The party of a sitting U.S. president almost always loses ground during the midterms. Since all 435 U.S. House seats are up every two years, we tend to assess midterms by how each party performs in House races. And dating back to FDR’s second term, the president’s party has lost House seats in 20 of 22 midterm elections.

Whether Donald Trump can break this trend is the crucial question heading into 2026. The current math is not in the GOP’s favor; the party will start the year with no more than a two-seat House majority and Trump’s gerrymandering push is floundering. The stakes are particularly high because Trump won’t be able to enact much of his audacious second-term agenda if Republicans lose their governing trifecta in Washington.

So what are the odds that Republicans can defy history in 2026? Let’s look at the four midterms since 1938 in which the president’s party gained U.S. House seat or lost fewer than eight to see if there’s any hope of Trump’s party repeating these successes.

Perhaps the clearest outlier in midterm history was in 2002, when George W. Bush’s Republicans netted eight new House seats. Bush had won the presidency two years earlier in the closest U.S. presidential race in history (with the arguable exception of the disputed election of 1876). The GOP entered the midterms with a tiny three-seat majority in the House. But Republicans gained eight seats in 2002, and just as astoundingly, won the national House popular vote by 4.8 percent, having won it by 0.5 percent two years earlier.

What happened between 2000 and 2002, of course, was the attack on the United States on September 11, 2002. In the ensuing wave of patriotic, rally-around-the-flag sentiment, Bush’s job approval rating rocketed to 90 percent, and remained high after the invasion of Afghanistan, even though initial plans to extend the “Global War on Terror” into Iraq were not as popular. Democrats were divided on Iraq and other national security-related issues, and those issues dominated the 2002 midterms. Understanding how the GOP........

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