The country is still recuperating from the lightening bolt that was the 2016 presidential elections, but the American people are just seven months away from casting their ballots in yet another electoral contest. And depending on the result, the midterm elections this November could either be the continuation of the status-quo or the ushering in of a Democratic-led Congress that is busting at the seams to start impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

Republicans may or may not hold the House and the Senate, but one outcome most political pundits agree is extraordinarily unlikely is bigger GOP majority on Capitol Hill. But, like the prognostications in the months and weeks leading up to the 2016 elections—when practically everybody but the most loyal stewards of Trump world predicted a victorious onslaught by the Democratic Party and unified Democratic control of Washington—the pundits could very well be wrong about this cycle too. We may all wake up on Wednesday morning, November 7, to news that the Republicans kept both houses of Congress and picked up a few seats along the way.

Sounds implausible, right?

At this point in the cycle, absolutely. Things are not looking particularly good for the Republican Party right now, a big-tent group that is increasingly ditching right-of-center moderates or establishment types who are not singing Donald Trump’s praises loudly enough. The GOP is leaking politicians like a sieve; to date, 43 House Republicans have resigned, will resign at the end of the year, or are ditching their congressional careers for another office (Speaker Paul Ryan is one of them. He claimed to be quitting because he wanted to spend more time with his kids, but does anyone really believe that’s the only reason?). Deep red states and districts that voted by double digits for Trump are switching color towards the slightest tinge of blue; Alabama, which Trump carried by twenty-eight points, elected a Democratic senator last year for the first time since the early 1990’s. The eighteenth congressional district of Pennsylvania, about as far away from Democratic-rich Philadelphia one can get in the state, decided to elect an upstart Democrat rather than the Trump-endorsed Republican.

When Republicans have held seats this year, they have done so after spending millions of dollars that the party never thought they would need to spend in reliably conservative territory. The GOP and the White House are celebrating Debbie Lesko’s five-point victory, but so what? This is a seat that Trent Franks, the socially conservative Republican who resigned in disgrace, won by nearly forty points in 2016.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, not one for innuendo, is talking about the coming elections in near-disastrous terms. “This is going to be a challenging election year,” McConnell told the Kentucky Today editorial board earlier this month. “We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don’t know whether it’s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5.” Even White House staffers responsible for political strategy are bursting into the Oval Office and coaching President Trump to expect doom. According to the New York Times, Trump waved off the death-like assessments as fiction: “That’s not going to happen.”

Could Trump be right? To the professionals in the donor and consultant class who litter K Street, these sound like the words of an amateur who has no inkling of how difficult it is to be a Republican in the current political climate. Trump’s self-confidence is both ill-informed, if not foolish. They are a reflection of a braggadocio who cares about nothing and nobody but himself, a naïf detached from the political reality befalling Republican candidates this year.

Yet chances are that many of the same people who are today running around like headless chickens and yelling about a Republican defeat of epic scale also called Trump a dead man in October 2016, when audio of the Manhattan real estate developer bragging about sexually assaulting women was played constantly over the airwaves. I can still remember the outage at that time, when political reporters and horserace watchers on television were guaranteeing that Trump would lose by such a large margin that the Republican National Committee would be forced to do another comprehensive “what went wrong” study after the election. Republican lawmakers like Paul Ryan and John McCain were rescinding their endorsements, while then-RNC Chair Reince Priebus was counseling Trump to either quit the race are lose in Barry Goldwater-like fashion.

Obviously, all of them were wrong. Trump managed to beat the Republican and Democratic political establishments, making young millennials in New York City cry themselves to sleep.

Granted, midterm elections are not the same as presidential election years. The media coverage is still incessant, but it is not as obsessive as when the presidency is on the line. Many centrist and middle-of-the-road voters who are not wedded to ideology or partisan gospel tend to stay away from the polls, which means that whichever candidate can get their base out usually has a good shot at winning. Donald Trump may be an unpopular president, but as was demonstrated during his massive rally in Michigan last weekend, the guy can still turn out jubilant crowds of devoted followers and rile them up.

The question looming over the midterm elections is whether Trump can push those people to cast ballots in November. If he can pull that feat off, then the political class may have to hold another roundtable on Meet the Press exploring why and how they once again got it wrong.

Daniel R. DePetris is an analyst at Wikistrat, Inc., a geostrategic consulting firm, and a freelance researcher. He has also written for CNN.com, Small Wars Journal and The Diplomat.