Getting Back to the Senate: Defeated Senators Who’ve Returned to Office

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— Several defeated senators are currently running or considering runs for Senate in 2026.

— In the postwar era, about 220 sitting senators have lost their seats in general elections or primaries, and most do not try to reenter electoral politics.

— Still, almost 30 defeated senators have tried to return to the chamber, although only six have been successful since 1946.

Defeated senators: enjoy retirement vs. return to the grind

Over the summer, Politico checked in with former Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT). After losing his bid for a fourth term last year in one of that cycle’s most high-profile races, the former senator, who now has more time to dedicate to his farm, appears to be living his best life. From what we can gather, Tester’s experience seems common for senators who’ve exited the pressure cooker of electoral politics. At a 2019 Center for Politics event, former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who had just lost her seat the year before, put it most succinctly, “I actually thought I was going to be miserable when I left office. I’m really, really happy!”

While Tester made it known that he wasn’t eager to return to electoral politics—Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) is up this cycle, and national Democrats would probably have welcomed another Tester run—he also knocked his party for having, as he put it, a tendency to “recycle” candidates. In Ohio, former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), who entered and exited the chamber with Tester, is trying to win his state’s other Senate seat, which is up next year as a special election. Meanwhile national Democrats recruited former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is reportedly encouraging Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) to run for Senate—while neither might be “recycled” Senate candidates, both are well known and may help illustrate the national party’s preference for “tried and true” names.

To be fair to Democrats, this type of “recycling” has not been limited to their side. In New Hampshire, former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) is also trying to return to the Senate after losing his Massachusetts seat in 2012 and mounting an unsuccessful run against the now-outgoing Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) in 2014. We may also note that, in that same state, former Sen. John Sununu (R), who lost his seat to Shaheen in 2008, is also openly considering a 2026 comeback run.

With former senators as potential nominees in at least a couple of 2026 Senate races, we looked back at what former senators have done after being voted out.

Based on our research, from 1946 to 2024, there have been about 220 instances of sitting senators losing reelection bids. For the sake of completeness, our tally included both appointed senators who were running for office in their own right and senators who were defeated in primaries. Despite, or perhaps, because of, the differing political environments that were included within that 78-year span, there was an almost eerie partisan symmetry, with each party owning about 110 defeats apiece. One caveat here is that for at least the first couple of decades since 1946, there was not true two-party competition throughout much of the Old Confederacy. So the Democratic tally is probably a little inflated because, during the earlier postwar election cycles, turnover in the South was mostly driven by Democratic senators losing primaries to other Democrats.

Over the years, it seems evident that most former senators have found themselves in agreement with the sentiments that McCaskill expressed above. Former senators often stay involved in politics by taking appointed roles or serving in some civic, media, or government-facing capacity—since leaving office, for instance, McCaskill herself has been a regular contributor to MSNBC. But the overwhelming majority of former senators have not tried to re-enter electoral politics at either the congressional or statewide level: this has been the case for about 175 defeated senators since 1946, or about 80% of our sample size.

About 20 other defeated senators went on to launch runs for Congress or governor. In 2024, then-former Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) became a successful example of this, winning her state’s open governorship. Other recent, and less successful, examples include former Sens. Mark Begich (D-AK), David Perdue (R-GA) and Dean Heller (R-NV).

Another notable name was Massachusetts’s Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a Republican who lost his seat to then-Rep. John F. Kennedy (D) in 1952. Lodge would later serve in several ambassadorial jobs, which is not a rare post-Senate assignment for defeated members. But Lodge was also the GOP’s vice presidential nominee against the Kennedy/Johnson ticket in 1960.

But for this article, we’ll focus most on another subset of defeated senators: we looked at all the incumbent senators who lost in 1946 or later and isolated those who subsequently launched senatorial comeback bids.

Table 1 lists those such cases from 1946 onwards—the year listed is the year they were defeated, so their return efforts came in future years. Senators who made successful comebacks have their names highlighted in yellow while an asterisk denotes senators who were defeated in primaries, not general elections, before they tried to return to the chamber.

