New Pew Research Center polling finds that voters see Democrats as more likely to take control of the House in November, while expectations for the Senate remain almost evenly divided.
Most Americans expect Democrats to win control of the House of Representatives in November, but the public is much less certain about who will control the Senate.
A new Pew Research Center survey found that 55% of U.S. adults expect Democrats to win the House, compared with 40% who believe Republicans will keep their majority. The Senate picture is far tighter: 48% expect Republicans to retain control, while 46% think Democrats will take the chamber.
The survey of 5,062 adults was conducted from Sept. 28 to Oct. 4 and is intended to measure public expectations rather than voting intentions. Pew notes that these kinds of “citizen forecasts” are not meant to turn voters into political analysts, but they can provide a useful measure of how Americans perceive the political environment heading into an election.
Partisans mostly expect their own side to win
The topline numbers mask a familiar divide: most Americans expect their own party to come out ahead.
Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 80% expect Democrats to win the House and 71% expect the party to capture the Senate. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 68% believe the GOP will retain the House and 75% expect Republicans to keep the Senate.
That partisan confidence also shapes expectations for unified control of Congress. Pew found that 41% of adults expect Democrats to control both chambers after the election, while 34% expect Republicans to hold both. Another 14% expect Democrats to win the House while Republicans keep the Senate, and just 5% expect the opposite outcome.
The House appears clearer than the Senate
The more notable finding is the gap between the two chambers.
Public expectations around the House lean clearly toward Democrats, while the Senate remains effectively a toss-up in the minds of voters. That broadly tracks with the current political environment, where House control appears more vulnerable to a national shift while Senate outcomes depend more heavily on a smaller number of state-level contests.
The survey does not predict what will happen in November, and Pew is careful not to present it that way. But it does show what Americans currently think is most likely: a stronger Democratic path to the House than to the Senate, with both partisan coalitions still broadly convinced their own side can win.
With the election approaching, that gap between expectation and outcome will become one of the more useful measures of whether the political environment is shifting—or whether voters are simply seeing the race through their own partisan lens.