The last six times the White House has changed its party ownership, the new president brought in a governing trifecta as well. That includes Bill Clinton in 1992, George W. Bush in 2000, Barack Obama in 2008, Donald Trump in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and Trump again in 2024. It has been like clockwork. So as Democrats lick their wounds and think ahead, should they draw reassurance from the fact that with Trump retiring in four years they should be able to flip the White House and both congressional chambers and have the kind of moment of overwhelming power and confidence that the GOP is enjoying right now?
Maybe not.
Yes, it’s entirely possible, even likely, that Trump’s agenda will prove to be unpopular, counter-productive, or simply unfeasible, making a Democratic return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a decent bet (particularly since the incumbent party has now lost three straight presidential elections). History tells us that Democrats will probably flip control of the House in 2026, thanks to the extremely narrow margin of control Republicans won in 2024.
But the Senate is another matter. It’s not just that Republicans have a three-seat cushion (four so long as they have the vice-presidential tie-breaking vote) and yet another favorable landscape in 2026 — only one Republican-held seat, belonging to the very durable Susan Collins of Maine, is in a state carried by Kamala Harris, while there are two Democrat seats, held by the particularly vulnerable Jon Ossoff in Georgia and by Gary Peters in Michigan, in states carried by Donald Trump. As Ron Brownstein explains, the Republican Senate majority is now becoming entrenched by an increasingly dominant GOP position in half the states.
Twenty-five states have voted for Trump in all three of his presidential campaigns. That’s the most states either party has won in three consecutive presidential elections since 38 states backed Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and his vice-president and successor, George H.W. Bush, in 1988 …
Since 2016, Trump has shifted almost all of these states even further to the right. In 2024, he soared past 54 percent of the vote in every Trump 25 state except North Carolina, the only state among them that Democrats tried to be competitive in at all. (And even in North Carolina, he won an unexpectedly comfortable 183,000-vote victory.)
Perhaps most significantly in shifting the Electoral College map, Trump has tipped Ohio and Florida — the two most fiercely contested large battlegrounds of American politics from 1992 to 2012 — solidly into the Republican camp. Last year, he won nearly 55 percent of the vote in Ohio and 56 percent in Florida. That was a big jump over Trump’s vote share during his 2016 race of 51 percent in Ohio and 49percent in Florida.
More alarmingly for Democrats, the increasing GOP margins in the 25 base states and the intensifying tendency toward straight-ticket voting has created a lot of down-ballot carnage. Republicans now control 24 of the legislatures in these states (and really control 25 given the conservative margins in the technically non-partisan Nebraska legislature) and 22 of the governorships. But the really bad news is in the Senate, Brownstein notes:
Most important has been the GOP’s success at consolidating Senate seats across these 25 states. After Trump’s initial victory in 2016, Democrats still held seven of their 50 Senate seats, a number that grew to eight after Democrat Doug Jones won a 2017 special election in Alabama. But, even in a difficult election climate, Republicans beat four of those Democratic senators in 2018 (in Florida, Indiana, North Dakota and Missouri), ousted Jones in 2020, and dispatched the final three Trump 25 Democrats last year (beating incumbents Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, and capturing the open seat vacated by Democrat turned independent Joe Manchin in West Virginia). Now Republicans hold all 50 of the Senate seats from these states.
Flipping Senate seats back in states like Alabama, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, or West Virginia would take a small miracle for Democrats. And Florida and Ohio aren’t looking much better.
States can change in either direction, but we’re looking at long-term trends that seems more glacial in nature. The significance of this solid bloc of 25 Trump states may spill over into both House and presidential elections after the 2030 census, when current estimates suggest they will pick up ten House seats (and electoral votes) via reapportionment. States that have gone Democratic in all three Trump elections are expected to lose eight seats.
This isn’t a catastrophic forecast for Democrats, since they can certainly block future Republican trifectas; if they control the White House, they can get a lot done via executive orders and appointments. But until they solve the Senate puzzle, getting back the kind of power they had just four years ago with a narrowly held but very real trifecta isn’t going to happen like some sort of predictable metronome. That’s entirely separate, moreover, from the many things that Trump and his congressional allies may do to make voting harder for those likely to vote against them. Democrats will need a different strategy designed to build a different coalition if they want the power to do big things fast.
