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WASHINGTON — As Congress members are preparing to return home for the summer recess, both parties are confronting their vulnerabilities and observing significant shifts in the developing 2026 landscape.
Democrats, who are facing historically low approval ratings for their party, are hoping for a boost by focusing on local candidates who can convincingly distance themselves from the national brand and the letdowns of 2024. Meanwhile, Republicans aim to promote the most favorable elements of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” despite Trump’s declining popularity this year and polls indicating the overall unpopularity of the comprehensive law.
All this is occurring as both parties gear up for next year’s midterm elections, which typically serve as a referendum on the president. Republicans currently hold both chambers of Congress, with Democrats needing to gain three seats to take control of the House and four to capture the Senate.
In a midterm year, the president’s party usually loses seats, although new Republican redistricting efforts might strengthen Trump’s GOP. Democrats face greater challenges in the Senate, as most of the Republican seats up for grabs in 2026 are in red states.
Nonetheless, Democrats have recently become more hopeful that public dissatisfaction with their party will decrease and that a mix of unpopular Trump policies, strong Democratic candidates, high base enthusiasm, and a fragile Republican coalition could sway the midterm battleground in their favor.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who leads the party’s Senate campaign, expressed optimism about Democratic prospects improving, predicting a “backlash” similar to the 2006 midterms when she first joined Congress and Democrats achieved unexpected victories in red states.
“I think the Republican majority is at risk because of a series of recruitment failures, damaging primaries and their very toxic plan that slashes Medicaid and spikes costs,” she said.
Republicans stress that they remain in a strong position.
“We feel very confident. Certainly not complacent, but confident,” said Alex Latcham, executive director of the Senate Leadership Fund, the GOP super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune. “We’re taking nothing for granted.”
Democrats’ bruised brand
While they feel optimistic about their midterm prospects, Democrats acknowledge that they have a brand problem.
Polls taken throughout 2025 have shown record-low ratings for the Democratic Party, with the GOP faring better, though also in net-negative territory. A Quinnipiac poll this month found that voters gave Democrats in Congress a dismal 19% approval rating, with 72% disapproving. Even self-identified Democrats disapproved by a 13-point margin.
Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., who chairs Democrats’ House campaign committee, acknowledged her party’s brand problem in a recent conversation with reporters. She said House Democrats have to work to transcend it with “great candidates” who offer “authentic” messages for their districts.
Voters “are absolutely frustrated with the dysfunction, the chaos that they see in Washington, D.C. And they want strong representatives who are going to stand up for them,” DelBene said.
DelBene suggested more than a dozen House Democrats were able to win last year even as Trump carried their districts “because we had people who were talking directly to voters, who were talking about the issues that matter.”
Some Democrats also note that the low ratings are driven in part by Democratic voters who are unhappy with their own party but who won’t be inclined to support Republicans.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said the polls show “there are a lot of Democrats out there who want us to be fighting harder,” arguing that his party can turn the problem into an advantage.
“Trump is lighting our democracy on fire, and so it’s frankly a good sign that there’s a lot of Americans who see the threat that he poses to people’s health care, to our way of life, to our very democracy, and want their leaders here to be standing up and fighting,” Murphy told NBC News. “I understand that those numbers look kind of harrowing for Democrats, but at some level, it’s a good sign.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is retiring, also warned that the Democrats’ low rating won’t save the GOP next fall. He noted that the Republican Party’s broad brand was in terrible shape the year before the 2010 GOP wave election. NBC News’ July 2009 poll showed 28% of respondents viewing the Republican Party positively, versus 41% who viewed it negatively.
“I would go back and remind everybody to look at roughly the 2009 time frame when the same sort of assessments were being made in reverse,” Tillis said. “We should take nothing for granted. We should all assume we’re running from behind.”
The hunt for 2026 candidates
Both the House and Senate majorities run through territory Trump won in 2024.
House Republicans are defending just three districts Trump lost last year, while 13 Democrats are defending seats Trump carried, according to an analysis of election results from the NBC News Decision Desk.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, need to net four seats to take control of the chamber, and just one Republican, Maine’s Susan Collins, represents a state that also backed former Vice President Kamala Harris last year. Any path to the majority requires Democrats to win a few states Trump carried by double digits.
