Will It Be a Blue Wave?

As the midterm elections enter their post-Labor Day general election phase, all signs still point to Democrats taking the House, which requires a net gain of three seats. But we can’t know whether they will ride a Blue Wave that would give them a sizable House majority along with control of the Senate.  

What would constitute a “wave election”? Four years ago for the Washington Monthly, I explored that question, because no consensus definition exists. I offered my own benchmark: “Since the president’s party almost always loses House seats, the party out of power should net an above-midterm-average number of seats,” which means clearing 26. For that to happen, Democrats would, more or less, need to win every race classified by The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter as “Tossup,” “Lean Democratic,” or “Lean Republican”—yielding at least a net gain of 20 new seats after accounting for certain flips due to redistricting (possibly 21, depending on what happens with the Missouri map), as well as eat into the “Likely Republican” column (which currently includes four Democratic-held seats).  

Prominent election analysts recently offered two competing assessments. Charlie Cook, founder and contributor to The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, offered a bullish take in his Substack newsletter. “My advice,” Cook offered, “is to focus on the name-brand, top-shelf polls and avoid the noise. In the last three months there have been [19] very high-quality polls released in states with critical Senate and/or gubernatorial races—eight by The New York Times/Siena College, seven by Fox News, and four by AARP … all of significantly higher quality than 99 percent of the state polling floating around the internet and on the pages of publications that should know better.” When you do that, according to Cook, “Republicans are having to fight tooth and nail for seats that should be gimme putts.” 

Cook, in turn, laid out three scenarios for Republicans, “bad, really bad, or truly horrible,” with the least bad involving “a loss of between 15 and 25 House seats” without losing the Senate, and the middle option “losing between 26 and 35 seats in the House, and either four or five seats in the Senate”—which, by my standard, would amount to a wave. 

He defined “truly horrible” as a six-seat Senate gain for Democrats, which would have sounded crazy at the beginning of the year. But if the average of all the available Senate polls in August proves prescient, Democrats would flip five seats—Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas—without sacrificing any they currently hold. A big Blue Wave, in theory, could flip one more, most likely Iowa but the most optimistic Democrats are also looking at Kansas, Mississippi, and South Carolina, where little poll data exists. Additionally, Democrats are eyeing upsets in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Idaho, where they have ceded the ballot to left-leaning independent candidates.  

A more pessimistic take on Democrats’ chances of even taking the House comes from Henry Olsen of the Washington Post. While Olsen accepts the conventional wisdom that a House takeover is “the most likely outcome,” he cautions that “a seat-by-seat analysis reveals a tougher challenge for Democrats than the overall picture suggests.” He notes that the median House district is “Virginia’s 1st District, which [President Donald Trump] won by 4.9 points” and that, for Democrats, “winning that district plus every single House seat Trump carried by less than that will be a tall order.” He added: 

No party ever sweeps all the seats a baseline partisan analysis suggests it can win. That means Democrats probably need to take a few of the seats above the median to secure control of the House. Those seats are demographically even tougher. There are only five House seats that Trump carried by between five and eight percentage points. That’s uphill ground by definition. Democrats won only a handful of seats in 2024 that Trump carried by five or more points, and none that Trump carried by at least 10. 

Although Olsen acknowledges that the Democratic lead in the generic congressional ballot average appears healthy enough to meet the challenge (as of Labor Day, the Democratic lead in the average ranges from 5 to 6.6 depending on your aggregator of choice), he argues that this “blunt instrument doesn’t take into account the peculiarities of individual races.” 

I’m not sold on the Olsen analysis for two reasons.  

First, Trump’s 2024 performance is not a useful benchmark to assess the partisanship of House districts, especially considering that Trump’s current standing is well below where it was two years ago. A better metric is Cook’s Partisan Voting Index (PVI), which incorporates presidential voting performance from the last two elections, giving heavier weight to the most recent, thereby providing a better sense of partisan intensity and consistency across different political environments.  

The median House district noted by Olsen, Virginia’s 1st, has a PVI of R+3, meaning that over the past two presidential elections it has voted for Republicans three percentage points more than the national average.  

Flipping R+3 seats should not be a “tall order” for Democrats in a midterm year. Heading into Election Day in 2018, Democrats held a 7.3 percentage point advantage in the generic congressional ballot average—about a point higher than the current poll average—and ended up with an 8.4 percentage point margin in the national popular vote. In that similar political environment, not only did Democrats flip six of eight competitive districts with PVIs of R+3 and 23 of 26 with bluer PVIs, but also four of nine R+4 districts, and 10 districts with PVIs ranging from R+5 to R+13.  

The list of competitive districts in 2026 encompassing Cook’s “Lean Democratic,” “Tossup,” “Lean Republican,” and “Likely Republican” races (I’m going to assume the “Likely Democratic” column won’t be competitive for Republicans this year) includes five Republican-held districts with R+3 PVIs, matching the median district, and another 14 in bluer districts. That’s more than enough targets of opportunity for Democrats to take control of the House and fulfill Charlie Cook’s least “bad” scenario.  

For Democrats to net gain at least 26 seats—meeting Cook’s “really bad” threshold and my wave threshold—they would have to win some of the 21 districts with PVIs ranging from R+4 to R+8, only six of which are presently in the “Tossup” and “Lean Republican” columns, and limit losses by the handful of Democratic incumbents on GOP turf. (No district with an R+9 PVI or redder is currently included in Cook’s listing of competitive districts.) That’s tougher of course, but the 2018 example shows us that it’s feasible, especially if Democrats can pick up just a little more momentum in the generic congressional ballot average over the next eight weeks, potentially aided by Trump’s continued escalation of the economic and military wars he launched with Canada and Iran, respectively. 

