By admin 
The brightest warning light for Democrats in this year’s election is the consistent finding in early national and state polls that they are not winning nearly as large a share of voters who disapprove of President Donald Trump’s performance as they did during his first term. Paradoxically, that dynamic also could represent a major danger for Republicans if it proves unsustainable through November.
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Views about the incumbent president’s performance have become arguably the most powerful factor shaping modern midterm elections. But Democrats are struggling to convert pervasive disapproval of Trump’s second term into sufficient support for their House and Senate candidates.
The result is what might be called the 2026 approval gap. From one direction, Trump’s job approval rating has plummeted below the level that triggered midterm wave elections against other contemporary presidents, including Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, Barack Obama in 2010 and Trump himself in 2018. And yet most surveys do not show Democrats establishing a clear or consistent advantage in the key races that will decide control of the House and Senate.
Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic pollster allied with the party’s centrist wing, notes that in 2018, the share of voters who disapproved of Trump’s performance was about 10 points larger than the share who approved. Today, Smith points out, Trump’s net approval rating is about 20 points negative — twice as bad — and yet the Democratic lead in generic ballot tests for the 2026 House election is considerably smaller than the party’s actual advantage of about 8.5 points in the 2018 national House popular vote.
“Democrats have failed to convert a tenth of the American electorate that has turned against Donald Trump in a way they never have before,” Smith said.
The risk in this pattern for Democrats is clear. The danger to Republicans is more subtle. While Republicans are running surprisingly well among voters disenchanted with Trump today, it would defy history for them to hold as many of them through Election Day.
If those disappointed voters ultimately behave more like they did in Trump’s first term — or simply chose to express their discontent by not voting — today’s relatively comforting and competitive polls for the GOP could prove a false dawn.
Democrats are struggling to attract voters put off by Trump
Attitudes about the president have exerted increasing influence over the mid-term election for years, but the trend reached a new peak in Trump’s first term.
In the 2018 exit poll, 90% of voters who disapproved of Trump’s performance as president said they supported Democrats for the House; in 2020, 93% of Trump disapprovers voted Democratic. In the 2018 and 2020 Senate elections, Republican Susan Collins of Maine in 2020 was the only GOP incumbent or challenger who won in a state where exit polls were conducted and found that more voters disapproved than approved of Trump’s job performance. On the other side of the ledger, Republicans won about 9 in 10 Trump approvers in both the 2018 and 2020 House elections and reached roughly that level with them in most Senate races during his first term.
This year, Republicans continue to run well in early polls among Trump approvers. Recent national surveys by CNN, , , NBC, and all found at least 90% of voters who approve of Trump indicating they intend to support Republicans in November’s House elections. The recent New York Times/Siena University polls of six battleground Senate races found the GOP candidates winning at least 90% of Trump approvers in Iowa, Maine, Ohio and Texas, and around 85% in Alaska and North Carolina.
But Democrats are not yet matching their past performance among Trump disapprovers. Among voters who disapprove of Trump’s performance, House Democrats were winning 69% in the latest CNN poll earlier this spring, a little over 75% in the most recent national NYT/Siena and Marquette surveys, and 83-85% in the NBC, Marist and Quinnipiac polls.
A Quinnipiac survey in Pennsylvania released last week underlined the Democratic difficulty. Since February, the poll found, Trump’s net approval rating in the state had deteriorated from minus 15 points to minus 19. Yet the Democratic lead in the vote for the US House remained stuck at only 6 points, with the share of Trump approvers intending to vote Republican (93%) far exceeding the number of disapprovers planning to vote for Democrats (84%).
Likewise, in the NYT/Siena Senate polls, many of the GOP candidates were running ahead of Trump’s approval rating in a manner that only Collins achieved during his first term.
In those polls, Republican Senator Jon Husted in Ohio and GOP nominee Ashley Hinson in Iowa each narrowly led their Democratic opponents, while nominee Ken Paxton was tied in Texas — although just 44% of voters approved of Trump’s job performance in all three states. In Alaska, the surveys found, Sen. Dan Sullivan narrowly led Democrat Mary Peltola even though voters there split evenly on Trump’s job performance.
Only in North Carolina and Maine, the two states where the largest majority of voters disapproved of Trump, did the surveys find Democratic nominees Roy Cooper, and, at the time, Graham Platner, to be leading. (The Senate leads in all six states were within the surveys’ margin of error.) Even among voters who said they “strongly” disapproved of Trump, none of the Democratic nominees were winning as much support as almost all the party’s candidates did from the voters most alienated by the president during his first term.
The competitive showings for the GOP Senate candidates in red-leaning states where Trump’s approval rating has fallen so far “show that the Republican actual voter performance has achieved a real solid floor in those states,” says Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. If Democrats can’t flip Senate seats in states such as Ohio, Iowa and Texas while a Republican president is this unpopular, he adds, it will be legitimate to ask, “when can they win it?”
Republicans are facing a parallel challenge
In CNN’s latest poll of polls, Trump’s national approval rating among all adults stands at just 36%, with 61% disapproving as of Friday. That’s much worse than the roughly 45% approval rating other presidents faced in the exit polls conducted during difficult recent midterms: Clinton in 1994, Obama in 2010 and 2014, Joe Biden in 2022, and Trump himself in 2018 (when 45 percent approved and 54 percent disapproved in the exit poll.)
