Cook Political Gives Republicans the Edge in the House for the 2026 Midterms

One of the premier election analysis sites in the US, Cook Political, has come out with updated ratings for the 2026 US House of Representatives elections. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signing into law his state’s new congressional district map is what prompted the update.

If Democrats were hoping for a 2018-style blue wave, they just got some bad news to lower their expectations. The Cook Political Report currently has the GOP far ahead of the Democrats. 215 seats are rated as solid, likely, or lean Republican; while only 202 seats are denoted as at least leaning towards Democrats. 18 out of the 435 congressional races are in the pure toss-up column.

Cook Political has never been considered a right-leaning platform. Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, they followed the popular consensus and rated seven states as toss-ups: Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia—President Trump ended up sweeping all seven of those states. They even overestimated Vice President Kamala Harris’ chances in the state of New Jersey. Cook gave it the strongest, ‘Solid D’ rating, and Harris ended up winning it by only 6 percentage points. By comparison, they ranked Florida only as ‘Likely R’, a step down on their scale from ‘Solid R’, and President Trump won the Sunshine State by 13 points.

According to X user OpenSourceZone’s tabulation, Cook has been quite accurate in their House predictions for the GOP in the last two midterm elections, actually undercutting them by some seats both times.

In 2018, they gave 195 seats to the Republicans as ‘solid, likely, or lean’, and the party ended up getting 199 seats. In 2022, they projected 212 seats as more likely to go Republican than Democrat, and the Republican Party eventually won 222 seats. This also suggests that Cook rates President Trump’s party more favourably for the 2026 midterms, when it will hold the presidency, than it did in 2022, when it was in opposition.

In the 21st century, it is almost a given that the President’s party will either lose, or would not be able to regain control of the House (in the case of President Obama in 2014) during the midterm elections. The one exception to that rule is 2002, only a year after the 9/11 terror attacks, when President Bush’s Republicans managed to gain seats in the lower chamber of Congress. However, that has not always been the case.

In the 19th century, it was actually more common for the incumbent president’s party to hold a majority in the House during midterms than to lose it. Democrats dominated the House of Representatives for the majority of the 20th century. This was evident in the FRD era in the Great Depression (from 1932–1946, Democrats had the majority in the House, at one point having as many as 334 seats). The Democratic Party was also able to hold onto the House for 40 years between 1954 and 1994. This stretch of control is more peculiar, especially given the fact that it lasted through two 49-state landslides for Republican presidents (Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984). That changed with the ‘Republican Revolution of 1994’, when the GOP, led by future House Speaker Newt Gingrich, took back the majority in both chambers of Congress at long last.

Will Republicans Hold the House in 2026?

Even given Cook’s new ratings and the now likely incoming interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve (as per Chairman Powell’s speech at Jackson Hole last Friday), that is still not unlikely.

National polling has been notoriously bad in the Trump era, consistently overestimating Democrats. However, the one area where that has not been the case is the generic House ballot polling for the midterms. Currently, Democrats are up by 3.9 points in the RealClearPolitics aggregate. A D+3–4 generic ballot would be a respectable showing for the GOP in the 2026 midterms (in 2018, the last time President Trump was in the White House, they lost by 8.6 points).

However, in such a national environment, it will still be very hard for the GOP to find a path to hold onto their narrow, only five-seat majority in the House. If they somehow manage to do so, that would be a nearly existential crisis for the already frail Democratic Party.

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