Pressed on which seats she sees as competitive enough for Democrats to flip, Gillibrand declined to name states but said “there’s at least seven or eight states that are going to be in play because of the nature of their agenda.”
Joanna Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, laughed when asked about Gillibrand’s contention that seven pickups are a possibility.
“Democrats are facing historically low approval ratings of 19% because their delusional leaders focus on radical policies that are unpopular with voters,” she said, adding that Republicans are working to “lower costs of living, eliminate government fraud and waste, and keep males out of girls’ sports.”
Democrats are trying to cut into the red-tinted map with specific candidates who have demonstrated crossover appeal before. Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, who just jumped into the race to succeed Tillis, has won six statewide elections since 2000.
He’s on a collision course with Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, who launched his own campaign Thursday after Trump asked him to run.
Tillis warned Tuesday that Cooper will “no doubt” be a formidable candidate.
In Ohio, a state unlikely to have a heavily contested Senate race without a particularly strong Democratic candidate, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has twice traveled to the state in recent months as part of an aggressive recruitment effort targeting former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who lost his seat to Republican Bernie Moreno last year despite outrunning the top of the ticket. Schumer’s latest visit came last week, a source familiar with the meeting confirmed to NBC News. (The meeting was first reported by Axios.)
Brown has been contemplating a comeback but is torn between the idea of running for Senate or running for governor in 2026, which would give his party a top-tier candidate to take on Trump-endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy.
In Texas, meanwhile, some Republicans are worried about scandal-tarred Attorney General Ken Paxton defeating Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, in the primary and jeopardizing a safe seat in the general election.
“Number one, he’s not going to win. But number two, if he were to win, I think it would jeopardize the president’s agenda,” Cornyn told NBC News. “It would be the first loss of a statewide race by Republicans in 30 years. So it’d be a disaster.”
“All that money could be used to pick up Senate seats in Georgia, New Hampshire and Michigan,” he added. “But we don’t need — we don’t expect to give Democrats that opportunity.”
GOP challenges
Democrats have also been buoyed by recent polls with warning signs for Trump and Republicans defending their slim majorities in Congress.
The president’s approval rating has declined by a net 8 points since April, per a recent Fox News poll. Voters remain unhappy with the cost of living, and the president’s ratings on handling prices and the economy have tanked — though voters also split evenly on the question of which party they trusted more to handle those issues.
Trump’s “big, beautiful” law, which both parties call the defining issue in the midterms, is also broadly unpopular, although some provisions get high marks.
And the GOP faces a unique challenge: turning out Trump supporters who don’t show up as regularly when he isn’t on the ballot.
Democrats have also stumbled on an issue that provides a rare opening to drive a wedge between Trump and his base: encouraging MAGA-world criticism of how the administration has handled government files surrounding convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
As they prepared for the monthlong August recess, House Democratic leaders distributed a memo encouraging their members to highlight the issue back in their states and districts.
Republicans, meanwhile, urged their members to campaign on the “big beautiful bill.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee issued a memo on Monday urging GOP lawmakers to hold local events and engage with local media to tout popular provisions in the bill, like making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, increasing the child tax credit, cutting taxes on tips and overtime pay, and boosting funds for border security.
“Out of touch House Democrats voted to raise taxes, kill jobs, gut national security, and allow wide open borders — it’s no surprise their polling is in the gutter,” NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella said in a statement. “We will use every tool to show voters that the provisions in this bill are widely popular and that Republicans stood with them while House Democrats sold them out.”
Republicans have started to tout the measure on the airwaves. One Nation, the nonprofit arm of the main Senate GOP super PAC, has launched ads praising it as a “working family tax cut.”
The GOP also plans to nationalize New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist whose focus on affordability and grassroots energy powered his campaign.
“While President Trump and Republicans are delivering real results by lowering costs and securing the border, Democrats are embracing radical candidates like socialist Zohran Mamdani and fomenting violence against ICE and Border Patrol agents,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kiersten Pels said.
Still, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., warned that Democrats’ weak brand won’t save the GOP in the 2026 election.
“It’ll be a referendum on the party in power, which would be us,” Hawley said, adding that his party can only win “by delivering for the people who elected you, which would be my humble suggestion to my Republican friends.”
