Midterm Elections: Senate Races Polling Badly for Republicans

Each election cycle since the 2014 midterms, I’ve used a metric for tracking statewide races for the Senate and the governorships that I’ve come to call the Breakers. This isn’t a predictive model, just some simple algebra applied to the RealClearPolitics poll averages over time to track where these races are headed and what the Republicans need to win each one. One advantage of the RCP averages is that we have them going back two decades, so it is feasible to compare their predictive power over time. My original study traced patterns back to 2002.

What I found then were two things. First, which might suggest some hope but also even more dread for Republicans, is that mid-September polling is not the last word. There are often significant shifts between where the races are postured heading into the fall home stretch and where they end up. Second, which bodes very poorly for Republicans now, is the pronounced tendency of these races to track the president’s approval rating (or the presidential race) in wave-election patterns. At this writing, Trump’s approval rating in the RCP average is 18.5 points underwater, close to the worst it has been in his second term: 39.7 percent approval, 58.2 percent disapproval. The reasons are multiple and cumulative — he burned through his honeymoon by April 2025 and was double digits underwater by November 2025 — but far less relevant for these purposes than their effect on statewide Republican candidates. If Trump is below 40 on Election Day, it’s grisly news for the GOP.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

Featured Tags

Each election cycle since the 2014 midterms, I’ve used a metric for tracking statewide races for the Senate and the governorships that I’ve come to call the Breakers. This isn’t a predictive model, just some simple algebra applied to the RealClearPolitics poll averages over time to track where these races are headed and what the Republicans need to win each one. One advantage of the RCP averages is that we have them going back two decades, so it is feasible to compare their predictive power over time. My original study traced patterns back to 2002.

What I found then were two things. First, which might suggest some hope but also even more dread for Republicans, is that mid-September polling is not the last word. There are often significant shifts between where the races are postured heading into the fall home stretch and where they end up. Second, which bodes very poorly for Republicans now, is the pronounced tendency of these races to track the president’s approval rating (or the presidential race) in wave-election patterns. At this writing, Trump’s approval rating in the RCP average is 18.5 points underwater, close to the worst it has been in his second term: 39.7 percent approval, 58.2 percent disapproval. The reasons are multiple and cumulative — he burned through his honeymoon by April 2025 and was double digits underwater by November 2025 — but far less relevant for these purposes than their effect on statewide Republican candidates. If Trump is below 40 on Election Day, it’s grisly news for the GOP.