The midterms have historically been bad for the party of an incumbent president, but if a series of races since he took office have been anything to go by since Donald Trump returned to office, things could turn particularly ugly for Republicans come November.
Tuesday’s humiliating GOP defeat in Trump’s own Palm Beach district may have caught the president by surprise.
But the grassroots win was only the tip of the iceberg.
It’s not just that the president has been facing record-low approval ratings in his second term; Democrats have been on a winning streak in state-level special elections since Trump returned to power.
Democrats have now flipped 30 state legislative seats in elections from red to blue since January 2025. Republicans have not flipped a single one.
On Tuesday, the Democratic candidates won two special election races in Florida, including Emily Gregory’s victory in the race to represent the district that includes Trump’s own home at Mar-a-Lago. The president endorsed her GOP rival and voted by mail in the election in a district he won in 2024 by 11 points.
The other Democrat, Brian Nathan, flipped a state Senate seat in Tampa after Trump won it by more than 7 points in the last election.
“These flips have taken place in every environment that this administration has thrown at us,” pointed out Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “Whether you’re talking about the ‘Liberation Day’ time period, or you’re talking about the Epstein files, or you’re talking about the war in Iran, there’s not a single thing that this administration is doing that is positively connecting with voters, that is changing the way they feel about it.”
While Trump has touted the economy and insisted that the affordability concerns raised by Democrats are a “hoax,” voters have disagreed in the form of casting their ballots across the country throughout the past 15 months.
“Voters are showing up and saying, ‘We want something different.’ And that has been consistently true since January of last year,” Williams said, noting Democratic candidates at the state level have been “laser focused on affordability and costs.”
Earlier this month, Democrats also flipped a New Hampshire seat in a stunning upset in a district Trump won in both 2024 and 2020.
They also had a victory in ruby-red Arkansas, where Democrat Alex Holladay won a red seat with a double-digit shift blue.
“I think it really tells us that 2026 has the possibility to be an extraordinary year for Democrats,” said Amanda Litman, whose group Run for Something worked with Gregory, of the Democrats’ victories.
“Usually we try and think about a map where the most competitive places are two or three points where you could really flip it,” Litman explained. “I think this year we should be thinking as expansively as 20 or 30 points because who knows what is possible. And we’ve seen swings as aggressive as that if not last night in Florida then over the last six or eight months.”
The environment is favorable for Democrats in the midterms, but they’re not taking a foot off the pedal at the state level heading into the fall with their most ambitious plan ever to compete in 42 chambers with their biggest budget ever for a single year at $50 million.
“We know that our efforts to win back these state legislatures overlap with key congressional and Senate and gubernatorial targets,” Williams noted.
CNN’s data guru Harry Enten’s predicted Tuesday night that what happened in the Mar-a-Lago district was “likely to expand nationwide and to expand in the midterm elections as well.”
State-level races take place with candidates closely engaged in their communities, but it has become increasingly impossible for Americans not to connect the GOP with the president, whose MAGA movement has dominated the party for a decade now.
“The Republican Party is President Trump. He is the party. So those two things are intertwined and inescapable,” Williams said. “But I think maybe more importantly, this is an election where the conversations are about how to move forward and how to create something different.”
