The 2026 election will decide who controls the House and Senate for the duration of Trump’s presidency. Trump’s approval is low and public opinion is moving against his policy ideas. The historical pattern suggests Democrats are on the way to big congressional gains. Carlos Algara studies 80 years of high-frequency data on generic ballot polls and election results. Presidential approval and the ideological direction of public opinion consistently predict congressional vote choices. Like this year, both usually move against the president in midterms. Neither economic statistics and perceptions nor the degree of partisan competition matters independently of those patterns. Generic ballot polls reliably predict seat gains, though a lot more for the House than the Senate.
Guest: Carlos Algara, Claremont Graduate University
Study: Dynamics of Partisan Competition for Legislative Majorities in the U.S. House and Senate
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: What predicts midterm election results? This week on The Science of Politics for the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. The 2026 election will decide who controls the House and Senate for the duration of Trump’s presidency. His approval is low and public opinion is moving against his policy ideas. Does that mean Democrats are on the way to congressional majorities? That is the historical pattern. This week, I talked to Carlos Algara of Claremont Graduate University about his American politics research article, Dynamics of Partisan Competition for Legislative Majorities in the US House and Senate. He brings 80 years of high frequency data to bear on the question, tracking generic ballot polls and election results. The main predictors that matter consistently are presidential approval and the ideological direction of public opinion, both of which usually move against the president in midterms as they are this year.
Beyond those indicators, economic statistics and views don’t matter, nor does the degree of partisan competition. And generic ballot polls reliably predict seat gains, though a lot more for the House than the Senate. This research will help us anticipate the results of 2026, and Algara is not afraid to extrapolate to the expectations for this year. Enjoy our conversation. So you have recently written about the dynamics of partisan competition for legislative majorities, a big event this year in the United States. So tell us about the big findings and takeaways from that American politics research article.
Carlos Algara: Absolutely. So I appreciate the introduction and the opportunity to talk about this work. And so, I guess the big takeaway of that article or the big question rather it’s trying to answer is, what’s really motivating from one election cycle to the next the preferences of the mass electorate as it relates to who they want to control Congress? So there’s a couple of competing theories as one scrolls through the literature. The first is sort of your classical thermostatic model sort of group of theories, which is essentially the electorate could be rather fickle. So it elects a majority. Sometimes it gives one party unified control of government. And when that party implements policies that they campaigned on, the public sort of backlashes. And we’ll get into this when we talk about the dynamics this year.
So one of the big findings of that article is once the public’s policy mood shifts from one election to the next, that’s the biggest predictor of who they prefer for Congress. So they generally shift against the majority. The other big finding of that article is that the president plays, of course, an outsized role in all of this. So independent of the ideological representation provided by parties in Congress, or the majority rather, the president has an independent relationship with how the public is moving. So I take that to mean that this is what we call valence considerations. So do they like the type of presidential leadership being espoused? And that’s reflected in presidential approval.
One interesting note, once you control for how the mass public feels about the president and also when you control for the ideological preferences of the mass public, some things that we generally thought would influence how the public views Congress generally washes away. So I’m thinking of things like partisanship on Capitol Hill, right? So this partisan conflict. If the policymaking process is really messy, someone argue that the majority would have a price to pay for that. And I find no evidence of that, which tends to suggest that what’s really motivating the public from one election cycle to the next is policy outputs and how they feel about the president on any given day. It’s not about partisan conflict and stuff that’s happening sort of locally in DC.
Matt Grossmann: So the big dependent variable that we’re predicting here is generic ballot polls. And you have assembled a huge database of these polls so that you have kind of a picture of whether people wanted Democrats or Republicans for Congress over a very long time span. So what are the big patterns there? I know that one of them is that Democrats used to have a long-term majority. And for a long time, more people said they wanted Democrats than Republicans, but since 1994, we’ve been in kind of a back and forth period. So I guess what are the main overtime patterns that stand out?
Carlos Algara: Right. That’s one of the big things that stood out from constructing this time series. So I collected data on the generic ballot, which is, as you suggest, is your standard question asked in surveys. If the election were held today in your district, would you support the Democratic candidate or the Republican candidate? And it’s a really clean measure because it doesn’t ask about specific candidates. So traditionally in congressional elections, the local candidates have been much more popular than their national brand. So this question sort of skirts around that.
So I collect this data, going back, I believe to the early 1940s. And one thing that really struck out was the Democrats for a long time had this massive advantage, that there was really in this post-New Deal all the way up to 1994, with some few exceptions during the Reagan years, Democrats enjoyed an overwhelming majority support on this generic ballot question. It’s really after 1994, I’m thinking about Francis Lee’s work on insecure majorities, when you start getting two-party parity as it relates to the generic ballot.
