With the rising cost of living front and centre in the minds of many American voters, Republicans could stand to lose control of the U.S. Congress during midterm elections on Tuesday. “The expectation here is that Democrats are going to have an extraordinarily great night and sweep both chambers of Congress,” David Wasserman, an elections analyst with The Cook Political Report, told CTV’s Your Morning on Tuesday. “This is an affordability election, and voters who hired [U.S. President Donald Trump] to usher in an economic golden age are feeling let down.” Americans go to the polls on Tuesday for midterm elections that include contests for all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate. Republicans currently hold majorities in both chambers of Congress. While Wasserman expects a clear majority for the Democrats in the lower house, he anticipates a tighter Senate battle that will hinge on whether Democrats can flip historically red states like Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, Texas and Kansas. “Democrats have multiple paths to the Senate majority,” Wasserman said from Philadelphia. “Right now, they’re at 47 Senate seats and they need to get to 51. They’re almost guaranteed to pick up North Carolina, where Republicans have stopped spending, and three more of those toss-up races would put them in the majority.” Wasserman says Trump and the Republicans have been hemorrhaging support amongst key groups like independents, blue-collar workers and Hispanic voters. “The president’s coalition has disintegrated,” Wasserman said. “And Republican candidates are having to walk a tightrope between trying to motivate Trump’s hardcore more MAGA supporters to the polls, but also appealing to enough independents, who disapprove of the job the president’s doing, in order to get to 50 per cent. That’s extraordinarily difficult to do.” If Republicans are handed a defeat in the midterms, Wasserman also expects courts to sideline any attempt by Trump to question the validity of the election results. “The president has been casting doubt on the election system for many years since 2020, so this is not new,” Wasserman said. “There are possibilities after the election of how he could try and interfere and pressure Republicans to block certification or send federal agents to monitor vote counts. However, the courts here have routinely rejected President Trump’s challenges to elections.”
