The Senate: A Couple of Rating Changes in Favor of Democrats, but Republicans Still Favored Overall

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— Despite facing what is likely to be a difficult national political environment this fall, Republicans remain favored to hold their Senate majority.

— President Trump did well among young people and nonwhite voters in 2024 for a Republican, but he has seen his approval erode with those voters. However, that doesn’t have as much of a bearing on the Senate map, with Democrats having to compete in whiter states like Iowa and Ohio.

— Democrats do get a couple of rating upgrades this week, with the biggest change coming in Georgia, as Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D) race moves from Toss-up to Leans Democratic.

Table 1: Crystal Ball Senate rating changes

Map 1: Crystal Ball Senate ratings

Updating the race for the Senate

The 2026 midterm may once again be a “Blue Wave,” as we saw in 2018, Donald Trump’s first midterm as president.

But that environment wasn’t enough for Democrats to win the Senate that year, and it may not be in 2026, either.

While Democrats have made progress over the course of the last year in positioning themselves to compete in enough Republican-held seats to win the majority, the GOP nonetheless remains favored to hold that majority.

The basic asset for Republicans, and problem for Democrats, is the structure of the Senate map. With Republicans having knocked out all of the remaining Democrats from states that voted for Donald Trump all three times he was on the ballot—a group of 25 states that accounts for half of all the Senate seats—Democrats either have to start winning in redder states again or, over time, essentially sweep all of the Senate seats in blue and purple states.

Despite Republicans defending 22 of the 35 seats being contested this November, only a pair of those are in states where Democrats are currently very competitive: Maine, which consistently votes Democratic for president but also has the only Republican senator from a Kamala Harris-won state, Susan Collins; and North Carolina, which consistently votes Republican for president but often elects Democrats in other statewide races. Meanwhile, Democrats have to defend a couple of Trump-won states, namely an open seat in Michigan and the Georgia seat held by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D). We are upgrading Ossoff’s race to Leans Democratic—more on that below—but these other three races remain Toss-ups. Holding Georgia along with all of their other seats and flipping Maine and North Carolina would get Democrats to 49 seats—still two short of the 51 they need for a majority. Democrats have attracted credible recruits in additional, Republican-held seats, most notably Alaska and Ohio, but they may just run into a red wall even if the political conditions are very favorable in November.

A New York Times/Siena University poll helps illustrate what we mean. That poll, released last week, showed Trump’s approval rating at 40% approve and 56% disapprove among registered voters, with Democrats leading Republicans by 5 points on the House generic ballot. Both findings are roughly in line with current polling averages of Trump approval and the generic ballot; they’re also in the ballpark of what we saw around this time eight years ago (the Democrats did have a more robust generic ballot polling lead, though).

Surveying the findings, the Times’s chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, noted how Trump’s gains in the 2024 election among younger and more diverse voters had evaporated. “Mr. Trump’s approval rating by demographic group looks almost exactly as it did in Times/Siena polling in the run-up to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. If anything, young and nonwhite voters are even likelier to disapprove of Mr. Trump than they were then, while he retains most of his support among older and white voters,” he wrote.

It’s that last observation that accentuates the challenge for Democrats in the Senate. Even with Trump in a weakened state, the floor of Republican strength with white voters in some of the states that feature on this year’s Senate map—such as whiter-than-average Iowa and Ohio, for instance—may very well be strong enough to hold up even in a 2018-style environment. And in states that are more diverse—like Florida and Texas—Republicans can probably afford to lose their gains accrued over the course of Joe Biden’s presidency and still come out ahead.

Back in 2018, it is true that then-Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) was reelected in Ohio by a little under 7 points. But he was an incumbent back then facing a weak Republican rival. This time, he is coming off a 2024 loss and is running against an incumbent, albeit an appointed one, in Sen. Jon Husted (R). Iowa did not have a Senate race in 2018, but Democrats did win three of the state’s four House elections that year—however, those three districts were (and are, under the current lines) more competitive than the state is as a whole, thanks to the state’s heavily Republican, northwestern 4th District. So Democrats might still have come up short had the state had a Senate race in 2018 (as they did in that year’s closely-watched gubernatorial race). In Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz (R) beat then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D, TX-16) by a little less than 3 points; in Florida, now-Sen. Rick Scott (R), then the state’s outgoing governor, unseated then-Sen. Bill Nelson (D) by a tenth of a point. That still ranks as a significant upset, but the result makes more sense now when considering Florida’s shift to the right in subsequent elections.

