Notes on the State of the Senate: The Post-Kemp Battlefield

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— Republicans missed out on a top recruiting target earlier this week, as Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) decided not to challenge Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA).

— Georgia remains a Toss-up in our ratings even as Ossoff’s reelection path got clearer.

— Another place where Democrats are playing defense, Michigan, remains a Toss-up, while a couple of other open Democratic seats in Democratic-leaning states, Minnesota and New Hampshire, are developing better for Democrats than Republicans.

— While there have already been many key developments in the race for the Senate in 2026, history shows that key candidate decisions may still be months away in some places.

— Republicans remain favored to retain control of the Senate in 2026, and we are not changing any ratings in this update.

A Senate check-in

One of the big 2026 Senate dominoes fell on Monday as Gov. Brian Kemp (R) decided not to challenge Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) in next year’s Georgia Senate election. Kemp, a popular term-limited governor, was arguably the most important non-incumbent potential candidate on the Senate map this cycle. His announcement does not remove Georgia from the list of Republican offensive targets in the Senate, but it does help Ossoff in his bid for a second term.

Polling demonstrated Kemp’s relative strength over other Republican candidates, including a recent survey from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution released late last week. Kemp led Ossoff 49%-46% in a hypothetical matchup, while Ossoff led other Republicans by fairly clear margins with support either a little below or a little above 50%.

Kemp would not have been sure to beat Ossoff, nor is Ossoff sure to beat any other Republican, but it’s also obvious that Kemp would have been a solid recruit for Senate Republicans.

There are many other potential GOP candidates, and those candidates now have a clearer runway to run now that Kemp is out of the race. The field could include any number of sitting members of the U.S. House as well as other prominent state Republicans. Democrats would assuredly love to run against firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA-14), who performed the worst against Ossoff in the aforementioned AJC poll (he led her 54%-37%). Ossoff’s big polling leads over other Republicans are probably reflective of name ID to some extent, but Kemp leading Ossoff while others trailed the incumbent with Greene trailing by the most likely reflects that both Kemp and Greene are well-known—it’s just that Kemp’s name ID is positive and Greene’s is not.

We are keeping Georgia as a Toss-up in our ratings as we see how the field develops following Kemp’s announcement, but it’s closer to being Leans Democratic than Leans Republican. The opposite would have been the case, at least to start, if Kemp had run.

Let’s take a quick look around the rest of the Senate map:

— If we were ranking all of the Democratic-held Senate races in terms of likelihood to flip to Republicans, we would probably put open-seat Michigan over Georgia now, even as both are in the same Toss-up category. The Democratic primary field there to replace the retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) has expanded, and it now includes Rep. Haley Stevens (D, MI-11), state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, and 2018 gubernatorial candidate and former Detroit-area health director Abdul El-Sayed, and others may enter as well. This could be a highly competitive primary that may not produce a candidate as proven as now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) was in last cycle’s open seat Senate race. Slotkin won a largely uncompetitive primary and then narrowly held the seat in the general election. Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R), who Slotkin beat last year by just a few tenths of a percentage point, is running again for Republicans. Although both Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-SC) have already endorsed Rogers, he may still have company in his primary: recent reporting suggests Rep. Bill Huizenga (R, MI-4), who represents a competitive but Republican-leaning district in southwest Michigan, is pondering a run, and 2022 gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon is also mentioned as a possible Senate or gubernatorial candidate. There are just a lot of moving parts in Michigan right now that together support a Toss-up rating, even though at the end of the day it’s a seat Democrats should probably be able to hold as the non-presidential party in a midterm.

— Peters’s retirement made the Michigan Senate race a Toss-up, but Democrats retain an edge in their other open seats. In New Hampshire, Democrats have coalesced around Rep. Chris Pappas (D, NH-1), who has performed well in his Democratic-leaning but competitive House seat. The Republicans’ best potential recruit, former Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH), decided, like Kemp, not to run, so the most notable potential candidate is former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, who lost a New Hampshire Senate race in 2014. Meanwhile, Rep. Angie Craig (D, MN-2) just unsurprisingly jumped into the open-seat Minnesota race there following the retirement of Sen. Tina Smith (D). Craig is like Pappas in that she is a proven candidate who has held down a Democratic-leaning but competitive district since 2018, but unlike Pappas so far, she has legitimate competition for the nomination: Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (D), who entered the race as soon as the seat became open, and former state Senate Minority Leader Melisa López Franzen (D) are also in the race. The Republican field so far does not feature an obvious top contender: 2024 nominee and former NBA player Royce White is running again, and he’s made a litany of outrageous statements in the past; another candidate so far is retired Navy SEAL Adam Schwarze. There’s still plenty of time for these races to develop but neither seems like a great pickup opportunity for Republicans.

— A pair of safe states on either side are set to have competitive primaries to replace some of the Senate’s longest-serving members. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) recently announced his retirement, and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced his retirement earlier in the cycle. Competitive primaries to replace each are brewing, but from a general election standpoint, both are rated Safe for the incumbent party.

