Right after the 2024 GOP power sweep, the general consensus around Washington was the with a 53-seat majority – plus the VP ready to break any tie – the GOP had locked in control of the US Senate until at least 2028 and Democrats had better channel their efforts into flipping the House come November 2026 in order in order to win back a fundamental and desperately-needed leverage.
Still, a little more than six months into highly consequential midterm elections, the situation seems to have taken a turn for the GOP. The American people are souring on the administration’s favorite policies, such as his immigration enforcement, Trump’s approval rating on inflation and economy are lower than they ever were during his or Joe Biden’s first term, the war on Iran is fueling the affordability crisis, and the economic outlook is at its worst since 2022, according to the gold-standard University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index.
Can Democrats flip the Senate?
The widespread dissatisfaction with the government and the Trump administration has now the potential of triggering a full-throated backlash against the ruling party – the likes of which we haven’t seen since the GOP flipped 62 House seats in 2010 as a response to Barack Obama’s first two years of his presidency – possibly resulting in the kind of blue wave Democrats need in order to pull off the daunting feat of flipping more than 4 seats and gain control of Upper Chamber of Congress. But despite their chances of inflicting Republican a resounding loss in November may be rising – the prediction market Kalshi recent gave them better than 1-in-2 odds of winning both the House and Senate – they nevertheless face an uphill battle due to the politics of the states at stake in this year’s election and the ongoing polarization of the current political era.
The main issue Democrats will bump across in their quest to win a Senate majority isn’t the sheer number of seats to flip – Republicans ended up actually flipping 4 seats, as Democrats would need, in the 2018 blue wave – but rather the geography of states that make Senate Class 2, as well as a growing polarization that has dramatically reduced the pool of persuadable voters willing to cross the aisle, and as a result winnowed down the column of competitive voters.
Even if Democrats won all the competitive seats, defending two states Trump barely lost such as New Hampshire or narrowly carried like Georgia and Michigan – with a progressive-on-moderate hard-fought campaign that may draw down important resourced for the general election – flipping North Carolina and ousting longtime GOP incumbent Susan Collins in Harris +7 Maine, they would still need to win two states that President Trump carried by double digits in the 2024 Presidential Election.
Democrats have to win deep-red states
This is easier said than done, particularly considering that right now there are only 7 out of 100 senators representing states the voted for the opposite party’s nominee in 2024 – Collins being one of them – and that never in the Trump era did any party flip a state previously carried by the other party by more than 10 points. Regardless, difficult does not mean impossible, even more so if certain critical conditions are met.
While major outperformances over presidential candidates have become rarer after 2016, it does not mean they did not occur. And it is true that a majority of major under- or over-performance instances could be chalked up to specific circumstances – such as a particularly well-liked incumbent on hostile soil, flawed candidates, shifting political dynamics or a challenging overarching environment – it increasingly looks like Democrats may actually recreate some of these peculiar situations they need to overcome unfavorable fundamentals.
If – and this is a big if – the tide will turn against the GOP resulting in a national blue wave with Democrats winning the national House popular vote by a healthy margin, their objective candidate advantage – the result of a well-crafted recruitment effort put in place by Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer – coupled with recent electoral movements and some GOP missteps may end up giving them a real shot at pulling off something mere months ago was considered more than prohibitive.
10 point overperformances can happen
One daunting precedent that may lower Democrats hopes is that in the Trump Era – i.e. since 2016 – no party has been able to flip any Senate seat in states they had lost by more than 10 points two years earlier in the presidential race. Still, this remarkable dynamic is to ascribe more to specific factors such as the rotation of incumbents rather than to the absence of instances of overperformance. The 2018 blue wave midterm – when Democrats won the House popular vote by 9 points – epitomizes this trend.
Democratic candidates in more than a dozen states outrun Clinton’s numbers by double digits. Notably, this was true in reliably Democratic states like New York, Delaware or New Mexico, in eternal battlegrounds like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota and also in many Republican-leaning or deep red states such as Tennessee. The only reason Democrats didn’t flip any state Trump had won by more than 10% two years earlier was that many of biggest outperformers were actually Democratic incumbents defending seats in Republican territory – from Brown in Ohio to Manchin in West Virginia to Montana’s Tester.
At the end, the GOP could even pick up a few seats in states that used to be competitive but had started shifting hard to right after 2008 – such as Missouri, Indiana and North Dakota – but it still had to contend with a more than lackluster showing compared to Trump’s 2016 numbers.
The Senate isn’t immune to major swings
The notion that Senate races can sometimes be strongly influenced by contingent factors – such as candidate quality or local issues – and decoupled from national politics is self evident by looking at what happens when presidential candidates are at the top of the ballot. Despite the race for the highest political office dominating the discourse and acting as coattails on down-ticket contests, some major instances of Senate candidates doing significantly better than their party nominee for Commander-in-Chief made headlines both in 2020 and 2024, despite the high degree of polarization of the current political environment.
