President Donald Trump has faced widespread accusations of planning to rig the 2026 midterm elections, and according to a prominent polling analyst, his declining approval ratings may represent the most favorable path to avoiding the loss of one or both chambers of Congress. Midterm elections have historically posed challenges for the party occupying the White House, with the president's party losing House seats in nearly every midterm cycle over the past century.

"2 ALL-TIME lows in Trump job approval over both terms today," polling expert Larry Sabato wrote on X on Wednesday. "CNN has it at 34 [percent]. QUINNIPIAC has it at 32 [percent]."

Sabato, who has a long-standing reputation as an objective polling analyst, recently laid out the 2026 electoral landscape through his website, Sabato's Crystal Ball. He rates 213 House seats as safe, likely, or leaning Republican, while 201 seats are rated safe, likely, or leaning Democratic. That leaves 15 seats classified as "toss-ups" — races that could break for either party — giving both sides an extremely narrow margin to claim the House of Representatives in November 2026. With 218 seats needed for a majority, Democrats would need to win nearly every toss-up district to take control.

His analysis of Senate control was similarly measured. Democrats would need to hold all 47 of their current seats and flip four Republican-held ones to reach the 51 required for an outright majority — a steep climb given that the Senate map offers few obvious pickup opportunities in a single cycle. That task would require pickups in some combination of Maine, Alaska, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, and other contested states.

Democrats may also benefit from Trump's unpopularity. In an exclusive interview with AlterNet ahead of the Fourth of July, Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball, cited Trump's handling of America's 250th anniversary celebration as a telling example. Unlike President Gerald Ford — the Republican who occupied the White House during the nation's 1976 bicentennial — Trump made the event explicitly partisan, Kondik noted, thereby squandering an opportunity to harness patriotic goodwill.

"It is to some degree an apples to oranges comparison, because Ford was on the ballot and Trump is not, and the country was also a lot different," Kondik told AlterNet. "But I do think in the midst of a trying decade, Ford's positive messaging helped cut through the negativity and capitalized on good feelings about the bicentennial. But there were many other reasons Ford came back, including uncertainty about whether Carter was up to the task of being president."

Elaborating on how this represented a missed opportunity for Trump, Kondik argued: "If Trump is as weak as he is now or weaker at the time of the election, and Republicans have a poor showing (losing the House and losing the Senate or at least losing one or more races in red states), it'll be easy to point to Trump's standing as a driving force in those results."

He continued: "If that does happen, there will have been many missed opportunities for Trump, and perhaps how he handled the Fourth would be one of those (although in all likelihood other things would have been more important, like the decision to attack Iran and the subsequent impact on gas prices along with a general inability to address the big 'affordability' questions driving the election)."