Key races to watch as Democrats forge strong lead in midterms

NEW YORK — With just days to go until Election Day, Democrats are holding onto a surprisingly strong late lead in the midterm fight for Congress as Republicans have been dragged down by President Donald Trump’s historically deep unpopularity.

It’s far too early for Democrats to declare victory before votes are counted, especially with the party’s supporters deeply scarred by previous predictions of slam dunk electoral wins that turned to agonizing heartbreak.

But polls and pundits largely agree the opposition party is heavily favored to retake control of the House of Representatives, a win that would make Brooklyn’s Rep. Hakeem Jeffries the first Black Speaker of the House.

And Democrats are given better-than-even odds of flipping the four or more Republican-held seats they need to win back the Senate, a position that seemed very far-fetched even just a few months ago.

Here’s a look at some of the key races and storylines from the midterms:

Democrats eye deep-red Senate flips

Even as Democrats hoped to forge a midterms blue wave, few gave them a realistic chance of flipping the four GOP-held Senate seats they need to retake control of that chamber.

Only a couple of those races looked winnable on paper, like an open seat in purple North Carolina and toppling Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

The other GOP seats are in reliably red states like Ohio, Alaska, Texas and Iowa, all states Trump won by more than 11% in 2024.

As the campaign has unfolded into a horror show for Trump’s GOP, Democratic candidates have grabbed leads of various sizes in all of those states.

Polls even show a dead heat in Kansas, where voters last elected a Democratic senator in 1936.

Perhaps most unnerving for Republicans is the Democratic edge in Texas, the biggest red state in the nation, where no Democrat has won a statewide race in three decades.

Democratic rising star James Talarico has forged a small but steady lead in polls for months over Republican Ken Paxton, a flawed candidate who is unpopular with the GOP establishment after his bitter primary win over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.

Lawler and Kean in tough fights

With Democrats eyeing the potential pickup of a couple dozen Republican-held congressional seats, it’s no surprise that local GOP Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Rep. Tom Kean Jr., R-N.J., are facing strong challenges.

The pair both represent affluent suburban swing districts that have been mostly trending blue in recent years and turned decisively against Trump in his second term.

Lawler, a gifted campaigner, is still given a decent shot by both sides of holding onto his seat in the northern suburbs and Hudson Valley against Democrat Cait Conley.

He calls himself a moderate who breaks with Trump when he needs, like when he battled to win a bigger SALT tax deduction that benefits homeowners in high-tax suburbs, claims Democrats say are belied by his backing of the president on most key votes.

The outlook is far cloudier for Kean, who fumbled a controversy over his unexplained disappearance last spring, which he later attributed to treatment for depression.

The son of former Gov. Tom Kean is widely considered to be “cooked” as Republican campaign groups abandon his reelection bid and Democrat Rebecca Bennett has forged a strong lead in polls.

Some Republicans thought Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., could be a potential target of their own if Long Island swing voters were to rebel against Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s growing power and influence. But polls say the Long Island lawmaker is not in peril, at least for this election cycle.

What about Mamdani’s progressive allies?

Mayor Mamdani scored a major political coup last summer when his slate of three insurgent progressive congressional candidates swept to victory in Democratic primaries.

Four months later, Brad Lander, a former mayoral candidate and public advocate, is an overwhelming favorite to win his NY-10 district over token Republican opposition, as are Democratic Socialists of America members Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez.

Moderate Democrat Micah Lasher is similarly poised to easily win the race to replace his mentor Rep. Jerry Nadler representing Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The only Republican lawmaker in the NYC delegation, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, is also cruising to reelection in her GOP-leaning Staten Island-based district after a Democratic effort to redraw the district’s lines was struck down by the Supreme Court.

Midterms usually favor the opposition party

The national Democratic edge comes as little surprise to historians and political analysts, who say the party of the sitting president is usually doomed to lose badly in midterms.

Republicans swept to huge midterm wins when President Barack Obama was in the White House, and Democrats scored similar big gains in 2006 President George W. Bush’s second term and in 2018 during Trump’s first stint in power.

Pundits say Trump exacerbated the expected trend by ignoring public anger over mass deportation, the Iran war and his trade war, even doubling down on those policy decisions. He even baited swing voters by repeatedly insisting they should “pretend I’m on the ballot.”

He held a rare midterms convention and insisted on playing the starring role. Even allies later admitted Republican poll numbers tanked.

“Trump may have fundamentally changed the Republican Party without necessarily creating a durable Republican majority,” said Basil Smikle, a Columbia University professor and Democratic strategist. “He brought new working-class voters into the coalition … but now voters are confronting the economic consequences of tariffs, war, and some of his immigration policies.”

Latino voters, a key bloc in his winning 2024 coalition, have turned away from Trump in the face of his mass deportation campaign.

Worst of all for Republicans, Trump has eagerly taken center stage in the midterms limelight, leading many pundits to conclude he has dragged down fellow Republicans, even in normally deep-red states and congressional districts.

Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political analyst, bluntly said: “Never has a president so over-read his mandate.”

“Prices are higher than ever, people can’t make ends meet, a completely unnecessary war is fast becoming a forever war,” Sabato told the News. “It’s actually amazing that it took Americans so long to figure out they were being conned.”

What about Trump’s redistricting gambit?

Trump thought he had a magic bullet to thwart Democratic hopes of retaking control of the House.

He ordered Republican state lawmakers in red states to embark on an unprecedented mid-decade campaign to redraw congressional districts in GOP candidates’ favor.

Republicans started by rejiggering Texas maps with the goal of picking up five seats. Other states followed suit, including North Carolina (one seat), Ohio (two seats) and Florida (four seats).

Meanwhile, the conservative Supreme Court severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, giving a green light to Republicans in the Deep South to redraw lines in their states that would eliminate seats designed to boost Black Democrats. That set up potential gains of seats in Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee.

Democrats fought back, notably in California, where voters approved a plan to effectively flip five GOP seats. A similar effort in Virginia failed when the state’s highest court struck it down on a technicality.

After the partisan dust settled, the potential gains for Republicans look decidedly underwhelming, falling far short of what the GOP would need to hold the House.

Several of the seats gerrymandered by the GOP look set to reelect incumbent Democrats regardless of the new maps, especially the three in South Texas where Latino voters have turned strongly against Trump.

Reading early vote tea leaves

With Election Day looming on Tuesday, tens of millions of Americans have already cast early votes, either by mail or in person.

Many nonpartisan analysts say there are some signs that Democrats are turning out to vote early at much higher rates than Republicans, compared to previous elections.

They say Latino turnout in particular is way up, perhaps a sign of anger over Trump’s aggressive mass deportation campaign.

In Texas, Republican candidates themselves have sounded the alarm that the turnout has been far higher in the heavily Democratic metro areas of Dallas, Houston and Austin compared to the state’s blood-red exurbs and vast rural hinterland.

But others counter it’s a fool’s errand to make predictions based on early vote comparisons because Democrats have shifted their voting preferences in recent election cycles, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic.

GOP-leaning analysts predict Republican voters will defy the polls and turn out in droves to vote in person on Election Day to keep Trump’s GOP allies in power for two more years.