Participants at last month’s general-election kickoff rally for Michigan Democrats.
(Emily Elconin / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: The Democrats have recruited a series of their top-choice Senate candidates to take on Republicans in double-digit Trump states on a pretty brutal map. The unpopular president is mired in scandal, and because GOP primary voters picked a series of creepy MAGA quislings as their nominees, hopes are high. Democrats look competitive almost everywhere and sport a large and durable lead on the “generic ballot.” Party strategists are whispering about a once-unthinkable takeover of the upper chamber just two years after a stinging, demoralizing defeat.
If this set of shifting baseline conditions ahead of a crucial midterm test of Trump’s power sounds a lot like the situation as the 2018 cycle began in earnest that September, that’s because we are, uncannily, at pretty much the same point we were at the end of that fateful summer. And we all know how that ended: Democrats cruised to a decisive House takeover in November but somehow lost two seats in the Senate, as red-state voters reverted to their underlying partisan preferences. That crushing setback for the Democrats gave the president the consequential opportunity to put one last hard-liner on the Supreme Court—Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett—in October 2020.
More than a decade into the Trump era, dreaming of a major electoral breakthrough in hostile partisan territory based on the president’s manifest ineptitude, grotesque shenanigans, and unabashed corruption feels almost masochistic. But this time around, it really could be different. Subtle distinctions are emerging in the national political environment and polls that could put Democratic Senate candidates over the top in deep-red Alaska, Ohio, and Texas. Those Democratic incursions on the red Senate map, coupled with expected pickups in Maine and North Carolina and holds in Georgia and Michigan, suggest that Democrats could actually seize a 52-seat majority—and possibly a bigger one, if the president continues his hopeless standoff with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz and further erodes his party’s standing.
One central dynamic behind this shift is that Democrats are picking up momentum in what had been regarded as long-shot races as normie voters are starting to tune in this fall. We’re understandably loath to recall the details of the Democrats’ Senate trauma in 2018, but in point of fact, the fall was when many highly touted Democratic candidates in red states like Missouri and Tennessee had already started to fade. In Missouri, incumbent Senator Claire McCaskill had surrendered her slim polling edge to MAGA toady Josh Hawley. And in the Volunteer State, former two-term Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen had by now blown his once significant lead over Republican Marcia Blackburn, and was running even at best. For all the money and attention lavished on Beto O’Rourke’s energetic challenge to Ted Cruz in Texas, he actually never led the race and was down more than five points on this date in 2018.
Today, by contrast, many red-state Democrats in tough races look as strong as they have all year. In Alaska, Mary Peltola is the party’s dream candidate, with a strong brand and a recent track record of running competitive campaigns for the state’s one at-large House district, winning it in 2022 and losing it narrowly in 2024. She has led eight of the nine publicly released polls in 2026. In Ohio, former senator Sherrod Brown is looking to overcome the state’s dismal history of defeated senators trying to reclaim their seats and has led seven of the last eight surveys over incumbent Republican Jon Husted, who was appointed to Vice President JD Vance’s seat following the 2024 election. And in Texas, Democrat James Talarico has led scandal-ridden MAGA nominee Ken Paxton in nine of the last 10 polls.
Republicans also seem highly unlikely to flip any Democratic-held seats this cycle. Despite all the hand-wringing about him from the usual suspects, Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed has topped the last five polls in Michigan over Republican Mike Rogers. As for Georgia, which GOP strategists had once considered their best target, incumbent Senator Jon Ossoff has built such a formidable lead that Republicans may not invest in their nominee, fascism enthusiast Mike Collins, at all.
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Buried in all of this polling data is another reason Democrats are increasingly excited. In the winter and spring of 2018, when red-state Democrats like Bredesen were ostensibly leading their races, they did so mostly with topline numbers in the low-to-mid 40s. In red states like Tennessee, the undecided voter pool was—and is—heavily GOP-leaning. So as such races were poised to enter the homestretch, Democrats were unlikely to add many votes to their final polling numbers.
Meanwhile, in the states where incumbent red-state Democrats pulled off victories, they were running stronger than you would have thought if you just looked at the average survey margin because they consistently polled around or above 50 percent rather than in the low 40s. In Montana, for example, Jon Tester was averaging 49 percent in the closing months of the race, suggesting durable crossover support; he went on to defeat his GOP rival, Matt Rosendale, by narrowly clearing the 50-percent threshold.
