The Democratic Party needs to net four U.S. Senate seats to flip the chamber in 2026. Even earlier this year, that was not going to happen. Conventional wisdom before this cycle was that North Carolina and Maine were serious pick-up opportunities, but Democrats had to deal with Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire, and so even in a good cycle, they may actually come out behind a seat or two, simply because of the map. I’m happy to report that will not happen in 2026. The races in North Carolina and Georgia do not even look close. New Hampshire is far from over, but Congressman Pappas has a lead that hovers near 5%, and the MAGA brand is just toxic in that state at this point, something that has kept John Sununu in a vice all race. Maine is close, in part because of how weird this race was, and because Susan Collins has always been able to outrun the letter after her name. Oh, and while he’s fine as a Senator, Troy Jackson is kind of weird. As for Michigan, our candidate has challenges. Lots of challenges.
Even with those challenges, if you put a gun to my head today and asked me to make a prediction, I’d say that the Democrats probably win at least four of the five. In other words, I think they’re at least +1 in the original battleground states. Democrats are wildly over performing though in 2026. Democrats got very strong nominees in Ohio (Former Senator Sherrod Brown), Alaska (former at-large Congresswoman Mary Peltola), Iowa (State Representative Josh Turek), and Texas (State Representative James Talarico), or at least the strongest nominee who was available to them. Still other states like Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina, all chalked up as almost certain losses even six months ago, are surprisingly close, and even states like Montana, the GOP nominee has poor polling numbers. If these races are *actually* competitive, it means the Democrats probably swept the first group, at least one would think, and are at +2 and need just two of the four particularly strong nominees to pull through to flip the chamber. Right? The math is really good.
At least it looks like that. Three basic math problems though.
The first is John Fetterman. He says he won’t switch parties. Everyone who has been around him from the Democratic side says he won’t switch. Do you trust him to not? If the Democrats win 51 seats, Fetterman could simply switch and J.D. Vance would break the tie in the GOP’s favor. No more majority. Maybe just as bad, he could simply hold the entire chamber hostage as essentially a rogue Democrat, making passing anything impossible. With two years until his re-election, Fetterman might just hold us hostage. You know, I remember his supporters in 2022 telling me what a strong fighter he was…
The second problem is that Democrats seem to be having issues in three seats that they really should be winning in a year where Trump’s disapproval is breaking records, the House appears to be won, and Republicans are about as popular as mold in your house. Maine and Michigan I talked about above, but polls from Minnesota really aren’t too great either. Now look, if you asked me, I think they win them all. However, what if the real story here in 2026 is that Blue states are sick of Democrats shit, just to a lesser degree than Red states are sick of Republicans?
The third problem? The battlegrounds are really red. From The New York Times “On Politics” this morning:
The Senate is not the House.
The poll found that likely voters preferred Democratic candidates over Republicans by 11 percentage points in their congressional districts. That’s a big number, my colleague Nate Cohn writes:
In this particular poll, the Democratic lead is large enough that the party would still deliver a significant victory even if it were off by as much as the polls were in 2016 or 2020.
But when our pollsters asked voters in the 35 states that have a Senate race whether they would vote for the Democrat or the Republican, the Democrats’ lead narrowed to just five points. That could be a sign that reclaiming the Senate is still a tall order for Democrats, who are trying to flip seats in several red states while battling it out in purple states, too.
Hear me out here- Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, and Texas were not very close in 2024. In fact, they really weren’t even super close in 2020, for the most part. Talarico could run like four points better than Harris, and Paxton four points worse than Trump, and the result wouldn’t change. Sherrod Brown could run a bit better than he did in 2024, same for Peltola, and they still might lose. Turek could run considerably better in Iowa, and yes, still lose. In fact, they could all lose by 1-2% very easily, and still have run fantastic campaigns. These seats are absurdly hard if you dig into their performance after Barack Obama left the Oval Office.
It is entirely possible that the momentum of the cycle means the Democrats are going to win every jump ball this year. Trump is not popular at all, and that is the most important indicator in the average modern midterm. Unlike the House, where gerrymandering is the chief challenge now, in the Senate it’s simply the schedule of which seats are up for election. The seats are hard. If I had to gamble tonight, I’d predict the Democrats to win four seats and have 51 the morning after the election (then we can hold our breath over Fetterstein). All I am saying to you is that it is more than a little possible that it will not. Democrats could end up netting 2-3 seats and over performing by 5-6% over what you would have thought at the start of the cycle. It wouldn’t be enough.
In 2022, the narrative after the election was that the GOP had a horrible midterm. After taking over 40 seats in Bill Clinton’s first midterm, and over 60 in Barack Obama’s first midterm, Republicans only won 9 seats in the 2022 U.S. House races. Obviously the fall of Roe v. Wade was a big part of that, as was better gerrymanders than in the past. We all sort of missed the story though. While Democrats over performed and made everyone gush over “how well they did,” the Republican Party won the popular vote by 3 million votes. They won it by 2.7%. They also won the majority with 222 votes. They did perform better than the Democrats.
And two years after that victory, they won the trifecta. They won the White House. It turns out their actual wins were the better predictor of the future. If the Democrats come up short in the Senate, well… let’s check back in 2028.