Three days before the midterm elections, Republicans are playing defense in Kansas, Texas, and Alaska. The House of Representatives is all but lost to them, and control of the Senate will be decided in states where the ruling party has not lost in decades.
On Friday, October 30, Pope Leo XIV, who remains a registered voter in Will County, Illinois, mailed in his completed ballot. It was the first time in history that a sitting pontiff had voted in a secular election. That same day, early voting closed in Texas, and by then more than 43 million Americans nationwide had already cast their ballots, a pace at which overall turnout could surpass the record set in 2018, when more voters turned out for the midterms than at any time since 1914.
Still, the biggest sensation of this fall is not in the Vatican. Kansas, which last sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in 1932, on the wave of Franklin Roosevelt's first victory, now appears on the list of states with an unpredictable outcome. Adam Hamilton, the founder and longtime pastor of the largest United Methodist church in the country, is ahead of incumbent Senator Roger Marshall in a number of independent polls. Tim Scott, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, was forced to admit that the Kansas race had become "more competitive than I'd like."
When the ruling party pours millions of dollars into a state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, this is no longer the familiar midterm backlash. What we are witnessing is a crisis of confidence with a very specific address: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
War, Gasoline, and $2.7 Billion: Where the Record Disapproval Came From
On February 28, 2026, American and Israeli aircraft carried out the first strikes on Iran. The president promised the campaign would take a few weeks. Eight months have passed. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil and gas passed before the war, has yet to return to normal operation, the April ceasefire is hanging by a thread, and on August 31 Iran struck American military facilities in the region in retaliation for an attack on an island in the strait.
According to the American Automobile Association, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the United States has risen from just under $3 to just over $4. In a country where, across most of its territory, the car takes the place of public transportation, an extra dollar at the pump becomes a daily reminder of a war the voter never asked for. Speaking at an August 14 rally in Garden City, outside New York, Trump called the willingness to pay "a little more for gas" a reasonable price for keeping Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons. The argument did not work. Only one in five Americans, according to national polling, believes the war has been worth its costs, and among Republicans only half think so.
The president's weighted average approval rating has fallen to 36%, with more than 60% of Americans disapproving of his performance. In one regular national tracking poll in September, the figure dropped to 32%, the lowest of Trump's entire political career. The same tracking poll recorded something far more alarming for the White House: in a single September week, the share of Republicans satisfied with the president fell from 82% to 73%. The core of his electorate is not fleeing yet, but for the first time it has visibly wavered.
Corruption has been added to war and inflation. According to one major October poll, 60% of voters are extremely concerned about it. Compilers of billionaire rankings have calculated that Trump's net worth has grown by at least $2.7 billion since his 2024 election victory. For a president who came to power promising to drain the Washington swamp, the combination of rising gas prices and a rising family business has proved toxic. Health care, where prices are climbing noticeably faster than overall inflation, worries about half of voters and completes the picture.
The current campaign has an almost perfect historical twin. In the fall of 2006, George W. Bush, who had drawn the country into the Iraq War, went into the midterms with an approval rating of around 37%. Democrats picked up 31 seats in the House and six in the Senate that year, taking both chambers for the first time since 1994. At a press conference on November 8, 2006, the morning after the vote, Bush acknowledged that his party had taken a "thumping." Twenty years later, the scenery has changed but the plot remains the same: a war in the Middle East that was promised to be short turns out to be long, and voters send the bill to the president's party.
Senate Arithmetic: 51% of the Vote Is Not 51 Seats
Discontent with the president does not by itself translate into seats. The leading polling aggregator shows average support for Democrats in congressional elections at over 51%, compared with under 43% for Republicans. Among those firmly intending to vote, the gap is even wider, according to the Pew Research Center: 59% to 35%. The Senate map, however, is drawn in such a way that even this advantage does not guarantee control of the upper chamber.
Democrats have a fresh lesson on this score. In 2018, they won the national House vote by nearly nine points and picked up 41 seats in the lower chamber, yet lost two Senate seats because that year's map forced them to defend conservative states.
Republicans currently hold 53 of the 100 seats. A third of the Senate is up for reelection every two years; this year 35 seats are at stake, including special elections in Ohio and Florida, and Republicans are defending 22 of them. Democrats need a net gain of at least four seats. A 50-50 split would keep the majority with the ruling party: in that case, the tie-breaking vote belongs to Vice President JD Vance as president of the Senate.
