What Will It Take for Democrats to Take the Senate?
Blue Wave. Democrats are saying it. Republicans are saying it. With President Donald Trump’s approval rating mired in the low 40s, Democrats overperforming in off-year and special elections, and the House Republican majority so narrow, the Speaker’s gavel appears poised to change hands.
The Senate is harder to call. Democrats must net four seats on a very red map. A Blue Tsunami needs to crest in some Republican strongholds such as Ohio, Texas, Iowa, or Alaska.
To maximize their chances, Democrats will want to nominate the most electable candidate. But what makes someone electable? An unabashed progressive to juice turnout or a moderate pragmatist to woo swing voters? An experienced statewide vote earner or a youthful outsider? A candidate that chooses words carefully or lets ‘er rip?
Anecdotal examples can support any of these arguments, but there doesn’t appear to be any consensus among the Democratic electorate. In turn, we are poised to see these debates play out in upcoming Senate primaries. Afterwards, certain theories of the case—perhaps different theories—will be tested in November.
The Democratic Party is not split between two distinct factions battling it out state by state. In some states, Democrats have organically rallied around Senate candidates with proven records: North Carolina’s former Governor Roy Cooper, Ohio’s former Senator Sherrod Brown, New Hampshire’s Representative Chris Pappas, and Alaska’s former Representative Mary Peltola. In others, raucous primaries are brewing, but each has its own fault lines.
The Lowest-Hanging Fruit: Maine and North Carolina
In Vacationland, the divide is primarily generational. The most recent poll, conducted by Pan Atlantic Research in late November and early December, shows 66 percent of voters aged 55 and over siding with the 78-year-old two-term incumbent Governor Janet Mills, while voters younger than 55 break heavily for the 41-year-old military veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner.
Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed Platner and stuck by him after offensive social media posts surfaced in the fall, whereas Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recruited Mills. (Donors stuck by Platner as well, as he raised about $2 million more than Mills last quarter.) But framing the race as a progressive outsider-versus-moderate-insider contest would be too simplistic. Mills’ most high-profile moment was when she sparred with Trump face-to-face in defense of transgender student-athletes, telling the president, “See you in court.” (Trump threatened to cut off Maine’s school funding but has not followed through.)
Major policy differences between the two haven’t materialized, though Platner has tried to get to Mills’ left on immigration, but the opening is narrow. Platner criticized Mills for not signing legislation last summer designed to limit local police involvement with ICE. While Mills hesitated over concerns about the bill’s particulars, initially calling them “confusing,” she didn’t veto it. She let it become law on January 1 without her signature because “the times call for it” in the wake of ICE’s “extraordinary and horrifying actions.”
Polling ahead of the June 9 primary offers little guidance as to who has a better chance against the resilient Republican Susan Collins, running for a sixth term. The Pan Atlantic poll—the only independent poll taken weeks after Platner admitted having a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol and had it covered up—shows Platner up 1 percentage point over Collins and Mills exactly tied. One data point against Platner is a January poll conducted for a pro-Collins PAC; an initial test shows Collins ahead by one over each, but after hearing negative information about the Democratic candidates, Mills falls behind by six while Platner’s deficit balloons to 13. Still, that’s not enough data to conclude Platner is less electable.
This year, Maine is the only state with a GOP-held Senate seat on the ballot that Kamala Harris won, so Democrats almost certainly need to flip it to notch a net gain of 4. The next most likely pickup is North Carolina, where Trump has narrowly won three times in a row, but Democratic gubernatorial candidates have as well (and not so narrowly in 2024). The former two-term governor Cooper has never trailed in polls against his likely opponent, former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley. At 68, Cooper’s no fresh face and he’s far from an ideological firebrand. Still he hasn’t attracted any significant younger, more progressive primary opposition.
If Democrats flip Maine and North Carolina, they need two more—and to hold all Democratic seats, including in purplish Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota. Four Republican-held seats in Trump-won states are currently classified as short of “Solid Republican” by The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, which has been professionally handicapping congressional races for over 40 years.
The Comeback Kids? Alaska and Ohio
Alaska and Ohio are considered “Lean Republican” by Cook and Schumer recruited former members of Congress: Mary Peltola, former one-term-plus-four-months Representative, in Alaska, and former three-term Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Brown, 73, has longstanding populist bona fides earned in elective office over decades, service only briefly interrupted after losing re-election in 2024. The Generation X Peltola is more moderate; she has been supportive of oil drilling and won the National Rifle Association’s endorsement in her ultimately unsuccessful 2024 re-election bid. But both are widely perceived as good fits for their states and have not attracted significant intra-party opposition.
Still, neither contest is a sure thing for Democrats. Peltola had a 2-point lead over the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, in a January Alaska Survey Research poll, the most recent independent survey. Brown trailed Ohio’s Republican incumbent Jon Husted by three points in a December poll from Emerson College.
The Longshots: Texas and Iowa
The other two pickup opportunities are longshots: Texas and Iowa, deemed “Likely Republican” by Cook. Both have contested Democratic primaries. Texas gets more attention as the March 3 primary looms and there’s racial division, which always spawns Democrats-in-Disarray hot takes.
