Amazingly, the Democrats Have a Shot at a Senate Majority

And in many key states, Democrats have found Senate candidates who are familiar to voters and have been skilled enough to win in these places before. Cooper was elected attorney general of North Carolina in 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 and then governor in 2016 and 2020. The Democratic presidential candidate at the top of the ticket lost in all those years but 2008. Peltola was the first Democrat since 2008 elected statewide in Alaska when she first won her at-large House seat three years ago. Brown lost his reelection contest in 2024, but received 47 percent of the vote in Ohio, compared to 44 percent for Kamala Harris. The Democrats also have a good plan to make Nebraska competitive. The party is standing down there while populist Dan Osborne makes a second run as an independent. He won 47 percent of the vote in 2024, well ahead of Harris’s 39 percent in the state.

OK, let’s not get overly optimistic here. Democrats would need to flip four seats to win control of the Senate, and they may not win any of these. Cooper is a great candidate, but Democrats almost always come close but narrowly lose presidential and U.S. Senate races in North Carolina. Alaska’s Peltola lost in 2024, and her two wins in 2022 may have been largely because the top Republican candidate was the very polarizing Sarah Palin. In Maine, even though Collins looks beatable, Governor Janet Mills has been very uninspiring on the campaign trail. Her Democratic primary opponent Graham Platner is untested and, yes, used to have a tattoo of a symbol associated with the Nazis on his chest. And there is a good chance that the party’s left and center-left wings turn that race into a very divisive fight, making it harder for Maine Democrats to come together and defeat Collins in a general election.

Alaska, Nebraska, Ohio, and even North Carolina may just be too pro-Republican to buck the party in a high-stakes Senate race. And Democrats have to hold onto seats in Georgia, where Democrat Jon Ossoff is strong but where the state leans red, and Michigan, where the retirement of Gary Peters has resulted in a very intense three-candidate primary that may turn ugly.