Table 1: Defeated senators who’ve attempted comebacks in the postwar era

Notes: Former Sen. Rod Grams (R-MN) began a 2006 comeback campaign but dropped out before the primary to run for a House seat. Former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) took steps towards running for his old seat, which was up in 2014, but died in 2010. Both are excluded from Table 1.

Though there have been a handful of efforts since then, the last defeated senator to return to the chamber was Washington state’s Slade Gorton. A moderate Republican, Gorton ousted Warren Magnuson, then the Senate Pro Tempore, as part of Ronald Reagan’s wave in 1980. During Reagan’s “sixth year itch” midterm, Gorton narrowly lost his seat in 1986. Two years later, and with the benefit of both a better national environment and a more liberal Democratic opponent, he won the state’s other seat 51%-49% in 1988. As with 1980, Gorton had the national environment in his favor when his seat came up in 1994—Washington state, where Republicans gained 6 House seats, was Ground Zero for the red wave that year. But in 2000, Gorton got a well-funded challenger in then-former Rep. Maria Cantwell (D), who was herself a casualty of the 1994 wave. Though she has only had easy races since then, Cantwell’s 2,000-vote win that year represented the state’s closest Senate result in the popular vote era. Before he died in 2020, Gorton remained active in non-elective political roles—some of our readers may remember he served on Washington state’s redistricting commission.

Before Sherrod Brown got to the Senate, the last Democrat to hold his seat was the late Howard Metzenbaum, who is also on Table 1. Metzenbaum initially ran for the Senate in the 1970 election, and he defeated famous astronaut John Glenn in that cycle’s Democratic primary. But Metzenbaum then lost the open-seat general election to Robert Taft Jr., a member of the state’s famous Republican family. Metzenbaum was then appointed to the state’s other Senate seat in advance of the 1974 elections, but Glenn defeated him in the Democratic primary en route to winning the seat. Two years later, Metzenbaum got a rematch with Taft. As the Almanac of American Politics put it at the time, Metzenbaum seemed to just outwork Taft. As Jimmy Carter narrowly carried Ohio, Metzenbaum finally won a Senate seat in his own right. Brown is also set to run against an incumbent in his 2026 comeback bid, Sen. Jon Husted (R), who was appointed earlier this year.

Going back further into senatorial history, Republican John Sherman Cooper had one of the most notable careers in his state’s politics since, perhaps, Henry Clay. In addition to positions in local and international roles, Cooper’s roughly 50-year career in public service included three tours of duty in the Senate, and his name appears twice on Table 1 because his two successful comebacks followed two separate reelection losses.

Before locking down a seat for several terms beginning in 1956, his first two terms were shorter and his electoral prospects reflected the national mood, even if Cooper himself was known as a political maverick. Cooper first got to the Senate in 1946, an anti-Truman year, and was narrowly voted out in 1948. As noted in his biography, The Global Kentuckian, even in a time of relatively low party loyalty, Cooper had only voted with the rest of his party in the Senate 51% of the time. Though it wasn’t enough to save his seat, Cooper’s independence clearly helped—he ran 10 points ahead of GOP nominee Thomas Dewey in the state and carried several Truman-won counties.

When his Democratic successor, Virgil Chapman, died midway through the term, Cooper ran in and won a special election to replace him in 1952. In 1954, when the seat came up for a regular election, national Democrats—as we might say in today’s parlance—landed their strongest recruit in former Vice President Alben Barkley, who served in the Senate before joining Truman’s 1948 ticket. Barkley defeated Cooper by 9 points. But when Barkley died in 1956, Cooper entered the race at President Eisenhower’s behest. He won the race on what would be his fifth attempt at the seat over the span of a decade.

West Virginia is another Ohio River state represented here. One of Cooper’s GOP contemporaries, Chapman Revercomb, was also in and out of the Senate. In 1942, Revercomb upset a former governor to win a Senate seat in Franklin Roosevelt’s final midterm—in his book Our Country, Michael Barone called 1942 a cycle defined by backlash to Roosevelt’s New Deal and war mobilization efforts. But as with Cooper, Revercomb lost his seat in 1948, a much better year for Democrats with Truman leading the ticket.

