Analysts heavily favor House Democrats; retaking the Senate remains possible
Two years after the 2024 election, support among young men who voted for President Trump has eroded, according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump was ushered into a second term in office in part by winning over young men, a majority of whom supported him. The paper reported that the backing had weakened since then.
The Wall Street Journal’s latest project revisits that group directly. Last year, the paper brought together men under 30 who had all voted for Trump and asked them to grade his first six months in office. Just before the 2026 midterm elections, it invited them back to provide their perspectives.
National political reporter Eliza Collins wrote the report. She described the video as the second in a Wall Street Journal series that brings together groups of voters from across the country to hear their perspectives. Another installment featured a group of Democratic voters debating the future of their party.
According to analysts, Democrats are heavily favored to win the House and have a chance at retaking the Senate. Republicans headed into the November elections facing low approval ratings for Trump among young men and other parts of his 2024 coalition.
The report places those reassessments within the broader struggle over Trump’s 2024 coalition. The returning voters offer a focused view of the change: the project follows men who had already given Trump grades and asks how they assess him shortly before the midterms. The direction The Wall Street Journal reported was an erosion of support among the young men who backed him in 2024.
The timing puts the project just before the November elections. According to analysts, Democrats are heavily favored to win the House and have a chance to retake the Senate. Republicans face that test with low approval for Trump among young men and other parts of the coalition that helped return him to office.
For Republicans, the report identifies erosion among young men as one part of the broader approval challenge. For Democrats, the analysts’ House and Senate assessments leave both chambers within reach, with the House heavily favored and the Senate more uncertain.
Eliza Collins is a national political reporter for The Wall Street Journal based in Phoenix. Her coverage includes the politics of Arizona and western states, and she travels the country looking at how politics in Washington affect people in the real world. She has been with the Journal since 2019. Before joining, she worked as a political reporter for USA Today and Politico. She was previously based in Washington D.C., where she covered Congress and campaigns. In 2022, she reported from Germany as an Arthur Burns Fellow, with coverage focused on the effects of the war in Ukraine on Europe.
Denise Blostein is a senior video journalist on The Wall Street Journal’s enterprise video team, where she produces video investigations, original video stories and documentaries. Since joining the Journal in 2012, she has produced explainers, short documentaries and visual investigations on subjects including the art world, pro-Democracy protests in Hong Kong and the meltdown of the global supply chain during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Blostein produced the Journal’s documentary Shadow Men, which traces the evolution and global expansion of the Russian private military company of the Wagner Group. The documentary was a 2024 duPont-Columbia Award finalist and Peabody nominee. She was part of an Emmy-nominated team for a series that revealed how Amazon failed to protect consumers from unsafe products and sourced merchandise from banned factories in Bangladesh. The team was a 2020 Pulitzer Prize investigative reporting finalist on the same topic.