Democrats are quietly building momentum in the 2025 election cycle, notching two key legislative flips in special elections and gaining ground in early polling ahead of the 2026 midterms. While the victories are modest in number, they signal a potential shift in voter sentiment — and a brewing backlash against Republican-led redistricting efforts.
Out of 40 special elections held across the United States so far in 2025, only two seats have changed party control — both flipping from Republican to Democrat.
In Iowa Senate District 35, Democrat Mike Zimmer, president of the Central DeWitt School Board, defeated Republican Katie Whittington with 52% of the vote, flipping a district that Donald Trump carried by 21 points in 2024.
In Pennsylvania Senate District 36, Democrat James Andrew Malone, mayor of East Petersburg, narrowly edged out Republican County Commissioner Josh Parsons by less than 1%, marking the first time Lancaster County has sent a Democrat to the state Senate since 1879.
These wins, though numerically modest, signal potential voter backlash against GOP-led policies and redistricting efforts.
According to Bolts, August is the busiest month for competitive specials, with four districts in play where the 2024 presidential margin was within 15 points.
Viet Shelton, spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told Newsweek, “Democrats are confident they will re-take the majority powered by an aggressive message focused on fighting for lowering prices and holding Republicans and Trump accountable for their record of broken promises”.
In a rare mid-decade redistricting push, Texas Republicans are attempting to redraw the state’s congressional map to add five new GOP-leaning seats — a move widely criticized as a partisan power grab. The proposed map, approved by the Texas Senate on August 12, would significantly dilute the voting power of Black and Latino communities, with districts like Rep. Al Green’s in Houston seeing the Black voting-age population drop from 39% to just 11%.
“This mid-decade redistricting isn’t about fair representation—it’s about politicians picking their voters instead of voters choosing their leaders,” said the Senate Democratic Caucus in a statement. The controversy has sparked a national redistricting arms race, with states like California and Florida signaling plans to redraw their own maps in response.
California Governor Gavin Newsom vowed to retaliate, telling MSN, “If Texas wants to rig the maps, California will make sure they pay a price. They want to steal five seats? We’ll match and secure more — and turn the tables on their entire strategy”.
This tit-for-tat redistricting war could reshape the congressional map before 2026, with both parties seeking to maximize safe seats. But the strategy risks alienating swing voters and escalating legal battles over gerrymandering and minority representation.
Recent national polls show Democrats leading Republicans on the generic congressional ballot. A CNBC survey conducted in early August found Democrats ahead by 5 points — 49% to 44% — while a YouGov/Economist poll showed a 6-point lead.
“Democrats are outperforming where the average out-party has been at this point in the cycle over the last five midterms. If the election were held today, they’d be favored to win the House," wrote G. Elliott Morris, Strength In Numbers.
Still, analysts caution that midterms are historically unfavorable to the party in the White House. With President Trump’s approval ratings slipping, Democrats hope to replicate the 2018 “blue wave” — but redistricting could blunt their gains.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.