Democrats are still favored to capture the House

But Republicans have a better shot in the wake of the Callais ruling and redistricting

May 11, 2026

House Democrats, led by Hakeem Jeffries, are still most likely to win a majority in 2026. But recent events have improved Republicans’ chances. (Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0)

🍺 What’s on tap 🚰

Today’s newsletter features:

Opening Bell: Must-read items about elections and politics.

The Frontrunner: A look at the potential swing in the 2026 midterm vote and why it still suggests Democrats are favored to win the House, despite recent Republican gains from redistricting.

Around the Corner: Upcoming elections we’re tracking at DDHQ.

🔔 Opening Bell 🐏

Must-read items about elections and politics.

On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the April 21 redistricting vote, saying the process used to bring the amendment to a vote violated the state constitution. This means the state will use its present map in the 2026 midterms, which currently gives Democrats a 6-5 edge in the U.S. House delegation, rather than a map that might have given Democrats a 10-1 edge. In the wake of the ruling, some national Democrats have discussed something of a nuclear option to keep the 10-1 map in place. The proposal would remove all high court justices by lowering the court’s mandatory retirement age, fill the body with replacements, then rehear the case. There is little sign that Virginia Democrats have much appetite for this idea.

☑️ Introducing DDHQ Votes ☑️

Here’s a look at Votes, Decision Desk HQ’s new election data portal:

On May 5, Democrat Chedrick Greene won a special election in Michigan state Senate District 35. This victory enabled Democrats to maintain their slim majority in the upper chamber of Michigan’s state legislature. We can see the ballot summary in Votes here, including county-level results and voter registration data.

But using Votes’s past performance data, we can go deeper to better understand what happened in this election. It turns out this was quite a notable Democratic win, as Greene’s showing marked a nearly 19-point improvement on then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s roughly 1-point lead in this district in 2024. Similarly, Greene did about 16 points better than now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin did in this seat back in 2024.

You can have data like this at your fingertips by signing up for Votes. Other features include:

Up-to-date polling on the key issues and races
Prediction market data for elections
25 years of election results at your fingertips
Track election results as they come in
From local to federal, find every race
Coming Soon: 2026 Election Forecast

Click here to learn more about Votes and sign up now! Now is the perfect time to join, with the 2026 primary election season now in full swing.

📈 The Frontrunner 🥇

Republicans will gain from redistricting, but Democrats are still favored to win the House

Quick summary:

Republicans have improved their baseline seat expectations in the 2026 House race thanks to recent redistricting developments. This has somewhat improved their chances of retaining control of the House.
However, House Democrats remain favored due to a very positive national environment that makes it likely that 2026 will see a notable shift to the left from the 2024 presidential race.
Using the generic ballot, the 2024 presidential vote by district, and the 2024 House vote by district, we can see how potential swings still suggest that Democrats have an edge in the battle for control of the House.

Republicans will almost certainly gain from congressional redistricting in the 2026 midterm cycle. That’s the takeaway from the past two weeks, a period that included: the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling that invalidated the state’s recent redistricting vote, and a flurry of redraws (or potential redraws) in GOP-controlled states in the South.

These recent changes have left Democrats with less room for error, thereby improving the GOP’s chances of retaining the House. Yet Democrats remain favorites to flip the chamber in 2026. The electoral environment remains quite positive for Democrats, such that they should win at least a fair number of light-red seats in November. This gives Democrats an ample number of seats to target — or fight to retain — that will more likely than not prove sufficient for them to claim a small House majority.

The national environment

The degree to which the country swings toward the party out of power — the Democrats in 2026 — is pivotal in a midterm year. Swings will vary across the country, but broadly speaking, midterms generally see broad shifts toward the opposition party. The only exceptions have been in years when the incumbent president had a high approval rating, such as Bill Clinton in 1998 for Democrats and George W. Bush in 2002 for Republicans. President Donald Trump’s approval rating is right around 40% in Decision Desk HQ’s average — and his disapproval rating is nearly 57% — so that caveat is not in play right now.

We can get an idea about how Americans plan to vote in the fall by looking at how they respond to the generic ballot question. Right now, Democrats lead by about 6 percentage points in Decision Desk HQ’s average, 46%-40%. This is line with the longer-term trend, as Democrats have usually led by about 4 to 6 points in our tracker since late last year. All told, that would work out to around a 5.5- to 7.5-point swing from Trump’s 1.5-point advantage in the 2024 national popular vote margin.

If Democrats are still leading by this kind of margin in early November, that will bode well for them. For all the conversations about polling accuracy in recent midterms, generic ballot polling has been pretty good when compared the actual national House popular vote. That is, in three of the past four midterms, the measure was relatively on the mark. Now, this could be a bad year for polls, and they could oversell the Democrats’ position. But the thing is, polling error is unpredictable — it’s just as possible that pollsters will overestimate Republicans, which is actually what happened in elections last November.

