The US Senate is suddenly in play

The prevailing view a few months ago was that Democrats were likely to retake the House of Representatives in November's midterm elections. In recent decades, these cycles have tended to cut against the party in control of the White House, and Republicans held a razor-thin House majority in a political environment that was already tilting blue.

The Senate, however, looked out of reach. Democrats would need to defend 13 seats plus flip four Republican-held ones, including two in states President Trump won by double digits. This is a tall order in our hyper-polarized era of slim-margin elections, made even steeper by an administration willing to tilt the playing field in its favor. It’s no wonder betting markets and political analysts (ourselves included) had Republicans as heavy favorites to hold the upper chamber.

But in case you’d forgotten, we’re living in 2026, when unprecedented things happen every day. And boy have things changed.

Democratic candidates are currently tied or leading the polls in the four Republican-held seats Democrats most need to win the Senate: North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, and Alaska. I don't quite see it as a toss-up yet: Democrats would need to run the table, going four-for-four in those races while also holding tough seats in Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire – the first two in states Trump carried in 2024, the third an open seat made newly competitive by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen's retirement. But there's no doubt the Senate is now very much in play.

How did this happen? A drip-drip-drip of unpopular policies – Greenland annexation threats, ICE raids in American cities, the Epstein files, tariffs and their fallout, a zillion unsavory corruption scandals – has steadily chipped away at Trump’s support with the voters Republicans need to hold Congress. The president is now underwater on pretty much every major issue Americans care about, including cost-of-living, immigration, trade, foreign policy, crime, education, and healthcare, dragging his overall approval on the Silver Bulletin tracker to 38.8% and sliding.

Of course, the principal driver of discontent is what it always is: the economy. Trump’s average approval rating on the economy sits at 35.5%. On inflation, it’s 28%. This is the issue voters consistently rate as their top concern, and the one that delivered Trump the presidency in 2024. The thing is, by conventional measures, the economy isn’t obviously bad. Inflation is running around 3% and unemployment is above 4% but not alarmingly high. These are, historically speaking, okay numbers. And yet, the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index is at record lows. The disconnect has a simple explanation: after living through the most inflationary five-year period in decades, voters don’t just want slower inflation and an okay economy. They want lower sticker prices – the return to pre-2021 price levels that Trump promised them but can’t deliver without a recession that would be even more politically painful.

Barring an AI-driven productivity surge that rewrites the rules of the possible in the next few months, there’s little Trump can do to turn sentiment around. If anything, Trump’s instincts in response to setbacks – more tariffs, price controls, attacks on the Fed – tend to make things worse. National gas prices are averaging $4/gallon thanks to the administration’s unpopular war of choice in Iran. Quagmire abroad and rising prices at home is a textbook recipe for a midterm blowout. A quick negotiated end to the conflict isn’t in sight, and even if it came, it wouldn’t reset the underlying headwinds by November.

Midterms are a referendum on the president, and Trump is more unpopular than any recent leader heading into November. Joe Biden’s approval was around 42% at this point in 2022, Trump himself was near 41% in 2018, Barack Obama was around 48% in 2010 – all three watched their party lose the House but hold the Senate. Perhaps the best analog to Trump's standing on the present trajectory is George W. Bush at 35.6% in April 2006, the last president to lose both chambers in a single election.

All of that is showing up in the generic congressional ballot, where Democrats currently lead by 5.9 points. That’s a much bigger margin than the out-of-power party had at this point in the 2010, 2014, and 2022 cycles, which all ended badly for the incumbent. But it’s smaller than the lead Democrats held in 2006 or 2018, two of the most lopsided midterm cycles of the past generation, so 2026 may not be quite as bad for Republicans as those years. That said, the generic ballot may be underestimating Democratic performance this cycle, as the voters most likely to show up in midterms skew more politically engaged and noticeably angrier at the incumbent than the registered voters polled. Special-election results this year have run an average of 13 points ahead of the 2024 presidential baseline, which implies a popular-vote margin closer to D+6.5. And there’s plenty of time for the national environment to grow even more favorable for Democrats.