The Democratic path to a majority begins with defense. In Michigan, where Senator Gary Peters retired, Abdul El-Sayed leads former Congressman Mike Rogers 50 to 48 among likely voters in the latest Marist College poll. Jon Ossoff in Georgia is ahead of Republican Mike Collins by an average of eight to nine points. In New Hampshire, in the race for the seat vacated by Jeanne Shaheen, Congressman Chris Pappas leads by about seven points over John Sununu, the former senator who lost to none other than Shaheen in 2008.
North Carolina offers the most reliable chance of a pickup. After Thom Tillis declined to run, former Governor Roy Cooper leads former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley by an average of ten points, and the final pre-election Elon University poll gave him a 13-point lead. That same poll recorded a telling shift: in February 2025, 45% of the state's residents approved of Trump's performance; in October 2026, 34% did.
Maine deserves a conversation of its own. Graham Platner won the June Democratic primary here with 72.3%, but later withdrew, and about 600 state party convention delegates nominated Troy Jackson, a logger and former president of the state senate, in his place. Susan Collins's campaign has since portrayed Jackson as a creature of the party establishment. The latest Marist College poll gives Jackson 49% to 47%, while a joint survey by a Democratic and a Republican polling firm shows a 49-49 tie. I would not be in a hurry to write Collins off. In 2020, nearly every poll predicted her defeat, and she won outright in the first round with 51%.
Ohio looks more attractive for Democrats than it did a year ago. Sherrod Brown, who served in the Senate from 2007 to 2025 and lost to Bernie Moreno in 2024, is trying to return by taking the seat of Jon Husted, whom the governor appointed in January 2025 to replace Vance after he became vice president. Brown leads by three and a half points in the polling average, and in the governor's race, Democrat Amy Acton led Vivek Ramaswamy by eight points in one October poll.
Suppose Democrats win all six of these races. That would give them exactly 50 seats. It is not enough. The fourth pickup will have to be found where Republicans a year ago were not even mounting a defense: in Texas, Alaska, Kansas, or Nebraska.
In Alaska, former Congresswoman Mary Peltola, the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress, has not trailed Senator Dan Sullivan in a single poll since late September; her lead ranges from two to seven points, and in the final round of ranked-choice voting, one October poll gives her 50.1% to 48%. In 2020, Sullivan won by 13 points. A detail that is easy to miss: there is another Republican on the ballot named Dan Sullivan, sharing both the senator's first and last name, and in a state where candidates are ranked, such confusion could cost a few tenths of a percentage point.
Nebraska has prepared a surprise of a different kind. Independent candidate Dan Osborn, a former union leader, lost to Deb Fischer by about seven points in 2024 in a state Trump carried by more than 20 points. Now he is up against former Governor Pete Ricketts, and the averages are nearly even: 45.9% to 45.3%. On October 5, Trump personally flew to Grand Island to support Ricketts. It remains an open question which caucus Osborn would work with in the Senate if he wins, and the answer could determine who appoints committee chairs.
Forecasters differ in their assessments. One of the leading independent models on October 26 gave Democrats a 57% chance of controlling the Senate and projected them winning 51 seats. Participants in the Kalshi prediction market on October 22 put the same odds at 68%. The 11-point gap is explainable: the model relies on historical statistics and fundamentals, while the market reacts more quickly to early voting data.
Texas: Paxton Versus Paxton
Democrats have not won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. Thirty-two years is long enough in politics for something to start feeling like a law of nature. This year, that law cracked.
Democrat James Talarico, a state legislator, former schoolteacher from San Antonio, and seminary student, leads Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton 48 to 46 in an October University of Houston poll of two thousand likely voters. Among independents, his lead looks overwhelming: 60% to 32%. The average across all polls gives Talarico 48.4% to Paxton's 45.8%.
The key to this race lies in the same line of the same poll. Republican Governor Greg Abbott leads Democrat Gina Hinojosa by three points. That means a significant number of Texans are prepared to vote for a Republican governor and against a Republican Senate candidate at the same time. The Republican brand in Texas remains strong; the weak link has turned out to be a particular candidate. Paxton was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 and acquitted by the state Senate, dragged a securities fraud case behind him for years, and for a moderate suburban voter outside Dallas or Austin he embodies everything that voter would like a break from. One of George W. Bush's brothers publicly urged people to vote for Talarico.
