We already know who will win the midterms: expert

Experts disagree as to whether President Donald Trump will succeed in rigging the midterm elections, but that he will try is not in doubt. The dispute is that some say that he simply lacks the ability, while others think he is on a path to succeeding.

By contrast, analysts have sharply differed as to how Democrats will perform in key races absent any meddling from Trump. Yet one pundit demonstrated on Wednesday that, as long as Trump doesn't rig things, Democrats are poised to win anywhere from 225 to 232 seats in the 435-seat House of Representatives.

"This week, I set about reverse engineering the past three midterms using generic congressional ballot polling," Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote for The Washington Post on Wednesday. "I expected the analysis to be fruitful, but even I was surprised by just how predictive it turned out to be. Applying the same model to the election before us renders this verdict: a Democratic majority of at least 225 seats and as many as 232."

Olsen added, "It’s widely recognized that voting in House races has become extremely partisan. For decades, split-ticket voting meant that many Republicans ended up representing districts carried by Democratic presidential candidates, and vice versa. Not so anymore."

Even without Olsen's statistical analysis, Trump is at an in-built disadvantage in these midterm elections because he is an incumbent in his second term. Speaking earlier in September with Kyle Kondik, a polling expert and editor at Sabato's Crystal Ball, AlterNet learned more about exactly how this is the case.

"It's primarily the president's weak approval rating combined with the usual difficulty that the presidential party has in a midterm," Kondik explained to AlterNet at the time. "I also think there may be even more for voters to react to in 2026 compared to even 2018, because Trump has acted as more of an imperial president and there is more dissatisfaction both with the economy as well as the president's foreign policy choices."

He continued, "Generally speaking, a president who is this unpopular should see his party lose a lot of ground in Congress. That said, Joe Biden also had poor approval in 2022, but Republicans didn't do all that well—they flipped the House but not the Senate. However, the Republican lead in the generic ballot was not as large as the Democratic lead is now."

Democrats' primary challenge will be warding off Trump's various attempts to steal the elections. According to Common Cause’s Policy Director in the Voting and Fair Representation Program Susannah Goodman, Trump tried to do this in part by requiring states to turn over voting rolls to him so he can purge voters likely to vote against Republican candidates.

"The administration has been trying to compel states to turn their voter rolls over to the federal government and to consolidate all of that in a mega database,” Goodman told AlterNet. “A number of states have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls with personal identifying information — Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, et cetera. Common Cause and our partners have intervened in, I think, 17 of those cases on behalf of voters.”