All the polls show a Republican bloodbath in the Midterms. So why aren’t Democrats celebrating?

If Republicans feared they would lose the House and Senate, this week showed a tidal wave of polls that makes them think no lifeboat could save them.

In Texas, an Emerson College poll showed Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico beating Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton — strongly endorsed and stumped-for by President Donald Trump — by one point after the same poll in August showed a slight lead for Paxton. Last week, polls showed that Josh Turek, the Paralympian Democratic nominee for Senate in Iowa, is beating Trump-endorsed Rep. Ashley Hinson.

On Friday, Republicans got hit with a nuclear bomb when another Emerson College poll showed Democratic nominee Adam Hamilton beating Sen. Roger Marshall by two points in ruby-red Kansas of all places. Even Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed in a survey that former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown has a slight lead in Ohio against incumbent Sen. Jon Husted.

The generic ballot, which asks if a voter will pick a non-descript Democrat or Republican for Congress, shows a Democratic advantage anywhere from 7 points in the latest Fox News survey to 12 points in an Economist/YouGov poll.

Make no mistake. These are extinction-level numbers for Republicans — and they seem to know.

Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Cuban-American Republican from Miami, cut an ad warning “some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far” — after staunchly supporting Trump up till now. Trump made history in 2024 when he became the first Republican president to win Miami-Dade County since George H.W. Bush in 1988, largely thanks to the county’s heavy Cuban-American population, which leans conservative.

That’s why Cuban-Americans breaking from Trump is a five-alarm fire for Republicans.

Vice President JD Vance, the presumptive heir to the Republican nomination for president in 2028, has offered the hollow ask of, “Give us another chance, or give us another couple of years.”

And polling shows that Trump’s pledge to give every American a $5,000 check — but only if Republicans maintain their control of the House and Senate, which many have called a “bribe” — has not helped. Bribe concerns aside, an Economist/YouGov poll showed that 61 percent of voters don’t think Trump will deliver on the pledge.

When Americans either say no or brush off free money, things are shaping up in a bad way.

But Democrats are not popping bottles just yet. And rightly so. They have too much trauma from past elections, where polls showed them in cruise control — or at least ahead — coming into Election Day.

In 2018, during Trump’s first term, it looked like they would be bound for a blue wave, but it barely materialized and Republicans actually gained Senate seats. Polling has also had major misses in recent years. In 2020, Joe Biden looked like he would win by a landslide, but he only narrowly won, Democrats lost seats in the House and only got a 50-seat majority.

Democrats also have a significant cash disadvantage. While individual candidates like Talarico, Brown and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff have raised massive amounts of money, Republican committees out-raise Democratic ones. The Republican National Committee raised $19 million in July, the most recent numbers available show. The Democratic National Committee by contrast raised $9.2 million that same month.

Trump has also finally opened his MAGA Inc. super PAC to prop up Republican incumbents. Elon Musk’s America PAC has also done the same.

Republicans are also deploying the same attack that they used in 2024: saying Democrats support transgender athletes in women’s sports and allowing minors to receive health care to transition.

But there are some significant differences this time. On transgender policy, Brown is running ads saying gender-affirming care for minors is already outlawed and Husted should answer for raising costs. In Iowa, Lindsay James, who is running in the second district, is running an ad saying “parents know what’s best for our kids. Washington needs to stay out of it.”

In the same token turnout in Democratic primaries has been significantly higher than Republican turnout. And since Trump has largely remade the Republican Party into the party of non-college-educated voters, they do not turn out in midterms the way they do in presidential elections, which has worried Trump.

Lastly, there seems to be no sign that the war in Iran will come to an end any time soon. And even if it does, it’s unlikely voters will feel relief at the gas pump or at the grocery store in enough time.

Still, Democrats understand more than ever that even when they look like they have all the cards, they can still fold. So they are proceeding caution, trying to contain their glee, but also knowing election night could upend their plans.