Veteran election handicapper Charlie Cook says the worst-case scenario he outlined for Republicans this cycle would have sounded absurd to him just six months ago — but he now considers it the most probable outcome of the midterms.
"If I read what I wrote six months ago, I would have thought I'd been on some kind of mushrooms or something," Cook told The New Republic's Greg Sargent. "It just didn't seem possible, didn't seem realistic. But we're seeing what we're seeing."
Cook, who has covered American elections for roughly five decades, laid out three possible scenarios for Republicans in a recent analysis – a "bad" outcome costing the GOP 15 to 25 House seats and two or three Senate seats while retaining the Senate majority, a "really bad" outcome costing them both chambers with 26 to 35 House seats and four or five Senate seats lost, and a "horrible" scenario involving even steeper losses, including six to eight Senate seats.
Cook said the "really bad" scenario, the one costing Republicans both chambers of Congress, is what seems the most likely outcome to him.
"It’s sort of lots of different things coming together in, like, a perfect storm for Republicans," he said, "and, you know, Republican consultant types, they’ve got to be beside themselves — that, you know, they’ve seen disasters, but not like this one."
The forecast comes as President Donald Trump's approval ratings sit at historic lows heading into a midterm election, according to polling averages, with independents in particular souring on his presidency. Cook pointed to state-level surveys from organizations including The New York Times, Fox News and AARP showing Trump running six to 14 points below his 2024 vote share in key battleground states, an average underperformance of about 10 points.
"Midterm election dynamics happen for a reason, and that is, you get two years into a presidency, and people in the president’s party are generally lethargic," Cook said. "They may be satisfied, but obviously sometimes they’re just not terribly motivated. The other side’s on fire, particularly in this era of hyperpartisanship, and the pure independents are really, really fickle, and tend to get buyer’s remorse. So that’s sort of the normal stuff."
Cook argued that traditional midterm dynamics — an energized opposition and a lethargic incumbent party — are being amplified by Trump's specific policy choices, including tariffs, rising fertilizer costs and the strikes on Iran, which he said have uniquely alienated parts of Trump's own base, including rural and small-town voters.
"You look at what Bill Clinton had done prior to ‘94, what George W. Bush had done prior to 2006, what Barack Obama had done prior to 2010 — you could take all that combined and not quite get the level of sort of radioactivity that you see with many of the things that President Trump has done," Cook said.
As a result, Cook said, races in states long considered safely Republican, such as Alaska, Iowa and Texas, are now competitive in ways he has not witnessed in his career. He cautioned, however, that competitiveness does not guarantee Democratic wins, noting many of those races may still fall short of a Democratic majority even as they outperform historical expectations.
"Bases are always hard, but to have the people that are generally the most enthusiastic for you uniquely hurt — now, that’s new territory," Cook said, "and previous presidents have sort of given some degree of license to their members, that if you need to put some distance between us, go ahead – and that’s just not Donald Trump’s MO."
"But President Trump is basically radioactive with independent voters, with pure independents, and because so few of the congressional districts are in competitive places, and so few of the Senate races were in even states that ought to be competitive at all, that seemed likely to limit the potential damage for Republicans," he added.