With all the signs of a Democratic comeback arising from 2025’s off-year elections, there’s understandably some excitement among Democrats about a possible “wave” election next year that would dislodge the GOP trifecta that allowed Donald Trump to enact a legislative agenda this year without any minority-party input or support. The obvious benchmark for an anti-Trump wave is the 2018 midterms, which gave Democrats net gains of 41 U.S. House seats and a 17-seat majority in that chamber.

This week, Politico published a granular analysis of the 2026 House landscape that, at first glance, should curb any Democratic enthusiasm. It suggests the 2026 midterms are unlikely to produce anything like the 2018 wave. The landscape of winnable Republican seats is much narrower than in the first Trump midterms, for two basic reasons: (1) two rounds of gerrymandering have reduced the number of competitive districts, and (2) there’s a higher starting point of Democratic House seats. Or as Politico puts it:

Partisan redistricting — even before this year — has allowed both parties to draw mostly safe seats, dropping the number of competitive districts that are likely to flip. And while the battlefield is smaller, Democrats also already own more of it than they did going into 2018. The very reason Democrats........

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