Donald Trump’s greatest success in the 2024 election may pose the greatest threat to Republicans in the 2026 contest.
Trump won reelection last year largely because he succeeded in turning out a large pool of infrequent voters, many of them younger non-white men without a college degree. Now, the GOP faces the challenge of mobilizing those voters to come out again for a midterm election, when far fewer of them have typically voted.
“That’s the big question of this cycle: How do we turn out this base that turned out so strong last cycle?” said Mike Marinella, press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.
Trump’s test closely resembles the Democratic dilemma during Barack Obama’s two terms in the White House. Obama also benefited from a strong turnout among irregular voters, particularly in his initial victory in 2008. But Democrats struggled to mobilize his voters during the two midterm elections of his presidency, which contributed to crushing losses in both 2010 and 2014.
Republicans are not defending nearly as many vulnerable House and Senate seats now as Democrats were then, so the GOP’s downside risk isn’t as great. But because the Republican majorities in both chambers are so thin, even much smaller losses next year than the Democrats endured during the Obama mid-terms could cost the GOP its majorities, particularly in the House.
Marinella said Republicans are confident of holding support next year from the infrequent voters who fueled Trump’s victory in 2024. But public polls consistently show that his job approval rating, particularly for handling the economy, is now running well below his 2024 vote share with several of the key groups that moved toward him — particularly Hispanics, young men, and non-white voters who did not attend college.
That’s boosting Democratic confidence that Republicans will struggle in the midterm election to mobilize the low-propensity voters who supported the president in 2024 — and to maintain his elevated support among those who do come out. “With these key groups, we see the kind of backsliding you would observe if you are looking at a poor election for Republicans,” said Erica Seifert, senior director of Navigator Research, a Democratic polling consortium.
Throughout American history, midterm elections almost always have been tough on the party that holds the presidency. But they were especially rough on Democrats during Obama’s two White House terms, for reasons that could also prove relevant to Trump.
In his own presidential campaigns, Obama did exceptionally well: He became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a majority of the popular vote twice. But in both of his midterms, his party came up short: In the 2010 election, Democrats lost 64 House seats (the most either party had lost in a midterm since 1938) and control of the lower chamber; in 2014, they lost nine Senate seats and control of the upper chamber.
Data from Catalist, a Democratic data and analytics firm whose analysis is respected in both parties, helps explain that divergence. Catalist analyzes data from state voter files to track the behavior of individual voters. In data provided to CNN, Catalist calculated that almost 48 million people who voted in 2008 did not vote in 2010, and nearly 52 million people who voted in 2012 did not show up in 2014. In each case that meant about 40% of the people who voted in the presidential election sat out the subsequent midterm.
That huge falloff fundamentally reconfigured the electorate between Obama’s presidential and midterm elections. Each time, the midterm electorate was much older and Whiter than the voter pool for the presidential year. Voters younger than 30, for instance, soared to 17% of the electorate when Obama won in 2008 but fell back to just 11% in 2010, when Republicans had a banner year, according to an analysis of Census data provided to CNN by demographer William Frey of Brookings Metro. In 2014, Frey calculated, the youth share of the electorate fell to just 10%, while voters of color constituted just 23.7% of the electorate, down from 26.3% in 2012.
These patterns created a devastating headwind in midterm elections for Democrats during the Obama years because, at that point, the party was still winning preponderant majorities of young people and nonwhite voters. In its modeling, Catalist projected that most presidential-year voters who stayed home in each of Obama’s midterm elections were people who had voted for him two years before. That turnout collapse explained a large part of the Democrats’ struggles in Obama’s midterms, Catalist concluded.
The Obama years solidified the belief in the political world that Democrats run stronger in presidential than midterm years, when they were thought to face a structural turnout disadvantage. The Trump era, though, has dissolved that consensus. In the 2018 midterm, under Trump, Democrats won 40 seats in the House and recaptured the majority; in 2022, under Biden, Democrats lost the House majority but surrendered far fewer seats than anticipated and ran unexpectedly well in the Senate and governor races across the key swing states.
What changed? One key reason the GOP’s midterm advantage has dissipated under Trump has been the shifting loyalty of college-educated White people, who tend to be the most reliable voters. College-educated whites typically have made up about 3 to 4 percentage points more of the electorate in each midterm election than in the presidential contest two years previously, according to Frey’s analysis.
During Obama’s presidency, that turnout differential benefited Republicans because the GOP still won many more of those well-educated voters than Democrats did. (Exit polls found that college-educated Whites preferred Republicans over Democrats in House races by a crushing 19 percentage points in 2010 and 16 points in 2014.) But Trump has repelled many of those voters, and exit polls found that Democrats carried them at least narrowly in the 2018 and 2022 House elections as well as in many of the most competitive statewide races those years.
The other factor that has eroded the GOP’s midterm advantage has been the behavior of voters of color, though their role has changed over time.
In Trump’s first midterm, Democrats benefited from an unusual surge of new voters, many of them younger and nonwhite, who came out to oppose Trump. Catalist calculated that over 14 million people who did not vote in 2016 did vote in 2018 — double the number of new voters in either Obama midterm. Catalist projected that a clear majority of those new voters backed Democrats that year; a study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center similarly found that in House races, over two-thirds of new 2018 voters backed Democrats.
