After this week’s Iowa primary, the field is pretty much set in the six states that Democrats are mainly targeting to retake the Senate this November.
It won’t be easy. Democrats must hold their seats and win at least four Republican-held ones — including at least two in states that President Trump won easily in 2024. Those are seats Republicans should be able to defend, even in a challenging year.
But in most of the key states, there’s a good reason Democrats have a shot at winning, too — whether it’s the state’s partisanship, the strength of the Democratic candidate or the weakness of their opponent.
At this early stage, North Carolina stands out as the best opportunity for Democrats, and Iowa seems to be the likeliest Republican hold. In between, Maine, Texas, Alaska and Ohio all feature a mix of challenges and opportunities for both sides. Among them, it’s hard to figure where Democrats or Republicans are likeliest to prevail.
Here are the six battleground states, with some measures of the state of play: the baseline political environment in the state, the candidates’ track record of past performance, and the recent polls. (More details on those metrics below.)
Here are the metrics we’ve considered in the chart:
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The state’s 2026 partisan baseline, calculated using the results of the last presidential election and the shift in the latest national polls, including by demographic group. You can think of it as how we might expect the Senate race to go in this state if we didn’t know anything about the candidates.
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A measure of the quality of the candidates, based on how well this year’s two major party nominees in each Senate race fared in their last elections, relative to the rest of their party in the same contests (either the presidential race or other statewide races). If the candidate has never run for public office, the measure is blank.
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An average of this year’s polls (but excluding any sponsored by Democrats or Republicans).
One crucial difference in these four races is that Alaska and Ohio are mostly competitive because Democrats have nominated top-tier candidates, while Democrats are competitive in Maine and Texas because of the Republican Party’s weaknesses — whether it’s Maine’s usual tilt against Republicans or a shaky Republican nominee in Texas. If Democrats win in Maine and Texas, it might ultimately be in spite of their candidates, not because of them.
At least for now, the polls show Democrats at least slightly ahead in all four of the mid-tier battleground states, along with North Carolina in the top tier.
North Carolina is not “easy” for Democrats. They haven’t won a statewide federal election there since Barack Obama and Kay Hagan (Senate) in 2008.
Still, it’s hard to come up with a reason Republicans should be expected to hold it in this political environment, with voters souring on Mr. Trump and the G.O.P.
For one, North Carolina is a pretty light shade of red. It voted for Mr. Trump by around three percentage points, only a tick to the right of his 1.5-point victory nationwide. It’s one of the few Republican-held states where Democrats ought to be at an advantage in this environment: If we didn’t know anything about the candidates, Democrats might be favored to win by four points, based on the latest national polls.
With knowledge of the candidates, Democratic chances look even better. They’ve nominated Roy Cooper, who won the governor’s race twice, in much less favorable political environments, in 2016 and 2020. His opponent, the former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley, is well funded but is a first-time candidate who doesn’t enter the race with broad name recognition.
Mr. Cooper has led every poll of this race, often by a wide margin.
These two states don’t have much in common, but this year’s premier Senate contests bear a strange mirror-image resemblance.
In Maine, Republicans have perhaps the nation’s single strongest Senate candidate in Susan Collins, who ran nearly 20 points ahead of Mr. Trump when she won re-election in 2020. She’s the kind of Republican candidate who would have a chance to survive even in a great year for Democrats, and even in a state that reliably votes for Democrats for president. She has won five times before, after all — including in a big Democratic year in 2008.
On the other hand, Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, could be the weakest candidate for Senate in a battleground state. Of the 12 candidates in these six states, Mr. Paxton is the only one who underperformed his party’s statewide ticket in his last election, in 2022 — and that was before he was impeached, sued for divorce and pulverized by tens of millions of dollars in negative advertising from his own party. He’s the kind of Republican who can cost his party a race in a reliably Republican state.
The polls have shown Democrats ahead in Maine and Texas all year. The reason is obvious enough in relatively blue Maine in this Democratic-leaning year, but in Texas the story is partly about demographics. National polls show Democrats making enormous gains among Hispanic voters, which could send Texas leftward and into contention. Add in Mr. Paxton’s liabilities, and suddenly Texas looks like a prime Democratic opportunity.
But can Democrats take advantage of these two opportunities? The Democratic candidates, James Talarico in Texas and presumably Graham Platner in Maine, have impressive strengths but also potentially deal-breaking weaknesses that are only beginning to be put to the test.
In Mr. Talarico, Democrats have a youthful and articulate candidate who emphasizes his Christian faith. But some of his past pronouncements, like saying that God is nonbinary and that there are six biological sexes, may alienate the conservative and religious voters he might need to win.
