Speaking during an interesting CNN segment on Wednesday, October 15, CNN’s leading data analyst, Harry Enten, painted an exceedingly bleak picture of what the 2026 midterms are increasingly starting to look like for the Democrats, noting that their chances of winning the majority in the House of Representatives have fallen dramatically.
Such is what he told Kate Bolduan when she asked him about tracking the apparent odds of Democratic victory in the House on Kalashi, the betting platform, and he noted that they have fallen precipitiously in recent months. He began. “So, you know, if you go back six months ago, you go back to April . . . we were looking at the Democrats with a very clear shot of taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives according to the Kalshi Prediction Market Odds. We saw them at an 83% chance.”
Continuing, he noted that the GOP is steadily rising as Democrats keep crashing harder and harder, saying, “But those odds have gone plummeting down. Now we’re talking about just a 63% chance, while the GOP’s chances up like a rocket, up like gold, up from 17% to now a 37% chance. So, it will look like a pretty clear Democratic — likely Democratic win in the House come next year has become much closer to a toss-up at this point, although still slightly leaning Democratic.”
Then, when asked why things have changed so dramatically, he explained “OK, what has changed? Well, why don’t we just take a look at the national picture first, take a look at voters and how they’re feeling about things. And we can take a look at the generic congressional ballot. And I want to take a look and compare it to 2017, 2018, right, because that’s sort of the baseline. That was, of course, the first Trump term. That was where Democrats were sort of keeping pace.”
He continued, noting that the Democrats just aren’t managing to keep pace with their past performance, saying, “You go back to April, look at the generic congressional ballot. What’d you see? You see plus three Democrats in 2025 in April. You see plus three Democrats back in April of 2017. Now, jump over to this side of the screen. What happens? Well, the Democrats are no longer keeping pace with the pace that they were setting back in 2017, 2018.”
Giving an example, the data analyst noted, “You look back in 2017, you saw that the Democrats had leaped up to an eight-point advantage. I remember covering this. I remember a lot of folks, including myself, saying, you know what, Republicans look pretty decent right now in terms of the fact that they had the House, they had the Senate, they had the presidency, but things were likely going to flip. And I was looking for the same signs this year.”
Noting that no such signs of Democrat victory have cropped up so far, he said, “The bottom line is, it hasn’t happened . . . Democrats have stayed basically steady. They have fallen off the pace. Democrats were way out ahead back in 2017 on the generic congressional ballot.”
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Concluding, he noted that the slight polling advantage Democrats currently seem to have likely won’t be anywhere near enough for victory, saying, “And now we’re basically looking at Democrats ahead. But again, they are so far in back of the pace that they set back there. And so, I think what a lot of folks are seeing, folks like myself, are saying, wait a minute, given what we might be seeing in redistricting, is this plus three going to be enough?”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video