So now, if you recall in 2024, the parties were pretty split, maybe a slight Republican lean, but this year, and we’ll talk about this later, there’s a strong Democratic advantage. And I suspect 2028, you might have something close to parity, and if a Democratic president is elected in 2028, in 2030, you would expect a Republican advantage there too, like you saw in 2010 and 2014. So these days, it generally ebbs and flows, whereas prior to 1994, it was a really consistent Democratic advantage.
Matt Grossmann: And what about within cycle? Is there any regular pattern here where it gets closer as we get close to election day or the majority party loses steam or gains steam over the course of the two years?
Carlos Algara: What’s really interesting is if you look at within cycle, it’s almost the opposite, right? So at the beginning of the cycle, I’m thinking about January, February, that first quarter of an odd numbered year, the two parties are in relative parity. One party generally comes after a sweeping electoral, a clear electoral victory. The public is really, it’s a little bit of a tossup. Elections are close in the contemporary period and the public is a little bit sort of squishy about who they wanted with their majority.
As we get closer to election day, the bottom really starts to fall out. And I think you’re actually seeing that with respect to this cycle. At the beginning of, in January 2025, as the second Trump term is beginning, Democrats and Republicans were neck and neck within the margin of error on the generic ballot. But as the election cycle goes on, particularly as I argue in the article, as the majority actually starts to pass policies, you start seeing a clear break from the majority. You start seeing the sort of thermostatic backlash that political scientists generally refer to.
Matt Grossmann: So you mentioned that the main predictor that you’ve found is this ideological policy mood, which is Jim Stimson’s measure of aggregating public opinion polls to see if people have liberal or conservative opinions on policy issues. So tell us about the logic of that and the nature of that relationship.
Carlos Algara: Right, right. No, that’s a great question. And I’m glad you brought up Jim Stimson, who’s sort of the pioneer in this work. The basic idea is that you collect a bunch of survey data on how the public feels ideologically on a host of different issues. So how they feel about economic policy, how they feel about social policy, criminal justice, stuff like that, foreign policy. And essentially what you’re doing is you’re aggregating all of that data to come up with some sort of latent measure of ideology for the mass public. And what’s really interesting is both in Stimson’s pioneering work, and other scholars have replicated this finding, is that generally speaking, the public ebbs and flows, and it ebbs and flows as a basis of who’s in power.
So during, for example, the Biden years, 2022, 2023, you see a shift in the policy mood go from more liberal to where it was in 2019 and 2020 to a more conservative direction. And again, there’s a little bit of sort of this Goldilocks backlash to the thermostatic mood of the public. And so, policy mood, I think is one of the standard measures for the policy preferences of the mass public here in the United States. It has been replicated in more comparative context, so it’s a really powerful way using national level data across multiple dimensions to be able to come up with some sort of measure for how the public is feeling on public policy from one time point to the next.
Matt Grossmann: Okay. And for the relationship, it is that a movement in a liberal direction is going to help the Democrats? Or is it the level? And what is… And I assume the main dynamic is the party in power is having public opinion move against them, and therefore that’s going to help the opposition party.
Carlos Algara: That’s exactly right. So what I’m focusing on are the delta shifts, right? So how is the public moving relative to where it was, say in the previous quarter? So the logic here is that if the public is moving in a more liberal direction, and I suspect that’s what we’re going to… Once a new policy mood data set is published, I suspect that’s what we’re going to see, given just the high profile Republican wins on legislation, that you’re going to see the public move generally against the party in power.
And one thing I’d like to add is, at least right now, given the polarization on Capitol Hill, it’s really easy for the average voter to assess blame and reward on the basis of the ideological nature of policy. So the Republican Party, of course, owns everything coming out of DC right now, because Democrats essentially have no power except for maybe having 41 votes to sustain a filibuster in the US Senate. And so, for the average voter, it’s really easy to connect the direction of policy or their perceptions of the direction of policy with which party is in control of Congress.
And so, what I’m finding is that it’s all about the relative shifts, but what’s really interesting about those shifts is that, going back to the previous discussion about what happens within an election cycle, the shifts away from the party in power become more pronounced as the election cycle draws near. So that could be a campaign contrast relationship effect. I think future research should sort of tease that out, but it’s clear that the public really begins to shift over time against whichever party is in power.
Matt Grossmann: And the other main predictor is presidential approval. So I assume that if the president isn’t allied with the majority party in Congress, it could actually help the majority party, but most of the time we see that relationship, and so they need that approval. But I think this is also the one place where you find that it has been different since 1994, presidential approval is less relevant. So tell us about those findings and how you’re interpreting that.
