Maine's Graham Platner is the Democratic candidate for what's considered one of the nation's most competitive battles for the U.S. Senate. Platner, who is challenging incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, is shown at a rally at the Holiday Inn by the Bay in Portland on April 18, 2026. (Photo by Jim Neuger/ Maine Morning Star)
Democrats are growing hopeful they can recapture the U.S. Senate in this fall’s midterm elections amid President Donald Trump’s plummeting approval ratings.
But they still need nearly everything to break their way against a map that put them at a starting disadvantage, analysts and campaign officials say.
At the outset of this election cycle, Republicans appeared highly likely to hold their majority. Democrats would need to flip four seats, and competitive races this year are in states that are more Republican than average.
(Getty Photos)But as election watchers increasingly expect a blue tint to the November midterms, the question is now whether it will be blue enough to put Democrats back in the Senate majority, where they are now at a 53-47 disadvantage.
Democrats are mounting competitive campaigns in Republican-run states typically seen as stretches, including Texas and Iowa. But analysts say scandals surrounding the party’s nominee in Maine, Graham Platner, have exposed how dependent Democrats are on a rising tide of voter anger with Trump and Republicans to lift their candidates to victory.
“Is 2026 gonna be a mildly blue lean year, like 2018, or a kind of tsunami blue year, like 2006 or 2008?” J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a University of Virginia-based election forecaster, said. “I think the answer to that question is still kind of, we’ll see.”
Strong candidates, high prices
Thirty-five Senate seats will be on the ballot during the November midterm elections.
Of the nine deemed most competitive — Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — that will likely decide control of the chamber, Trump won all but Maine and New Hampshire in 2024. Democrats would have to retain their current seats and flip others in some combination of seven of those Senate races to take over control of the chamber.
But Democrats have also offset their geographic disadvantage by fielding strong candidates in a few of the most important races, making pink-to-red states such as Alaska, Ohio and North Carolina ultra-competitive.
Democrats’ optimism comes as Trump has made a series of moves they believe could prove toxic for Republicans. Potentially most damaging, the war with Iran sent gas prices soaring and inflation rising, calling into question his handling of the economy as voters continue to rate affordability as a top issue.Trump has signed a ceasefire agreement and gas prices are dropping, but the question is whether there’s enough time left to erase the damage.
The president’s approval rating was near 50% when he won the 2024 election, Coleman said, but has since sunk as the cost of living keeps rising.
U.S. President Donald Trump spoke about the war in Iran from the Cross Hall of the White House on April 1, 2026 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images)Trump continues to turn off voters, with elections now less than five months away. A New York Times daily average of polling placed the president’s approval rating at 39% as of June 17.
A switch in Senate control would have major implications for the remainder of Trump’s term.
Democratic senators, assuming they vote together, would have the power to block any U.S. Supreme Court nominees put forward by Trump in the final two years of his term, as well as executive branch nominees and federal judges, and to shut down major party-line legislation enacted by Republicans twice already in the past year through the budget reconciliation process.
The combination of an unpopular president and a strong crop of candidates gives Democrats a fighting chance to win the majority, even if they still face long odds, Coleman said.
“If you asked me a year ago if Democrats had a path to the Senate, I would have said the chances aren’t zero, but they’re very hard,” Coleman said. “Now, I think there are several paths that the Democrats have to take the Senate, but I think the Republicans just have an easier path holding it.”
Moderates put red states in play
Alvin Tillery, a Democratic pollster and consultant who is also a professor in Northwestern University’s political science department, said strong candidates in North Carolina, Ohio and Alaska give his party the edge in those states
Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and former Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola are “moderates who have won statewide,” Tillery said.
Though the Democratic candidates in those states are establishment-friendly, Tillery said Democrats generally should look to motivate younger voters and voters of color by leaning in to issues that the No Kings protests have elevated, as well as keeping affordability in focus.
But, despite the apparent quality of Democratic candidates, those states are still purple at best. Trump has won each state in each of his three White House runs.
The president’s drooping approval may not be as big a factor as Democrats need, a national Republican campaign operative said.
“Yes, approval ratings, obviously, have gone down,” the operative, who declined to be identified by name, said. “However, when it comes to the Republican base, they are still showing up for Trump, and he will make sure to turn them out … At the end of the day, we have an advantage when it comes to the state-specific electorates that we’re looking at.”
Control of the Senate may come down to the Democratic candidates’ strength against the overall partisan lean of the states in play.
“They’ve by and large done a good job of recruiting the candidates they need to to put those states in play,” Coleman said of Democrats. “It’s just a question of: Are those states too red?”
Democrats are also defending open seats in Michigan and New Hampshire, while Sen. Jon Ossoff is seeking reelection in Georgia. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates the Michigan race as a toss-up and the contests in New Hampshire and Georgia, where Ossoff will face Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins after his win in the June 16 GOP primary, as leaning toward Democrats.