The 2018 case stands out, given that it was Trump’s first midterm and the one Democratic-leaning year among that quartet. Ahead of that election, the implied swing of the generic ballot average ahead was a little under 7 points from the D+2 popular vote margin in the 2016 presidential race. That is similar to the range of the implied swing we’ve seen in 2026 polling, noted above.

The potential swing still favors Democrats

Let’s look at how the generic ballot swing could affect the number of seats leaning toward either party, based on the 2024 presidential vote in each district. Remember that Democrats’ current 6-point generic ballot edge would mean an implied swing of about D+7.5, which would put seats that Trump carried by up to 7.5 points more clearly in play. Such a swing would give Democrats an advantage, with about 223 seats sitting to the left of the midterm swing and 212 to the right.

Now, swings from district to district (or state to state) are never uniform, thanks to the vagaries of each individual election. Differences in incumbency, candidate quality, turnout, and the makeup of the district’s electorate, among other things, creates variance. However, vote share usually swings toward the opposition party across most districts. Such shifts could make it more likely that Democratic incumbents in newly-drawn, red-leaning seats could survive, such as Reps. Henry Cuellar of Texas, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, and Jared Moskowitz of Florida. Additionally, Democrats could flip a seat or two on the periphery of their target list in places that Trump carried by more than 10 points.

To be clear, the Democrats’ figures in the chart above have worsened. In the past couple of weeks, Republicans redistricted in Florida and Tennessee, which converted five seats that Trump lost into five that he carried. Democrats also lost out on four seats that Trump would have lost in Virginia under the party’s proposed map.

Additionally, it seems likely that Louisiana will add one more heavily Republican seat at the expense of one solidly Democratic seat, a change that is included in the chart above. And things could still get even a tad better for Republicans if Alabama and South Carolina can also redistrict. (South Carolina looks on the precipice of making changes, while Alabama passed a new map that will only come into effect if the Supreme Court removes a federal court injunction blocking the state from redrawing.)

We can also take the potential swing in the generic ballot and apply it to the 2024 House vote to see how seats could shift. While the presidential and House votes are more closely aligned than ever, some variation still exists because different candidates out- or underperform the presidential nominee from their party. In 2024, for instance, Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania won reelection by 13 points even as Trump narrowly lost in Fitzpatrick’s district. Conversely, Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa only won reelection by 0.2 points even as Trump was carrying her district by about 8.5 points.

The potential swing scenarios for the House vote also show that Democrats maintain an edge in 2026. Whereas the starting point for the presidential vote was R+1.5, the GOP actually had a larger 2.7-point edge in the aggregate 2024 House vote. So, a 6-point Democratic lead on the generic ballot would work out to nearly a 9-point swing in the House vote. If we applied that swing uniformly to the 2024 House vote, Democrats would lead in 225 seats to the Republicans’ 210.

By comparison, a D+3.5 lead in the generic ballot would produce a swing that would give Democrats an edge in just 220 seats. Such a lead would fall on the lower end of the Democrats’ recent generic ballot advantage. But the Democrats’ advantage across those two scenarios indicates why they are still at least somewhat favored to win the House.

An even better day for Democrats (D+8.5 on the generic ballot) would give them an edge in 235 seats using this approach. However, a stronger showing for the GOP that holds Democrats to a narrower generic ballot lead (D+1) could leave Republicans with a 223-212 seat edge. That latter scenario illustrates how the GOP’s chances of winning the House have improved somewhat in the wake of all the map changes.

Again, a truly uniform swing will not happen, but the average swing could approximate how the generic ballot will broadly move things in most districts. Just consider some recent midterms that, like 2026, also followed a close national popular vote in a presidential election. In 2018, Democrats enjoyed a swing of more than 9 points in margin from 2016, on average, in seats contested by both parties. In 2006, Democrats enjoyed a similar average swing from 2004 in contested seats. In 2014, Republicans saw an average improvement of 7 points from 2012. (Because of redistricting, a seat-level average was not possible for the 2022 midterms. But in the aggregate House vote, Republicans improved by around 6 points from 2020 to 2022.)

***

While Democrats remain favorites to take back the House in 2026, these recent developments do somewhat boost the GOP’s chances. If Republicans win an unusual number of close races, somewhat like Democrats did in the 2024 House race, they could hold onto their majority. Yet a Democratic House after 2026 is still the most likely outcome, though they could hold a very narrow majority — part of a recent pattern of closely-divided Houses.

📆 Around the Corner 📌

On DDHQ Votes, make sure to add these upcoming races to your watchlist:

May 12:
- Nebraska primary (including the 2nd Congressional District)
- West Virginia primary (including U.S. Senate)
May 19
- Alabama primary (including U.S. Senate and Governor)
- Georgia primary (including U.S. Senate and Governor)
- Idaho primary (including U.S. Senate and Governor)
- Kentucky primary (including U.S. Senate)
- Oregon primary (including U.S. Senate and Governor)
- Pennsylvania primary (including Governor)
May 26
- Texas primary runoffs (including the GOP race for U.S. Senate)