On Monday, with Election Day mere hours away, a prominent conservative political analyst shared his final midterm prediction: President Donald Trump has brought the Republican Party to “doom.” According to Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen, “A terrible night awaits the GOP, and even that might be an understatement,” as he forecasts that Democrats will win both the House and Senate. What’s more, this political crisis is comparable to those the GOP faced in 1976 and 2008, when the party was brought to its knees by Watergate, then a combination of the Iraq War and the economic collapse.
In Olsen’s estimation, Trump and the GOP are about to meet the “painful fate” of Odysseus and his men in the Odyssey. “Just as Odysseus’s men were wiped out on the long journey back from Troy, so too will large numbers of Trump’s Republican troops meet electoral doom Tuesday,” predicts Olsen. “You don’t have to be a prophet to see what’s coming. No serious analyst thinks Republicans will have a good night as midterm returns roll in. The open question is whether it will be merely bad, terrible or something akin to being eaten by a Cyclops.” According to Olsen, who has forecasted the past 12 elections for the Post, “I foresee a terrible night for the GOP, with losses in the House of 20 seats and a Democratic takeover of the Senate. Team Red will also lose many governorships and state legislative chambers as the public expresses, up and down the ballot, its significant dismay at the course of Trump’s presidency.”
Polling has shown that the midterms are leaning strongly in Democratic favor, and while Republicans are hoping these surveys have underreported conservative voters, “Trump’s weak job approval rating is key. As readers of my column know, job approval ratings are a strong predictor of how presidents’ parties perform in midterms. In each of the past five midterm elections, the share of the national House vote that the party holding the White House received was no more than 5.8 points higher than the president’s job approval. In two cases — Trump in 2018, Barack Obama in 2010 — it was within 1.7 points of RCP’s final pre-election approval number. This suggests it’s possible to work backward from Trump’s job approval rating to estimate the GOP’s share of the national House vote. Based on the historical pattern, Trump’s 38.8 percent job approval rating Sunday translates to a GOP share of the vote falling somewhere between 40.5 and 44.6 percent.”
Olsen also points to historical data regarding support for independent and third-party candidates, which shows that Democratic candidates received between 3.8 and 4.5 percent in 2006, 2010 and 2014, and 2.8 percent in 2018 and 2.7 percent in 2022. As he points out, “You don’t have to be a math whiz to see how bad this looks for Republicans. Trump’s 38.8 percent job approval suggests the GOP will get no more than about 44.6 percent of the vote Tuesday. If third-party voting is as high as it was from 2006 to 2014, Democrats would get a minimum of about 51 to 52 percent, giving them a 6.5-to-7.5-point advantage. That’s a bit less than the generic ballot shows, but still quite large. If it’s more in line with the past two midterms, Democrats would get about 52.6 percent — about an eight-point margin.” And taking other factors into account, the numbers could bump up to a “massive Democratic win of between 8.5 and a bit over 10 points.”
In light of all this, writes Olsen, “My final prediction on the Democratic margin in the national House popular vote is 9.25 percentage points. It could be more than that, and an extra couple of points would matter. At 9.25 points, my simple House model favors Democrats in 230 seats, and they would probably take a few seats more. At 10.3 points, it has them favored in 237. This is why I am projecting Democrats to win 235 House seats, a gain of 20 from 2024’s level. If the optimistic Democratic scenario comes to pass, they will probably win between 240 and 250. The national environment is also why I’m so bullish on Democrats’ chances to win the Senate.” He notes that while a few last-minute scandals have rocked the Democratic races, he’s betting that most opinions are already hardened while many have already voted.
And while Olsen muses that “the Republican in me” hopes that he’s wrong, “the analyst in me” suspects he’s right, “and that’s why I think Tuesday will be terrible — possibly horrific — for the GOP.” He notes that this doesn’t necessarily mean “the Trump era is over,” writing that “the GOP has supposedly been on its deathbed at least twice in my lifetime, after 1976 and 2008, and both times it rose not only to win but also to fundamentally shift American politics in its direction. There’s no reason it can’t do so again. American politics shifts as quickly as the winds on the open sea, and savvy mariners know how to take advantage of those changes to steer their ships to port.” But as Olsen concludes, “That is for the future, however. Today, the Republican Party faces the prospect of becoming a minority in both houses of Congress while being led by a battered president badly in need of a new way forward.”