A Maine street fight
On paper, Maine could be seen as the bluest state on the map this year because of its state’s record in presidential elections.
But its Senate race also may be the most immune from the national environment, with a battle-tested Republican incumbent running in a lightly populated state where retail politics can still swing an election.
The matchup, which may be the single most competitive in the country, pits a controversial newcomer in Platner against Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate and powerful Republican with proven electoral appeal who has occasionally criticized the president during the Trump era but also voted for conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner rally together in Portland, Maine, on May 25, 2026. (Photo by Emma Davis/ Maine Morning Star)Democrats are betting that Maine voters want more full-throated opposition to Trump. Primary voters formally made Platner the nominee in June after Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, seen as a more establishment candidate, suspended her campaign.
Platner, a gruff-looking oyster farmer and Marine veteran, has connected with voters with a populist, outsider message. But he has faced an array of flaps, including over a tattoo with Nazi associations and that Platner had sexted several women while married. The New York Times also reported on women who said they were disturbed by Platner’s behavior while dating him.
He faces a difficult matchup with Collins, who has won other races in the face of significant national headwinds. In 2020, even as Trump lost the presidential election nationwide and in Maine, Collins won reelection while outperforming Trump by 18 points.
Senate math
The president’s party typically does poorly in midterm elections. Republicans are seen as likely to lose the House, though gerrymandering may make the fight for control of that chamber tighter than before. Republicans losing the Senate, too, would be seen as a stinging rebuke of Trump and GOP lawmakers.
In Ohio, Republican Sen. Jon Husted is seeking election after he was appointed to the Senate last year to replace JD Vance, who resigned to become vice president. Brown is running against Husted after losing reelection in 2024 to Sen. Bernie Moreno.
Brown, who promotes a populist message, hearkens back to an earlier era of Ohio politics, when Democrats were more popular. President Barack Obama won the state in 2008 and 2012 but Republicans have since become ascendant, with Trump winning the state all three times he’s run for president.
While Husted hasn’t won a Senate race, he’s won statewide races for lieutenant governor and secretary of state.
In North Carolina, Cooper is now favored in a contest with Republican Michael Whatley, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. Sabato’s Crystal Ball and the Cook Political Report have said the race leans Democratic, though another forecaster, Inside Elections, rates it as a tossup.
They are battling to flip the seat and succeed Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican who chose not to run for reelection after repeatedly clashing with Trump. He has publicly said Trump is harming Republican chances in November.
“We need Republicans to do well in November, but the stupid stuff is killing our chances!” Tillis wrote on social media in late May.
Former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola at a July 28, 2022 ceremony at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)Alaska’s Senate race pits two well-known politicians in the state against each other. Incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan is facing Peltola, who was the state’s lone U.S. House member for more than two years.
Peltola represents a hope by Democrats that a familiar face will resonate with voters in a state where the party has struggled. She was the first Democrat to win statewide in Alaska since 2008. Peltola, who was first elected to Congress in a 2022 special election, lost her race for reelection in 2024.
Sullivan’s campaign got a boost after Alaska election officials disqualified a different Dan Sullivan from appearing on the ballot. Alaska Elections Division Director Carol Beecher wrote that the other Sullivan had filed “with a purpose to confuse or mislead” voters.
In Iowa, Republican U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson and Democrat Josh Turek, a state representative, are running for an open seat created after Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican, declined to run for reelection.
Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek celebrated his primary election victory to become the Democratic nominee for Iowa’s U.S. Senate seat at an Iowa Democratic Party election night party in Des Moines June 2, 2026. (Photo by Robin Opsahl/Iowa Capital Dispatch)Iowa was once a major swing state and home of long-serving Democratic U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, and helped power President Barack Obama’s rise in 2008. It has since become solidly Republican, but anger over Trump’s tariffs and concerns that the war in Iran will send fertilizer prices rising have potentially created an opening for Democrats.
Lone Star longing
After Maine, no race has perhaps attracted as much attention as Texas.
Republicans are emerging from a bruising primary battle between Sen. John Cornyn and Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued and previously indicted state attorney general. Paxton won and will face Democrat James Talarico, a state lawmaker and seminary student who speaks openly about his faith, a progressive form of Christianity.
A Democratic victory would represent a political earthquake. Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in Texas since the 1980s and haven’t won a statewide election since the 1990s.
Trump won 56% of the vote in Texas in 2024. A Talarico victory — a statewide Democratic victory — would open up the possibility that the party might one day again compete at the presidential level in Texas, the state that sent President Lyndon B. Johnson to Washington. Texas has 40 Electoral College votes, the second-biggest prize after California’s 54.
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