Unlike Maine, there’s no generational divide in the Texas contest as both candidates are Millennials: the 44-year-old (Elder Millennial/borderline Gen X) U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett and the 36-year-old state Representative James Talarico. But limited public polling shows Black voters largely siding with Crockett, and white voters with Talarico. The data on Latino voters is mixed, with two of three recent polls giving Talarico the edge.
Talarico has suffered a controversy after being accused by a former supporter of privately referring to former Representative Colin Allred—who lost a Senate race against Ted Cruz in 2024 and dropped out of the 2026 Senate race in December—as a “mediocre Black man.” However, Talarico insisted the adjective only described Allred’s “method of campaigning.” Allred then endorsed Crockett and demanded that Talarico apologize. While her comments have not garnered as much national attention, Crockett has faced questions about her description of Hispanic Trump supporters: “It’s almost like a slave mentality that they have. It is wild to me when I hear how anti-immigrant they are as immigrants, many of them.” A Democrat can only win a Texas general election with a multiracial coalition, so whoever clears the primary will need to defuse any lingering tensions.
Potentially easing the post-primary unification project for the eventual nominee is the lack of any substantive policy differences between Talarico and Crockett. And while they are stylistically different, they aren’t all that different. Both portray themselves as fighters, although they differ in their choice of primary foils. The narrator of Crockett’s new television ad intros: “Texas has a warrior who’s fighting back. A champion for us, our votes, our rights. It drives the president crazy.” While Crockett often sells herself as the antidote to Trump, Talarico tends to focus on “billionaires.” In his most recent ad, after ticking off a short list of populist policies, Talarico decrees, “our government should work for all of us, not just billionaires.”
That difference in their preferred target speaks to their theories of the case: Talarico wants to woo Trump voters, and Crockett wants to overwhelm them. “The theory of my case has always been that we could expand the electorate,” Crockett has said flatly, noting that “nearly half of Texans don’t cast a ballot.” Talarico boasts of flipping a Trump-won district, notes he has Trump supporters in his family members, and leans on his Christian faith (he’s a minister-in-training) to transcend party lines.
Texas Monthly’s Ben Rowan called the argument that Democrats win Texas if they energize unlikely voters “the biggest lie in Texas politics” since plenty of those voters lean right and Republicans know how to turn them out. Rowan observed that the 21st-century campaign that got closest to turning Texas blue, the 2018 Beto O’Rourke U.S. Senate campaign, did so well not because it expanded the electorate but because it convinced “hundreds of thousands of Texans who also voted for Republican Governor Greg Abbott to support him simultaneously.”
Still, even if Crockett’s philosophy is flawed, we don’t have much polling to prove she is less electable. A late January University of Houston poll showed incumbent Republican John Cornyn beating Talarico by 2 and Crockett by 3.5, a slight difference but not enough to draw a conclusion. According to the same poll, if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is the nominee, each Democrat would lose by 2. A mid-January Emerson College poll had each tied with Paxton, but Cornyn beat Talarico by 3 and Crockett by 6.
The general election polling differences between the potential Republican nominees are also minor, but the slightly weaker Paxton—as a scandal-tinged, far-right, non-incumbent—would likely entice Democrats to spend more heavily. With the courtly Cornyn’s occasional bouts of bipartisanship upsetting the MAGA faithful, Paxton has been leading in most primary polls, but usually only by little, while a third candidate—U.S. Representative Wesley Hunt—is also in the mix. The National Senatorial Campaign Committee is backing Cornyn, while the right-wing Turning Point USA PAC is with Paxton. Trump, usually eager to endorse and prone to backing general election losers, has stayed out of it but hinted that could change.
The June 2 Iowa Democratic primary has remained below the radar. Still, it features a Schumer-favored candidate—Josh Turek, a 46-year-old state Representative who once played on the United States wheelchair basketball team. Slightly out-fundraising him is Zach Wahls, a 34-year-old state Senator who went viral at 19 after, as the son of two moms, speaking out against a gay marriage ban on the Iowa House floor. Wahls was briefly the Iowa Senate Minority Leader but was ousted by colleagues after firing two longtime staffers. While Turek may be seen as the establishment candidate (there is chatter that the DSCC is discouraging consultants from working with Turek’s opponents) and Wahls as the insurgent (though the true outsider candidate is Nathan Sage, a military vet who leads the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce), both have impressive lists of endorsers and have no major issue disagreements.
After incumbent Senator Joni Ernst decided not to run for re-election, Trump has rallied Republicans around Representative Ashley Hinson. A recent Change Research poll showed all three Democrats trailing Hinson by only 3 points.
Holding Down the Fort: Georgia, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Minnesota
Cook deems two Democratic-held seats to be toss-ups, Georgia and Michigan, with New Hampshire “Lean Democrat” and Minnesota “Likely Democrat.” Democrats have avoided significantly contested primaries in Georgia, where Jon Ossoff is running for a second term, and New Hampshire, where one of the Granite State’s two House members, four-termer Chris Pappas, is seeking a promotion.
