Presidential Downballot Losses: An Updated History and a Look Ahead to Trump’s Second Term

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— Since World War II, presidents have consistently presided over losses for their party in downballot offices—in the Senate, the House, governorships, and state legislatures. This is an indication of “thermostatic” public opinion, in which a decisive fraction of the electorate becomes disenchanted with the party in power and punishes them in down-ballot contests.

— President Joe Biden lost ground in the Senate, the House, and in state legislative seats. But unusually among postwar presidents, Biden escaped losses in governorships and state legislative chamber majorities controlled. In addition, Biden’s losses in the other three downballot categories were more modest than the postwar average.

— Biden’s pattern of modest down-ballot losses echoes the record of Donald Trump during his first term—setbacks, but muted ones. One possible reason: Intensifying partisan polarization, which has made voters less likely than in the past to consider voting for the other party, effectively dampening the potential for large downballot pendulum swings against the president’s party.

— Trump hasn’t faced a midterm election in his second term yet, but he has already experienced one gubernatorial flip and many flipped state legislative seats.

Downballot losses come with holding the presidency

One of the iron laws of American politics has been that when a president leaves office, their party holds fewer downballot offices compared to when they came in.

Why does this happen? Simply put, in presidential politics, familiarity tends to breed contempt. Political scientists call this “thermostatic” public opinion. With only a small number of historical exceptions, voters have tended to register their displeasure with the status quo by punishing the president’s party in subsequent elections, even if they reelect the president to a second term.

As I speculated in Governing in 2014, “Presidents try to accomplish things, but not everyone likes what they do. Even if they have support from the majority of voters, it’s always easier for critics—even if they’re in the minority—to block major initiatives than it is for supporters to pass them. Once a president’s agenda has been blocked, their supporters grow disappointed, joining critics in their unhappiness. The president’s overall approval ratings sag, and voters take out their anger on whichever party that controls the White House.”

To measure this phenomenon, Sabato’s Crystal Ball has periodically measured the downballot losses for post-World War II presidents. We published our most recent edition in 2021, when we were able to close the book on Donald Trump’s first term. (At that time, no one knew there would be a second.) We can now do the same for Biden, and also look at where Trump is so far.

As it turns out, Biden and Trump are more similar than might be expected, at least in this one way. Both men presided over losses in downballot offices, as all post-war presidents did—but those losses were relatively muted by historical standards.

Is the whipsaw against the president’s party becoming less harsh? We’ll mull some possible explanations in a moment—but first, let’s look at the numbers.

Biden lost ground in the Senate, in the House, and in state legislative seats. Between his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, and his departure 4 years later in 2025, the Democrats shed 3 Senate seats, 7 House seats, and 93 state legislative seats.

This is a negative pattern—but it’s relatively modest by historical standards.

From the end of World War II to the close of Barack Obama’s term, the average president lost more than 8 Senate seats, almost triple Biden’s loss. (We combined the final term of Franklin Roosevelt and all of Harry Truman’s tenure, as well as the terms of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.)

The average House seat loss was about 36 seats, about 5 times larger than Biden’s. And the average state legislative seat loss was 467 seats, also about 5 times larger than Biden’s decrease.

Meanwhile, Biden pulled off the historically rare trick of escaping losses entirely in two other categories. He saw no change in gubernatorial offices on his watch, and he actually scored a 2-chamber gain in legislative chamber control. Of the postwar presidents, only Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush managed to gain in any of these categories, even as they lost ground in others.

Table 1: Downballot partisan change for postwar presidents’ parties

Notes: We have eliminated tied state legislative chambers from this tally. Nebraska’s unicameral legislature is officially nonpartisan, so we aren’t counting it in either party’s column. For more details on how this table was created, see previous editions of this story.

Sources: U.S. Senate; U.S. House; CQ Press Guide to U.S. Elections, vol. ii, sixth ed.; NCSL; The Book of States, vols. 9-34; Polidata; Party Affiliation in the State Legislatures; Crystal Ball research

Biden became the second consecutive president to experience modest losses during his term.

During his first term, Trump lost 6 governorships, 2 Senate seats, 28 House seats, 189 state legislative seats, and six legislative chambers. These losses are not only below the postwar historical average but are also, along with Biden’s, easily the lowest among the most recent five presidents.

During his second term, Trump hasn’t faced a midterm election yet, but he’s already lost one governorship (in Virginia), and 30 state legislative seats in off-year legislative elections in New Jersey and Virginia as well as special elections in other states.

Visualized in bar chart form (Figure 1), it becomes clear that the losses under Trump’s first term and Biden’s only term have been smaller than those of their recent predecessors.

Figure 1: Downballot change by category under recent presidents

So why were the losses during Trump’s first term and Biden’s only term relatively modest?

One factor may be that both looked at one term rather than two. A one-term president not only has fewer years in office to experience down-ballot losses, but they also avoid the “six-year itch” midterm elections when voters historically register heavy dissatisfaction with the incumbent in the White House, many of whom experience second-term scandals like Nixon’s Watergate and Reagan’s Iran-Contra. Not only do such scandals sour voters on the president’s party, but presidents who are fighting for their own political standing don’t have a lot of political capital to share with those from their party who serve at lower levels.

However, we expect there’s more going on here than just a shorter time period in office.

There is notable evidence that American politics has become less “elastic” in recent election cycles. Americans tend to closely align themselves with one party or the other, and fewer can be convinced to vote for the other party under any circumstances. Ticket-splitting on any level is increasingly rare.

This means that the pendulum swings for and against the parties have become less strong.

In the Senate, presidential partisanship has come to predominate. In the 25 states Trump won three times, Republicans hold all of the Senate seats. Meanwhile, Democrats hold all but one of the Senate seats in the 19 states Trump never won.

And in the House, as the Crystal Ball has noted, the number of districts that voted differently for president and House fell from 86 in 2000 to 16 in 2024.

Such strong partisan alignment up and down the ballot has meant that both parties have relatively little low-hanging fruit to poach from the other party. On the eve of the 2006 election, the Crystal Ball rated more than 60 seats as either Toss-up, Leans Republican, or Leans Democratic. By the eve of the 2024 election, that number had fallen to 42.

A related explanation is that between the 1990s and the early 2010s, the Democrats experienced a wholesale loss of seats in an entire region—the South—that is unlikely to swing back any time soon.

One final comparison between Biden and Trump is that neither saw a huge downballot wave in favor of their parties when initially elected. Despite flipping the White House, both candidates saw their party lose net House seats in their elections, for instance. So both were in some ways starting with smaller holdings, which may have also contributed to smaller losses. The presidential-to-midterm dynamic is sometimes described as a “surge and decline,” but the lack of a big surge likely contributed to a smaller decline (Trump’s second election also did not feature a big downballot surge).

In all, the smaller landscape of genuinely competitive seats has meant that the reaction against the incumbent president has become less swingy than it once was. Maybe the 2026 midterm drag for Trump will be unusually heavy and reverse this trend. Or maybe not. We’ll just have to see.