Ronald Brownstein: Democrats' Senate problems are more than map-deep

The odds of Democrats recapturing the Senate in next year’s midterm election are long. The usual explanation is that they are confronting a “difficult map,” with few opportunities to flip seats that Republicans now hold.

That’s not wrong, but as an explanation it obscures as much as it reveals. The Democrats’ challenge in capturing a Senate majority isn’t unique to the particular states at stake in 2026, or to any other single election. Their problem is more structural and entrenched.

The core of the Democrats’ difficulty in the upper chamber is the hardening alignment between how states vote for president and who they elect to the Senate. In the past few decades, it has become much more difficult for either party to win Senate seats in states that usually support the other side in presidential elections. That trend has limited the opportunities for both parties, but it creates a special burden for Democrats because slightly more states now reliably lean red than blue in the race for the White House.

In other words, Senate elections now usually turn less on the personal strengths of the two candidates than on the partisan trends in their state, measured above all by recent presidential results.

Twenty-five states — what I call the Trump 25 — have voted for Donald Trump in each of his three campaigns for the White House. Today, Republicans hold all 50 Senate seats from those 25 states.

Democrats are nearly as dominant in the states that have voted three times against Trump, but there are only 19 such states. Democrats hold 37 of their 38 Senate seats, with Susan Collins of Maine, who is seeking reelection next year, the sole exception.

Democrats are staying close in the Senate only because they hold ten of the twelve seats in the presidential swing states. There are six states that have flipped between supporting and opposing Trump in his three races: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the Rustbelt and Georgia, Arizona and Nevada in the Sunbelt. (The best news for Democrats in the 2024 election was that they defended four of their Senate seats in this bucket, while losing only Pennsylvania, even as Trump carried all of those states in the presidential race.)

The correlation between presidential and Senate outcomes is much more powerful than a generation ago, when many more voters split their tickets. After Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won 38 states in all three presidential elections of the 1980s, for instance, Democrats still held 40 of those 76 Senate seats, including both seats in a dozen states that voted three times for the Republican presidential candidate. Even as recently as 2017, Democrats held eight of the 50 Senate seats from the Trump 25 states, before the GOP systematically dislodged all of them in subsequent elections.

Now the presidential map has become the defining feature of the Senate battlefield. Democrats face tough-but-winnable races to defend two of their seats in today’s swing states (an open seat in Michigan and Senator Jon Ossoff’s bid for reelection in Georgia). They could also face serious contests in New Hampshire and Minnesota, two of the consistently anti-Trump states, though Democrats will be favored in each unless Trump’s approval rating improves. Simultaneously, any realistic path back to a Democratic Senate majority will require them to finally oust Collins, the last Republican standing in the 19 anti-Trump states.

But the biggest question in next year’s Senate election is whether Democrats can crack the states that have backed the president in all three of his national campaigns.

Their best chance to peel off one of the Trump 25 Senate seats will come in North Carolina, where Democrats have recruited popular former Governor Roy Cooper as their nominee. Democrats may also have plausible opportunities in Iowa (where Senator Joni Ernst’s decision not to seek reelection has created an open seat) and Ohio (where former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown gives them a credible challenger to Jon Husted, the Republican appointed to succeed JD Vance). There’s even an outside chance that a Democrat could win in Texas, where a bitter Republican primary between Senator John Cornyn and scandal-plagued state Attorney General Ken Paxton should produce a weakened GOP nominee.

But there’s no doubt that across the Trump 25 states, Democrats are swimming upstream. In 2024, Trump soared past 54% of the vote in each of these states, with the lone exception of North Carolina. Demographically, they are a tough fit for Democrats, since almost all contain more White Christians (especially evangelical Christians) and rural residents than the national average, and fewer immigrants, college graduates and metro-based information-age workers.

Because many of the Trump 25 states have small populations, they don’t currently provide the GOP an insurmountable advantage in the Electoral College: The Trump 25 offer 235 electoral votes, compared to 226 from the 19 reliable anti-Trump states.

But that balance will become more precarious for Democrats after the 2030 Census, when most analysts project the Trump 25 states will gain from five to seven electoral votes, with the anti-Trump states suffering the offsetting losses. If those projections bear out, Democrats in 2032 could win all 19 anti-Trump states, plus the former blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and still lose the Electoral College.

In the meantime, the Republican hold on all 50 seats from the Trump 25 states obviously leaves Democrats with no margin for error in the Senate. So long as Republicans can defend that stronghold, Democrats must win every Senate seat from the remaining states — including those that swing between the parties at the presidential level — just to reach a 50-50 tie they could break with control of the White House after 2028.

It may look as daunting as storming Normandy, but to maintain their long-term viability in presidential contests and their near-term hopes of recapturing the Senate, Democrats have no alternative but to somehow reestablish a beachhead in the Trump 25.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a CNN analyst and previously worked for The Atlantic, The National Journal and the Los Angeles Times. He has won multiple professional awards and is the author or editor of seven books.