Carlos Algara: Right. So that’s exactly right. Certainly post-1994, post the Republican revolution, we see this increase in partisanship on Capitol Hill. Presidential approval becomes less of a predictor. And so, what I take that to mean is, at least as it relates to the mass public, the public really has a fine-grained view of the president over time and it’s pretty stable. So I believe George W. Bush was the last president where we saw these really dramatic shifts in approval. So President Bush obviously has a very high approval rating after the September 11th terrorist attacks. He gets something to, I can’t remember the exact number, 80 something percent in one ballot poll.
But then of course, he leaves office in 2008 with the lowest presidential approval since Harry Truman during the Korean War. It’s something at 34%. Trump sort of saw a little bit of this in his first term, certainly not as dramatic. President Trump has never been a particularly popular-
… dramatic. President Trump has never been a particularly popular president. He’s been very polarizing. But what’s interesting is after the January 6th insurrection, we actually observed Trump in the waning days of that first administration. He was getting into levels well within the 30s. 35, 36%.
So today, presidential approval is relatively stable. If you look at President Biden’s approval, he enters office with a honeymoon period of about 56%. He leaves with about 42%. So that 14% spread is much, much lower than President Obama. President Trump has an even lower spread. He comes into office with about a 50, 51. Now he’s at, depending on the poll, 42, 43. So the variation around approval is certainly shrinking. And what I take that to mean is the public has a pretty good idea about how they feel about the president independent of where they are in the election cycle.
Matt Grossmann: So you also have some factors that don’t matter as much, and one of them is the partisan relationship that you talked about how partisan is the voting. So voters aren’t necessarily reacting just against polarization or against partisanship in Congress or even gridlock. And then the second one is just this long list of economic factors that doesn’t appear to matter, including both the subjective assessments and the kind of objective economic conditions. So what do you make of those findings?
Carlos Algara: Yeah. What’s really interesting about… I was very surprised to see that the economic assessments, both subjective and objective, really didn’t play a significant role in predicting the generic ballot. And so what I took that to mean was that might be baked into other factors within the model. So that might be baked into, for example, almost certainly baked into presidential approval. So all that predictive power that these economic considerations might have, that’s being sort of channeled through approval assessments of the president and the mass public.
What’s also really interesting is even after accounting for presidential approval, it’s really the ideological direction of the public that’s really manifesting these things. So I think the conventional wisdom about this election cycle, the 2026 cycle, is this is very much an economic sort of election. It’s all about affordability. It’s all about these different things. And I’d be a little bit skeptical of that general portrayal of the cycle, right?
Because currently, Republicans have passed a sweeping tax bill, certainly the most significant tax reform, certainly since 2017, but one could argue probably the most significant tax bill since the 1980s. Just given the scope, it goes beyond the 2017 tax bills during the first Trump administration. So the public notices that. All the different things relating to funding for DHS, for border enforcement, stuff like that. So there’s a lot of signature Republican victories in Congress right now that the Republicans are hoping to campaign on to save the majority.
But I would argue that that might be a little bit of a fool’s errand just given where the policy mood seems to be right now. So voters are not paying attention to the everyday details in Congress. They’re not paying attention to the gridlock. They’re not paying attention to the filibuster conflict and so forth. It’s really, I think, policy outputs that are driving the discussion.
Matt Grossmann: So it would be disappointing if we asked people if they were going to vote for Republican or Democrat for Congress and it didn’t have a relationship with the actual House results. So it’s good that you’re able to show that these polls do predict the actual election outcomes.
You also show a relationship with the Senate election results, even though I think usually people are asked about the House, but it’s less of a strong relationship. So how should we view those? And is there any viable kind of rule of thumb? People talk about the majority party needs to be ahead by X or behind by X, or is it just kind of a general relationship that the more you’re ahead in the generic ballot, the better you do in terms of election results?
Carlos Algara: Right. No, that’s a great question. When you ask that, my first thought goes to Madisonian logic is sort of rearing its head here. Because you’re right, there’s a much weaker relationship between the generic ballot differential and how many seats a party wins in a Senate election. And I’ve replicated that finding in a lot of forecasting work now. And what I take that to mean is the distribution of Senate seats are such that a third of Senate seats are up every two cycles and each class has a certain Republican bias to it. So we all know that the Senate, given its equal representation among states, independent of population, we know that the Senate is a pro-Republican institution. I believe the 51st Senate seat, for example, is Republican plus four relative to where the country is at large.
