Democrats Just Might Win the Senate

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With primary elections in the key 2026 battleground states largely complete, Democrats have emerged with several open paths to take the majority in the US Senate .

The basic contours of the national map remain uphill for Democrats. They currently hold 47 seats in the Senate, meaning they need to flip four Republican seats and hold their current ones, including in Michigan and Georgia, which President Donald Trump won in 2024.

But presiding over an unpopular Iran war that has dragged on for six months and resulted in high gas and grocery prices, Trump’s approval rating is now consistently below 40 percent , a historically perilous level. A Reuters/Ipsos poll has shown his approval nearing 30 percent.

The last time a Republican president was presiding over an unpopular war and spiking gas prices with less than 40 percent approval—George W. Bush in 2006—Democrats picked up six seats and took control of the Senate.

As a result, political strategists tell Inner Loop , there are now several states in play for Democrats beyond the four-state path of Alaska, North Carolina, Ohio, and Maine envisioned by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer at the start of the year.

The picture for Democratic pickups remains perhaps brightest in Alaska and North Carolina, two states where Democrats have candidates that have previously won statewide elections and are polling ahead of their Republican opponents.

In conservative-leaning Alaska, former representative Mary Peltola is leading incumbent Dan S. Sullivan by more than 5 percentage points in the state’s nonpartisan primary, according to incomplete results, suggesting Democratic voters are highly engaged in that race.

In an added annoyance for Republicans, a retired teacher named Dan J. Sullivan won a spot on the general-election ballot Tuesday—a development that could split the GOP vote if Alaskans get the two Sullivans mixed up.

If the midterms are decided as much by turnout as other political factors, a similar turnout in the general election could give Peltola an edge in a race the nonpartisan Cook Political Report recently moved from “lean Republican” to “toss-up.”

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, former Democratic governor Roy Cooper, who has never lost an election , is running as a tough-on-crime moderate against Trump-endorsed candidate Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chairman.