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.
Democrats are driving a polarization over immigration that will probably backfire.
Liberals are confusing support for a humanitarian DACA with support for open borders.
Democrats are officially not in favor of open frontiers but the discourse on the left has finally arrived at a place where it amounts to tacit support for it.
If you oppose the Wall, ICE enforcement, the use of administrative law, detention and deportation, then in essence you support open borders.
If you think there should be very few restrictions on family reunification (chain migration), that risk of absconding should be ignored and that everyone who is eligible for asylum should receive it (no quotas) and be resettled, then in essence you support open borders.
DACA negotiations have collapsed because Democrats and the far right are colluding to undermine them. The far right with bad faith proposals and Democrats with a no compromise stance given that the courts have suspended Trump’s DACA repeal action.
One can understand Democrats’ defense of the diversity lottery and some family reunification rules, as well as an unrestricted path to citizenship for Dreamers and many other previous immigrants, but Democrats have adopted a take it or leave it attitude, even though they are the party in congressional minority.
Once DACA arrives to the Supreme Court immigrants may be left with very few protections. Democrats are gambling with time and with immigrants’ interests.
The fact that the Obama administration (with the exception of DACA) had legislative, fiscal and administrative policies regarding immigrants that were similar or even identical to Trump will always explode in the face of Democrats when trying to pin Republicans with accusations of abuse and lack of sensitivity.
The left has arrived at a place where opposition to police brutality is confused with opposition to all police enforcement and opposition of ICE brutality is confused with opposition to all immigration enforcement.
At the same time, the left wants vigorous federal enforcement of civil and voting rights laws and LGBT rights, ADA, labor law, abortion rights, consumer law, privacy laws, environmental laws, freedom from religion, etc.
Gun rights and freedom of religion don’t get the same defense and are tacitly opposed. So are some aspects of freedom of expression and association.
In other words, the rule of law is to be applied selectively.
Liberals talk about human rights, but countries of origin and transit have a duty to respect the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
And it is a legitimate question to ask if parents risking their children’s lives are doing it for the children or for themselves.
The notion that Mexico is such a bad country that everyone deserves to leave is itself racist in the dual forms of white supremacist thinking and white saviorism.
When the right talks about alternative facts and fake news these are the kind of issues they talk about.
One can understand that Trump’s comments over immigrants are problematic, but he is being smart about making those comments in contexts where the facts can easily be interpreted as favoring his position. His conflation of all immigrants with gang members is meant to provoke liberals into defending gang members. This is what he has done for two years and it seems to keep working. Trump is pushing for cynicism because cynicism only favors the right.
The left is increasingly complicit in pushing cynical views about how government works.
ICE and the Police are conflated with overall brutality. People only have rights but no obligations. International law only applies to the United States.
The right of people to look for democracy and a better life doesn’t include domestic citizens. The opinions of domestic citizens are reduced to racism if they don’t support policies that are tantamount to open borders even though nobody openly talks about open borders.