But what’s really interesting is if you look at the individual Senate classes, and there are three of them, we’ll see that this election cycle, the Class II Senate seats are actually more Republican than the Senate seats of the Class I cycle, which was a 2024 election. So Democrats really have an uphill battle as it relates to the Senate because all of those Senate battlegrounds are fought on decidedly Republican turf. So to have any shot at winning the majority, they have to win in places like Alaska, which has only voted Democratic once for president’s entire statehood. Places like Iowa, which are decidedly Republican, places Texas. And that’s just a reflection of just the map. And I think that’s being captured in those model results in the paper.
Matt Grossmann: So as you mentioned, we have a low presidential approval going into this year’s election. And although we don’t have the Stimson measure, we have all kinds of policy opinion polls which do show a left moving policy mood. So are we ready to bet on a massive Democratic wave this year or are there factors that will make the historical pattern a little bit more complicated this year?
Carlos Algara: I think that’s a great, great question. I think if you … It’s interesting. This morning I was reading, I believe it was the New York Times and they mentioned Senator Fetterman from Pennsylvania, sort of seen as the swing vote, essentially declared this morning that everybody seems to think on Capitol Hill that the Democrats are going to take back the House. It’s the Senate now that’s becoming the real sort of betting question.
What I would suspect, I mean, there’s a couple moving parts here that make it really interesting. The first is the redistricting wars that we’re sort of seeing across the states. So as we all know, Texas was very much the opening salvo, right? Texas redistricts its map amid census redistricting. Of course, each state redraws their map after a census. We just had a new map in 2022. So now Texas is looking and has drawn a map to net Republicans four more House seats. That forces California through a ballot proposition, the state that I’m currently in, where Democrats gain five. Or baseline, they expect to gain five, maybe up to six on a good year. And then now we’re hearing Virginia, Maryland, Republicans tried to push into Indiana, but it failed. They succeeded in North Carolina. So there’s a bunch of moving parts here.
I think what’s really that makes me pause is we really don’t know what’s going to happen with respect to the Supreme Court case of Callais versus Louisiana. I don’t know if I pronounced that correctly, which essentially is looking at the question of Section II in majority minority districts. And if that were to be struck down, the question becomes… And there seems to be a growing consensus that it will, the question becomes, does that apply to the 2026 cycle? Because if it does, what that means is a bunch of the majority minority districts, particularly in the south, places like New Orleans, maybe some seats in Atlanta, certainly the Democratic seats in Mississippi and Alabama, Memphis, those all could be subject to being withdrawn and that could net Republicans, a recent New York Times analysis a couple of months ago, positive that can net Republicans up to 15 seats just in the deep South.
So that’s an unknown. We’ll have more clarity in the summer. One possible dynamic at play could be that the Supreme Court decides in the summer, but makes it too late to apply to the 2026 because states need time to be able to redraw their map. Some states are bound to certain laws of public comment and stuff like that. So essentially running out the clock. But yeah, there’s a lot of unknowns right now. I would say given the way that the districts are drawn right now and given the very narrow two seat, four seat Republican majority, Democrats are very much on their way for a House majority. And the Senate looks… I mean, the Senate seems to be anybody’s guess. I don’t quite know what’s going to happen there.
Matt Grossmann: So we have been talking about these aggregate national trends, but obviously we have seen increasing relationships between district and state partisanship and the outcomes of these elections over time. And you also do research on individual races where you have shown that the incumbency advantage has diminished significantly, have not been eliminated, but that it still does matter whether there’s a big difference in the previous experience of the candidates, usually called candidate quality.
So tell us about how you interpret that and then what it means for this year. Are there any races where candidate quality could really make a big difference? Or have the parties learned their lessons and started nominating experienced candidates?
Carlos Algara: I think that’s a great, great question. One of the surprises for me this election cycle has been the ability by the out party, in this case the Democratic Party, to recruit really notable, quality candidates. By quality, we mean experienced candidates that know how to run campaigns and know how to win, and they’ve been able to recruit them in places where you would not expect Democrats to be competitive. And not only that, but you’ve been able to recruit them in places where incumbents are running for reelection.
So Democrats have really expanded the map. And there are two candidates that really strike me out in particular. The first is Mary Peltola, the former Congresswoman from Alaska. I think that’s indicative of where Democrats believe the national environment actually is. She’s running against an incumbent Republican Senator who’s seeking a third term. In Texas, two experienced candidates are running in a primary for the opportunity to either essentially take on an incumbent Republican who’s seeking a fifth term or the sitting attorney general who’s been elected to statewide office, I believe twice.
