Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. The vote count is not quite over, but it is already clear that 2026 ranks among the most consequential midterms.
Kylee Wilson, a part-time bartender in the blue-collar town of Prairie City, Iowa, turned to the bar and broke the news to one of her regulars. After voting three times for President Trump, she pulled the lever for Democrats this year.
“Tim, don’t hate me for this,” she told the customer, Tim Charls, 64. But Mr. Trump had become “too brash,” too bellicose, too tied up in the war in Iran, she said, all while she and her family struggled with rising costs and health care cuts.
“Trump put a target on America’s back,” said Ms. Wilson, 29, who works in sales support at a heavy machinery company during the day. She said she was concerned about “the state of the country and the world.”
All across the country, millions of white, working-class voters such as Ms. Wilson shifted toward Democrats in the midterms, part of a lurch to the left across demographic groups that propelled the party to its biggest rout in a generation.
While a clear majority of white voters without a college degree favored Republican House candidates over Democrats (59 percent to 40 percent), the margin was 14 percentage points smaller than Mr. Trump’s was in the 2024 presidential election, according to Times Voter Trends data.
Our larger midterm deck (40 slides): The 2026 Midterms
What to expect in post-election Washington: The Road Ahead
Congressional oversight plans: The 12Oversight Congress
The bigger macro challenges: Mind These Gaps