It would surprise few in either party if Trump’s approval rating improves somewhat by Election Day. But given the persistence of economic discontent, the difficulty Trump has had in finding an off-ramp from the Iran war, and the underlying inflexibility of attitudes about him, it will be difficult for the president to significantly recover or reach even his approval level from 2018. This means avoiding the worst outcomes in November will likely require Republicans to run better than they ever have among the voters dissatisfied with his performance.
One advantage for Republicans in that effort is the landscape of the upcoming election. Control of the House and Senate, as I’ve written, will be decided primarily in House districts and states that voted for Trump in 2024.
Trump should retain more popularity in those places than in purple or Democratic-leaning areas. But as the NYT/Siena polls in Iowa, Ohio and Texas demonstrate, Republicans have no guarantee that a majority of voters still approve of his performance in many of the battleground contests this year. To hold the Senate, they may need multiple candidates to do what only Collins did in Trump’s first term: win a state where most voters disapprove of his performance.
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Republicans confident they can outrun the first term precedents point to one factor above all: the deterioration of the Democrats’ image after Biden’s troubled presidency. In the 2018 exit poll, voters split evenly on whether they viewed Democrats favorably or unfavorably; today, the party’s image is much weaker.
“They have a brand problem,” says GOP consultant Jesse Hunt, the communications director for the party’s Senate committee in 2020. “They have failed to adequately present an alternative.”
GOP consultant Brad Todd, a CNN political commentator, says the Trump disapprovers still reluctant to support Democrats are concentrated in two groups: college-educated White men (what he describes as “middle managers in corporate America, or small business owners… essentially people who own golf clubs”) and non-college White women. Both groups, he says, have plenty of complaints about Trump’s performance, but also harbor substantial unresolved doubts about Democrats.
“The president’s message has to pivot from, ‘This is the greatest economy ever’ to ‘I inherited a mess and if you let them back in charge it will get worse,’” Todd says.
Both Todd and Hunt say Republicans in tough races will benefit from tying all Democrats to the far-left candidates, including several who identify as democratic socialists, who have broken through in primaries this year.
The best recent example of the president’s party successfully shifting attention to the other side came in 2022. That year, multiple Democratic Senate candidates won in states where most voters disapproved of Biden’s performance. For senators such as Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock and Maggie Hassan, the key to survival was effectively portraying their Trump-allied opponents as extreme.
But this year, Republicans are trying a maneuver with an additional degree of separation. Since Democrats have picked relatively more centrist nominees in almost all the competitive races, Republicans must discredit them through association with leftist candidates running in most cases hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Republicans tried something similar in 2018 amid the initial victories of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the left-wing “Squad” — but that didn’t stop Democrats from gaining over 40 House seats. Hunt says this year will be different.
“The (far-left) individuals you had in 2018 were enough to fill a starting lineup in a basketball game,” he says. “Now you have a lineup that could fill a full baseball roster. That’s reflective of a growing momentum and voters can recognize that.”
Still, the 2018 experience reflects how attitudes about the president’s performance have typically eclipsed views of the opposition party during mid-term elections. In 2010, the public image for the overall GOP was no more favorable than for the Democrats — and yet, with most voters discontented about Obama’s first two years, Republicans gained the most House seats for either party in a midterm since 1938.
“If voters are unhappy enough about the economic conditions and the performance of the president… I don’t think the fact that they don’t like the Democrats that well either is going to matter so much,” says Alan Abramowitz, an emeritus professor of political science at Emory University who studies presidential approval and elections.
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The most optimistic Democrats believe the party’s struggles among Trump disapprovers are more seasonal than structural. CJ Warnke, the communications director for the House Majority PAC, says the shortfall will naturally close as candidates create distinct identities through the fall.
“I think where we are going to make up that ground and win more of the Trump disapprovers is with our candidates as they’re on the campaign trail over the final months,” Warnke says. “That’s where they’ll show voters that they are deeply rooted in the districts and will fight to address the issues those voters care most about.”
Democratic strategist Dan Sena, the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the party’s 2018 sweep, says that is exactly what happened in that election. “This is why you campaign,” Sena said. “It really took the candidates introducing themselves and establishing themselves as an independent voice” distinct from the national Democratic Party “that opened up the ability to convert some of that vote” disenchanted with Trump.
By Election Day, Sena said, hardly any Republican candidates in 2018 ran above Trump’s approval rating in their district — and he expects most GOP candidates this year to bump against the same ceiling.
Like Abramowitz, Sena says the biggest threat for the GOP isn’t that many Republican-leaning voters who disapprove of Trump will cross over to support Democrats, but that some will stay home, creating a more Democratic-leaning electorate than most polls are projecting now. The latest Marquette survey hints at that possibility: It found Democrats winning only 76% of Trump disapprovers when it measured all registered voters, but 86% when it narrowed its sample to those it considered likely voters.
Smith, the Democratic pollster, expects his party to benefit from these dynamics too. But he’s more concerned that Democrats could continue to underperform among Trump disapprovers straight through Election Day.
Convincing those voters Democrats will produce better outcomes in their lives than Trump, Smith says, “is the ballgame” for 2026. “The size of the House Democratic majority, the question of who will control the Senate, comes down almost entirely to whether Democrats have a pithy, clear way to describe what they are offering different than Donald Trump to these 10 percent of voters who disapprove of Trump in a way they never have before,” Smith adds.
Trump’s decline is a necessary condition for big Democratic gains in November. The question remains whether it will prove sufficient.