The money tells the same story. According to available data, Republican groups have spent nearly $240 million to elect Paxton, more than five times what Democrats have invested in Talarico. Elon Musk sent $10 million to a political action committee set up specifically for Paxton's campaign. When a party spends a quarter of a billion dollars to hold a state that should be its fortress, that in itself is a diagnosis.
Turnout is heightening the suspense. Texas has a record 19 million registered voters, 7.7% more than before the 2022 elections. Harris County received more than 127,000 voters on the first day of early voting, setting a record for a midterm. As of the end of early voting, Texans had cast more than 5.8 million ballots, 1.75 million more than four years ago. In border counties where Hispanics make up over 90% of the population, early turnout has in some cases already exceeded total turnout in 2022.
A fair caveat is necessary here. In 2018, Beto O'Rourke also generated excitement, also drew record lines, and also led in some polls, yet he ultimately lost to Ted Cruz by 2.6 points. In the first seven days of early voting this fall, 23.4% of registered voters cast ballots, compared with 24.3% in 2018. Republican analysts in the state point out that the outcome will be decided by the 2.1 million people who voted in the last Republican primaries but have not yet turned out. Texas polls have historically overestimated Democrats by two to three points.
The Gerrymandering Trap: How Republicans Drew Districts to Their Own Detriment
In the summer of 2025, Trump asked Texas Republicans to redraw the electoral map mid-decade, without waiting for a new census. In August, the state legislature adopted a map designed to add five seats for the party in the House. A federal three-judge panel blocked it in November as an illegal racial gerrymander, but the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Texas to use the new boundaries. California responded in kind: on November 4, 2025, voters approved Proposition 50 by roughly two-thirds, temporarily sidelining the independent redistricting commission and handing Democrats five potential seats.
The essence of gerrymandering is simple. Opposition supporters are packed into as few districts as possible, where they win by huge surpluses, while the rest are spread out so that they remain in the minority everywhere. By various estimates, Republicans overall expected to squeeze 15 to 16 additional seats out of redistricting, and Democrats about six.
The technique's weak spot is known among specialists by the ironic term "dummymander," a blend of "dummy" and "gerrymander." A map drawn to the electoral proportions of 2024 becomes a trap if those proportions shift. By stretching its advantage across the maximum number of districts, a party leaves itself a thin margin in each of them, and in an unfavorable wave it loses seats in bunches.
Of the five new Texas districts Republicans were counting on, three are already in jeopardy. Telling is the 35th District in San Antonio, which Trump carried by roughly ten points in 2024. Democrat Johnny Garcia has pulled Republican Carlos De La Cruz into an unexpectedly close fight there. The White House's bet that Hispanics who swung right in 2024 would stay there for good is shattering against gas and grocery prices.
The overall picture in the lower chamber is grim for Republicans. With full membership, they hold 220 seats to 215, meaning Democrats need a net gain of just three seats. On October 23, one of the most respected ratings shifted 19 races toward Democrats and now considers a gain of 12 to 22 seats most likely, which would give the party between 227 and 237 seats. The model mentioned above puts Democrats' chances of winning the House at 79%, with a projection of 238 seats; the prediction market puts them at 91%.
The President Being Kept Out of Sight
The Republicans' main problem is their own leader. The party's candidates publicly swear loyalty to Trump but in practice try to keep their distance from him. According to American journalists' counts, in 41 of 62 competitive districts, Republican candidates break with the president on important issues. Republicans spend less than 1% of their advertising budget on ads mentioning Trump.
Democrats are doing exactly the opposite. Mentions of the president account for about 20% of their ad spending, and the total number of such mentions in Democratic ads has passed 180,000. The strategy is transparent: turn 435 separate battles for House seats and 35 Senate races into a single national referendum on confidence in Trump.
Trump himself, meanwhile, continues to travel to rallies, and the route of his trips betrays panic more precisely than any poll. On October 5, he spoke in Grand Island, Nebraska. On October 13, in Wasilla, Alaska, alongside Sullivan. Vice President Vance went to Olathe, a Kansas City suburb, to rescue Marshall. A president who stormed Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2024 is forced in 2026 to hold states that Republicans won automatically for decades.
