Dems Have a Good Shot For The House In Congress in "26 But Something Is Opening Up For the Senate
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| Ben Wiseman |
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
When you think about states that might throw Democrats a lifeline, Alaska hardly comes to mind first.
But I could argue that it will play a crucial part in the party’s quest to reclaim a Senate majority next year. And that Democrats will prevail.
Hear me out. One of Alaska’s two Republican senators, Dan Sullivan, is up for re-election. His Democratic opponent might be Mary Peltola, a former member of Congress who was defeated in her statewide race to be re-elected to Alaska’s sole seat in the House by just two percentage points last year. Peltola lost in what turned out to be a chilly climate for Democrats, but 2026 is shaping up to be colder for Republicans. So she — or another reasonably popular Democrat — should have a shot, especially given demographic changes in Alaska that seemingly cut in the party’s favor.
It has been an article of faith that Democrats’ greatest hope for preventing Republican control of both chambers of Congress during the second half of President Trump’s term lies with the House. But the current frenzy of gerrymandering, which could get worse if the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act before the midterms, complicates that assumption. And there’s a case to be made that Democrats’ prospects in the Senate are better than commonly predicted. I stand bravely before you to make it.
I recognize the hurdles that Democrats face. To wrest control of the chamber, they must hold on to seats in two states — Georgia and Michigan — that Trump won in the 2024 presidential race. They must also flip four seats currently held by Republicans. And only one of the states squarely in Democrats’ sights, Maine, was won by Kamala Harris.
But the elections on Nov. 4 told a promising story. Democrats won the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey by atypically large margins and in ways that reversed some advances that Trump had been making with Latinos. Those returns bespoke a degree of disgruntlement among voters that’s consistent with the president’s pathetic approval ratings. They also affirmed that when Trump himself isn’t on the ballot, Republican enthusiasm and turnout falter. He’s not on the ballot next year.
Couple those dynamics with the usual midterm comeuppance for the party in power and Republicans have reason to sweat. And several developments suggest that the Senate really could give Democrats their path out of the wilderness.
In Georgia, where Senator Jon Ossoff is up for re-election, the Republican politician who would have been his toughest opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, took a pass on the race. In North Carolina, Senator Thom Tillis, the Republican incumbent, decided not to seek a third term, and Democrats recruited the state’s popular former governor, Roy Cooper, to run. Cooper has consistently led his presumed Republican opponent, Michael Whatley, in polls.
Such surveys have limited meaning this far ahead of Election Day. But if voters are as dissatisfied then as they seem to be now, North Carolina could easily fall into the Democratic column. And Maine is probably up for grabs. Sure, Senator Susan Collins, the Republican running for a sixth term, is a proven survivor. And yes, Democrats could be hampered by a messy primary battle between the oyster farmer Graham Platner, a favorite of progressives whose past social media outbursts and Nazi tattoo have dulled his shine, and the state’s more moderate governor, Janet Mills.
Platner could indeed get the nomination. That would be bad luck for Democrats. But he might still have a chance of victory in the general election: Harris won Maine by about 7 percentage points, and there’s no sign that the state has grown fonder of Trump or the Republican Party since.
And if Collins faces Mills? I’d give Mills the edge. She isn’t as easily caricatured and vilified as Platner, and her age, 77, isn’t a liability in the face of Collins, who’s 72. It’s one member of the gerontocracy against another. May the steeliest septuagenarian win.
North Carolina and Maine would give Democrats two of the four pickups they need. Ohio could give them another. Sherrod Brown is trying to return to the Senate, where he served three terms; he lost his bid for a fourth last year. But his margin of defeat was 3.5 percentage points, in contrast to Harris’s margin of more than 11 points in Ohio. In other words, Brown runs far ahead of the Democratic norm in the state, as he demonstrated during his past Senate victories. If voters in 2026 are sour on Trump and sweet on change, Brown is well positioned to benefit from that recipe.
North Carolina, Maine, Ohio — Democrats would need just one more pickup, assuming they’re victorious in Georgia and in Michigan (which, despite Trump’s 2024 win there, is decidedly bluer than it is red). Which state might be fertile territory?
As proof that I’m not becoming some deranged political Pollyanna, I won’t say Texas, whose incipient or imminent blueness has so often been proclaimed — and so often been disproved — that such forecasts should be outlawed until further notice.
But I will invoke Iowa, where the Republican incumbent, Senator Joni Ernst, is not running for re-election and where the field of Democratic aspirants is so robust and so promisingly suited to an unstuffy, unelitist, gritty model for success that Michael Kruse dedicated a long, deeply reported article in Politico just to them. Watch the announcement video of one of those Democrats, State Representative Josh Turek, a wheelchair basketball champion who has already defied the political odds to win twice in a red patch of the state. Consider that he’s not even the clear Democratic front-runner. Then tell me you can’t see the party pulling an upset in the Hawkeye State.
In fact, the party could pull an upset in any number of places if the mood is right, and it may well be, judging from what happened on Nov. 4 and from Trump’s continued over-interpretation of his supposed mandate and his irreparable habit of putting his own vanity, insecurity, cupidity and grievances ahead of competent governance and sensible economic stewardship.
Democrats, so dejected after Harris’s defeat, are allowing themselves some optimism, and in that new frame of mind, the dream of a Senate majority doesn’t look impossible at all.
Just last week, a nonprofit group with ties to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, revealed a $1 million buy of ads aimed at shaming Republicans for failing to extend health insurance subsidies that expire this year. The states in which the ads were scheduled to run? Alaska, Maine, Ohio and Iowa. There’s surely more where that came from, as the short stack of chips that the party was placing on a Senate majority grows taller.
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