During Donald Trump’s first term, Democrats cleaned up in the midterm elections. “This wasn’t just a blue wave in the House. It was a tsunami,” wrote CNN data analyst Harry Enten in 2018. Now, similar structural conditions mean that Trump’s best-case scenario for 2026 might be stopping a blue wave from becoming a tsunami.

Midterm elections are a puzzle for Republicans in the Trump era. The voters who turn out tend to be more affluent — and therefore less inclined to back Trump. In presidential election years, the Republicans lean on Trump’s coalition to carry them over the line, drawing crucial support from lower-propensity voters, less affluent constituencies, and minority groups whose backing of Trump often does not extend to other Republicans or generate enthusiasm in midterm elections.

In a shaky economy, motivating a less affluent coalition with total GOP control of the government will obviously be difficult too. As in 2018, Democrats are already squeezing every bit of juice out of Republicans’ glaring healthcare blind spot. The party has been fighting for an extension of Obamacare subsidies which are set to expire at the end of the year, leading to a significant spike in insurance costs for millions of Americans. Republicans are struggling to find an answer to this.

To the extent that this can be mitigated, Republicans should do everything in their power to pass legislative fixes to the broken healthcare system — for both moral and political reasons. Blaming the Affordable Care Act clearly has merit, but voters understand the GOP is in control of the government right now. Blaming Barack Obama will not cut it.

Politically, Trump and Republicans should both govern and message in a way that appeals to independents and the low-propensity voters in the President’s coalition. He could achieve this by lifting tariffs on foods that cannot be grown at scale in the US, by expanding job-training programmes and support for workers displaced by the AI boom, and by framing deportations as a measure to boost wages. All of these arguments will likely be made by the GOP, but how much they focus on these messages is what will matter.

Boasting about the stock market won’t be enough to bring out Trump’s coalition either. An analysis of census data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that in 2022, “while 58% of eligible homeowners turned out to vote in the midterm elections, just 37% of eligible renters cast their ballots.” In addition, 67% of Americans with household incomes above $100,000 voted, compared to just 33% of those with household incomes below $20,000. With millennials and Generation Z increasingly frustrated over obstacles to homeownership, Trump — acutely aware of interest-rate politics — needs renters in his coalition to support Republican candidates.

Virginia’s Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin won back a blue state in 2020 by marrying a cultural critique of Democrats with a class critique. “Our kids can’t wait. We work in real-people time, not government time,” Youngkin said in his victory remarks. But when his lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, leaned on culture-war messaging in last month’s special election, Abigail Spanberger easily defeated her by running on an affordability-focused agenda.

In next year’s midterms, Republicans would be wise not to prioritise culture over economics — or to neglect either entirely. Earle-Sears assumed that Spanberger’s unpopular stance on transgender issues would deliver a decisive boost and that personal controversies surrounding the Democratic attorney general candidate would sink him. In reality, Youngkin’s coalition could not be reconstituted, and voters remained unmoved by these arguments.

Midterms do not historically go well for the party in power. Republicans still struggle to crack the code of turning out Trump’s coalition when he is not on the ballot. Conditions, then, are tough for the GOP: the wave might be coming, but the party needs to prevent a tsunami.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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