Why 2026 Could Be a Bigger Blue Wave Than 2018

By John McCormack

Monday, August 24, 2026

 

If the bottom falls out for Republicans in November and they lose control of the Senate, a big reason will be that President Donald Trump’s approval rating on the economy is far worse now than it was during the midterm elections of Trump’s first term.

 

Back in 2018, even as Trump’s overall approval rating was in the low 40s, voters consistently gave him a net-positive approval rating on the economy: His economic approval rating sat at or above 50 percent, according to Gallup. But in 2026, Trump’s overall approval rating has sunk to the high 30s, and his rating on the economy is significantly worse than his overall rating. American voters disapprove of his handling of the economy by nearly 2 to 1.

 

Earlier this month, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Democrats with a slight edge over Republicans on the economy (37 percent to 36 percent) for the first time since 2017. Fox News polling this year has similarly found Democrats opening up an advantage over Republicans for the first time since 2010—with the Democratic advantage at 9 points in July.

 

David Wasserman, elections analyst for The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, noted that the groups in which the decline in support for Trump has been most pronounced are independents, Hispanic voters, and white voters without a college degree. “We’ve seen bigger declines in Trump support and Republican support among those groups because they’re where he made the biggest strides and therefore had the most ground to fall,” Wasserman told The Dispatch. “These are voters who rehired Trump to the White House because they were nostalgic for what things cost during his first term, but are inclined to either sit out the election or vote for a Democrat.”

 

“I would be betting my life it’s going to be worse than 2018,” one GOP campaign strategist told The Dispatch. The strategist pointed to private campaign research showing that white women without a college degree, a demographic that backed Trump by a wide margin in 2024, had turned against the president and the GOP, and that shift is “almost entirely economically driven. Basically these are women to whom Trump offered an alternative economic vision that was appealing to them, and none of that stuff has, from their perspective, panned out.”

 

The alternative economic vision that Trump campaigned on in 2024 wasn’t that the rate of inflation would merely slow relative to the Biden presidency—but that prices would actually drop if Trump was elected. “Prices will come down. You just watch. They’ll come down and they’ll come down fast. Not only with insurance, with everything,” Trump said at an August 2024 rally in North Carolina. “We intend to slash [energy and electricity] prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months.”

 

Of course, prices continued to increase during Trump’s second term. Over the past 12 months, overall inflation was a little over 3 percent—north of the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target—and energy inflation was 15 percent.

 

“People really, really don’t like inflation,” Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Dispatch. “That resolves a lot of the mysteries of trying to interpret what’s happening with people’s perceptions of the economy.”

 

Voters aren’t merely upset that inflation is 3 percent rather than 2 percent over the past year—they remember overall prices being 30 percent lower back in 2020. Trump’s approval rating on inflation is shy of 26 percent, according to Nate Silver’s average of polls.

 

But Trump isn’t simply the victim of setting expectations too high, he’s also the victim of self-inflicted political wounds. His tariffs remain deeply unpopular: Only 33 percent of voters approve of Trump’s trade policy, with 60 percent disapproving, according to an average of polls compiled by Silver. A YouGov poll from July found 72 percent of Americans saying that Trump’s tariffs had increased prices.

 

“A lot of the stuff you buy at the grocery store is imported, and a lot of the stuff you buy at retail stores is imported,” Strain said. Beef prices, for example, jumped nearly 20 percent since Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025. Trump effectively conceded his tariff policies have raised prices on Americans when he announced on Friday that he would allow 300,000 metric tons of beef to be imported over the next three months not subject to higher “out of quota” tariffs (and claimed importers pledged to sell the beef for 25 percent below current market prices).

 

Strain added that “whatever the merits of the war in Iran are, just analytically speaking, that has led to higher inflation rates at the gas pump.” Gas prices are now $1 per gallon more expensive than they were a year ago.

 

Mortgage rates, now hovering under 7 percent, put a house purchase out of reach for many Americans, and Trump has done little to reassure bond markets that drive those rates. “I think his fiscal policy has put upward pressure on the rate of inflation by running huge deficits,” Strain said. Still, he noted that in many other respects the economy remains “very strong” like it was in 2018, with the unemployment rate now around 4 percent. “The difference really is inflation,” Strain said.

 

Voters’ perception of the economy is just one important factor among several that will affect the outcomes in November. If the economy were the only thing voters cared about, after all, Democrats wouldn’t have swept to power in the House in 2018.

 

But the GOP’s strength on the economy in 2018 is one reason they were able to oust a Democratic incumbent in one purple state (Trump had carried Florida by just a point back in 2016) in addition to flipping three deep-red states (Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota) while losing seats in two purple states (Nevada and Arizona).

 

In 2026, Democrats need to gain four seats on net to take control of the Senate, which will require them to flip seats in at least two states that Trump won by double digits (Texas, Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio) in 2024. Democrats are heavily favored to flip North Carolina, while Maine, where incumbent Republican Susan Collins has defied gravity, remains a tossup. Democrats are only playing defense in Michigan, where far-left Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s nomination has kept the race competitive.

 

“People underestimate just how red Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska are,” Sean Trende, elections analyst at RealClear Politics, told The Dispatch. “These are states that are redder than New Jersey and Virginia are blue.” (In 2024, Trump lost those two blue states by about 6 points while carrying the four red states by 11 to 14 points.) But even with that tough map, Trende still thinks Democrats have roughly a 2-in-5 chance of taking control of the Senate, while Silver’s model gives Senate Democrats closer to a 3-in-5 chance. “We both agree that it could easily happen,” Trende said of Silver’s model. “He thinks it’s a little easier than I do.”

 

Meanwhile, in the House, “a really great night for Democrats would be getting back to the same seat count they ended up at in 2018 at 235,” said Wasserman, who noted that gerrymandering and other factors have reduced the number of swing districts. “That’s harder to do this cycle because they’d have to reach deeper into Trump territory. Whereas in 2018, Democrats were able to win a variety of districts that Trump carried by mid-single digits in 2016, this time around, Democrats would need to win some double-digit Trump seats to get to that same result.”

 

But with Trump’s overall approval rating in the high 30s and his economic approval rating in the low 30s, there’s a decent chance they’ll do just that in November—especially if voters follow the request Trump made at a rally on Friday night to “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.”