On the Republican side, Trump swallowed hard in New Hampshire and backed a one-time critic, former Senator John Sununu, cutting the legs out from under Sununu’s opponent, former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown. But in Georgia, as in Texas, Trump has hung back as a messy three-way primary plays out. Two MAGA U.S. House members, Mike Collins and Buddy Carter, are jostling for the top spot while Derek Dooley, a former college football coach backed by Trump frenemy Governor Brian Kemp, appears stuck in third. Collins has been the frontrunner, leading Carter by 16 in the most recent poll taken last month. General election polling is scant, with nothing published since September when Quantas Insights had Ossoff tied with Collins but leading the other two candidates. Ossoff had small leads over Collins in other polls taken earlier in 2025. The Georgia primary is not until May 19, so Trump has time to put his thumb on the scale.
The Democratic primaries in Michigan and Minnesota, where Democratic incumbents are retiring, look to be the most ideologically divisive and—along with Maine and Texas—will probably give party poo-bahs the most agita, especially since neither will be settled until August.
In the Great Lakes State, the DSCC appears to be quietly tilting toward moderate U.S. Representative Haley Stevens, the only primary candidate invited to a DSCC retreat last October. Yet Stevens, wary of the establishment label, hasn’t committed to supporting Schumer for Senate Majority Leader. (Trump, meanwhile, is rallying Republicans around former Representative and former FBI agent Mike Rogers who once said the president was “responsible” for the January 6 riots.)
On the left edge is Sanders-backed Abdul El-Sayed, who lost the 2018 gubernatorial primary to Gretchen Whitmer; he is a longtime supporter of single-payer health care and is carrying the “Abolish ICE” banner this year. State Senator Mallory McMorrow is also seeking to claim the progressive lane and is supported by U.S. Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. She backs a public health insurance option and has dinged El-Sayed for arguably muddying his position (while El-Sayed claims McMorrow often “waits until I take a position and then takes a halfway position.”) On ICE, she has called for an “immediate, sweeping overhaul,” which is a hair short of “abolish.”
Stevens, meanwhile, says “not one more penny should go to ICE” while calling for “real reform and real accountability.” El-Sayed knocked Stevens for voting for a House resolution that was primarily about condemning an antisemitic attack in Colorado. Still, Republicans tucked in a loaded line expressing “gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland.” She has also sought to claim moderate turf on the environment, attacking El-Sayed’s support for the Green New Deal, which she argues would have hurt Michigan’s auto industry. And Stevens has used McMorrow’s statements about diversifying the state economy to argue that only she is committed to Michigan manufacturing.
Middle East politics may play a bigger role in Michigan than any other primary, with the Democratic Majority for Israel [DMFI] PAC supporting Stevens, who calls herself a “proud pro-Israel Democrat.” El-Sayed has long accused Israel of committing genocide, and more recently, McMorrow has also used the term.
Who has the best shot against Rogers? Only Stevens holds a lead in the RealClearPolitics average of four general election polls taken since November, but it’s only 1.3 points. McMorrow trails by 1.5 and El-Sayed by 3. With a tight November contest looming, whoever emerges with the nomination will have to work hard to unify the party after what’s sure to be a bruising primary.
DMFI is also backing Representative Angie Craig in the Minnesota Senate primary over Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, but in the state that has suffered the most from Trump’s mass deportation operation, ICE has quickly become the biggest flashpoint. Flanagan has hammered Craig on voting for the aforementioned antisemtism resolution as well as the Laken-Riley bill, which requires detention of undocumented immigrants who are arrested (but not yet convicted) for certain crimes. “This Senate race is a fundamental question about whether or not we’re going to have a United States senator who sticks to their values and truths, or someone who votes with Republicans and Donald Trump when it’s politically expedient,” Flanagan told HuffPost. Craig deemed Flanagan’s criticism “disgusting” and shot back, “I would advise the lieutenant governor to join me in this fight against the Trump administration and this lawless thug group of ICE agents in Minnesota, instead of taking this opportunity to attack a fellow Democrat.”
Independent polling of the race is hard to come by, but we saw dueling internal polls last month, with Flanagan’s camp claiming a 13-point lead and Craig’s camp conceding a 3-point deficit. Notably, Team Craig’s polling memo said that Flanagan’s support plummets after voters hear about “her role in the fraud scandal.” So expect this race to get nastier.
But as heated as the Democratic primary race is getting, in the wake of Operation Metro Surge it’s hard to see the state flipping to red, especially since the NRSC has tapped former sports reporter Michele Tafoya who expressed sympathy for ICE agents and suggested protesters were being paid following the homicides of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
The contested Democratic primaries in Maine, Texas, Michigan, and maybe Iowa are the ones that are likely to have the most bearing on the ultimate outcome. But of those four, only Michigan’s is currently breaking down along ideological lines. Otherwise, we are not seeing an all-out intra-party civil war between progressives and moderates.
Judgement calls regarding electability, particularly in Maine and Texas, could determine who controls the Senate next year. But it’s also possible—if not probable—that the rising Blue Wave will crest so high that it doesn’t matter who Democrats nominate.
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