With President Donald Trump’s approval rating sinking to historic lows amid the war with Iran, Republicans down ballot stand to suffer, with the president potentially teeing his party up for massive losses in state legislatures come November. However, increased partisanship and geographic polarization might still save the GOP from the sort of losses seen by other recent presidents.
A few weeks into the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, Trump’s approval rating sank to a new all-time low, with a Reuters Ipsos survey from late March finding the president at just a 36% approval rating. Even in polling averages, like from The Economist, Trump’s approval rating has sunk below any point during his first term and even former President Joe Biden’s lowest rating.
In the midterms, this has solidified expectations that Democrats could regain control of the House, even kindling hopes that the Senate, too, may be for the taking. Trump’s cratering popularity may also be sinking his party’s chances further down the ballot in state legislative races, potentially setting the GOP up for what the Democrats experienced under former President Barack Obama. Between 2008 and 2014, the Democratic Party lost nearly 1,000 state legislative seats.
Early signals of trouble go beyond just topline approval numbers of the GOP party leader. Dan Patrick, the Republican speaker of the Texas House, said last week that he believed the party would “have a tough time” retaining control of the House there, which they have controlled for more than two decades, with a current advantage of 88 to 62.
Democrats have signaled an ambitious push in state legislatures this cycle, with the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee announcing a target map recently naming Alaska, Arizona, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire as battleground states for control of their state legislatures, alongside 11 other states, where the party says it is working to build towards contesting control of the state legislature. Part of this push is simply the fact that Democrats are making a concerted effort to leave fewer state legislative seats uncontested in the general election. And the committee boasts that it has already flipped some 30 state legislative seats since Trump won re-election in 2024, while Republicans have not flipped any seats.
“Things are lining up well for the Democrats’ chances at the state level in November,” Peverill Squire, a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri, told Salon. “If people continue to sour on the Trump administration, it will, of course, hurt the Republican party’s prospects down the ballot.”
“But the party’s problems go beyond just that problem,” Squire explained.
“In a number of states where the Republicans enjoy control of the governorship and both houses of the state legislature, they have pushed hard on conservative policies on abortion, education, taxes, and other issues that may lose them votes from independents and suburbanites,” he said. “It is not clear that they will be able to mobilize voters beyond their hardcore base, which is always a concern in a midterm election.”
Squire noted that Democrats, on the other hand, have demonstrated enthusiasm so far going into 2026, which is a key factor in the lower turnout in midterm elections. And, the party’s fuller slate of candidates means that if a so-called “blue wave” does materialize in 2026, Democrats will be well-positioned to benefit from it. Still, there are a few factors that could prevent them from putting up the numbers Republicans did during Obama’s two terms.
“We may not see the Democrats succeed at the same level the GOP did in 2010 — gerrymanders and the way Democratic voters are distributed geographically limit their chances — but they may flip a few chambers and greatly reduce the Republicans’ numbers in others,” Squire said.
Maggie Mick, the vice president of Multistate, a group that works in state policymaking strategy, told Salon that she sees a few major differences between how Republicans were situated during Obama’s presidency and how Democrats are situated now. One of them is that Democrats are climbing out of a hole dug in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election.
“You’ve got 21 Republican super majority states where they have both chambers right now. Last election, North Carolina was the only Republican state to lose its supermajority in one chamber. That is where you will see actual governing impact in seat loss,” Mick said, adding that Mick said slipping GOP supermajorities will have two impacts.
“We may not see the Democrats succeed at the same level the GOP did in 2010 — gerrymanders and the way Democratic voters are distributed geographically limit their chances.”
The first is on member management and leadership choices, because smaller majorities give individual members more power and the party smaller margins to work with in terms of legislation. Because of this, she expects Republican parties to elect more moderate legislative leaders following the 2026 midterms and for the party’s state-level governing agendas to be more moderate as well.
Mick said, however, that she expects this year to be just the beginning for Democrats regaining their footing in many state legislatures, pointing to Florida as a good example of a state where she expects it to take more than one cycle for Democrats to break the Republicans’ supermajority in the Senate there.
“I think in the out years, the Republican Party will have a reframing of its identity post-President Trump. It has been the president’s party the past 10 years, and that reframing, that potential shift, that backlash, will actually occur potentially in ‘28 ,‘30 out years,” Mick said. “I don’t think you’ll see it this midterms, because there were so many gains made by Republicans in ‘24.”
Mick also said that top-of-the-ticket races will have down-ballot effects. She said, for example, that she expects Democrats to do well in Minnesota, ostensibly a battleground state, according to the DLCC target map, because Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., should be a strong gubernatorial candidate there. State attorneys general have also injected significant cash into their races, which could have similar downballot effects.
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It’s also clear that Republicans understand that they are up for a fierce battle for state legislative control, announcing in their own target map that “success this cycle will not be defined by sweeping gains, but by whether state Republicans can withstand sustained pressure in the most competitive districts.”
The Republican State Leadership Committee, in their target map memo, indicated that they believe they can convince voters to split their ticket by focusing on issues of economic growth and public safety, where they believe they have an edge over Democrats. They also indicated that they are focusing on defense in Arizona, Wisconsin, Iowa, Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and New Hampshire.
Adam Myers, a political scientist at Providence College, told Salon that he agrees Democrats are well-positioned to make gains in 2026, but said that these gains may be limited again by geographic advantages enjoyed by Republicans as well as increased partisanship among voters. He added that, unlike in 2010, Democrats likely won’t be able to retrench themselves following big wins, because 2026 does not precede a redistricting year.
“For Republicans in 2010, that was a very optimal year for them to win a lot of state legislatures, because it preceded redistricting. So, Republicans were able to basically win in a whole bunch of states and then redraw state legislative maps to insulate themselves from future electoral patterns,” Myers said. “Democrats obviously are not in the same position in 2026 unless they decide they want to do the kind of decade redistricting for state legislatures that Republicans did for a number of states in terms of their congressional districts this year, and of course, that Democrats responded in kind.”
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