The party in power in Washington typically loses about 20 to 30 House seats in a midterm election, so the GOP is climbing up hill to hold the House majority.
But CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten says Democrats are not performing as well in polls as they did in the last two elections when a Republican President was in office. While Democrats only need three more seats for a House majority, prediction markets still give the GOP a 22% chance of keeping control and still favor the GOP holding the Senate.
Democrats are up by five percentage points in generic congressional polling from NBC News, but at the same point of the 2006 midterms, Democrats were ahead by 11 points in polling, and in 2018, they were ahead 10 points.

“So this is not just one poll in which we are seeing this,” Enten reports. In three separate polls shared by Enten, Democrats haven’t increased their support from January and February compared to the most recent surveys. The NBC poll showed them losing 1% of support, Marquette Law School showed them losing 3%, and the Ipsos poll had them even.