So Democrats have really expanded the map here, and I just think that’s indicative of the cycle. If those candidates believed that Democrats did not have a pronounced advantage to the cycle, I’d be very skeptical that they would run for a federal office. Peltola running for Senate in Alaska rather than governor, governors are really less polarizing races or catching up a little bit, but that’s a state office, you deal with state issues. You don’t have to answer for the two parties in DC generally. And the fact that Senator Schumer and the DSEC was able to recruit her to run for Senate, I just think is indicative. And so if there’s a big wave, six point, seven point Democratic advantage, that little boost of candidate equality could be enough to get those really out of reach places like Alaska and Texas maybe over the finish line.
Matt Grossmann: So Democrats, yeah, have some kind of consensus candidates for the Senate, which are seen as good candidates in North Carolina and in Ohio and Alaska. They also have some competitive primaries in Alaska and in Texas.
… competitive primaries in Alaska and in Texas, and I guess to a lesser extent in Iowa now. And obviously there’s been a big debate about whether there’s an advantage to moderation that has played out in these debates. That is separable from the potential advantage of experience. So in Texas, both candidates are experienced, but in Alaska, these kinds of crossover. And there are people who say, “Well, your measures are coarse and old, and do we really want this most experienced old governor running who might not appeal to the working class electorate or do we want to try something new?” And obviously the national pattern in the House is to get fewer experienced candidates nominated. So is there a sign that any of this is changing or what do you make of that, of people who say, “Yeah, that might’ve been the historical pattern, but experience isn’t what’s going to work this year”?
Carlos Algara: That’s a great question. And I currently have a working paper on this exact topic in the U.S. Senate. Co-authors and I have coded the political experience of all Senate candidates that have emerged in Senate primaries and Senate elections since 1980, and what we find is actually, in both parties, during the contemporary period, candidate quality or political experience, however you want to call it, does not predict candidate success in the primary. So this is a really similar finding to really terrific work done by Rachel Porter and Sarah Treul within the context of the House. And so within the Senate, it doesn’t seem that political experience really helps get you out of that primary. And we also find that that’s happening while experienced candidates are keeping their fundraising advantage. And so amateurs are doing better in primaries, their reach parity, and it’s not because they closed a resource advantage.
And so within these Senate primaries, the question then becomes is, does candidate equality matter for general election? And some of my works suggest that it could be a modest, about 1% or 2%, significant boost. But what’s really interesting within the Senate is, in the last election cycle, if you look at where Republicans, unseated Democratic incumbents, they were all “political amateurs”. So Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, Tim Sheehy in Montana, Bernie Moreno in Ohio, McCormick and Moreno obviously ran and did not win the nomination in 2022, but they’ve ran previously, but they’ve never run a winning campaign. They’ve never held elected office. And all three of those candidates unseated, three-term Democratic incumbents that were institutions within their state.
10 years ago, it would’ve been unthinkable, for example, for Senator Jon Tester of Montana to lose to a recent transplant in a small state. The new Republican Senator, Tim Sheehy, is a recent, I believe he moved to Montana about 10 years ago or so. In a small state like Montana, that would’ve been seen as unthinkable because Tester, he’s funded off challenges from statewide. Each of his reelections, each of his Senate elections, he’s defeated candidates that were currently serving in statewide office. Sherrod Brown in Ohio who’s running against this cycle, same thing. Bob Casey, an institution in Pennsylvania loses, granted he loses by about 15,000 votes out of, I believe, 4 or 5 million, but he loses to an amateur.
And I think that’s just indicative of the fact that the political environment dictates everything. So if you have a pronounced Democratic environment, it might not matter that the amateur candidate wins the primary in Maine, because the only thing that matters is Senator Collins is a Republican and the voters really want to take out their disagreement with the Republican Party at the ballot box. And so that’s one way to sort of think about it.
Matt Grossmann: Yeah. So as you and many others have shown, the dominant pattern is just that all of these factors are mattering less while party is mattering more, and it’s sort of harder for candidates to stand above or substantially behind their party’s national standing. So that might lead some people to say that it doesn’t really matter who’s nominated in Alaska or Iowa, what you’re going to need is just a massive Democratic year for those seats to come on the board, potentially. And otherwise, basically all you need to know is what’s the state’s partisanship and what’s the national swing? Are we at that point? Other people say, “Well, we haven’t really tried to nominate candidates that were sort of substantially different than the National Party, or we’re trying less than we used to.” So any truth to that or is the dominant story really the right one?
Carlos Algara: I think that’s a terrific question. I sort of think about it in two buckets. I think in terms of just your traditional quantitative political scientists, we’re working with a very large data sets, but I think the dominant explanation is, yeah, we should see a significant relationship between quality and success, both in the general election and also in primaries, because in primaries, you can really express your sincere preference and you don’t have to worry about electability anymore because so many seats and so many states are off the table for either one of the two parties.