In 2020, those new voters returned to the polls in big numbers and again gave Biden big margins, the Catalist and Pew data show. But Trump also displayed his own pull among irregular voters, running better among young, and Hispanic and Asian American voters in 2020 than he did in 2016.
These competing trends offset to produce a virtual draw in the 2022 midterm election. Disappointment in Biden depressed turnout among the new anti-Trump voters from 2018: Pew found that voters who did not show up in 2022 after voting in the previous two elections leaned strongly Democratic.
And as during the Obama midterms, overall Democratic turnout fell, helping the GOP to narrowly regain the House majority. But in the most closely fought swing states — including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin across the Rust Belt, and Arizona, Nevada and Georgia in the Sun Belt — presidential-year Democratic voters showed up in unusually large numbers and allowed Democrats to win many of those Senate and governor contests, according to calculations from Catalist data by longtime progressive strategist Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO.
Democrats could not sustain that precarious equilibrium into 2024. As in 2022, large numbers of disappointed Biden 2020 voters again stayed home, both Catalist and Pew found. (Pew concluded that about one-fifth of Biden’s 2020 Black and Asian American voters, and nearly one-fourth of his Latino supporters, did not vote in 2024.) Meanwhile, both Catalist and Pew found Trump won a solid majority of new voters. Multiple studies from pollsters and analysts across the political spectrum concluded that Trump ran best among irregular voters with the least voting history, including many younger and nonwhite men.
Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini recently wrote that Trump had become a perfect candidate for reaching the disconnected Americans who might tune in only for a presidential race, if they tune in at all. “Trump is optimized for this kind of electorate,” Ruffini wrote. “His appeal transcends politics, mobilizing the previously apathetic—from steelworkers in 2016 to crypto bros in 2024.”
The targets were different, but much the same was once said of Obama’s cultural reach. Keeping those peripheral voters engaged in a midterm election when the president is not personally on the ballot, as Obama discovered, is a very different proposition.
With this reconfigured coalition, Republicans face a midterm puzzle like the challenge Democrats confronted in the Obama years: They are gaining ground with groups that don’t reliably vote and losing support among the groups that do.
Marinella, the NRCC spokesperson, said Republicans are optimistic that Trump’s approval rating among his new 2024 supporters remains sufficiently strong to ensure enough of them will turn out for GOP candidates next year.
“We’re seeing a realignment in real time,” Marinella said. “Hispanic voters across the country and working-class voters across the Rust Belt are moving decisively to the right, and importantly, that trend holds strong even in midterm cycles.”
While “Trump is our strongest driver of turnout,” Marinella added, “polling shows these voters will still show up for Republicans even when he’s not at the top of the ballot.”
Democrats, though, see plentiful signs that the new voters who moved toward Trump in 2024 are already reconsidering. Seifert said that in Navigator polling, Trump’s approval rating has sagged since February not only among adults paying close attention to the news but also those who say they don’t seek out political news — a group with whom Trump made big gains last year.
Carlos Odio, a Democratic pollster who focuses on Latino voters, says that in surveys by his firm Equis, a sizeable minority of Trump’s 2024 Latino supporters express at least some regret for their vote. “There is discontent against Trump across all Latinos, but it is greater among the more sporadic-voting Latinos,” Odio said. Public polls show Trump’s approval rating among both Latino and younger voters, particularly on the economy and inflation, has fallen well below his vote share with them in 2024.
Podhorzer, the Democratic strategist, said Trump faces bookended risks from the possible turnout mix in 2026. One is lower participation among his new 2024 voters because he has failed to alleviate their core concern: the cost of living. “His first-time buyers are going to be pretty disillusioned,” Podhorzer predicted.
At the same time, he argued, Trump’s bellicose second-term agenda may reawaken the anti-Trump surge voters of 2018 and 2020 who then stopped participating because of their disillusionment with Biden. Referring to the large number of Biden 2020 voters who did not turn out last year in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and other big cities, Podhorzer said, “I suspect if they had known that what was on the ballot was ICE raiding the city and sending the military in, a few of them would have showed up.”
Still, Seifert noted that in Navigator polling, even voters growing disillusioned with Trump’s record are not yet expressing much confidence in Democrats. Odio likewise said expectations that Latinos could snap back to their pre-2020 levels of support for Democrats are unrealistic. “Trump probably will hold onto most of his new Latino voters,” he said, but even the small erosion now surfacing in polls could make “a big difference” in the next election. Podhorzer points to another uncertainty: How much will Trump seek to tilt the electoral playing field toward the GOP by interfering with election administration next year, as he’s already done by pressuring red states to gerrymander new Republican House seats?
The huge swings in turnout between midterm and presidential elections have added more volatility and unpredictability to the four-year campaign cycle. For 2026, Republicans face the greatest risk from this growing volatility: Even if unresolved doubts about Democrats prevent too many new Trump 2024 voters from voting blue in 2026, disappointment in the president’s results might keep many of them on the couch.
But because Democrats now run best among the most reliable voters, many strategists are warning the party not to assume that even a good night in 2026 would portend success in 2028, when more of those irregular voters will return to the ballot box.
“Democrats have to be really, really careful not to learn the wrong lessons from whatever happens in ‘26,” said Dan Kanninen, the battleground states director for Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign. Even if Democrats perform well next year, he says, “I’m not going to hang the ‘mission accomplished’ banner.”
