On Monday, hours before Election Day, a prominent conservative political analyst shared his latest midterm prediction: President Donald Trump has led the Republican Party to “lose.” According to Washington Post Columnist Henry Olsen said, “A terrible night awaits the Republican Party, and even that might be an understatement,” as he predicted Democrats would win both the House and Senate. Moreover, this political crisis is comparable to those the Republican Party faced in 1976 and 2008, when the party was brought to its knees by Watergate, then a combination of the Iraq War and economic collapse.
According to Olsen, Trump and the Republican Party are about to experience the “painful fate” of Odysseus and his men in the Odyssey. “Just as Odysseus’s men were wiped out on the long journey home from Troy, many of Trump’s Republican troops will also experience electoral catastrophe on Tuesday,” Olsen predicts. “You don’t have to be a prophet to see what’s going to happen. No serious analyst thinks Republicans will have a good night as the midterm results approach. The open question is whether it will be just bad, terrible, or something akin to being eaten by a cyclops.” According to Olsen, who has predicted the last 12 elections for the Post, “I predict a terrible night for the GOP, with losses of 20 House seats and a Democratic takeover of the Senate. The Red team will also lose many governorships and state legislative chambers as the public, up and down the ballot, expresses great dismay at the course of Trump’s presidency.”
Polls have shown that the midterm elections are tilted heavily in favor of Democrats, and although Republicans hope that these polls underestimate conservative voters, “Trump’s low approval rating is key. As readers of my column know, approval ratings are a good indicator of the performance of presidential parties in the midterms. In each of the last five midterm elections, the share of the national House vote that the party holding the White House received was no more than 5.8 points higher than the office of president in two cases – Trump in 2018, Barack Obama in 2010 – it was within 1.7 points of the final approval figure of the RCP before the election.
Olsen also points to historical data regarding support for independent and third-party candidates, which shows that Democratic candidates received between 3.8 and 4.5 percent in 2006, 2010 and 2014, and 2.8 percent in 2018 and 2.7 percent in 2022. As he points out, “you don’t have to be a math whiz to see how bad this looks for Republicans.” The Republican Party will not obtain more than 44.6% of the votes on Tuesday. If third-party voting is as high as it was from 2006 to 2014, Democrats would get a minimum of around 51-52%, which would give them a 6.5-7.5 point advantage, but that’s still quite large. about 52.6 percent, a margin of about eight points. And taking into account other factors, the numbers could reach a “massive Democratic victory of between 8.5 and just over 10 points.”
In light of all this, Olsen writes, “My final prediction for the Democratic margin in the national popular vote in the House is 9.25 percentage points. It could be more than that, and a few more points would be important. At 9.25 points, my simple model in the House favors the Democrats in 230 seats, and they would probably win a few more seats. At 10.3 points, it favors them in 237. That’s why I predict the Democrats will win. 235 seats in the House, a gain of 20 from 2024. If the Democrats’ optimistic scenario comes true, they will likely win between 240 and 250. The national environment also explains why I am so optimistic about the Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate. He notes that while a few last-minute scandals have rocked the Democratic race, he’s betting that most opinions have already hardened while many have already voted.
And while Olsen thinks “the Republican in me” hopes he’s wrong, “the analyst in me” suspects he’s right, “and that’s why I think Tuesday will be terrible — even horrible — for the GOP.” He notes that this does not necessarily mean that “the Trump era is over,” writing that “the GOP would have been on its deathbed at least twice in my lifetime, after 1976 and 2008, and each time it rose not only to win but to fundamentally shift American politics in its direction. There is no reason why it cannot do it again. American politics changes as quickly as the winds on the high seas, and wise sailors know how to take advantage of these changes to direct their ships to port But as Olsen concludes, “That’s for the future, though. Today, the Republican Party faces the prospect of becoming a minority in both houses of Congress, while being led by a defeated president who sorely needs a new path forward.”
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