Democratic strategists know this. And that’s why when they look at candidates like Peltola, they don’t see a chimera driven by undecided Republicans who will eventually grit their teeth and come home; they see a potential breakthrough. While polling has been sparse in her race, she’s at 49 percent in the Real Clear Politics average. Brown is at 49.3 percent in Ohio. Talarico’s support in Texas looks a bit softer, but he is in a much better position than O’Rourke was in 2018—and it’s worth remembering that Beto, unlike most Democrats that cycle, beat his polling average, losing by only 2.5 points.
The deeper, more structural reason for optimism is that President Trump is significantly less popular than he was at this point in 2018—and for reasons that have a more direct impact on the average voter. In the New York Times average, his average job favorability is 38 percent and his net disapproval is eight points worse than it was at this point in 2018. Eight years ago, his unpopularity was driven largely by issues that animated Beltway journalists and Democratic activists, like violating the Hatch Act, behaving like an ogre at G7 meetings, and conducting himself like a blackout drunk on social media. These breaches of decorum didn’t land with nearly the same force with the kind of rural diner-goers that the Times loves to interview in taking the temperature of MAGA-branded public opinion. Many Republicans and Republican-leaning independents simply tuned Trump out and focused on the robust, growing economy and the admirable lack of stupid new wars in the Middle East. But you can’t tune out credit card bills riddled with gas station charges of $75—or skyrocketing healthcare costs and grocery bills.
In 2026, Trump’s endlessly vile, made-for-Tik-Tok antics are almost part of the background din of American public life. His biggest liability today is that he promised voters that he would address the cost-of-living crisis, tame inflation on his first day back in office, and secure the border while he’s acted with almost perverse determination to enrich his ruling-class cronies at the public’s expense, spike inflation, and very publicly inflict bottomless cruelty on law-abiding immigrants far from any international frontier.
Trump lit his political capital and credibility on fire in the opening months of this administration—starting in April 2025, with his “Liberation Day” roster of chaotically conceived tariffs sparking payback initiatives from virtually every country in the world—all to be absorbed by American consumers. That was when the kind of low-information, persuadable voters who drove his 2024 victory started reevaluating their support. And the ensuing occupation of cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis by ICE goons and the predictable bloodshed that came in its wake permanently tanked his numbers with young voters and Latinos, where he had made inroads that were key to his improbable political comeback.
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And it was Trump’s demented decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iran that has led more directly to higher gas and energy prices, worsening inflation, and a general climate of impending economic doom. Trump’s favorability numbers have worsened considerably since he launched his losing war in February—but what should really worry Republican strategists is that the political instincts that have allowed him to survive this long have abandoned him. To pick just one example at random, he took to Truth Social on Monday to shill for the despised AI industry’s data center buildout, warning Americans that “you will only have yourselves to blame” if they successfully oppose the construction of these monstrosities. That clueless counsel flies in the face of polling numbers showing that 75 percent of Americans oppose erecting data centers in their communities. Trump is also operating—unlike in 2018—within a near-complete political and intellectual vacuum, issuing dictats like his AI broadside from an under-construction palace full of sycophants and a cabinet stocked with blind loyalists barely qualified for entry-level work in the agencies they run. That means that as the country’s mad tyrant rants and rages on, there is no adult in the room to sit him down and tell the GOP’s one very special boy the truth.
The president’s abject haplessness and near-total indifference to public opinion is why Democrats could pull off wins in Senate contests they hadn’t previously dreamed would be within their reach. In Iowa, Democrat Josh Turek is now narrowly behind, but the state, which had gone twice for Obama, isn’t as deep-red as Texas or Tennessee. And Democrats could also score wins in outlying races that have so far barely been surveyed. Take Nebraska, for example, where independent union leader Dan Osborn is making his second run at the Senate. In 2024, he lost to Republican Deb Fischer by fewer than seven points in a national environment that was considerably better for the GOP. Osborn’s campaign has, admittedly, bankrolled all of the available polling of this race, which shows him running even with incumbent Pete Ricketts—but generic ballot polling alone suggests that this seat could be very much in play given Osborn’s popularity.
Five times in the last 10 years we have gathered at election-night parties or parked ourselves in front of the TV hoping to witness the across-the-board repudiation of Trumpism that never came. Some of those nights were more painful than others, but they all hurt. There are still 63 long days to go until the election. And we must inevitably brace ourselves for the kind of legal and procedural skulduggery the president and his personal lawyers on the Supreme Court will be getting up to, and the nontrivial possibility that all of these polls could be underestimating Republicans yet again. But after what we have endured over the past two years, even the possibility of a midterm cycle that could finally break Trump’s calamitous hold on this country is positively exhilarating.
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