— Democrats continue to wait on former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, who is still mulling a challenge to Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). Like in Georgia, Cooper’s announcement—whenever and whatever it ends up being—wouldn’t automatically lead to a change in our Toss-up rating there, even as Cooper leads the Democratic candidate wish list, much like Kemp led the Republican list in Georgia. Meanwhile, former Rep. Wiley Nickel (D, NC-13), who won a battleground district against a flawed Republican in 2022 but then retired after a GOP gerrymander, is already running, and Rep. Deborah Ross (D, NC-2) recently told NOTUS that three (unnamed) Democrats told her they would run if Cooper does not. So if Cooper passes on the race, we may see something like we are seeing in Georgia now—a litany of candidates taking a look at the race.

— Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) continues to show weakness in polls. A late April poll of Maine by the University of New Hampshire had Collins’s favorability at just 12% favorable and 58% unfavorable (another 27% said “neutral”). That is so bad that it’s difficult to believe, and Collins’s supporters will (accurately) note that Collins defied the polls in a significant way to win in 2020 (Tillis did too, albeit not as significantly). But this is also not the first poll to show Collins with weak numbers: Morning Consult, a pollster that tends to show statewide officials with decent approval ratings, nonetheless had Collins’s approval/disapproval split at 42%/51% in the first quarter of 2025. Democrats continue to lack a top challenger in this race—term-limited Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) may still be a possibility. Jordan Wood, a political operative who once served as chief of staff for former Rep. Katie Porter (D, CA-47), recently entered the race.

— Speaking of difficult-to-believe polls, the Houston Chronicle recently reported that a Republican survey showed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) leading Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) 50%-33% in their primary. That actually wasn’t the hard-to-believe part—we could see Paxton beating Cornyn. Rather, the eye-popping finding was that 2024 Senate nominee and former Rep. Colin Allred (D, TX-32) led Paxton 52%-37% in a hypothetical general election. Even with Paxton’s baggage, we don’t buy that: in 2022, even as some of his ethics issues were public knowledge, Paxton was still reelected as attorney general by nearly 10 points. Allred, who outperformed Kamala Harris in all but a few counties last year, may run again in Texas. Rep. Wesley Hunt (R, TX-38) is also reportedly sniffing around the race. Though Hunt’s candidacy could help Cornyn, at least at the margins (by splitting the not-Cornyn vote), Texas does have primary runoffs, so the eventual nominee will have to win a majority to be nominated. Next door Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) is another Republican incumbent who could have primary trouble—remember, starting in 2026, Louisiana will switch from its jungle primary format to partisan primaries for federal offices. National Democrats are reportedly trying to recruit former Gov. John Bel Edwards (D-LA), although Louisiana is even redder than Texas, so Edwards would have a very difficult path to victory regardless of who the GOP nominee is. Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times had a good rundown of possible Democratic Senate candidates in red states on Tuesday, including Edwards. That article also explored possible independent candidacies in lieu of Democratic challengers, like former union leader Dan Osborn’s independent challenge of Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) last cycle. Osborn turned in a solid performance, losing by 7 points, and he is exploring a challenge to Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) this cycle. We currently rate that race as Safe Republican but we probably would move it to Likely if Osborn officially takes the plunge. One could argue that it could be even more competitive than that, but Osborn seemed to catch Fischer flat-footed in 2024; Ricketts, who just won an uncompetitive special election last year, should be ready. Put a little differently, while Fischer was a weak incumbent in what turned out to be a good year for her party, Ricketts is a stronger incumbent who could be up in a potentially rough year for his party.

— Many Big Senate decisions have already come early in the cycle this year. However, that does not mean that there aren’t significant decisions to come, and some of these may come much later in the cycle. For instance, back in 2012, then-Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) did not announce her retirement until late February of the election year, a key development that led to the easy election of Democratic-caucusing independent Angus King (who just won a third term last year). Two years later, then-Rep. Cory Gardner (R) waited until early March 2014 to launch what would be a successful campaign against then-Sen Mark Udall (D) in Colorado. In February 2024 and March 2020, respectively, former Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) and then-outgoing Gov. Steve Bullock (D-MT) announced Senate bids that got a lot of attention and investment but ended up resulting in double-digit losses. We bring all of this up just to note that while there has been a lot of action in Senate candidacy decisions so far, there’s still a long ways to go.

— Republicans remain clear favorites to retain their Senate majority even in the event of a Democratic wave because Democrats still lack obvious targets beyond Maine and North Carolina. Republicans hold a 53-47 edge in the Senate, meaning that Democrats would need to flip four Republican seats while defending all of their current seats to win the chamber. Our current ratings are below in Map 1.

Map 1: Crystal Ball Senate ratings

Kyle Kondik is a Political Analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the Managing Editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball.

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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.