President Donald Trump’stumbling approval ratingsare raising the odds that the 2026 midterm elections will extend one of the most powerful trends in 21st-century American politics.

The president’s steady decline in popularity has increased the chances that Democrats in November could recapture the House of Representatives, and maybe the Senate too.

If Democrats flip either chamber, it will continue theextraordinary run of volatilitythat has seen control of the House, the Senate or the White House change hands between the parties in 11 of the 13 elections since 2000. By contrast, control of either congressional chamber or the White House flipped in just five of the final 13 elections of the 20th century and only seven of the last 20 stretching back to 1960.

Each time voters recoil against the party in power, political analysts usually focus on the immediate choices made by the president and his party in Congress. But the pattern of rapid reversals has become so entrenched that it appears driven less by tactical decisions than by deeper forces in the economy, society and the electorate that show no sign of abating.

“Five or six years from now, if we are having this conversation, it will probably be 14 out of 16 elections with people voting for change,” said Doug Sosnik, a former White House political adviser for Bill Clinton, who has tracked the trend.

Part of the explanation for this volatility is that whenever they do win power, both parties usually have only managed to scratch out small majorities. These smaller majorities leave them with little cushion for the midterm losses that have always been common for the president’s party.

“The midterm loss phenomenon is not new to the 21st century, but often the party in power absorbed the losses” and preserved its majority, said Brandice Canes-Wrone, a Stanford University political scientist and senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution. Now, she said, “the majorities are so tight” that even small reversals flip control.

A similar dynamic is evident in the White House’s revolving door.Each party has reliably locked down so much of the Electoral Collegethat small shifts in the handful of swing states now decide elections.

But while narrow congressional and Electoral College margins can explain the frequent shifts in power, that raises another question: What explains the narrow margins?

In their book “Identity Crisis,” UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck and co-authors John Sides and Michael Tesler, argued that the 2016 election culminated a long-term shift in the basic conflict between the parties from economic to cultural issues. Around polarizing questions including on immigration, racial diversity and LGBTQ rights, they wrote, Trump tilted the axis of political debate “to competing visions of American identity and inclusiveness.”

Source: Drudge Report