Four Off-Year Insights From Democrats and Republicans

The 2026 midterm elections may be more than a year and a half away, but the off-year outlook for both parties is quickly coming into view.

Republicans, five months removed from President Donald Trump’s election victory, are facing new fundraising challenges, as well as the typical political headwinds that come with control of the White House and Congress. Democrats, meanwhile, are scrambling to rebuild their brand as quickly as possible.

Here are four insights from strategists and operatives on the current outlook for both parties:

Republicans are Facing Some Fundraising Challenges

For the first time in a decade, downballot Republican candidates won’t have to compete with Donald Trump’s political operation for donations. On the flip side, it’ll be harder to fundraise off his coattails. 

Mike Hahn, the president of digital strategy and operations at Frontline Strategies, said that his firm conducted a study after the 2024 elections and found that about a quarter of donations that came into Frontline were from Trump-related entities.

“That’s going to be a huge vacuum that down-ballot candidates are going to have to fill,” Hahn said during a panel discussion at the Reed Awards in Austin, Texas last month.

What’s more, Trump is now the sitting president and Republicans control both chambers of Congress, depriving Republicans of the opportunity to fundraise on conservative outrage with Democratic rule.

Daria Grastara, the CEO of Direct Persuasion, said that Republicans cleaned up among small-dollar donors during former President Joe Biden’s time in the White House. Simply put, she said, “we don’t have that this time around.”

But There are Also Bright Spots for the GOP

Republicans are hoping that they can still convince grassroots donors to give to down-ballot candidates on the promise of fulfilling Trump’s agenda. In other words, Hahn said, “if President Trump doesn’t have a Republican House or a Republican Senate, then that’s kind of effectively the end of the Trump era.”

Aaron Evans, the president of Winning Republican Strategies, said that it’ll be up to the candidates and campaigns to remind donors that Trump’s win last November can’t be treated as the end-all-be-all victory for the GOP. 

“If we settle in on being the winners and let that be our message, I think we’re going to struggle with fundraising and we’re probably going to lose some races in the midterms,” Evans said at the Reed Awards. “We can’t look at last November as the victory. We have to look at that as Step One.”

There’s also another tool in the GOP’s arsenal: billionaire funders, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who have come off the sidelines for Republicans in recent years.

“President Trump’s not sucking up the energy in the room with small-dollar donations, but we have a whole new billionaire class that is funding and having a seat at the table with elections,” Grastara said.

Democrats are Starting From Scratch

Former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss in 2024 devastated Democrats across the board and forced them to grapple with what went wrong and what the party can do to fix it. 

So far, there’s no universal agreement on the answers to those questions. But one thing is clear, according to Democratic consultants and operatives: the party needs to go back to square one.

“I think we have a lot of opportunity to build from where we are, but it is going to require us to recognize some hard truths; to talk about the fact that the house is on fire and not have deep conversations about what wallpaper to pick for the guest bathroom,” said Sarah Flowers, a partner at the Democratic media and general consulting firm 76 Words.

The to-do list is long for Democrats. Strategists said that the party needs to rethink everything from its basic messaging tactics to its tech infrastructure. MaryEllen Veliz, the head of political for the programmatic advertising firm DSPolitical, said that prospect of starting anew should be exciting for Democrats.

“We have the opportunity to win races…at the local level, where we can bubble wrap our communities and say: things may not be good at the top, but we will make sure that we can address the concerns right here at home,” Veliz said during a panel discussion at the Reed Awards. “And we have the opportunity right now to craft a new narrative on how we talk to the American people.”

2024 Wasn’t All Bad for Democrats

Democrats and progressives said that the 2024 cycle shouldn’t just be seen as a lesson in what Democrats did wrong. Across the country, voters approved state-level measures protecting abortion rights and raising minimum wages for workers.

James Herrmann, the campaigns director at the Empower Project, said that the success of such measures in red states like Missouri proves that “progressive policies are popular” and should be treated as a roadmap for winning future elections.

“We just need to find a way to make that connection for voters that we are the champions of those policies and that we are the people that they can trust to protect and fight for those rights, because Democratic policies are popular,” Herrmann said at the Reed Awards last month.