With Slim Margins and Big Questions, Democrats Hunt for a Midterm Strategy

This column was reported for Political Breakdown, a bi-monthly newsletter offering analysis and context on Bay Area and California political news. Click here to subscribe.

It’s 543 days until the 2026 midterm elections, the Democrats’ first big chance to claw themselves out of the political wilderness. It’s pretty unlikely they can win control of the U.S. Senate, though not entirely impossible. But party leaders seem to feel surprisingly good about their chances in the House, where Republicans enjoy a slim majority.

So what are Democrats doing to get the speaker’s gavel back? The Political Breakdown team swapped San Francisco fog for D.C. humidity to find out.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing among Democrats about the best way to regain voter support and rebuild their party brand after last year’s trifecta loss. Is it a messaging problem? A policy problem? Did the party go too far left? Does it need a dose of economic populism? Are prominent Democrats too old? Too out of touch? Will the priorities of younger leaders alienate more centrist voters?

After several days in D.C., we can report there’s zero consensus on the answers to those questions — and plenty of Democrats who’d rather not weigh in. However, Democrats of all stripes can agree on one thing: While President Donald Trump may not be on the ballot in 2026, his agenda — and Republican support for it — will be.

“This is a midterm election. … There isn’t a top of the ticket. This is going to be very focused on really a referendum on what Republicans have done,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene of Washington state, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC.

The DCCC is targeting 35 Republican-held seats while defending 26 battleground seats currently held by Democrats. Five of them are in California, a place, DelBene notes, where Democrats flipped seats in 2024 despite Trump’s overall gains compared to 2020.

Across the nation, 14 House Democrats won in districts that Trump carried in the last cycle. That fact — along with Democratic gains in recent elections, such as two Florida House races in deep-red districts where Democrats nearly halved GOP margins despite losing — makes DelBene optimistic.

“Every day, the American people are feeling the impacts of the policies of this administration, the lack of action from Congressional Republicans and they want change,” she added. “I think we do our job of making sure we have great candidates running in districts across the country, we will take back the majority in the House.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is similarly bullish.

“We fully intend to have control of the House in about a year and a half,” she said.

Pelosi said Trump’s dismal approval ratings across the U.S. and in California give Democrats a path to pressure their House colleagues before the midterms. A UC Berkeley poll released this week shows him underwater, with just 30% of Golden State voters approving of his performance so far.

“They should stop voting with him on these ridiculous bills,” Pelosi said. “Because they’re gonna lose their seats if they stick with him, and I think they know that.”

Democrats have a branding problem of their own, though: While Trump is unpopular, polls show the Democratic party’s reputation struggling even more than the controversial president. For example, a CNN poll found that more voters still think Trump’s doing a better job than former Vice President Kamala Harris would be doing if she were in the White House.

Rep. Pete Aguilar, a Democrat representing portions of California’s Inland Empire, said it’s not really an apt comparison.

“I understand the desire to try to compare him to our Democratic candidate and our friend Kamala Harris from six months ago,” said Aguilar, who chairs the House Democratic caucus. “The most important metric, though, is do people trust Donald Trump to deliver on these issues more or less than they did six months ago and in just about every category, from the economy to tariffs to immigration, that answer is no.”

Aguilar said Democrats need to hone a message based on what they support — not just what they oppose — and acknowledged his party isn’t always as good as their opponents at communicating.

“Democrats often like to talk in paragraphs rather than bumper stickers. Our Republican colleagues believe in very simple things,” he said. “Oftentimes, their answer is just ‘no’ and they don’t wanna help people. We lead from a position of wanting to help our communities. And sometimes that means explaining ourselves.”.

Besides campaigning against Trump and his agenda, Aguilar said Democrats are “running on creating good-paying jobs with healthy benefits, having safe streets, safe communities, clean air, clean water.”

It will be more than a year before we know if the plan works.