As Barone also noted, split-ticket voting began to increase in the 1950s, though it evidently didn’t take hold in Revercomb’s races that decade. In 1952, he challenged Sen. Harley Kilgore (D) for the other seat but lost as Eisenhower also failed to carry West Virginia. In 1956, Kilgore died and Revercomb won the seat that November in a special election. At the top of the ticket, Eisenhower flipped the state in 1956, and his showing was comparable to the Senate result. The 1958 cycle could be called Democrats’ best midterm of the 20th century—that year, Revercomb was defeated for a full term by then-Rep. Robert Byrd (D), who would hold the seat until his death in 2010. Though Byrd would change his outlook later in life as he tried to shake his association with the Ku Klux Klan, at the time, he made an issue of Revercomb’s support for civil rights.

Finally, the last two senators who’ve returned to the chamber in the postwar era came from the Mountain West.

Wyoming’s Joseph O’Mahoney (D) probably has the profile that is closest to what Sherrod Brown would like to pursue. Before his 3-point loss in 1952, O’Mahoney won three terms and served as a mostly reliable New Dealer—at the 1944 Democratic convention, he was considered for the vice presidential slot that ultimately went to Truman. Two years after his loss, the state’s other seat had concurrent special and regular elections (the incumbent died five years into his term).

Going by news articles from the time, the nastiness of the 1954 Wyoming races seems very much in line with today’s Senate contests. O’Mahoney, who was drafted into the race by a local grassroots effort, faced Rep. William Henry Harrison III. As with the aforementioned Taft, the latter had a sterling GOP pedigree: he was the grandson of a president and great-great-grandson of another. As is sometimes the case in western contests, both candidates accused each other of having weak connections to their state: Democrats pointed to Harrison’s Indiana roots while Republicans charged that O’Mahoney stayed in DC after his 1952 defeat, never really intending to return to Wyoming. Democrats tried to contrast O’Mahoney’s longevity with Harrison’s allegedly poor House attendance record. Richard Nixon, then the sitting vice president, also got involved, pointing out that as a lawyer, O’Mahoney defended scholar Owen Lattimore, who, according to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), was one of the Soviets’ most valuable assets in the United States. The outcome ended up a reversal of 1952, with O’Mahoney winning both 1954 races by 3 points.

In Idaho, Republican Henry Dworshak won a 1946 special election, but, like his GOP colleagues Cooper and Revercomb, lost in the 1948 Truman wave. When his successor, Bert Miller (D), died less than a year later, Dworshak was appointed to the seat; he held it by a close 52%-48% vote in a 1950 special election, and then was reelected twice more in his own right. A major issue in the 1950 race (and one where the ideological fault lines have some similarities to our current day debates) was foreign policy. The Democratic nominee, Claude Burtenshaw, ran as a supporter of the Marshall Plan, citing the foreign aid that the United States gave to Europe as an effective means to stop the spread of communism. Meanwhile, Dworshak took an isolationist stance—in his newspaper ads, he called the program socialistic and pledged to keep voters’ money at home.

So, while it is not unprecedented for defeated senators to return to the chamber, it is uncommon: only 6 senators have done so over a 78-year period. Looking ahead to 2026, we rate both former Sens. Sherrod Brown and Scott Brown as underdogs in their respective races—and we’d probably still hold New Hampshire at Leans Democratic if Sununu launches a run for his old seat. But, as we’ve seen in some cases above, the national environment can be an important factor. While we’d expect it to be at least a bluer year than 2024, we’re still watching to see how it develops.

Note: In addition to Managing Editor Kyle Kondik, who assisted with the research behind this article, we would also like to acknowledge our interns this semester, Leo Johnson, Celeste Wetmore, and Spencer Lieb, for their help.

J. Miles Coleman is an elections analyst for Decision Desk HQ and a political cartographer. Follow him on Twitter @jmilescoleman.

See Other Political Commentary by J. Miles Coleman.

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Views expressed in this column are those of the author, not those of Rasmussen Reports. Comments about this content should be directed to the author or syndicate.