If there was a truly bright spot for Democrats last November anywhere in red-state America, it was surely in Colorado (with Montana running a close second). Of all the Democratic candidates in close U.S. Senate races, Ken Salazar was the only winner. His brother, John, pulled off one of the few gains Democrats were able to make in U.S. House seats. And Democrats won control of both branches of the state legislature. Now they look poised to take back the governorship next year, and run the whole shooting match.With Democrats around the country looking to Colorado Democrats as role models, you’d think Chris Gates, the state party chair who oversaw this remarkable election day would be on an extended victory lap. But no: yesterday the state party’s executive committee ousted him as chair in favor of environmental activist Pat Waak (Gates is contesting the outcome based on a claim that certain proxy votes didn’t get counted).According to press reports, the coup against Gates was basically an act of revenge by “activists” unhappy with his less-than-secret support of Salazar in his Senate primary against fellow-activist Mike Miles. Presumably, Gates’ perfidious maneuvering, in tandem with virtually everybody in the national party who wanted to win a Senate seat, was responsible for Salazar’s photo-finish 73-27 win over Miles in the primary.I don’t live in Colorado, and thus don’t know if something else is going on, but it sure as hell looks like suicidal cannibalism of the highest order. And it poses a real challenge to those outside Colorado who keep insisting that the post-election activist insurgency in Democratic circles is “not about ideology, but about Democrats winning.” I know some people are unhappy with Salazar about his vote to confirm Gonzeles (which I disagreed with myself), but Jesus, folks, if the Democratic tent isn’t big enough for Ken Salazar–a guy recently touted by no less a fire-breather than David Sirota as a hero of “populist progressivism”–then we better get ready for permanent minority status.The Colorado Coup is especially bad news for new DNC chairman Howard Dean, who may now have to treat one of the most successful state party organizations in the country as yet another basket case. And it doesn’t much help that at least a few of his more vocal and visible supporters are touting the Coup as part of a “silent revolution” spurred by the Dean movement. I know Dean has other fish to fry right now, and is trying to keep a relatively low profile. But if he should happen to feel the need for a bit of a Sister Souljah moment to instill a sense of political reality in Activist World, this would be a really good occasion to indulge it.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 15: How Democrats Might Flip the Senate
As the 2026 midterms move closer, it’s time to recalibrate expectations now and then, and there’s now a glimmer of hope that Democrats could flip the Senate as well as the House, as I explained at New York:
Much of the early coverage of the 2026 midterm elections dwells on the fight for control of the U.S. House. The current GOP majority in that chamber, after all, is very fragile, and historically the president’s party almost always loses House seats in midterms. Busting up the Republican governing trifecta that is working to implement Donald Trump’s agenda is both a realistic and an important goal for Democrats, who gained 41 net seats and flipped the House in the 2018 midterms after Trump’s first election.
If Republicans do lose the House next year, they won’t be able to enact “big beautiful” budget-reconciliation bills that Democrats can’t filibuster. But if the GOP holds on to the Senate, Trump can still get his judicial- and executive-branch appointees confirmed, and Republicans can block any Democratic legislation with ease. Thanks to the peculiarities of the Senate landscape, in which only a third of the chamber is up every two years, Republicans have a good chance of maintaining control of the Senate, even if 2026 turns out to be a fine year for the Democratic Party. In 2018, after all, Republicans posted a net gain of two Senate seats despite getting pasted in House races.
At this point the 2026 Senate landscape is very favorable to the GOP. Yes, it must defend 22 Senate seats. But as Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times points out, 20 of them “are in states that Mr. Trump carried by at least 10 percentage points in 2024.” The authoritative Cook Political Report rates 19 of these 20 seats as “solid Republican,” meaning the races shouldn’t be competitive at all. Meanwhile, Democrats must defend two seats in states Trump won in 2024 (Georgia and Michigan), and four of their seats (in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire) have no incumbent running. Flipping the Senate would require a net gain of four seats (thanks to Vice-President J.D. Vance’s tiebreaking vote), and the arithmetic for doing that with just three competitive races for Republican-held seats is daunting, to put it mildly. Democrats need to win all seven of the races Cook rates as competitive and then somehow make a safe Republican seat unsafe.But as Nate Silver observes, Democrats could have a very strong wind at their backs in the midterms:
“I’m a fan of what groups like Cook and Crystal Ball do. But having been in the forecasting game for a long time, they have what I consider to be a persistent bias. Namely, they tend to assume a politically neutral environment until there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary.
“This assumption is wrong. It ignores years and years of history of the president’s party performing poorly in the midterms.”
Silver calculates the average midterm advantage of the non–White House party since 1994 as 4.4 percent in the House national popular vote but suggests that Trump’s history of subpar job approval (even if he doesn’t blow up the economy or threaten the future of democracy) and Democratic overperformance in recent non-presidential elections should bump up the Democratic edge: “In fact, the pattern looks a lot like 2018, when Democrats won the popular vote for the House by 8.6 points.”
A national wave of anything like that 2018 percentage could change the Senate landscape significantly:
“States like North Carolina and Georgia actually become ‘lean D.’ And while the next tranche of states — Florida, Ohio, Texas, Iowa and Alaska — are still ‘lean R,’ it’s not by such a large margin that you’d write the Democrats’ chances off.”
At that point, the path to a Democratic Senate is a matter of candidate recruitment and possibly sheer luck. One place to watch in particular is Texas, where John Cornyn is facing an existential primary challenge from the state’s attorney general, right-wing scandal magnet Ken Paxton, in what is sure to be a nasty, expensive, and competitive race. It could also provide an opening for a Democrat like Colin Allred, who ran a creditable campaign against Ted Cruz last year and might run for the Senate again. If former senator Sherrod Brown attempts a comeback in Ohio, it’s likely he could provide a stiff challenge to recently appointed Republican senator Jon Husted. And in Alaska, the state’s unique top-four/ranked-choice voting system gives any centrist Democrat in a good year a shot against Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan, who, according to a recent poll, isn’t terribly popular. One possible candidate, Mary Peltola, won a statewide House seat in 2022 (defeating Sarah Palin) before narrowly losing it last year.
Candidate recruitment will matter in some of the contests where Democrats have a particular reason to be optimistic. Beating Thom Tillis in highly competitive North Carolina won’t be as much of a reach if popular former governor Roy Cooper runs against him. And in Georgia, incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff has high hopes of a divisive Republican primary to choose his opponent among relatively little-known candidates, now that both Brian Kemp and Marjorie Taylor Greene have given the race a pass. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Republicans failed to convince Governor Chris Sununu to run for the seat being vacated by Jeanne Shaheen, which probably means the GOP nominee will be retread Scott Brown, who lost Senate races in Massachusetts in 2012 (following his shocking special-election win in 2010) and in New Hampshire in 2014.
A lot can change between now and November 2026 in terms of both individual Senate races and the national political landscape. At present, you’d have to say the Democratic odds of flipping the Senate along with the House have gone from none to slim — but that’s still a very real opportunity for the party.