So the Senate battleground, for example, is really condensed. It’s almost shocking how condensed it is. Only three states, I believe, have split Senate delegations, which means you have a Democratic and Republican Senator. It’s Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Maine. So on the one hand, the battleground is shrinking, primary voters don’t have to think about electability, right? And in general election, you’re exactly right, it’s partisanship. So I think as, just a matter of being in quantitative political science, yeah, I think that’s the right approach.
I think there’s room for case study here. And I’ll show one example. Senator Fetterman said in an interview yesterday, he was sort of musing, why hasn’t President Trump and Republicans, “Locked down the Texas Senate seat”? There, there’s a clear… The way the Texas Senate race is going to go, I think completely hinges on who wins the Republican primary.
If Senator Cornyn wins the primary, there’s this general perception that that seat might be out of play for the Democrats. Cornyn is a long-term incumbent. He’s a very partisan Senator, but he has made overtures with respect to Democratic constituencies in Texas. For example, he’s very involved, I think, to his credit, in South Texas, cultivating relationship down there and he’s been in an elected office for a very long time. If he wins the primary, there’s this general perception that the fundraising in that race will dry up and essentially taking it off the board for the Democrats.
However, if he loses that primary, Ken Paxton, the scandal-ridden attorney general, provides the Democrats with… He’s a consistent under performer at the top of the ticket. When Republicans are winning by high single digits, he’s winning by about 4 or 5 percentage points, right? He’s generally perceived as a weaker candidate just given his valence perception. So I think there’s some room for some qualitative case studies here.
We saw this back in 2012. Democrats flipped a seat in Indiana during that election cycle because Dick Lugar, a longtime popular Republican incumbent, lost his primary to the state treasurer. I don’t think anybody would say in a counterfactual where Luger wins that primary, the Republicans would lose that seat. So I think, just on average, I think candidate equality is probably reaching zero with respect to as a predictor of success. But I do think on the tails of the confidence intervals, I think there’s really rich case studies to suggest that candidate equality could be pivotal.
Matt Grossmann: So your research uses presidential approval as an input and the generic ballot as an output, but I think that you see both of these as responses to real policymaking actions as evidence that the public is actually paying enough attention to kind of figure out what’s going on and react to it. So what do you make of the reactions this year?
Presidential approval has gone in a pretty stark pattern that the President’s been losing approval for many months now, but the generic ballot remains relatively close. It took until the late summer, for Democrats to get any stable plurality, and it’s nowhere near the gap between the disapprovers and the approvers in the presidential numbers. So is that a typical pattern? Does it suggest that anything is going on different this year where there’s apparently quite a bit of the public who disapproves of President Trump, but isn’t yet signing onto that?
Carlos Algara: I think that’s exactly right. I think there’s a lot of the public that have pretty crystallized views of President Trump. Of course, he’s been on the political scene now approaching over a decade. We’ve been sort of in this Trump-era of politics even when he’s not in office. And I think the voters are pretty crystallized.
Of course, during the Biden years, I think President Trump was helped by the fact that he wasn’t an incumbent overseeing an economy that was plagued by inflation and there’s a lot of rampant pessimism. But of course, the economy has really… To the average person, according to the polls, they’re still very sour on the economy. And I think you see this sort of rhetorical pivot by Republicans to talk about, for example, the stock market, which is a very, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, reaching all time highs. And you saw this in Attorney General Bondi’s Hill testimony about something that was not related to the stock market.
So I think you’re seeing that messaging manifest itself in the campaign. Asking about President Trump, I think is a really easy question. Asking, “Who do you want to control Congress?” Is probably a little bit harder question to answer for the public. And I think probably they’re not paying attention now, which is why we see, as you mentioned earlier, that the polls really start to break in the summer. And so what I would suspect is right now we’re seeing about a 2 or 3 point Democratic advantage. I suspect that’s going to get into the high single digits, 6% or 7%, by the summer, just given the fact that you look at the polling around the right direction of the country, consumer sentiment, they’re approaching all time lows. And so I think that’s going to have a consequence on the generic ballot once people really start paying attention to the campaign.
Matt Grossmann: So these patterns rely on the public learning what’s going on in Congress and reacting to it, and this year, maybe not a ton has broken through. Although, as you mentioned, there was a big tax bill, and as a component of that big tax bill, there was a big tripling, really, of the immigration enforcement budget, which people have also noticed. We’ve now had a couple of government shutdowns or partial shutdowns related to inability to reach compromise between the parties. So you have also studied this from the point of view of the policymakers, and it seems to me the Republican Congress should have anticipated that it was going to face some challenges this year and maybe have been a little bit more oriented toward compromise according to your models than they have been. So are they departing from precedent here? And if so, why?
