With less than a month until Election Day, Democrats are favored to win the House and have a fair chance at the Senate. Susan Ferrechio and Seth McLaughlin explain how heating oil, gas and grocery prices are putting Republican seats in play, how Republicans are fighting back with a Democratic Socialism message, and why turnout may decide it all.
Americans are already casting their ballots in a midterm election that could reshape the balance of power in Washington. Republicans are fighting to hold on to both the House and the Senate.
But Democrats are making a push in traditionally red states, where polling suggests they have a real shot at flipping seats. And with control of Congress on the line, a handful of issues could determine which party comes out on top.
[FERRECHIO] Analysts now are sort of predicting this bloodbath for Republicans — that the momentum is with Democrats, Trump’s approval ratings are down and that the whole thing signals that Congress will flip from Republican control to Democratic control. But to get there, they’re going to need to win a certain number of seats, obviously, in each chamber. And in the House, the Cook Political Report, which is kind of the gold standard, they’re predicting between 5 and 15 seats for Democrats to pick up. They only need to really pick up a handful of seats because Republicans only have about a five-seat advantage right now. So we’ve got to flip those seats, pick up a couple more, and they have got control. Right now, they are favored to win the House. And it’s not a guarantee, but they’re favored.
Now, the Senate’s a different animal. The outcome there is less certain. But now, as we’re getting closer to the election, less than a month away, it’s thought that Democrats are picking up enough momentum that they have a fair chance of winning back the Senate majority.
[MCLAUGHLIN] The magic number of seats right now for Democrats, they need to net four. For Republicans to retain the Senate, they need to defend the seats that are in these battlegrounds. And a lot of them are playing out in red areas. This includes Ohio, Texas, Kansas. And they also have flip opportunities. And I think probably the best flip opportunity for Republicans right now is in the state of Michigan, where the jury is out on whether Democrat Abdul El-Sayed can build a winning coalition, particularly in the Detroit area, Wayne County. And that is the most important area for Democrats to drive out the vote. Now, Republicans on the flip side want to either depress that or convince people to stay home and then also drive up the vote in the more rural areas of the state.
And it’s a somewhat similar story in Texas. Except Democrats are trying to flip that seat there, where James Talarico, state representative, 37-year-old guy, is trying to become the first Democrat since 1994 to flip the state, and he sees national momentum at his back, and Democrats believe that Attorney General Ken Paxton is just an inherently flawed candidate, both in his personal life, and they’ve really played up the idea that he’s been involved in corrupt dealings. And they really do think Talarico is sort of this new-age Democrat who leans into his faith and can provide a new model for Democrats in Texas to win statewide.
But beyond the candidates and battleground states, there’s one issue dominating this election: the cost of living. And as Americans grow increasingly frustrated with rising prices, Democrats see an opportunity to win over voters who have traditionally backed Republicans.
[FERRECHIO] Nothing motivates voters like their own wallets and kitchen table issues. That’s long been the case. And I think this November, it’s all coming to a head. We’re talking about really high prices at the grocery store. And of course, you know, devastating at the gas pumps and diesel fuel and heating oil.
For an example, if you look at what’s happening in Maine right now, there’s a toss-up race that everyone is watching, could help determine who controls the Senate. We have Susan Collins versus Troy Jackson. Susan Collins has been there for five terms. She’s a Republican and a moderate. Troy Jackson, a Bernie Sanders Democrat. So he’s further to the left. Well, Mainers are dealing with these incredibly high costs, and Maine, more than any other state, relies on heating oil in the winter. And it gets cold up there. A lot of people have converted to these heat pumps, but still many, many use heating oil. Well, the price of heating oil is up past like $5.50 a gallon, which is a lot. It’s a really high 40% increase. You’re talking people paying thousands more just to heat their homes, which of course is an absolute necessity. That makes people really angry. They blame Trump. They blame the Iran war that’s just dragged on. Troy Jackson’s done a good job of trying to pin it on Collins, despite the fact that she’s probably one of the biggest opponents of Trump in the Senate.
