Can Democrats Still Win the Senate?

Going through the latest ratings for the upper chamber after a tumultuous summer.

Not very long ago, a consensus reigned over the discussion about the Democratic Party’s once-long-shot fight to take back control of the U.S. Senate this year: that everything that could have gone right for the party had gone right for the party. Over the course of the pre-campaign buildup in 2025, the party’s leaders pulled off the candidate recruitment equivalent of an inside straight, somehow convincing every popular and established former red state winner at their disposal to forego retirement and/or easier contests to take the fight for the upper chamber. In the cases where their recruitment efforts went bust or were nonexistent—think Janet Mills in Maine or the entire debacle in Texas—fate miraculously intervened to create quality nominees from thin air. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, stumbled from disaster to disaster, dragged down by a White House breaking its back to saddle them with the worst possible candidates imaginable. By the time they started an unwinnable war that sent gas prices to $5 a gallon, it had become accepted wisdom that the battle for the chamber was at least a tossup.

You’d be hard pressed to find someone pushing this exact narrative after the past few months. Remarkably, this hasn’t been because of bad developments in what should by all means be the Democratic Party’s weakest link: their always-tenuous efforts to snag a pair of seats in double digit Trump territory. Instead, the disaster has struck on the party’s backline. Up in Maine, a Harris+7 state that polled as the party’s easiest pickup opportunity less than two months ago, Democrats were left literally without a candidate with only months to go after the spectacular implosion of the grand Graham Platner experiment. Over in Michigan, a race that once figured to be a positive exhibition of the party’s young talents has devolved into an immensely negative eight-figure slugfest thanks to AIPAC and the Democratic establishment. Somehow still leaderless and fractured deep into July, both state parties now have less than four months to mend their deep internal wounds and take the fight to well-polling Republican opponents who have been in general election mode since last year.

It’s hard to exaggerate how high the stakes are. If just one of these two races enters true tossup territory—to say nothing of outright leaning towards the GOP—the entire house of cards that the opposition party has carefully constructed will collapse. As Republicans learned the hard way in 2022, screwups in states that should otherwise be safe bets can have very national consequences. Every dollar that goes to a last-minute rescue mission is a dollar that isn’t spent on frontline candidates who desperately need funding. Resources become scarce, odds get longer, and things get set up for a full-on sweep for the opposing side—one wide and deep enough to set back a party for a generation.

So, while this article will go over every Senate race on the ballot in this country, it will principally focus on the two big Ms: Michigan and Maine. Together, these two races will do much to decide just how much Democrats can achieve this year, with it be a full-on realignment-level wave or a simple consolidation of low-hanging fruit. How much have centrist Democrats and their allies in the Israel lobby screwed the anti-Trump cause with the obstinance and ineptitude? What do things look for left-flank candidates in those races who are now suddenly beset on all sides? Can they truly get these races back onto stable footing with the whole world against them, and what options are left open for the party if they cannot?

Simply put: can Democrats still win the Senate in 2026?

The New Official Ettingermentum 2026 Senate Ratings Map. No Tossups.