None of this would matter if Democrats hadn’t also put up candidates who could actually win the purple and red states through which their Senate majority hopes run. Unlike in recent cycles, this time they’ve fielded three superstars. In North Carolina, former Governor Roy Cooper – who won in 2016 and in 2020 even as Trump carried the state both years – has turned what would normally be a hard race into a likely Democratic pickup. In Ohio, former Senator Sherrod Brown is running again after losing by 3.6 points in 2024, a cycle in which he outran Kamala Harris by nearly eight points. And in Alaska, former Representative Mary Peltola lost her House race by about two points in 2024; the current political environment is roughly eight points more Democratic than the 2024 baseline. So while Democrats are getting lucky with the tailwinds, for once they’re not fumbling the opportunity to make the most of them.

Maine runs on a different logic. Democrats recruited well there, too, getting popular four-term Governor Janet Mills to run. But she’s currently trailing Graham Platner in the primary – a first-time candidate running as a populist progressive, with a checkered internet history and a now-covered tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol. He nonetheless leads Mills and performs even better than the incumbent governor in general-election polling against longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins. An electoral juggernaut who’s beaten establishment Democrats through four cycles, you can never count Collins out. But if Platner wins the June 9 primary as polls suggest he will, he’d enter the general in a blue state that voted for Biden by nine and Harris by seven, in an environment where being a Republican anywhere is a liability. Even a flawed candidate has an edge in those conditions.

Should the environment prove strong enough, the blue wave could plausibly extend to Texas, the graveyard of many a Democratic electoral dream. The scandal-ridden, hard-right Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary runoff, which takes place May 26. A Paxton nomination would materially improve Democrat James Talarico's chances in a state that’s less reliably red than the headline margins suggest. Trump carried the state by just 5.6 points in 2020, and his 14-point margin in 2024 was built on nonwhite voters who have since been swinging back toward Democrats. A Trump endorsement for Cornyn would likely flip the GOP primary, but Trump has shown no inclination to intervene.

Needless to say, there are plenty of ways Democrats could fall short. They need to run the table on seven correlated races all polling within the margin of error. Any one of them breaking Republican keeps the Senate in GOP hands. Platner – assuming he becomes the nominee – is a high-variance candidate; a late implosion in Maine would close the easiest pickup on the map. The US economy could turn around by summer on the back of AI-driven market exuberance, blunting the strongest Democratic issue. And just as Trump is massively unpopular, so is the Democratic Party itself.

Still, suppose Democrats pull it off. What actually changes?

In the near term, less than you might think. Gridlock on legislation was already the baseline. Trump governs by executive action anyway, ignoring and bypassing Congress at will. A Democratic-led House’s investigations and impeachments will amount to noise the White House can ignore. What a Democratic-led Senate can do in 2027 is gain some leverage in budget negotiations and kneecap the administration's ability to confirm judges and senior officials. But even that check isn’t foolproof. The White House can lean harder on acting secretaries – the Office of Legal Counsel has already laid the groundwork for deputies to serve as acting heads without Senate confirmation, a live option at Defense, Justice, and Labor at a minimum (important given the accelerating pace of Cabinet departures).

The real prize for Democrats is a 2029 trifecta. Even short of a majority, just two Senate pickups this year would put them at 49 seats heading into a cycle where Republicans are defending vulnerable incumbents in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Add the presidency and one more flip, and Democrats could have their first unified government since 2022 – and with it, the first chance to enact the kind of legislation the party hasn't been able to pass since the Inflation Reduction Act. What's being decided in November is less the shape of 2027 than the feasibility of an ambitious Democratic program in 2029.

The stakes for Trump are bigger, at least as he sees them. His political revolution – the attempt to dismantle the checks on his power, capture the machinery of government, and wield it against his enemies – depends on the cover that unified Republican control of Congress provides. A Democratic sweep wouldn’t stop the revolution, but it would increase the costs to Trump and his allies of a Republican defeat in 2028. Which means the more likely a blue wave becomes, the harder Trump leans on the revolution and on the electoral process itself.

Most of these efforts will meet resistance and ultimately fail or backfire (as with his mid-decade redistricting push). Courts, career officials, and enough Republican dissenters will hold the line on the worst of it. But the pressure on the system is going to intensify over the next six months. And the system isn’t in great shape to absorb it.