These include Susan Collin’s 18% overperformance to Trump in Maine, which the then soon-to-be former President lost to Joe Biden in 2020, and a couple of high-profile Democratic outperformances with potential effects on this year’s election. In Ohio, then-incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown lost by just 4% to Bernie Moreno in a state Trump carried by 11%, while in deep-red Nebraska, independent – and Democratic-backed – veteran and former labor union leader Dan Osborn came just 7 points from unseating Republican Deb Fischer in a state Harris lost by a whopping 21%.
Swing state elasticity is dow
Even in 2022, despite the GOP winning the national House popular vote by less than 3%, featured a healthy number of states voting quite differently compared to two years earlier. Republicans recovered ground in a number of red states after their 2020 loss, outrunning Trump By double digits in four ruby-red states. But importantly, Democrats held out where it mattered most: in battleground critical to the control of the Chamber, which they kept even widening their majority in an unexpected win for Biden.
The intense campaign targeting of only a handful of turfs – coupled with other issues that affected the 2022 race particularly in these states such as gubernatorial elections and the backlash over SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade – had the well-documented effect of reducing the elasticity in highly polarized swing states. Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson run ahead of Trump by just under 2 points, while Democratic candidates in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona ended up outperforming Biden’s 2020 numbers.
Hence, despite the increasing polarization of our political times, even the Trump Era does provide some precedent for the kind of outperformance Democrats would need in order to flip the Senate. And perhaps more importantly, a number of situations and trends seem to point in the right direction as to the possibility giving the party an actual chance at pulling off major upsets in what is otherwise Republican country.
The candidates
Ohio
In Ohio, Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown is a proven overperformer. He ran ahead of Harris in 2024 and in 2018 he won in a state Clinton had lost by 8%. His rival in November, incumbent Jon Hosted may prove to be more formidable than the somewhat-controversial Bernie Moreno and the GOP donor apparatus planning to spend millions of dollars in the Buckeye State may result in Ohio shifting less to the left than the nation as a whole in November. Still, as Brown lost by 4% in a national environment favoring Republicans by 1.5%, the former Senate seems well-positioned to take on the Republican incumbent if Democrats win the popular vote by around or more than 5 points, particularly given the GOP’s slips with Hispanic voters – a key constituency that swung hard to the right in 2024 that has come to deeply disapprove of President Trump’s job and that makes up a significant portion of population in Northern Ohio.
Texas
The Hispanic problem for the GOP may be exacerbated in Texas – a Latino plurality state. It is worth noting that in 2018 Senator Ted Cruz won re-election by 3 points, but if you add together a significant national performance for Democrats, Paxton’s nomination – possibly worth around 3-4 points of candidate quality – and a significant backlash from Hispanic voters you could very well envision Democratic candidates James Talarico turning the Lone Star State blue for the first time in a federal election in more than 30 years.
Nebraska
Another state to look closely on Election Day will be Nebraska. If Democrats do not put any candidate on the ballot and coalesce around Osborn – there is a lawsuit underway concerning this, but even if an unknown Democrats wounded up on the ballot, it would probably siphon off only a handful of votes from Osborn – the race may get extremely hot despite the relative lack of national attention. The former labor union leader after all managed to outperform Harris by 15% in 2024, losing a Trump +22 state by just 7% in a year when Republicans won the presidential popular vote by 1.5%, suggesting the state may come into play if Democrats were able to shift the nation left by similar margin.
Though this time around Osborn will face off against Senator Pete Ricketts, who is generally regarded as more popular than Deb Fisher, the Republican won be able to benefit from Trump’s coattails as well as the president’s capability of turning out infrequent Republican-leaning voters. What’s more, Nebraska is home to a significant share of population that represents the demographic groups Democrats made the biggest inroads into: well-off, college-educated white voters. Democrats have performed consistently well in Omaha’s Congressional districts in recent presidential elections: therefore, it’s possible any nationwide leftward shift might be emphasized in a state that features a demographics Democrats have been making inroads into even in their darkest period.
Iowa and Alaska
Finally, the GOP’s growing vulnerability with college-educated White voters, coupled with Democrats’ efforts to win back rural voters let down by Trump’s tariffs and what they claim is a vision for the economy that only works for the top 1% may give Democratic candidates a shot in Iowa, a state Trump won by 13% in 2024 where unpopular GOP incumbent Joni Ernst is retiring, and more likely in Alaska.
The Last Frontier’s white and relatively educated electorate means Democrats are on the rise in the State, and their candidate, former Congresswoman Mary Peltola has a proved record of outperforming her party, having lost her re-election bid for the House in 2024 by just 2% in a state Trump carried by 13%. Again, despite all the efforts the GOP is going to make to protect Dan Sullivan’s seat, it is easy to see the race get very competitive should Democrats do well nationwide.
Conclusion
Overall, why Democrats will still have a hard time trying to take control of Senate, considering how they also need to defend and flip a number of competitive states, history and some peculiar situations suggest they might be well-positioned to pull up an upset in one or more states Trump carried handily in last year’s presidential election. While only time will tell, Republicans had better not underestimate what a combination of adverse political winds, electoral trends and poor candidate quality could do to what would usually be considered safe seats.