Our overall point is this: These are the kinds of states where Democrats are going to need to compete this year to win the majority. We can see Democrats getting close in several of these states, but we are still struggling to see them winning (which is why all of these races, along with others such as Alaska, are all still rated at least Leans Republican).

Let’s look at some of this year’s key races in more detail, starting with Georgia, which moves from Toss-up to Leans Democratic.

— Reps. Buddy Carter (R, GA-1) and Mike Collins (R, GA-10) as well as former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley are the leading contenders for the GOP Senate nomination in Georgia. Collins, who is perhaps best known for posting memes on social media but who also is dealing with an ethics investigation into his former chief of staff, has led scattered polls that include all of these candidates, and he may be a soft favorite for the nomination even as all three appear to still have a shot. Carter has a great deal of self-funding potential, while Dooley, son of legendary University of Georgia football coach Vince Dooley, is backed by popular, outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), whose decision not to enter this race was a blow to national Republicans earlier in the cycle. This primary, slated for May 19, could go to a runoff on June 16 if no one breaks out over the next few months. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) won a full term in 2022, a midterm year where Democrats held the White House and thus were operating from a generic disadvantage, but Warnock also faced a flawed Republican opponent, former NFL star Herschel Walker. The GOP nominee probably won’t have Walker’s baggage but they also probably won’t have his name ID, either. Ossoff, a conventional modern Democrat, does have some challenges, for sure—Georgia has become a key swing state although it also still has a little streak of red mixed in with its purple, and it is reasonable to wonder whether Ossoff can generate the level of Black turnout that winning in Georgia will require (whoever wins the Democratic nomination for governor will play a role in that too). But this also should be a Democratic-leaning year overall. Ultimately if Democrats could win Georgia Senate races in a pair of 2020 runoffs as well as in the 2022 midterm, they should be favored to do so in a 2026 midterm, too, particularly when the GOP is not guaranteed to produce a very strong challenger. So this race moves from Toss-up to Leans Democratic. This race is likely to be decided by only a few points either way—we just think Ossoff is likelier to end up on the winning side of that margin. One other note about Georgia: Earlier this week, the latest census projections were released, and red states continue to be on track to add electoral votes in the 2030 reapportionment at the expense of blue states. A big-picture takeaway for us is that Georgia probably will move from being an Electoral College luxury for Democrats in the 2020s to being an Electoral College necessity in the 2030s. Holding both of Georgia’s Senate seats, as Democrats already do, has already become a necessary (but obviously not sufficient) condition for a Democratic Senate majority.

— Michigan remains as the lone Democratic-held Toss-up. There, Democrats are the ones with the messy primary, with Rep. Haley Stevens (D, MI-11), state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, and former 2018 gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed all battling for the nod while former Rep. Mike Rogers (R), who lost a squeaker to now-Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D) in 2024, is on a glide path to the nomination. The challenge for Democrats is that they have an August primary that very well may not produce a nominee as strong as Slotkin was. The flip side is that Rogers’s best chance to win was probably with Trump driving Republican turnout at the top of the ticket in 2024, and the midterm environment could just paper over whatever problems Democrats have in this race. We’d ultimately be at least a little surprised if this was the year that Republicans finally won a Michigan Senate race this century, but there’s enough uncertainty on the Democratic side that Toss-up is still the appropriate rating.

— That’s also where we still have the open, Republican-held seat in North Carolina. If forced to choose now, we would favor former Gov. Roy Cooper (D), who is on his way to the Democratic nomination, against former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, who is also favored to win his party’s nomination and has Trump’s backing (but he also faces some opposition in his primary, most notably from the very right-wing Michele Morrow, whose primary upset of then-state Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt quite possibly cost Republicans the office in 2024). Cooper continues to lead scattered public polling against Whatley, although we’ve been curious about whether he’d cross 50%. He has not, even in some polls where he is far ahead (like a recent TIPP Insights poll, where Cooper led 48%-24% over Whatley). In a closely-divided, politically inelastic state like North Carolina, we’d like to see more before making Cooper a favorite in our ratings—we can easily imagine Cooper leading every poll of the race only for it to be decided by a point either way in a state that remains a little bit redder than Georgia.

