It may feel early to be talking about next year’s midterm elections, but the battle is well underway. And the stakes are sky high. If President Donald Trump’s Republicans lose either the House or Senate – or both – that will present a major roadblock to his agenda for the rest of his time in office.
Enter Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, who joined 25 reporters at a Monitor Breakfast on Wednesday. Her target is tantalizingly close: Make a net gain of just three House seats out of 435, and the Democrats take the majority.
History is on her side. In every midterm election since 2006, the party that controls the White House has lost House seats. In President Trump’s first midterms, in 2018, the Republicans lost a whopping 40 seats.
Why We Wrote This
Since 2006, the party controlling the White House has always lost House seats in the midterms. DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene told a Monitor Breakfast how the “big, ugly bill” will work to Democrats’ advantage.
Mr. Trump knows his House majority is razor thin, and is urging GOP-run states to redraw their congressional districts in a way that could create more Republican seats, as the Monitor’s Cameron Joseph writes.
Democrats call that “cheating” – but say they are ready to do the same for their party. “We’re not going to fight with one arm tied behind our back,” Chair DelBene said, as our breakfast story by Cameron and Story Hinckley reported.
Still, as optimistic as the DCCC chair sounded, netting even just three seats isn’t a gimme. Party elders, like strategist James Carville, have been hand-wringing in public that the Democrats are “leaderless” and “confused.” Polls show low voter confidence in both major parties.
The democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani – quite possibly New York City’s next mayor, running as a Democrat – likely isn’t helping the party’s image nationally. But Ms. DelBene, a moderate who represents a district near Seattle, insists his influence outside New York is limited. Instead, she pounded away at what she called the “big, ugly bill” that Mr. Trump just signed – a.k.a, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” – which funds Republican priorities and is expected to remove millions of people from the health care rolls. The cost of living is the No. 1 issue this cycle, the campaign chair said repeatedly.
Also worth noting: Ms. DelBene is in her second term as DCCC chair, a sign that House Democrats trust her to do the job right. It’s a position with a storied history, a seat once held by the legendary Tip O’Neill before he became speaker. And she’s in a rematch with Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. We hope he’ll come talk to us soon.
