[WASHINGTON] Republicans are poised to do very well in the 2026 midterms in one of those rare instances when the party controlling the White House picks up seats in the House of Representatives.
The so-called Three-fifths Compromise distorted House apportionment, so starting from the end of the Civil War, the party controlling the White House has gained House seats three times: 1934, nine seats; 1998, five seats; and 2002, eight seats.
Often the Senate is rolled into midterm scorecards, but the Senate does not have the same dynamics as the House because only one-third of the chamber faces the voters every two years, unlike the House, which has all members up every two years.
This creates disparities, such as this cycle, with Republicans defending 22 Senate seats and Democrats defending only 11. Although the GOP has more seats to defend, only Maine Sen. Susan Collins is running in a state Trump lost in 2024.
Throw in that senators, running statewide, are better-known personalities and often have their own programs regardless of who is in the White House.
This disconnection with the White House is the opposite of how House races play. Few congressmen run statewide, and most are little known outside their district's political class of operatives, donors and news junkies. House races are tied almost directly to how the voters feel about the White House and the party in control of the White House.
With Republicans and Democrats each working to redraw House districts to improve their partisan advantage, it looks like there is going to be a five-to-10-seat advantage for Republicans nationally, but that is not the real reason why the GOP comes out of this cycle with more House seats.
The 2002 winning midterms model
There are two reasons, and the first is that the White House political team has studied the GOP's successful 2002 midterm campaign. In that cycle, President George W. Bush political strategist Karl Rove framed the election as a referendum on responding to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The centerpiece of this referendum was the fight to stand up the Homeland Security Department, essentially a repackaging of existing missions and agencies, such as the Secret Service, Coast Guard, and immigration and border enforcement, into a giant new cabinet officer's domain. There were new agencies, too, like the Transportation Security Administration and Homeland Security's own national law enforcement division with both armed and badged officers and a domestic security portfolio rivaling the FBI.
All this was against the backdrop of Bush sending in special operations forces to take the fight to al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the ramp-up for a war with Iraq unless it gave up its nuclear and chemical weapons programs.
Democrats were flummoxed. In his second term, President William J. Clinton had launched cruise missiles into Iraq, and it was not yet public that Clinton had also decided not to take out Osama bin Laden two years before bin Laden's men took over four airliners that summer day.
It was difficult to explain to voters why responding to the Sept. 11 attacks was a bad idea when everyone in the country was demanding that there be a response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
What was the point of an opposition party if it backed the party in the White House?
Fraud is the golden ticket
For this cycle, Team Trump is loading up on prosecuting government fraud. When Nick Shirley exposed how the Somali crime syndicate stole hundreds of millions of dollars in Minnesota, it motivated conservatives across the country to conduct their own citizen investigations into similar fraud schemes in their states.
The result has been political gold, and because these fraud cases are playing out locally, they are changing the political dynamics on the ground without triggering a damage-control response from national and Washington Democrats.
Already, Vice President James D. "JD" Vance led the effort to create a new National Fraud Enforcement Division at the Justice Department, where Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald is marshaling federal prosecutors, locally and at Main Justice, to bring prosecutions.
There is no more compelling political rhetoric than: People are suffering and we have to do something.
Democrats have played this card masterfully for the last 100 years.
At the same time, for the last 100 years, the best sustained response Republicans could come up with was: "Yeah, but they are expensive."
The fact is that nobody cares about the price tag if people's lives are being saved or improved. It is something we all take pride in contributing to.
However, once the voters find out the programs do not work—or worse, that it was all a ruse to loot the Treasury—then the voters are ready to elect Attila the Hun, or at least their local Republican.