The 2026 Senate Map Looks Great For the Opposition Party

Unfortunately, the opposition party is the Democrats

You may have heard that the Senate map in 2026 doesn’t look great for Democrats. They’ve got to pick up four seats to take control of the chamber, and they only have a couple of plausible pickup opportunities, the most promising of which (Maine, where Susan Collins is the incumbent) perennially disappoints. Meanwhile, they have to defend three open seats in purple states where incumbents are retiring (Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire), plus a seat in Georgia that they only won by a whisker last time. In the House Democrats will be playing to win, but in the Senate the consensus is that they’re playing mostly to hold.

All that may be accurate. But, just for kicks, take a look at the actual map for 2026:

Republicans are defending 22 seats to the Democrats’ 13. Why should Democrats be playing defense with far fewer seats to defend? Moreover, quite a few Republican incumbents are underwhelmingly popular:

• Roger Marshall (R-KS) — 40% approval

• John Cornyn (R-TX) — 41% approval

• Thom Tillis (R-NC) — 42% approval

• Joni Ernst (R-IA) — 44% approval

• Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — 46% approval

• Pete Ricketts (R-NE) — 46% approval

That’s six seats where the incumbent’s approval is significantly under 50%. To be sure, some of that is lack of name recognition; Marshall, for example, has a 34% approval rating, so he’s “above water” in the sense that more voters who actually have an opinion of him approve than disapprove. But still: the endangered Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff (D-GA) has an approval rating of 51%—and a disapproval rating of only 31%. If he’s got to fight to hold onto his seat, shouldn’t these other six have to fight even harder? Add in Ohio and Florida (where the incumbents were appointed), Kentucky (where the retiring incumbent, Mitch McConnell, is the most-unpopular sitting Senator), and the aforementioned Collins of Maine (whose approval is also below 50%, though higher than those other six), and it looks to me like in a neutral national political environment you’ve got ten states where the Democrats can attack, versus only four which they have to vigorously defend. That’s not a bad map!

But 2026 is not going to be a neutral national political environment:

• The incumbent president is a Republican, hence likely to face a thermostatic backlash that costs him seats in the legislature.

• That president’s popularity is declining rapidly, far more rapidly than is typical for a newly-elected president, in large part because he is doing things that are both disruptive and unpopular.

• We may well be heading into a recession, one that, if it comes, will overwhelmingly be blamed on the President’s extremely high-profile and disruptive policies.

• Those unpopular and disruptive policies are hitting many of these states with unpopular incumbents especially hard: Texas businesses frequently depend on businesses operating over the border in Mexico, Iowa farmers will suffer from retaliatory tariffs against American farm products, etc.

• Even though President Trump campaigned on many of the things he’s doing, from the perspective of the electorate much of this is a surprise; they voted for lower egg prices, not taking a chain saw to Medicaid.

• Finally, Republicans in the House and Senate have been absolutely supine, not only not daring to voice any real criticism but actively handing over as much power as they can, and are increasingly refusing to even explain themselves to voters in person for fear of the bad optics of angry questions.

This should, logically, make for an even more target-rich environment for the opposition party than the numbers currently suggest, with the possibility of netting as many as ten seats—the kind of performance the Republicans achieved in 2014.

But in the United States, there are only two political parties: the Republicans and the Democrats. And the Democrats—currently in opposition—are considered so unacceptable in so many states that even when a Republican incumbent is distinctly unpopular—as, for example, McConnell and Graham were in 2020—a Democrat can have a hard time beating them. Heck, an opposition candidate who isn’t a Democrat, who doesn’t even promise to caucus with the Democrats, but who is trying to unseat a Republican without themselves being a Republican, can struggle. Deb Fischer (R-NE) sports an approval rating of 41%, versus a disapproval rating of 48%, and her opponent, Dan Osborne, ran a model race—and did better than any Democrat has done statewide in Nebraska since Ben Nelson was around, and better than any Independent has ever done. Yet Fischer still won.

So did Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Ron Johnson (R-WI), who were also significantly underwater in terms of approval within their home states going into the 2024 election. By contrast, Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and John Tester (D-MT) both had higher approval ratings in their states when they lost than Cruz, Johnson or Fischer had when they won, and a higher percentage of voters who approved of their performance than disapproved.

I think Democrats in general understand the ridiculousness of their position; certainly the ones in charge of the party do. But even before the failures of 2024 a kind of fatalism appeared to have set in, a belief that while they could reduce the chance of losing by good candidate recruitment and smart ad strategy, there was nothing they could do to actually win. They still could win, of course, if they got lucky. Maybe Trump’s obvious unfitness would bail them out; maybe a pandemic would bail them out; maybe Dobbs would bail them out. But even if they did win certain individual elections, the Senate was baseline just a heavy lift every election given the hard, demographic-driven facts of partisan polarization.

This belief wasn’t based on nonsense, of course. I could go into specific arguments about how the extraordinary voting shifts over the last several elections should have proven that demography is not destiny, but that would be avoiding the central point: that a party that wants to win doesn’t spend its time making arguments about how hard it is to do so. And a party is a machine for winning elections, just as a corporation is a machine for making money.

That may sound cynical—it is kind of cynical, frankly. But the fatalism that is the alternative is fundamentally inimical to democracy. Democracy depends on competition, and if you aren’t going to play to win you should give somebody else the ball. And by “play to win” I mean “win elections,” not win applause either from your shrieking base or from pearl-clutching centrists. I don’t even mean “win policy fights.” Obviously the reason most people go into politics is to make a difference in the world, and people with ideological beliefs tend to think that making a difference means enacting policies that are good and stopping policies that are bad. But in fact, holding the other party accountable at the ballot box is the most fundamental way that people in electoral politics can make a difference. Why? Because the possibility of losing is what incentivizes both sides not to screw up. Lose that, and not only will the other side behave appallingly but your own side will become decadent and corrupt, and achieve less and less of what they themselves claim to stand for.

A common talking point now is that blue-state governance is part of the Democrats’ problem in convincing red-state and even purple-state voters to trust them. I think that’s correct, but it’s correct because the problem of not wanting to win and not worrying about losing are the same problem, a problem of lack of competition. And the only solution to that problem is to compete.