Even more boneheaded is this week’s unprecedented midterm Republican convention known as Trumpapalooza, which does little but give free footage to Democratic admakers. Normally it’s only the opposition party that tries to nationalize a midterm election, not the governing party saddled with an unpopular president. But Trump has too much main character energy to realize how badly he has lost the plot.  

The second aspect of the Olsen analysis I question is his assessment of the “the peculiarities of individual races.” Peculiarities certainly exist, but his examples don’t strike me as emblematic of the full political landscape.  

He notes that Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania’s 1st Congressional District represents turf won by Kamala Harris (PVI D+1) but has such a strong reputation as a moderate that he survived the 2018 Blue Wave. All true, but Fitzpatrick’s race is classified by Cook as a “Likely Republican” win. In other words, it’s already understood to be a reach for Democrats and is not essential for House control or even for a wave. 

Olsen similarly overemphasizes Wisconsin’s 1st District, held by Republican Bryan Steil, as a case where the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s official House campaign arm, hasn’t included the challenger on its “Red to Blue” target list. This is another “Likely Republican” reach district for Democrats. “You aren’t likely to win a seat you don’t seriously campaign for,” Olsen observes. True enough, but the Red to Blue list includes 37 Democratic candidates, 11 of whom are running in “Likely Republican” races plus two in “Solid Republican” races. Just because Democrats aren’t funding every longshot doesn’t mean they aren’t playing offense and pushing the envelope. 

Another Republican-held D+1 district is New York’s 17th, represented by Mike Lawler. Olsen suggests Lawler could survive because the district has a sizable Jewish population amid a “dramatic rise of pro-Palestine, anti-Israel sentiment within the [Democratic] party.” Of course that is possible, but Olsen’s analysis leaves out the fact that Lawler’s Democratic opponent, Cait Conley, is a supporter of Israel and of the continuation of military aid, although unlike Lawler she is critical of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. 

Olsen warns that “Democrats may also be hampered by the extreme candidates their voters nominated in some marginal seats,” noting that the “nominees against Reps. Tom Barrett (Michigan’s 7th District), Gabe Evans (Colorado’s 8th) and David G. Valadao (California’s 22nd) all campaigned as ardent progressives,” potentially helping GOP incumbents “convince Trump voters to turn out.” Whether ideologically edgy candidates either help extend or limit Democratic gains is worth tracking, but it does not make sense to group these three districts and candidates. 

Colorado’s 8th and California’s 22nd, unlike Michigan’s 7th, are heavily Latino. While Trump won slight majorities in these districts in 2024, he lost decisively in 2020, and all available data suggests Latinos across the country are swinging hard against Trump this year, so these are not places where juicing MAGA turnout is a viable solution for Republicans. Furthermore, Manny Rutinel, the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s 8th, was not endorsed in the primary by Senator Bernie Sanders and has tacked toward the middle on health care, the Middle East, and other issues.  

The Michigan 7th nominee, Will Lawrence, is perhaps the only Democrat running in a swing district with a history in the Democratic Socialists of America (though he recently let his membership lapse). He also has a particularly controversial record of past statements which he is trying to disavow and move past. Most difficult for Lawrence are comments he made in 2024 on a podcast deriding the “older generation of Black political leadership” for being “such a pillar, frankly, for establishment, capitalist, imperialist American power,” which “defangs the white left.” He has since expressed regret.  

Lawrence is presently the only Democrat running in a “Tossup” race who is not on the DCCC Red to Blue list in part, according to CNN, because of lingering anger from Congressional Black Caucus members. However, Representative Gregory Meeks, who leads the caucus’ political action committee, told CNN, “I think we’re going to get that resolved … We want him to win.” 

While there are arguably a few cases in which candidate quality—related to ideology, style, or paper trail—could limit Democratic gains in the House, this factor cuts both ways.  

For example, the domestic abuse allegations against Republican incumbent Max Miller prompted The Cook Political Report to reclassify his Ohio 7th Congressional District race as a “Tossup.” Sexual misconduct charges against Chuck Edwards of North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District led to his race moving from “Likely” to “Leans Republican” last June. Last month, Edwards suspended his re-election campaign and has been replaced on the ballot by the state GOP, but according to the North Carolina publication The Assembly, the Democratic candidate Jamie Ager has a cash and name recognition advantage, and Cook has not revised the rating. The conspiratorial, combative, and eternally online Anna Paulina Luna from Florida’s 13th Congressional District may be proving too extreme for her R+6 district if a recent Democratic internal poll showing Democratic challenger Leela Gray up five points is remotely accurate, though Cook still rates the race as “Likely Republican.” New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District race was long considered a “Tossup,” but incumbent Thomas Kean, Jr. didn’t help himself by not going to work for four months without explaining the reason for his absence, severe depression, until returning. 

The bottom line is that while political polarization and gerrymandering may be limiting the field of competitive districts, enough districts remain with a low-to-mid-range PVI for Democrats to build a Blue Wave. Simply looking at how well Trump did in a particular congressional district two years ago is not enough to determine Democratic viability, given that Trump’s job approval is in the tank and he appears disinterested in making any changes that would alleviate voter anxieties about him and his economic policies.  

Granted, quality poll data is increasingly hard to find, and that creates immense uncertainty which could complicate the final triage decisions both parties will soon have to make regarding which races should receive finite resources in the final days. But as Charlie Cook suggests, the credible data we do have gives Democrats every reason to think big. Limiting their investments to House races bluer than the median House seat would risk leaving potential pickup opportunities on the table.  

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