During Donald Trump’s bizarre pre-election event at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the president said all sorts of strange things, though he did share a reasonably accurate description about recent history.

“Usually, whoever the sitting president is, Republican or Democrat, good or bad, good president, great president, bad, for some reason the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms,” the incumbent said. He quickly added, “But we gave this a very strong shot.”

That eight-word addendum suggested that Trump did not have high hopes about the outcome of this year’s cycle, though his point about historical trends was largely true: Though there are notable exceptions, the incumbent president’s party tends to suffer losses in midterm elections.

And that got me thinking: What’s the average?

When I started putting the election data together, it seemed like a fairly straightforward exercise. My plan was to just count up the results and do the arithmetic, coming up with an average number of losses in the House and Senate for the incumbent president’s party.

But the more I dug into the data, the more complicated it became because of questions that might not seem immediately obvious. Which midterms should be used as a starting point? Is it best to start with the 1914 cycle, because that’s when the U.S. House grew to 435 members, or with the 1958 cycle, because that’s when the U.S. Senate grew to 100 members?

It’s tempting to limit the focus to the modern political era, but there’s no definitive consensus on when that began. World War II? Watergate? The start of the 21st century?

What about the difference between a president’s first midterm cycle versus his second?

There are, in other words, a variety of ways to look at the same statistics, but here’s an overview of what I found.

If we start with the turn of the 20th century (the 1902 cycle), the incumbent president’s party loses an average of roughly 31 House seats and four Senate seats.

If we start with the 1914 cycle, the numbers are largely the same: a loss of 30 House seats and 3.5 Senate seats.

If we start with the 1946 cycle (the first following World War II), the incumbent president’s party loses an average of roughly 26 House seats and nearly four Senate seats.

If we start with the 1958 cycle, the numbers shrink a little: a loss of 24 House seats and three Senate seats.

If we start with the 1974 cycle (the first following Richard Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal), the incumbent president’s party loses an average of 23 House seats and roughly three Senate seats.

If we limit the focus to 21st-century midterms, the numbers are very similar: a loss of nearly 25 House seats and roughly three Senate seats.

As for the differences between presidents’ first and second midterms, since the start of the 20th century, the incumbent president’s party tends to fare worse in House races in the first midterms (nearly 33 losses in the first vs. nearly 26 in the second), but in Senate races, it’s the opposite (nearly three losses in the first midterms versus nearly five in the second).

How will the 2026 cycle match up to these averages? Watch this space.

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