Veteran election forecaster Charlie Cook believes Donald Trump's Republican Party is headed for a “hell of a beating” in the November 2026 midterm elections as voters head to the polls.

Cook has been calling races since Ronald Reagan won reelection in 1984. He founded the Cook Political Report, a fixture of the Washington political scene, and now publishes the Charlie Cook Politics newsletter following his retirement. Speaking on The Daily Blast, the podcast hosted by The New Republic's Greg Sargent, Cook said that in 42 years of forecasting he has never encountered an election quite like this one — and he put his prediction bluntly, foreseeing a Trump-GOP “a—— whupping.” Such an outcome would also fit a long-running pattern in American politics: since World War II, the party holding the White House has lost House seats in nearly every midterm election, with only a handful of exceptions.

Cook laid out his case in last week's newsletter, in a piece titled “A unicorn election in red America.” The decisive bloc this cycle, he argues, is neither swing voters nor independents, but rural Republicans who would normally land in the GOP column.

Those voters, he writes, are fed up with the cost of living and with trade wars that have left farmers hurting. He also points to ICE enforcement, which has produced a shortage of workers, and adds a historically unpopular Iran war to the mix.

Cook puts Trump's standing among Republicans at roughly 80 percent — support he describes as unenthusiastic, and down from 86 percent at the start of the year. Among independents, he writes, Trump is at 25 percent.

In the interview, Cook described recent New York Times/Siena polling as the “gold standard,” noting that it places Democrats ahead in seven important Senate contests, some by substantial margins. Democrats would need a net gain of four seats to win a majority in the 100-member Senate.

Even so, Cook does not expect the midterms to produce a classic blue wave. The generic national ballot, he cautions, can be misleading, because the most hotly contested House districts lean redder than the country at large. Rather than a Democratic surge, he sees a “red undertow.”

Complicating the picture further are unhappy Republicans still weighing whether to stick with the party, stay home, or cross over — voters Cook says are difficult for pollsters to get a read on.

Sargent and Cook also discussed whether Democrats have a new opportunity to mend their relationship with small-town and rural America, a constituency the party has struggled with for some time.

“They've got to connect again with people that live in, you know, what people call it flyover country, rural, small-town, whites that go to church regularly; these are groups that Democrats used to do pretty well, and now there's this big opening to reconnect with them right now,” Cook said.

Cook forecasts roughly 230 to 235 House seats for Democrats, a tally that would put the party comfortably clear of the 218 seats needed for a majority in the 435-member House, and expects turnout among Democratic voters to run high — with the opposite holding true on the GOP side. The open question between now and Election Day is how many of those wavering voters act on their frustration, and whether the turnout gap Cook describes materializes at the scale he forecasts.