As President Donald Trump’s job approval sinks to below 40% (depending on which poll you’re looking at), betting markets and political conventional wisdom are that his Republican Party is not necessarily doomed to lose its narrow House majority, nor is it at serious risk of losing its Senate majority.
This is partly because of court decisions affecting redistricting in major states, but it also owes something to fundamentals that a few observers have noted even before. One example is Henry Olsen, writing two months ago in The Washington Post, noting that the president’s job approval has been cratering more among nonvoters than among likely voters. In today’s RealClearPolitics polls, the same relation is apparent: Trump’s slippage is less among those more likely to vote.
Similarly, Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini in March noted that, in a 60,000-person biennial YouGov survey, the Democratic advantage in party identification has been steadily narrowed toward the vanishing point since 2006. And this year’s special elections, in which the opposition party typically fares better than the president’s, have been showing less anti-Republican movement than in 2025.
Nonetheless, the fact that the president’s party almost always loses House seats (exceptions: 1934, 1998, 2002), plus the fact that Republicans won only 220 seats to Democrats’ 215 in 2024 has made it seem close to certain that Democrats would win control.
To forestall that, Trump last summer urged Texas’ Republican governor and legislature to redistrict its 38 House districts. They passed a plan portrayed as gaining five Republican seats, although it may not if the 2024 MAGA surge among Hispanics evaporates, as polls suggest. Similarly, Republicans in North Carolina (where the Democratic governor has no veto over redistricting) and Ohio passed plans advertised as gaining one and two seats, respectively.
Democrats retaliated spectacularly last November in California, where a plan is estimated to increase Democrats’ edge in the state’s delegation from 44-8 to 48-4. And then incoming Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) backed Virginia legislators’ plans to temporarily have a referendum to abolish the bipartisan commission they had installed and increase the party’s edge “temporarily” from 6-5 to 10-1. The state’s Supreme Court, at Democrats’ request, declined to rule on the legality of the procedure until after the vote.
On April 21, Virginians who had elected Spanberger by a 15 percentage-point margin voted for the Democrats’ ploy by only 3 percentage points. Unlike most special elections, turnout was higher among Republicans than Democrats. On May 8, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Democrats’ procedure had violated the state constitution.
In the meantime, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais ruled that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require maximizing the number of “minority-influenced” districts, which opened the way for some Republican legislators to redistrict and add a district for their party. And in Florida last week, Republican legislators quickly passed Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ redrawing of its 28 districts, which was predicted to add four Republican districts.
The result for the moment is nearly a level playing field in the House races. The authoritative Cook Political Report rates 188 seats as solidly Republican and 184 seats as solidly Democratic. It rates 22 seats as leaning or likely Republican and 23 seats as leaning or likely Democratic. That’s 210 seats at least leaning Republican, 207 as leaning or likely Democratic, leaving 18 seats, four currently held by Democrats and 14 by Republicans, as toss-ups.
So if Democrats win all the toss-ups, they would control the House 225-210, a net gain of 10 seats — a win, but not the blue wave they’ve been hoping for. If Republicans win half of the toss-ups, they would control the House 219-216, a net loss of just one seat.
Those numbers are beginning to look familiar. The House was 222-213 Democratic in 2020, 222-213 Republican in 2022, 220-215 Republican in 2024.
But this is May, and the election is in November — early voting starts in September. Republicans entered Trump’s first term with a 241-194 majority and had better numbers at this point in the cycle than they do now, and Democrats ended up with a 235-199 majority in November.
And they didn’t have the burden that year of being on the defensive on inflation, which most voters believe has been the result of Trump pushing through two long-held priorities: erecting tariff walls around the United States and reducing the power of the terrorist regime in Iran.
Republicans, surprised and pleased that the redistricting wars have gone their way, might entertain different possibilities, such as an easing of inflation and surge of economic growth, the end of hostilities in Ukraine and regime collapse in Iran. Disheartened Democrats would decline to turn out, while enthusiastic Republicans surge to the polls.
And since we have emerged into a period of parity between the parties, as a 49% nation, as I wrote in “The Almanac of American Politics” after the 2000 election, no presidential candidate has won in a landslide. Republicans have won trifectas in 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2024, and Democrats have won trifectas in 1992, 2008 and 2020.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics.” (Copyright 2026 Creators.com)