Carlos Algara: That’s a great question. And I think that’s probably reflective of just this Trump era that we’re living in where the parties are now becoming both much more polarized. And I think Democrats just went through an election cycle that was pretty, for lack of a better term, traumatic for them. And again, you had more pronounced losses in the Senate. I think the presidential results where Trump and Vance sweeping all the swing states was profound-
Trump and Vance sweeping all the swing states was profoundly psychological, but I think to the credit for the Republicans and any majority party, I think there’s increasing notion that you have two years to implement your agenda. And I think to their credit, I think Republicans, whether or not they say this publicly, I think the process and the content of that tax bill is reflective of that.
I think there’s a little bit of a puzzle currently within political science is why do parties push unpopular pieces of legislation? So this tax bill is very unpopular. Chris Warshaw has really terrific work looking at just how popular individual pieces of large legislation is. He’s collected all this really neat data, and he shows us that both the 2017 tax bill and this tax bill does not enjoy anything close to majority support. So the question becomes, why do parties push for these unpopular pieces of legislation?
And I think majorities understand that, in today’s congressional elections, they have very small windows to implement their agenda. And so I think Republicans probably see the writing on the wall. I think you’re seeing that with a lot of the Republican retirements. I think morale on Capitol Hill is at an all time low. We’re seeing a lot of resignations, leaving vacant seats in Congress. But the Republicans have been relatively productive with their signature pieces of legislation. And so I think that’s probably what’s driving the ideological mood to a certain degree. And that’ll manifest itself, I think, this November.
Matt Grossmann: There have been complaints from parties in power about how the economy is being interpreted for a long time now. And in particular, in 2024, Democrats thought it was either the media’s fault or some change in how voters were interpreting inflation in the economy, because in the year of the election, inflation had declined and there was economic growth. Republicans are now in the same position where they are trying to argue against consumer sentiment or the voters, or the media that actually the economy is better than it looks because again, inflation is down and there is economic growth.
Now, your evidence sort of suggests that maybe at least for the midterm year, this is not all that important because the relationship is not all that strong between economic results and partisan outcomes. But what do you make of this debate? Is there evidence that economic effects may be declining because of how people are interpreting them in this kind of more partisan or ideological fashion? And is it true that we should basically just ignore these indicators in midterm years?
Carlos Algara: That’s a really great question. And it’s one of the things I was wrestling with in this project, which is why I sort of leaned … How do people perceive the economy? I think the White House has taken a strategic decision, and granted this is, I think, their strongest economic hand to play, is when you hear about the economy, they’re talking about the stock market. They’re talking about unemployment. When Democrats are talking about the economy, they’re talking about the high cost of living, and they’re talking about these other dimensions. So what I find is, particularly as it relates to these objective measures, which is unemployment and how well the stock market’s doing, there’s really no relationship.
And what I take that to mean is I think in the minds of individual voters, the economy really depends where you sit. So for example, if you’re the average American, you don’t really have a 401K. You don’t have a lot of investments. So the rhetoric around the stock market, that probably doesn’t resonate a lot. Democrats, I think, found out the hard way in 2024. When people are thinking about the economy, they’re thinking more about the personal circumstance. Inflation, the cost of living, things that you can see every day. So I think there’s a couple of different dimensions.
With respect to the empirical models, I think that’s pretty much baked into presidential approval. I think President Trump’s approval rating is sort of manifesting itself with this lingering and persistent inflation and just the general sourness of the economy, which is, I think, bleeding over from the Biden years, but I think that’s ultimately what’s happening. And I think you see that in the rhetoric of the White House as well.
Matt Grossmann: So given the nature of the times, you have written a pretty optimistic story, I would say, here, about American democracy. It really is responsive. We really shouldn’t expect that to change all that much other than this partisan hardening that we’ve been talking about. There still is room for minority parties to gain back control when the public moves in their ideological direction and starts being unhappy with the activities of the president. So does that suggest you should be less concerned about Democratic backsliding in the United States, or about the potential for some kind of changes in the rules or election disruptions to disrupt this pattern? Or is there some kind of baseline that the US has to meet for these patterns to continue?
Carlos Algara: I think that’s a really, really interesting question, and I’ll just give you my general perception.
I’m optimistic as it relates to one half of the equation. I do think that the aggregate electorate is rational and it punishes parties for bad things that they perceive were happening in the rewards parties for good things they perceive were happening. So I’m going back to VOKE’s classical work. The public is, I think, behaving in a very rational sense. And that’s good for democracy, because that ensures responsiveness.
