The 2026 U.S. midterm election is among the most contentious elections ever without a candidate running for president. This year voters will determine the balance of power in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, potentially reshaping the nation’s political landscape.
We spoke with UC Davis experts in history and political science about their worries and hopes for the 2026 midterm elections. Many shared a mutual concern that election results will be contested by either or both political parties. However, they also shared hopes that this election, whatever the results, would lead to a stronger nation and democracy.
James Adams, Distinguished Professor of Political Science
I worry nationally that the elections will be contested. President Trump has been pushing this narrative of election fraud for almost as long as he's been in politics and our country is so divided already. People are so suspicious of each other and angry with each other and fearful of each other that I think anything that adds to this would be deeply undesirable.
I very much hope that candidates for office of either party who promote civility and respect for their opponents are rewarded at the ballot box. I study political anger in the mass public or what we political scientists call “affective polarization,” and it's my belief that a lot of the anger that we see now in America is very intense and stoked by politicians who demonize their opponents.
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and what we've seen in recent election cycles is a lot of politicians who imitate Donald Trump’s style, which can politely be described as combative, figure that it works for him so it can work for them too. I strongly feel that the American people need to stop rewarding them for doing that.
Amber Boydstun, Professor of Political Science
My greatest worry is that, regardless of the outcome, fewer and fewer people will trust the election process. There's been a flood of mis- and dis-information in the news about flaws in the election process, and I worry that if people see an outcome they weren't hoping for or expecting that they will be more likely than those in previous generations to assume there was something fishy about how the votes were collected or counted.
In truth we have an incredibly secure election process. Our election process is so decentralized. We don't vote at a federal level; we vote in lots of little libraries and scout camps and sometimes people's homes all around the country. It's a very well-organized but very decentralized system, and the collusion that it would take to actually rig something like a Senate vote is beyond imagination.
My greatest hope is that that the current cohort of college students votes in unprecedented numbers, however they vote, and blow people away and fuel the scholarship of people trying to figure out why they voted in such high numbers for years to come.
That is not how it has gone historically for young voters. They come in ebbs and flows. Right after the Parkland shooting in 2018 and for the next couple of elections, younger people voted in unusually large numbers, suggesting that there's maybe some kind of mobilization around core issues.
One of the things that is interesting about this generation is that young voters today are less likely to say that they are interested in politics, but they are interested in issues. They care about the issues even if they don't think that they care about politics. So the big question is whether there are key issues, like the cost of gas and the cost of groceries, that will mobilize them to turn out.
Gregory Downs, Professor of History
My biggest worry is about the continuing attack upon the idea of the reliability of election returns and the attack upon the general professionalism of the elections systems in the country in an effort to turn election returns and accounting into a source of partisan gamesmanship.
If we reach a point where either party has seen that delegitimizing outcomes works, then we are going to end up in a scenario where all parties delegitimize all outcomes. That really eliminates the capacity for or reduces the likelihood of peaceful institutional change.
One thing the Constitution does to protect against this possibility, which has been a source of frustration for various people at various times, is that it leaves almost the entirety of work on elections to the states. An interesting part of the current dynamic is that we see claims of federal authority over elections that are far in excess of what the Constitution supports and are also beyond the wildest dreams of people who hope to build some federal power to regulate elections for other reasons.
The Constitution establishes that Congress, not the executive branch, has significant authority over congressional elections, so most efforts to regulate voting rights have focused on congressional elections as places of intervention. The constitution is resiliently federalist in terms of delegating large chunks of authority to states and localities, and in this case it reminds us of why that can be a bulwark of defense against tyranny.
I hope that we get a restoration of Congress' quite expansive powers, not only to be a check upon the executive branch but actually to be the driver of policy in a way that Congress seems to have abandoned. We have seen generally in American history that an overreach by one party leads to an empowering of the other party to be a check.
I hope that what emerges is a self-conscious sense in Congress that despite whatever partisan and ideological disagreements exist, our system depends upon congressional assertions of its rights and responsibilities and not on deferring to every claim of executive power.
In almost every election cycle, it’s an extremely normal part of American politics that if a party wins the White House and both houses of Congress in one election that they lose at least one and sometimes both houses of Congress in the midterm election.
Erik Engstrom, Professor of Political Science
I worry that this presidential administration will question the validity of the election results, as happened in 2020. Political science research has found no evidence of significant fraud in contemporary U.S. elections. Thus, I worry about the public’s longer-term faith in the electoral system when elite actors cast doubt on the results.
My biggest hope is that there's a normal election and that the results are accepted by all. Electoral politics is certainly not perfect and can be messy. But democratic countries derive a large number of benefits from regularized, partisan competition and peaceful transfers of power.
Benjamin Highton, Professor of Political Science
I hope that control of the U.S. House and Senate are decided by sufficiently decisive margins that concerns about ballot counting, election administration and the like don't enter into one's ability to discern the winner and the loser with confidence. In the 2000 presidential election, there was the issue about the proper counting of ballots in Florida that ultimately ended up at the Supreme Court, and there was not a clear consensus on the court, let alone a clear understanding about what the right outcome should have been.
Concerns that some had about the 2016 presidential election when the popular vote winner was not the electoral vote winner are less bothersome to me because the rules are very clear about that. Yes, Clinton won the national popular vote, and yes Trump won the electoral vote, which is why he was elected president.
What worries me is another scenario like 2000. Is there going to be an election in Michigan or Maine or Alaska that's so close that allegations about improper vote counting, fraud, or other kinds of irregularities will affect the perceived and actual legitimacy of the results?
My hope is for legitimacy, and my fear is turmoil. Close elections can pose threats. Decisive outcomes are the best protection, though not a guarantee as we saw in 2020. So, if the outcomes of specific elections are sufficiently decisive, then which party legitimately controls the House and the Senate will be beyond dispute, at least for what a reasonable person would hope.