GOP Likely to Hold Senate, No Matter What Trump Does

If everything went right for Democrats in 2024, they’d still need a long-shot defection by Lisa Murkowski to control the Senate. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

For those who view what Trump 2.0 is doing to the country as an abomination, there are a few potential opportunities for relief. Perhaps the federal courts will restrain the unprecedented conquest of federal agencies by Elon Musk’s DOGE. Conceivably, congressional Democrats can overcome their confusion over Trump’s chaos tactics and their sense of guilt for allowing this catastrophe to happen and unite to exert some leverage via must-pass legislation, like the appropriations that will expire on March 14. Maybe Trump’s own party will cause him problems via their own disunity in a closely divided House of Representatives. But the one thing we know for sure (unless we are really headed off an authoritarian cliff) is that midterm elections in 2026 will offer voters the opportunity to bust up the Republican trifecta in Congress and express public unhappiness with what Trump has done with his slender 2024 “mandate.” The midterms, indeed, should arrive just as the implications of the massive income redistribution underway in Trump’s agenda of top-end tax cuts and deep budget cuts begin to become clear.

But while history and the almost certain backlash to the intensely reactionary Trump-Musk game plan suggest high odds for a Democratic reconquest of the House in 2026, the Senate is another matter entirely. The authoritative Cook Political Report has now released its initial Senate race ratings for the midterms showing that the three-seat (buttressed by J.D. Vance’s tie-breaking vote) GOP majority is looking unassailable. Of 22 Republican-held Senate seats, 19 are rated as “Solid R,” which means they aren’t vulnerable at all, short of an unimaginable development. Another seat (in increasingly red Ohio) currently held by newly appointed Republican senator John Husted, is rated as “Likely R”; no Democrat has won a statewide race in Ohio since 2018. Two races rated “Lean R” involve five-term incumbent Susan Collins (the only Republican senator running in a state carried by Kamala Harris in 2024) and Thom Tillis of North Carolina (a state Trump has now carried three times).

Meanwhile Democrats are defending two seats rated as “toss-ups” by Cook, both in states carried by Trump in 2024: one held by Jon Ossoff of Georgia, the other an open seat in Michigan from which Gary Peters is retiring. Both of those seats seem more vulnerable at the moment than either of the “Lean R” seats held by Republicans. Suffice it to say the odds are currently higher that the GOP will increase its Senate majority in 2026 than lose seats. But here’s the more important takeaway: Even if Trump 2.0 becomes a highly unpopular calamity, and Democrats gain 60 House seats in 2026, they are still going to control the Senate, almost no matter what. That’s how much the Senate landscape matters. Something similar happened in 2018, when Republicans lost 41 House seats but picked up two Senate seats in Trump’s first midterm. If everything went right for Democrats in 2026, they’d wind up with 50 seats, and would be forced to beg someone like Lisa Murkowski to abandon the party she’s belonged to her entire life to cross over and give them a majority. It’s not a promising prospect.

That means even if the American electorate has fully turned its back on the 47th president and his gang of disruptive billionaires, the Senate will be there to confirm his executive and judicial appointees every day like clockwork, just as they are currently on course to confirm even his most controversial Cabinet picks right now.

Voters can definitely end much of the madness in 2028 by expelling Republicans from the White House. But it’s much less likely they will give Democrats their own trifecta to undo some of the damage wrought by Trump 2.0. The Senate landscape in 2028 remains firmly pro-Republican, with Democrats defending four seats in states carried by Trump in 2024 and Republicans not having to worry about a single incumbent running in a state carried by Kamala Harris.

At the height of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, following his massive 1984 landslide reelection win, worried Democrats used to talk about the GOP having an “Electoral College lock.” Now that same party can exploit the upper congressional chamber’s deliberately non-representative character to forge a “Senate lock.” Perhaps if they are ever in a position to do so in the future, Democrats will give more serious attention to admitting new Democratic-leaning states like Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. They might do pretty well in Greenland and Canada too.