GOP lawmakers are growing increasingly concerned over signs the 2026 midterm elections could be a wipeout for Republicans that could cost them control of the House and shave down their Senate majority by two or three seats.
There’s growing anxiety in the Senate and House GOP conferences that Trump’s sinking approval rating will create a headwind in swing states and districts.
But GOP lawmakers say they still have time to improve their party’s image before next November.
The US system is so horrendously and completely biased towards the GOP, I don’t think polls mean much. Most of the country can not want a Republican and they’ll still be “fairly” elected.
I know we’re talking about midterms, but this is especially true of the Electoral College, where states with lower populations end up with higher representation per capita. Empty land doesn’t vote, but it does change elections in favor of the GOP.
A Republican I spoke to was fully convinced that living in a state with more land per capita should make each person’s vote worth more, while those living in a densely populated state should expect their votes to be worth less. He thought it was perfectly reasonable for someone moving from California to Wyoming to have the value of their vote increase by almost 4x. He balked when asked if the value of a Wyoming vote should decrease by 75% when the voter moved to California.
I can only imagine the impassioned whining if the situation were reversed and biased for liberals.
This is a boring narrative. The system isn’t stacked in favor of the GOP, it’s stacked in favor of parties that play by the actual rules. If a party can’t make a compelling message to multiple different states, it’s on them.
Hahahaha WHAT?
The rules are get 270 electoral votes, not get the most votes. This generally requires winning the majority of states.
Except you can “win” the election with something absurd like 27 votes, against 100 million.
Any system where that’s an actual possibility is fucking stupid.
Sure in theory if only a single person voted in the 12 largest states you could win that way, but that’s not really possible.
Wrong.
Why? because it feels better to say the system is rigged than admit Democrats sold out the working class across the country and are reaping the benefits?
What do you mean why? The electoral college has been utterly broken since they froze the number of house seats in 1929. It gets worse every year as population increases. This causes low population states to have way more representation in the House, influence over the presidency, and through that and the Senate, the SCOTUS, than they’re designed to. And since racism seems to play well to the rural folk who love to vote against their own interests, this has given Republicans a significant advantage.
This is on top of the blatant gerrymandering that Republicans do in red states (look at Ohio which voted under maps that were deemed illegal). And the blatant voter suppression actions taken every cycle.
Are corporate Democrats also failing to be appealing? Yes, but that doesn’t mean the board isn’t also tilted against them. The fact that Clinton had like 8 million more votes in 2016 but still “lost” is proof. SCOTUS stealing the election from Gore is also proof.
The low limit on the house is a problem for representation in general, but it doesn’t change the presidential election much. Trump would have still won the election if there were 800 representatives in the house, though it would have been closer.
The popular vote is irrelevant for the presidency, so your proving my point by bringing it up. It’s not relevant to the rules of the election.
False. The distribution of seats requires a lot of skewing to fit the vastly different sizes of populations.
I’m not proving your point at all. The fact that we don’t listen to the cast majority of people to represent the country as a whole is dumb. The fact that your presence in a state that votes differently from you actually works AGAINST you, is even dumber.
The apportionment formula is straightforward, you can find calculators to see what would happen as more representatives gets added. It’s not magic.