Republicans will lose the House of Representatives

That’s Why Congress passed the Big Beautiful Bill

It is simply a question of cause and effect: Republican on Capitol Hill pass the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB), and they lose control of the House of Representatives. But the causal connection is opposite the one generally understood. BBB passed because President Donald Trump and his Republican colleagues anticipate losing the lower chamber next year.

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“This vote will cost many, many voters,” declares the chair of the Democratic national committee. The New York Times tells us that sentiment is widespread: “Outrage over the bill has become a rallying cry for Democrats to win back the House and Senate in next year’s midterm elections.” Meanwhile, conservatives themselves are expressing alarm: Democrats think they can ride the Medicaid scare into a mid-term victory, worry the editors at the Wall Street Journal, “but there’s still time for the GOP to lay out the facts.” A retiring Republican member congressman from Nebraska told a Boston Globe reporter he feared “the other side is going to use Medicaid as an issue” so “I think that [Medicaid cuts] was a mistake.”

Yes, House Republicans will lose. To do otherwise would flout a fundamental law of American politics. Over the decades since the Civil War began, the president’s party has slid backwards 38 times in off-cycle elections to the House of Representatives. That law has been broken on just three occasions:

      1934: Franklin D. Roosevelt successfully blamed Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression.

      1998: Bill Clinton gained seats (but not control) after House Republicans impeached him.

      2002: George Bush added supporters after terrorists attacked the twin towers in New York City.

On three other occasions since the Civil War presidents lost votes but retained control of the House after a mid-term election. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter all survived a drop of a few seats in the lower chamber. Trump does not have that luxury. A three-seat switch turns the gavel of the Speaker of the House over to Democrat Hakeem Jeffries.

When all mid-term elections are considered together, the party of the president loses 27 House seats, on average. Multiple explanations have been conjured up to explain this regularity: 1) losers rise up in anger; 2) winners rest on their laurels; 3) presidential coattails are missing; 4) the party in office over-reaches; 5) voters like checks on presidential power.

All five are plausible explanations, but the one thing known with certainty is that voter turnout is lower when the presidency is not at stake. The number of mid-term ballots lags the number in presidential years by around 20 percentage points. In 2022, voters constituted 46 percent of the electorate, as compared to 66 percent just two years previously.

If everything breaks his way, Trump could join the exclusive group of presidents who kept a House majority in the second half of their term. The stock market is currently on the rise, suggesting the economy in 2026 will be favorable to the incumbent. On the foreign policy front, the Russian-Ukrainian war could come to a halt, and the key players in the Middle East could suddenly turn quiescent. Democrats could commit political suicide by nominating congressional candidates to the left of their progressive nominee for mayor of New York City.

All that could happen, but the right combination of these eventualities is about as likely in 2026 as arrival at the racetrack next year of a horse as fast as Secretariat lucky enough to win the Triple Crown.

Once political fantasy is put to the side, it becomes clear Trump urged his followers on Capitol Hill to pass BBB because nothing like it can again be accomplished during his second term. In 2026, Republican representatives will be too frightened by the looming election to take bold action. After those elections, no bill will pass Congress unless Democrats lend it their support. Realistically, it was BBB in the summer of 2025 or not at all.

The electoral situation in the Senate is altogether different. The president’s party can lose no more than three seats, but, currently, all 22 Republican-held spots appear safe, save for Susan Collin’s in Maine, an open seat in North Dakota, and, perhaps, the difficult-to-predict race in Alaska. Offsetting these potential gains are races in Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, purplish states that could drift red. Democrats could pull a dramatic surprise, as the New York Times seems to think plausible, but cards would have to fall exactly into place. In that unlikely event, the causes will be Republican disasters far beyond anything BBB by itself can produce.

In short, the widely anticipated, upcoming Republican defeat in the House of Representatives ensured BBB passage. Those who sacrificed their electability, or their conscience, will be rewarded, if not in heaven, at least by grateful party leaders.

Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University.