One of the things I’m less optimistic about is this general … Both Democratic backsliding, this notion of a lack of democratic norms, presidents really doing things that are divisive with respect to their legality. Another thing that I’m more concerned about, or as concerned about rather, is this abdication of Congress’s role in the policymaking process. I think anybody, any fair observer of Congress today would say that this Republican Congress has not conducted its constitutional prerogative as it relates to oversight. Also as it relates to oversight of the implementation of policies being passed by Congress.
So for example, the president withholding funds from New York for a transportation project over a naming. He wants his name on the transportation project, or withholding funding from Dulles Airport in exchange for having his name on the airport terminal. Of course, that goes against the intent of Congress. The legality is very suspect. I would subscribe that it’s not legal. So that’s what concerns me the most is if Democrats are able to win back power and they can become an effective check, or they’d be able to have the capacity to conduct oversight and ensure that the president is acting within the spirit of the law as dictated by Congress. In presence of both parties, I’ll try to sort of focus their limits on power, but it’s of course most salient right now, just given what we’ve seen in the short term.
Matt Grossmann: So tell us what you’re working on now that is related to this and anything we missed that you wanted to include.
Carlos Algara: Right. No, I think I try to spend a lot of time thinking about how parties value political experience. For a long time, one of the notions, particularly in primaries has been, should we nominate the candidate that’s the most electable? Should we nominate the candidate with the most experience, the ability to raise funds? And so we’re seeing this decline, both in my work and the work of other terrific scholars, showing that political experience really isn’t so much of a predictor of success anymore.
So I spend a lot of time of thinking why that exactly is. Is it a consumer side equation where voters just … It’s not a particularly salient consideration for them? Or is it sort of more party networks and the way they’re navigating these primaries? And so I think there’s a lot of work to be done on the landscape of congressional elections, what it means for experienced candidates, and what that ultimately means for the pipeline. Does it matter for Democrats to be investing a lot of resources and time to get, for example, Mary Patola to run in Alaska, or one of the candidates in Texas? So that’s pretty much what I’m focused on these days.
Matt Grossmann: And any signs we should look for this year that these patterns have broken down, or that the voters will might not actually end up making the next Congress different from this one?
Carlos Algara: Right. I would keep a very close eye in the redistricting wars, especially as it relates over the summer with the Supreme Court case. I think states are really pushing the limits on redistricting. And we’re seeing sort of a dynamic model at play here where Texas acts, then California acts, then Missouri Acts, then Virginia and Maryland are beginning to act. So where does that leave us? I think there’s going to be a national discussion about gerrymandering. Should there be a national ban? Generally speaking, Republicans have been opposed to a gerrymandering ban on the basis of this is a prerogative of the states. Well, as they’re losing seats in places like Virginia and Maryland, does that compel a change of tune for the National Republican Party? Is there a coalition that can emerge from this to stop gerrymandering?
Because it seems like, and I would not have predicted this a year ago, all I’ll sequel right now, assuming Virginia and Maryland can continue to redistrict, and that’s the end of redistricting, Democrats could net out from these redistricting war that we’re seeing. So that would be very surprising. So I think what I’m looking forward to the next couple months is just seeing how that’s playing out and seeing if this midterm is going to follow the same election cycle.
As a related point, what I’m also really looking at is there going to be a last second avalanche of Republican retirements? I think one of the lesser known things that gets written about these days is just how much members of Congress seem to dislike serving in Congress. You’re seeing people relatively young by congressional standards in their mid-40s and their late 40s essentially just retire and call it quits. Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin, rising star within the Republican Party. Two election cycles. He retires abruptly. Marjorie Taylor Green, a firebrand in Congress, resigns and cites the fact that Congress doesn’t seem like a great workplace. So I would be on the lookout for any last minute Republican retirements because I think that’s another signal of just how Republicans perceive the election cycle going, but also how they perceive Congress as functioning as an institution.
Of course, Green didn’t have any concern this November with respect to a primary challenge or general election challenge, but she just resigned and cited that it seems to be like a pretty poor work environment. So those are the things I’m looking closely at.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossman.
If you liked this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next all linked on our website. How Republicans lost 2018 by being too close to Trump. How voters judge Congress. Does the 2022 election show how Democratic campaigns win? Previewing 2024, how voters judge presidents. And can we believe the polls?
Thanks to Carlos Algara for joining me. Please check out Dynamics of Partisan Competition for Legislative Majorities in the US House and Senate, and then listen in next time.