Musk's Half-Billion Versus the Line at the Polling Place
Money remains the only area where the ruling party retains a clear advantage. According to business press estimates, Republicans have spent about $1.3 billion this cycle, compared with $800 million for Democrats. The Republican National Committee had more than $680 million left in its coffers heading into the finish, and Democrats about $480 million. A super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, together with its allies, announced it had raised more than $500 million, a record.
The campaign's chief backer has been the richest man in the world. Here it is important to compare two estimates. According to figures confirmed by a representative of Elon Musk's super PAC on October 12, the businessman had by then spent $366 million this cycle, $276 million of it since July. Of that sum, $158 million went to Thune's Senate Leadership Fund, $76 million to his own America PAC, and $20 million to the equivalent fund of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Other tallies, which account for later transfers and money not yet reflected in federal filings, put the total at nearly half a billion. The discrepancy is explained by the opacity of the campaign finance system itself.
Critics see Musk's motives in preserving and expanding government contracts, above all for SpaceX. He was Trump's top donor in 2024, took part in the purge of federal agencies, then publicly fell out with the president and just as publicly made up with him. The Democrats' most generous donors, George Soros and Michael Bloomberg, together contributed less than half of what Musk spent alone.
Money does not decide everything. The millions that the Senate Leadership Fund is shifting to Kansas and Nebraska will not be spent in Maine and North Carolina, and in that sense every dollar sent to defend yesterday's strongholds works as a distress signal. Ossoff in Georgia raised a record $14 million in a single quarter. A financial edge helps mobilize the undecided, but it is powerless where voters are angry and are standing in line at the polls themselves.
A Party Without a Leader: The Bible in Texas, Universal Health Care in Michigan
The lead in the polls does not cancel out the Democrats' main weakness. The party has no recognized leader, and one will not emerge before the 2028 presidential primaries. In a year and a half, the congressional leadership has failed to find an effective way to counter Trump's policies, and both major American parties have long since become umbrella brands sheltering mutually exclusive ideologies.
The Democratic umbrella today covers a very motley crowd. Moderates want to reform the economy and health care without breaking the system. The ascendant democratic socialists demand universal government health insurance, the deprivatization of entire industries, and income redistribution. The party establishment supports NATO and military aid to Israel; the left wing insists on reducing America's global footprint and ending military aid to Benjamin Netanyahu's government.
Two Senate candidates illustrate this split more vividly than any manifesto. Talarico in Texas emphasizes his Christian faith, speaks in the language of a sermon, and avoids radical economic slogans. El-Sayed in Michigan is a Muslim, a physician, and the former head of Detroit's health department, a supporter of universal health insurance and a sharp critic of military aid to Israel. Their positions diverge on immigration, energy subsidies, and the Middle East, and it is as hard to imagine El-Sayed as a candidate in Texas as it is to imagine Talarico as the leader of Michigan progressives.
The Michigan story is especially instructive. In July, a week before the primary, a poll commissioned by the state's largest teachers union showed Rogers beating El-Sayed by seven points while running nearly even with the moderate Haley Stevens. The party establishment panicked. On August 4, El-Sayed won the primary anyway, and by October he had pulled ahead; on October 24, Barack Obama came to Detroit to campaign for him. The wave against Trump proved powerful enough to carry to the top even those the party leadership considered unelectable.
At the same time, democratic socialists are not yet storming the party. Their candidates won primaries in only 7 of the 25 districts where they competed. The Democrats' current successes rest on very different faces: a pastor in Kansas, a Muslim doctor in Michigan, a logger in Maine, a former governor in North Carolina. The party is winning as a coalition of local brands united by a common opponent, and that is both its strength and a time bomb.
Hunting Hegseth: What Democrats Will Do in the First Weeks
The Democratic leadership in the House is in no hurry to discuss impeaching Trump himself. The president already went through that process twice in his first term, in 2019 and 2021, and was acquitted twice by the Republican majority in the Senate. Even with control of both chambers, Democrats cannot muster the two-thirds, or 67 votes, required for removal.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose department the administration has renamed the Department of War, is another matter entirely. At a campaign rally in October, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries promised that the new majority's first order of business would be to "run Pete Hegseth out of town." The groundwork has been laid: in April, Democrats introduced six articles of impeachment accusing the secretary of launching the war with Iran without congressional authorization. Robert Garcia, who would chair the Oversight Committee if the majority changes hands, says outright that Hegseth has no place in the government, and the list of grievances against the secretary includes purges of the military leadership and allegations of war crimes.