— Maine may be the truest Toss-up of them all, both because of Sen. Susan Collins’s (R) unique cross-party appeal in a politically quirky state and because the primary contest between insider Gov. Janet Mills (D) and outsider veteran/oyster farmer Graham Platner (D) has become one of the premier intraparty fights of the cycle. Platner, despite a flood of controversies that emerged as he became a political phenomenon, may very well be leading Mills, although that is not entirely clear and the primary is not until June. Collins, meanwhile, has been on the receiving end of ire from the president recently, which is not necessarily a bad thing for her given the kinds of voters in the middle of the electorate she needs to hold. Collins also has not formally announced her reelection campaign; there’s no real indication she might opt to retire, although we can’t help but remember that Collins’s former colleague, then-Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), shockingly announced her retirement in late February 2012.

— We wrote about the race in Alaska earlier this month and also discussed Ohio as part of that update, so we’ll leave those races alone for now. We considered whether the open seat in Iowa should join these states in the Leans Republican category (it is currently Likely Republican). Following Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R) retirement, Rep. Ashley Hinson (R, IA-2) quickly entered the race and solidified herself as the likely GOP nominee. The Democratic side is murkier, with state Rep. Josh Turek (D), a favorite among national Democrats, as well as state Sen. Zach Wahls and veteran Nathan Sage all competing. Iowa is similar to Alaska and Ohio in that it is a state Trump won by low double-digits that hypothetically could be gettable for Democrats under ideal conditions. Alaska and Ohio already have credible Democrats set to advance to the general election, though, while Iowa is still sorting that out. We could imagine Iowa becoming a Leans Republican race later in the cycle but it seems premature to do that now. Iowa seems potentially susceptible to a political swing based on economic disruptions and ripple effects from tariffs impacting the agricultural economy. However, national perceptions simply seem to matter more in voting these days (a dynamic that is likely helpful to Republicans in all of these red state races). Texas, also Likely Republican, is a stretch for Democrats even if the competitive primaries produce the ideal matchup for Democrats: state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) vs. state Rep. James Talarico (D).

— Moving into the Likely Republican column this week, from Safe Republican, is Florida. Democrats did just get a candidate there who at the very least is going to raise a boatload of money—Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council aide at the center of Trump’s first impeachment and twin brother of first-term Rep. Eugene Vindman (D, VA-7). Sen. Ashley Moody (R) is an appointed incumbent and, historically, appointees have a little more to prove than elected incumbents, although that is another factor that probably matters less now than in the past. Regardless, Moody herself does have an electoral track record of her own, winning statewide attorney general races by relatively impressive margins in 2018 and 2022. To be clear, we don’t see this as a top-tier race—Florida has very clearly moved to the right even as some reversion seems likely this cycle, and much more than money is needed for Democrats to really put this race into play. But we thought it merited inclusion along with the other Likely Republican Senate races. Like Ohio, the Florida race is a special election for a seat last elected in 2022, so the winner will have to run again in a regular election in 2028.

— Democrats still remain clearly favored to hold Minnesota’s open seat, although Republicans got an interesting candidate there when Michele Tafoya, a former sideline reporter for NBC’s Sunday Night Football, entered the contest. Democrats, meanwhile, have a competitive primary between Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and Rep. Angie Craig (D, MN-2). Democrats do have to navigate a fraud scandal that contributed to Gov. Tim Walz’s (D) recent decision not to seek a third term, and Flanagan (as a current state-level official) would be easier for Republicans to tie to that scandal. But the recent, horrific events in Minneapolis, with Renee Good and Alex Pretti being killed by federal immigration agents, are likely to nationalize the Minnesota races in favor of Democrats, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-MN) entrance into the gubernatorial race is also likely to be helpful to the eventual Democratic Senate nominee. The open seat in New Hampshire is probably a more plausible Republican target, although we favor the Democrats there, too.

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.