If you look at what’s happening in Kansas right now, this race was just moved by the Cook Political Report. It started off as a solid Republican seat, and now it’s a toss-up. Why? Well, let’s see, the farmers are upset about the tariffs and how that’s impacted their farming businesses. And then you have just the general cost of living. And you’ve got, of course, dynamic candidates in the race. Suddenly it’s a race. What does that mean? It means Republicans have to start spending money there and not other places. They can’t get competitive in other places if they’re trying to bail out seats that they were supposed to be able to just glide to victory on.
But while the cost of living has given Democrats an opening, Republicans are pushing a different line of attack. The growing influence of Democratic Socialism within the Democratic Party.
[MCLAUGHLIN] The Republicans are working hard to remind voters that there is a segment of the Democratic Party. who have a pretty radical platform. You know, it goes as far as to say they want to eliminate prisons, right? And they will jump on this sort of thing and say, this is the direction the Democratic Party is going to go. And they will point to candidates such as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and align him with some of the more radical characters in that left wing of the Democratic Party, including Hassan Piker, who’s become kind of infamous this campaign season as a streamer who once said that America deserved 9/11. He’s since sort of maybe backtracked on that a little bit, or understood the political repercussions of how it might impact his buddy. But those sorts of things are getting played up there in Michigan, where El-Sayed has been cast as a terrorist sympathizer and a lot of this stuff is directly tied to the left wing of the Democratic Party: this idea that they want to rethink on foreign policy, they want to jack up taxes on everybody. They want to go backwards on immigration enforcement basically a lot of the boxes that Trump had checked, they want to undo.
[FERRECHIO] There was a debate in Maine between Susan Collins and Troy Jackson, and he was asked directly by the moderator whether he was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. And he sidestepped an answer. He didn’t want to answer directly. So Democrats know. Democrats know that they need to be careful on their messaging here.
With key battleground states increasingly competitive, Republicans face a critical question. Can they turn out enough voters to reverse Democrats’ momentum before Election Day?
[FERRECHIO] There’s one way for them to win right now. Get the vote out. And really, in some of these races, it’s an unpopularity contest. In Texas, for example, there are so many problems with Talarico, so many problems with Paxton. Who gets their voters out? That’s the key.
[MCLAUGHLIN] We’re going to see so much spending over the next month, basically, to make the other person look so bad that you’re going to drive other people out. There’s an old saying in politics, it’s politics is addition, not subtraction. But it’s actually both. So on the Republican side, President Trump and the party are going to do everything in their power to get out the base. That’s through people that support the war. People that don’t blame Trump for inflation, you know, just rally the normal troops. And then beyond that, how do you get people that normally would vote Republican who are considering sitting out to the polls? Well, you scare them a little bit, usually. You tell them that other guy is so crazy or that other girl is so crazy, you got to go out. And then, within that same message, maybe you scare some Democrats away who have questions like we’ve been talking about with some of the candidates in their unconventional positions that are deemed extreme by Republicans.
[FERRECHIO] When you’re looking at these high gas prices and it’s almost embarrassing to go out there and tell everybody everything’s going great. Now you’ve heard Trump’s cabinet get out there and try to message that everything’s going fine and they get routinely mocked for that. And the problem is, you know, I think I heard Senator Kennedy say this — He’s a Republican from Louisiana — people’s checkbooks don’t lie. You know, you can’t tell people everything’s going great when they can’t pay the bills.
[MCLAUGHLIN] If Republicans want to retain the Senate, they’re going to have to defend seats in places like Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Kansas. But they could also lose a seat. They could then flip a seat in Michigan. Perhaps there’s a surprise. Elections are always full of surprises. Polls were wrong once again, and we’re all licking our wounds. Price at the pump is such a visceral thing, and it separates the political environment from others every time it happens. We’ve seen it in past elections. I really think the gas thing is such a direct line to someone’s daily thinking that resonates in such a strong, strong way. And it’s hurt Democrats in the past. And right now it seems like it’s going to hurt Republicans, but we’ll see.
Follow the 2026 midterm elections with The Washington Times.
People were interested in these podcasts
Get more from Susan Ferrechio and Seth McLaughlin
Please read our comment policy before commenting.