The most intriguing developments are in the Republican camp. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, who lost his primary in May, introduced his own resolution to impeach Hegseth in September. Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home early for the campaign recess, and the vote fell through. Massie promised to return to it in the lame-duck session after November 9, with one brief caveat: if Hegseth is still secretary by then. For Republicans who lost their districts because of a war the Pentagon started, such a vote would be a convenient way to settle scores.
A Senate majority would give Democrats tools far more serious than impeachment. Control of the upper chamber means the power to block administration and judicial nominations, hold the fiscal 2027 defense budget hostage, and conduct investigations with subpoena power and sworn testimony. Senate Democrats have already signaled that Hegseth's departure will be the price of their cooperation on key defense bills in the lame-duck session. Trump, accustomed to making decisions while barely consulting even his own party, will for the first time in his second term face a legislative branch capable of telling him no.
The threat to the opposition comes from within. A narrow House majority turns every faction into the holder of a blocking stake. Progressives could condition their support for the leadership on tough demands on Israel or health care; moderates from districts Trump won could demand that investigations that look like revenge be dropped. Along with power, the winners will inherit inevitable infighting.
The South Caucasus: How a Change in Congress Will Resonate in Baku
For our region, the November 3 elections have a very practical dimension. On August 8, 2025, at the White House, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan, in the presence of Trump, signed documents that opened the way to peace, and the key element of the agreements was the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), connecting mainland Azerbaijan with Nakhchivan through southern Armenia. At the same time, Trump signed an executive order extending the waiver of Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act, which for three decades restricted American aid to Azerbaijan.
The amendment was passed in 1992, when Armenian armed forces were occupying Azerbaijani lands, yet it was not Armenia that was punished. The president can waive it, but only Congress can repeal it. In December 2025, Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna introduced a bill to fully repeal Section 907. On June 17, 2026, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov discussed the issue with Congressman Abraham Hamadeh. In October 2025, Senator Adam Schiff's anti-Azerbaijani amendment to the defense budget failed, which many in Washington took as a sign of the pro-Armenian lobby's weakening influence on Capitol Hill.
A Democratic majority will change these mechanics. The chairs of key committees, including Foreign Affairs and Armed Services, will be Democrats, among whom pro-Armenian voices have traditionally been louder. The chances of a full repeal of Section 907 in 2027 and 2028 drop sharply, and attempts to attach anti-Azerbaijani conditions to the defense budget will become routine. The executive track, however, remains intact: the power to waive the amendment stays with the president until January 2029, and TRIPP rests on a logic both parties understand: transit that bypasses Russia and Iran, an American presence on Eurasia's transport links, and lasting peace instead of a frozen conflict. Baku will need to build a dialogue with Democratic committee chairs as concretely as it built one with the administration. Azerbaijan has plenty of arguments for this: amid the Iran war, a country that borders Iran and supplies Europe with Caspian gas becomes a partner Washington has every interest in dealing with.
What Comes Next: A Forecast With Dates
My forecast is as follows. Democrats will take the House, winning between 229 and 236 seats, and on January 3, 2027, Hakeem Jeffries will become speaker. In the Senate, they will reach 51 seats together with independents, taking North Carolina, Ohio, Maine, and Alaska from Republicans. Texas and Kansas will stay Republican, but by margins of less than three points, and those numbers will be the main political story of the night. The final result in Alaska, where the count includes ranked-choice tabulation and mail-in ballots, will not be known until the second half of November, so Americans will learn the exact balance in the Senate two to three weeks late.
Pete Hegseth will not survive in his post until April 1, 2027: either Trump will sacrifice him himself, or the House will vote to impeach him. Section 907 will not be repealed before the end of 2028, although the waiver will remain in place. Where I am most likely to be wrong is Maine, where Collins has already embarrassed the pollsters once, and Texas, where the wave may prove higher than the historical adjustment for polling error allows.
On the night of November 4, at around 4:30 a.m. Baku time, polls will close in North Carolina and Ohio. Half an hour later, the first numbers will start coming in from Kansas and Maine, and by six from the western counties of Texas. The last polls to close, at 9 a.m. Baku time, will be in Alaska. If by that hour Democrat Adam Hamilton is leading in Kansas, it will mean that a pastor from suburban Kansas City is retracing the path of George McGill, the last Democrat Kansas sent to the Senate, in November 1932, when the country voted against a president who had failed to cope with the crisis and unemployment.