Can Democrats really win the Senate in 2026?

Their math isn’t as bad as you might think — if they find the right candidates.

Mary Peltola, the former U.S. Rep. from Alaska and a possible Senate candidate in 2026.

Last week, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp — one of the few Republicans to defy Trump and live to tell about it — announced that he would not seek his party’s U.S. Senate nomination in 2026, removing a hurdle for Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff.

Democrats clearly do have a pathway to a Senate majority in 2028. Republicans currently control 53 Senate seats, and Democrats 47. Between 2026 and 2028, there are three contests in highly competitive 2024 states — one each in North Carolina in 2026 and 2028, and then one in Wisconsin in 2028. Plus, there’s a fourth race in Maine next year, where Susan Collins is running for re-election in a state that hasn’t voted Republican for president since 1988.

Obviously, none of this is easy for Democrats — Collins, in particular, survived in 2020 even as Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden. But if Democrats were to win three of the four races plus the presidency, they’d probably¹ have a trifecta in 2028.

But winning the Senate next year? If you follow one line of reasoning, then Kemp’s decision is a nice bonus for Democrats but not much more than that. Georgia isn’t even a pickup opportunity; instead, Democrats are playing defense in Ossoff’s seat. Instead, to win the Senate, they’ll need four pickups.² That will require probing deep into Republican territory, winning at least two states that have become solidly red at the presidential level.

Friend-of-the-newsletter Matt Yglesias wrote recently that “Democrats’ chance of winning a Senate majority in 2026 is nearly zero unless they do something dramatically different.” Yglesias was making a point I largely agree with about candidate quality — that Democrats ought to nominate moderates who are good fits for red states — so I’m not going to rag on him too much. But the early forecasts put together by groups like the Cook Political Report also paint a difficult picture for Team Blue. Cook rates all but three GOP-held seats (Maine, North Carolina and Ohio) as “solid Republican”, implying that there’s really no pathway for Democrats for a Senate majority at all.³

By contrast, the odds at the prediction market Kalshi give Democrats a 32 percent chance of winning the Senate next year.⁴ While you’d certainly rather be Republicans to Democrats, I happen to know a thing or two about how those one-in-three chances sometimes come through. That implies a competitive race, not the foregone conclusion that Cook assumes.

So, who’s right? It will be at least a year before we have the official Silver Bulletin midterms forecast up. And while I have no idea what it will say,⁵ I suspect that the prediction markets are more in the right ballpark than Yglesias and Cook.