Senate election, 2026

[AverageOldGuy]

We are two years away from the next general election in which all 435 House members must run for election.

In the Senate there are 33 seats up for election in 2026—13 seats held by Democrats and 20 held by Republicans.

While most of these are safe seats, and Osoff's seat in Georgia must be protected, we need to hold only 13 seats and flip 4. We need to flip 4 because if we flip only 3, then the Senate is tied 50-50 and VP Not A Hillbilly Vance will cast the deciding vote.

[Trust_Reality]

1. Get started with funding as soon as feasible.

Good candidates arise.

[dsc]

2. This map sucks

at least from the perspective of offense. Ohio (which will have a special election for Vance's former seat and only if Brown decides to run), ME and NC are it as far as possible pick ups. After that you have Alaska (if Peltola runs) and MT (if Tester runs) and then good luck with that. The Senate is very hard for us. If you look at what Harris won (California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine) that gets you 38 Senators and we already hold 37 of those seats. Add in the 7 swing states (Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina) and that gets you to 52 with us holding either 47 or 48 of them (depending upon what happens with Casey's seat in PA). The only seats we don't hold is Johnson's in Wisconsin (up in 28), the two NC seats (Tillis 26 and Budd 28) and possibly Casey's in PA (up in 30). That gives us a ceiling of 52 seats unless we win a state Trump won by a significant amount. We currently have 0 such seats. Since he came on the scene, we only have won three such seats (Manchin, Brown, and Tester all were up this year and we were 0 for 3. This is a hard structural problem.

[FakeNoose]

3. Kentucky and North Carolina are possibilities, since they both have D Governors

Also Texas maybe ... Colin Allred came close to flipping Ted Cruz's seat. Maybe he'd think about running against Cornyn?

[DetroitLegalBeagle]

4. It wasn't that close

Cruz won by around 9pts, which was a little over 970k votes.