Midterm congressional elections two years after a new president is elected are almost always downers for his party, but signs are multiplying that Donald Trump could be heading toward a historic triumph when voters go to the polls in November 2026.
Consider two landmark midterms for the proper context of where things seem to be heading in the coming year. First, there were the 2010 mid-term contests two years after President Barack Obama won a smashing victory over Republican John McCain.
Obama’s push for a near-complete federalization of healthcare in the U.S. via the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, sparked the Tea Party protest movement that produced a surge of GOP activism and enthusiasm in 2010. That movement, by the way, set the stage for Trump’s arrival on the political stage in 2015.
The result was a historic 63-seat gain in the House of Representatives, the largest such gain since the 1948 contest. The Republicans regained the majority in the lower chamber, but fell just short of doing so in the Senate despite picking up six seats in the upper chamber.
Democrats in 2025 are clearly expecting to achieve something in November 2026 against Trump along the lines of the 2010 outcome against Obama, and their successes in the Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City off-year elections on the surface certainly seem to support such expectations.
But now let’s look back at the 1934 midterms. New Deal Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) had won a sweeping victory two years before, but, given the historic patterns, the conventional wisdom said things would be very different in November 1934.
When all the votes were counted, however, FDR and the Democrats added nine more seats to the 313 they had from 1932, giving them 322 of the 435 total seats in the House. In the Senate, Democrats also gained nine additional seats, putting their majority at 69, a super-majority.
Between the GOP having only a fourth of the House seats and less than a third of the Senate seats, FDR and the Democrats were absolutely in control of the federal government, with consequences still evident throughout the federal establishment in the nation’s capital.
So, Tapscott, are you suggesting that Trump in 2026 is going to be closer to FDR’s 1934 precedent than to Obama in 2010? Why yes, that’s exactly what I am suggesting, and here are three reasons why:
First, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported earlier this week that the rate of growth in the economy during the third quarter of this year was 4.3 percent. That’s the kind of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth seen during economic expansions such as that which followed the Reagan tax cuts in 1981.
But the 2025 Trump tax cuts haven’t yet kicked in, so with the impact of no taxes on tips or overtime, plus monumental changes elsewhere in the tax cuts, still to come, beginning in January and stretching out through the Spring, across the Summer and into the Fall campaign season, odds are great that voters will go to the polls amid record-breaking economic growth.
Second, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) calculated that making extension of those “temporary” Obamacare tax subsidies would be the perfect setup for a big Democratic 2026 win, even if that required shutting down the government for a record 43 days.
In fact, odds are good that come November 2026, that calculation will be seen as an historic blunder. Everything depended on the Democrats’ prediction of exploding Obamacare health insurance premiums. Visions of angry voters faced with monthly premiums four and five times more costly because Trump and the Republicans refused to extend those tax subsidies danced in the Democrats eyes as the shutdown approached and then went on and on.
But what if Trump and Hill GOPers hold strong and let those costly tax subsidies expire but those explosive premium increases never materialize? Last week, during a White House Oval Office presser, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said the initial indications are the premium increases for 2026 are averaging less than three percent, nowhere near the 100% and 200% predictions of Democrats and health care insurance industry figures.
Which brings us to reason number three. Schumer and Jeffries thought they would kill Republicans’ chances in 2026 by making them responsible in voters’ minds for spiraling health insurance premiums. But what actually happened is Schumer, Jeffries, and the Democratic Party were exposed as defenders of healthcare insurance industry corporate titans who spent record amounts of money lobbying Congress in 2025 to keep those subsidies coming and contributed multi-millions of dollars in campaign contributions to Democrats in appreciation for their efforts.
Thanks to the intense focus on Obamacare that followed from the Schumer/Jeffries strategy, millions of Americans learned for the first time that those tax-paid Obamacare subsidies mainly went into the pockets of the healthcare insurance industry. And even with the subsidies enriching the healthcare insurers, premiums under the ACA have risen steadily for years.
And now along comes Trump and the Hill GOP, saying healthcare insurance consumers should get all of those billions that Democrats want to keep giving to the corporate giants. The early estimates are that healthcare insurance would be 11%; less expensive with the Trump-Hill GOP approach.
In other words, the traditional political script has been reversed — Trump’s MAGA populism says give the billions to the consumers and let them decide how to spend it on their healthcare insurance, while Democrats demand that the corporate bigwigs keep getting those billions instead.
Things can change radically between now and November 2026. But if these trends hold, as I expect they will, the day after the 2026 votes are counted could dawn like none since that tumultuous FDR victory 91 years ago.
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