In Mr. Platner, Democrats have a veteran and an oysterman whose anti-establishment message was resonant enough that it forced a sitting governor off the campaign trail. But he has been dogged by controversy. He wore a now covered tattoo of a Nazi symbol; he left an online trail of derogatory comments about women, and several women who dated him have recalled “unsettling” behavior; he reportedly sent sexual messages to women while married.
These are the kinds of issues or character questions that might be significant to the voters needed to win — moderate conservatives weighing whether to buck Mr. Paxton in Texas or the Maine voters who usually choose Democrats but have made an exception for Ms. Collins out of respect for her record and service.
It’s not always obvious when a political problem — whether it’s a gaffe, scandal or extreme policy view — crosses the line to do serious damage to a candidacy. Just four years ago, Republicans were highly competitive in the Georgia Senate race with a candidate, Herschel Walker, who was alleged to have committed domestic violence and paid for abortions, and who took extreme positions and stumbled on the campaign trail. It’s hard to say why he wasn’t disqualified by voters when so many with a similar track record have been. This same point applies to Mr. Paxton, who may — or may not — have disqualified himself with his conduct.
The line on what could be disqualifying can be awfully thin, but it tends to be thickest when the partisan stakes are highest — like when Senate control is hanging in the balance.
The bottom line is that it’s too early to say whether these Democratic candidates could cost the party otherwise winnable races. Republicans have only begun to campaign against both.
These are two solidly red states in presidential elections. Dan Sullivan in Alaska and Jon Husted in Ohio may not be electoral juggernauts like Ms. Collins, but they’re Republican incumbents who outran their party in their last statewide races (Mr. Husted for lieutenant governor before he was appointed to the Senate). On paper, they should be clear favorites.
But Democrats have nominated two excellent candidates who have a chance to grind out victories that Democrats otherwise wouldn’t have much chance to pull off. Former Representative Mary Peltola of Alaska and former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio are recent statewide candidates with a very recent record of running well ahead of their national party. In 2024, they ran far ahead of Kamala Harris; if conditions in 2024 had been like those today, there isn’t reason to doubt they would have won.
Of course, Ms. Peltola and Mr. Brown aren’t incumbents in 2026, as they were in 2024; this time, they’re running against incumbents, which makes their races a bit more challenging. But the polling, while inconsistent and fragmentary, suggests that both Democrats are highly competitive or perhaps even ahead.
To this point, every state on the list has something that Democrats can hang their hopes on: a blue state, a strong recruit or a weak Republican.
The same can’t be said for Iowa. While Democrats seem quite competitive, it’s hard to come up with a good reason Democrats should ultimately prevail.
At least based on the national polling, Iowa would still be expected to lean Republican in this environment. There have been almost no public polls of the state so far.
The Republican nominee, Representative Ashley Hinson, has a strong electoral record in her district. Democrats have a strong candidate of their own in Josh Turek, a Paralympic gold medalist and state lawmaker. He fared very well in his last election for state House, but that’s not quite the same as performing well statewide or in a federal election. At the very least, he’s not an established candidate with demonstrated statewide appeal and an existing reservoir of good will, like Mr. Brown or Ms. Peltola.
There is a case for Democrats to fare well in Iowa, but it doesn’t fit on this chart. You can read it in my colleagues’ reporting: Mr. Trump seems quite unpopular in Iowa; his tariffs have hit this agricultural state hard, and so have high fertilizer prices as a result of the conflict in the Middle East.
Obviously, much of this could be said for anywhere in the country, but it’s possible these factors will hurt Republicans more in Iowa than elsewhere.
While Democrats may not have an especially favorable candidate matchup in the Senate race, they may have a promising one in the governor’s contest, where the popular Democratic state auditor Rob Sand faces Zach Lahn, a MAHA-backed political newcomer who won impressively against a Trump-backed opponent in the Republican primary. If the governor’s race goes well for Democrats, maybe Mr. Turek can ride the coattails.
Is this a plausible story? Perhaps. In almost every election, some states move independently from the national trend. In 2022, for instance, there wasn’t an obvious demographic reason Florida and New York would zoom to the right, while Arizona and Pennsylvania would veer toward the left. But that’s exactly what happened, and the kind of analysis used here, based on national demographic trends and the track record of candidates, wouldn’t have anticipated it. Maybe this year, resentment toward tariffs and high prices will drive Iowa and other farm belt states disproportionately toward the left, much as resentment about crime and pandemic-era policies seemed to help move New York and Florida to the right.
Maybe polling in Iowa will bear out a leftward turn. For now, it’s at the bottom of the list.
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