support for Marshall in Kansas. No Democrat has won a US Senate election in North Carolina since 2008, but Whatley has trailed in polls for months. Democrats need to win at least four seats in the chamber to regain the majority they lost in the 2024 election.

The situation for Democrats appears to be similarly positive in their campaign to retake the House, which Republicans control only narrowly. A CBS News and YouGov poll released Sunday found Democrats with a nine percentage point lead on the generic ballot, an important indicator of voter intention in congressional races.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found Trump’s approval ratings remained at the lowest point of his career, with only 32% of adult respondents approving of his performance as president. Independent voters – whose views often make the difference in close races – planned to back Democrats by a 16 percentage point margin, though many remained undecided.

The president’s poor marks are believed to be a major cause of the Republican candidates’ struggles nationwide, but it is far from the only one. Discontent over the state of the economy – particularly the price of gasoline and other consumer staples – is another reason, as is the on-again, off-again conflict with Iran, and concern over Trump’s hardline approach to enforcing immigration laws.

Republicans maintain they have avenues to victory in both chambers of Congress. Eight House Republicans represent districts that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, as opposed to 22 House Democrats – a number that has grown larger thanks to the unprecedented redistricting war Trump instigated. Many polls show voters have an unfavorable perception of the Democratic party, though views of Republicans are similarly negative. And despite strong fundraising by some Democratic candidates, Republicans and groups allied with their agenda have an edge in cash to spend on this election.

It may not be enough to halt the disintegration that appears to be occurring in the coalition that elected Trump two years ago. Only 26% of Hispanic voters – who swung towards Trump after years of leaning Democratic – plan to vote for Republicans this year, while 52% prefer the Democrats, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

“We’ve been seeing among Latino voters, as we’ve been seeing kind of in the electorate as a whole, a real strong rejection of the Trump administration, and that has inflated into an increase in support for Democratic candidates,” said Maria Isabel Di Franco Quinonez, a senior research director at Equis Research, a progressive firm that focuses on the community.

Should the trend hold, it could bode well for Democrats’ hopes in states and districts with large Latino populations. The effect may be pronounced in Texas, where the Republican leaders drew new congressional maps to favor their candidates, but only if Latino voters continue voting the way they did in 2024.

“If we see those levels continue to rise and see those districts look more like the kinds of support levels for Democrats that we had seen back in 2018, then that would result in maybe Republicans get one more seat after redrawing all the lines, as opposed to getting four or five more seats,” Quinonez said.