By Lisa Lerer

National Political Correspondent

Good morning. The midterm elections are less than three weeks away. We explain the state of the races for the House and Senate.

Where we stand

Midterm elections can tell us a lot about American political life. They’re a referendum on the party in power, a chance to take the political temperature of the country and a glimpse into the anxieties and hopes of voters.

But those are things we’ll know a lot more about after Election Day. For the next three weeks, all anyone really wants to know is: Who’s going to win?

For Democrats, keeping their trifecta of power — the Senate, the House and the White House — would mean bucking decades of history. In Washington, it’s practically an ironclad rule that the president’s party loses seats in midterm elections.

These are not conventional times, though. The country is still recovering from a pandemic and a siege on the Capitol. The Supreme Court overturned nearly a half-century of federal abortion rights, and the former president and his supporters still refuse to admit that they lost the last election. As the executive editor of The Times wrote in this newsletter last month, the two parties disagree not just on their vision for the country but also on democracy itself.

The midterm race has reflected this uncertainty. In the spring, all signs pointed toward a Republican wave. The dynamic changed this summer — with the Supreme Court ruling on abortion rights, passage of Democratic legislation and falling gas prices — raising Democratic hopes of making some gains. Now, economic anxiety has deepened as gas prices ticked back up and inflation remains high. And America looks headed toward divided government.

Today, I’m going to explain where the election stands, and why House races are shaping up in Republicans’ favor, while the Senate is anything but conclusive.

The House

In the House, elections tend to rise and fall with the national tides, with individual members rarely able to combat the larger political trends. This year, that’s bad news for Democrats, who worry that their party may have peaked a few weeks too early.

There’s an expectation among both parties that a new Republican majority will take office in January. (Some lobbyists are already planning for this.) To win control of the House, Republicans need to pick up five seats on net. They might gain three from redistricting alone, according to some estimates.

Democrats are also defending a greater number of vulnerable seats. Republicans have a good chance of flipping nine Democratic seats, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Only two Republican seats are expected to change into Democratic hands. And two-thirds of the races Cook considers “tossups” — that is, too close to safely predict — are in districts held by Democrats.

A Republican win would be in line with recent history. In 2006, George W. Bush described the 31-seat Democratic wave in the House as a “thumping.” Four years later, Barack Obama experienced a “shellacking” with a 63-seat Republican gain. In 2018, during Donald Trump’s presidency, Democrats picked up 41 seats.

While President Biden’s approval rating has risen in recent months, it’s still below 50 percent, and in many states he’s less popular than his party’s candidates. Perhaps because of that, Biden has not held a campaign rally since before Labor Day.

The Senate

Unlike House races, Senate contests can rise and fall much more on personality — or as Mitch McConnell, the chamber’s Republican leader, put it last month, on “candidate quality.”

Several inexperienced, Trump-friendly Republican candidates — Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona, Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and J.D. Vance in Ohio — won their primaries this year. Their stumbles have given Democrats a boost, making the Senate more competitive.

But Senate races aren’t immune from the national mood. As polls find voters putting more emphasis on the economy than on abortion, Republicans have improved their standing in a few key races, such as in Nevada and Wisconsin. Some strategists also attribute the change to a deluge of ads hammering their opponents over crime.

And two of the races remain extremely volatile. In Georgia, Walker, an opponent of abortion, has spent the past couple weeks grappling with revelations that he paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion. And in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee, spent months away from the campaign trail while recovering from a stroke. (His doctor said yesterday that Fetterman had shown some lingering effects but was recovering well.)

In the most recent public polling, the majority of competitive races remain very tight. And Democrats’ advantage in the Senate is so narrow that Republicans need a net gain of just one seat to flip the chamber.

The bottom line

Democrats are relieved that they do not seem to be headed, at least right now, toward a repeat of the deep losses of 2010. But many have begun expressing a sense of gloom — and have cracked gallows jokes that the party’s uptick would have been better timed for September than July.

My advice: Prepare for a long election night. Or weeks, if the results end up hinging on a Georgia runoff race in December.

More election news

• Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont will campaign in eight states before the midterms, an effort to energize progressive voters.
• A new election crimes office in Florida arrested people who appeared confused about their voting rights.
• In the On Politics newsletter, Blake Hounshell explains how Republicans are pouring money into newly competitive House races.
• Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican running for re-election, is urging his supporters to report suspected voting problems.
• Representative Lee Zeldin, a Trump ally who voted to overturn the 2020 election results, hopes to become governor of New York.

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THE LATEST NEWS

• Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, declared martial law in four illegally annexed regions of Ukraine.
• Russia has redeployed military hardware and troops that were in Syria.
• Ukraine will reduce electricity use after Russian attacks knocked out a third of its power stations.

• In a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election, Trump submitted voter fraud information even after his lawyers had told him it was incorrect, a federal judge said.
• Trump made bigoted remarks about Jews and Persians at an event last year, including asking a filmmaker whether he was “a good Jewish character.”
• “There might be somebody else I’d prefer more,” Mike Pence said when asked if he would vote for Trump in 2024.
• The Biden administration is granting $2.8 billion to companies to expand electric-vehicle battery production.

• Liz Truss, Britain’s prime minister, was forced to dismiss one of her most senior cabinet ministers, heightening a government crisis.
• Social Security will allow people to select the gender they identify with.
• Suzanne Scott, the C.E.O. of Fox News, is at the center of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network.
• The actress Anna May Wong will become the first Asian American to appear on U.S. currency.
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ARTS AND IDEAS

Beirut’s drag icons

Stars like Dolly Parton, Madonna and Whitney Houston inspired a generation of American drag queens to take the stage. In Beirut’s growing drag scene, Arab pop icons are the muses, too.

In their outfits and performances, Beirut’s drag queens evoke sequin-clad singers like Haifa Wehbe, Sabah and Sherihan, who broadcast camp and glamour across the Arab world for decades. Their stage looks ensure “Arab representation in drag culture,” Anya Kneez, a queen, said.

Anya gets messages from aspiring drag queens all over the Arab world. “This is what I want to see,” she said. “I want to see young Arab queers coming out and doing their thing.”

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