A former adviser to former President Clinton downplayed Democrats’ hopes of making large gains in Congress in next year’s midterm elections, saying political realities could limit how much they can make up.
Doug Sosnik, who served as a senior adviser to Clinton during his first and second term, said in a memo first obtained by Politico that Trump’s poor approval rating, particularly on major issues like the economy and inflation, would suggest Democrats are in a strong position to win back many seats in Congress and take control of at least one chamber.
He predicted that while Democrats may perform well, they likely won’t approach the type of success that a party out of power has historically seen in midterm elections, when the president’s party usually loses seats in Congress.
“The reason for this has less to do with the Democrats’ historically low approval rating than with a political realignment that began forming long before Donald Trump ever ran for president,” Sosnik said in the memo. “We may be living in the Age of Trump, but the President should be viewed as the symptom, not the cause of these structural changes in American politics.”
“And at least for now, Trump and his party are the beneficiaries of this political realignment,” he added.
He said a president’s approval rating since the 1950s had been the best indicator of how their party would perform in the midterms, but it’s been replaced by a political realignment based on education level. The Democratic Party has increasingly performed more strongly with college-educated voters, who don’t make up a majority of the country.
Sosnik noted the party has suffered an “erosion” among working-class and rural voters since the 1990s and is increasingly reliant on these college-educated voters to win.
He later explains that Trump’s average approval rating is roughly in line with Clinton’s in 1994 and former President Obama’s in 2010, when Republicans made major gains in the House, but the GOP is more “insulated from an election catastrophe” in 2026 than the party in power has been previously.
The ex-Clinton aide also pointed to the increasingly fewer competitive races, as states and congressional districts more consistently vote the same way through multiple elections. Democrats would need to pick up four seats in the Senate to win back control next year, but only six are competitive and three of them Democrats are defending, he said.
The same dynamic is present in the House, with just a dozen and a half districts considered toss-ups.
The GOP’s mid-decade redistricting efforts, along with advantages in party registration and fundraising, could also bolster the party ahead of next year, he said.
Sosnik said Republicans have continued to struggle when Trump himself isn’t on the ballot, and Democrats could benefit from college-educated voters being the most likely to turn out in a midterm.
“The outcome will be determined by a historically low number of competitive Senate and House races,” he said. “The results will likely come down to whether the Republicans can overcome what is likely to be an increasingly negative political environment, with a majority of the country continuing to disapprove of the Trump presidency.”
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