Welcome back to On Politics. Hope you had a fabulous Fourth.
As you may have seen, The New York Times and Siena last week released polls in six Senate battleground states — North Carolina, Maine, Texas, Alaska, Iowa and Ohio. The bottom line? Democrats appear to have a shot at putting the majority in play this fall, but retaking the Senate remains a steep challenge.
One new complication for Democrats is their highly uncertain situation in Maine, where a damaging report emerged this afternoon about Graham Platner, the party’s nominee. The report, from Politico, described how a woman he once dated had accused him of sexual assault. Platner denied the accusation but suggested that he would “reflect on the best path forward.” You can follow our coverage of the Democratic fallout here.
Beyond Maine, both parties face both challenges and opportunities. To break down the most interesting findings from the Senate polls, I caught up with two of my colleagues who wrote about them, Shane Goldmacher and Lisa Lerer.
Below are excerpts from our Slack conversation, which have been edited and condensed.
Thank you both for joining. It seems clear that more Senate seats are in play for Democrats today compared with a year ago. But after reading our polls, I wondered if some have overstated the rosiness of the political environment for Democrats in recent months. Flipping the Senate remains hard! Shane, what’s going on?
SG: I look at these polls in terms of both where Democrats started, and where they want to finish.
They started with a 2026 map that seemed brutal: Only a single Republican-held state that Donald Trump lost in 2024 is up for election (Maine), while there are many that he won by 10 percentage points or more. Looking from that vantage point, it’s impressive Democrats are competitive in places like Alaska, Iowa, Texas and Ohio. And they are up in North Carolina, too.
But the goal for Democrats is an actual majority — which requires flipping four seats. They are in striking distance now. They are not quite there yet.
The polls also suggested that even in a potential wave environment, questions about candidate quality still matter — at least to a point — in both directions. Lisa, how is that playing out in Maine?
LL: Conventional wisdom would say that Democrats should be coasting in Maine. This is a state that Kamala Harris won by a sizable margin and one where voters have dismal views of President Trump, the economy and the war with Iran.
A majority also believe their current Republican senator — Susan Collins, who is running for her sixth term — is too old. Instead, she is locked in a neck-and-neck race with Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee. That’s largely because he has been battling a series of controversies practically since he entered the race last August. He could still win in November. But the race shows how even in our nationalized political environment, candidates still matter. A lot.
Conversely, maybe a generic Democrat would not be putting Alaska in play — but Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman who is running on a slogan of “fish, family, freedom,” appears to be doing just that.
LL: Yes. Another example is Texas, the state where the poll surprised me the most. This is a deep-red state that has bedeviled Democrats, who believed population shifts would move it in their favor, for decades. Now, our poll has the Senate race there tied.
In part that’s because of James Talarico, the Democratic seminarian and state legislator who ran with a call to broaden the party’s political tent. It’s probably more tied to views on Ken Paxton, the scandal-tarred Republican attorney general. But if Democrats appear to have a real shot in Texas, we should all buckle up for a pretty wild fall.
I’m buckled! I also have to ask about North Carolina. We keep hearing about how the Democratic base is in an angry, fiercely anti-establishment mood — and that has plainly proved true in a number of recent primaries.
But how is it that the party’s candidate in North Carolina, Roy Cooper, a mild-mannered former governor, is up by seven points in a state Trump won by three? Any theories?
SG: One of my favorite data points from the poll is that Trump, on average, carried the six states by eight points (that includes his loss in Maine). But the polls showed a tied race in the six states — meaning the political environment has shifted eight points total.
Looked at in that way, Cooper is running just a couple of points better than everyone else. What’s his secret? The formula appears to be for Democrats to find a popular two-term former governor who has been elected statewide for a quarter-century in a red-leaning state, who is somehow still not a septuagenarian (he turns 70 next year) and then run that candidate against a Republican without a statewide profile.
The problem is that this formula is not exactly repeatable.
Ah yes, there are not too many Cooper carbon-copies these days. Which results from the poll surprised you both most?
SG: Two things most intrigued me. The first was how favorably Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee in Iowa, is viewed. He had a net favorable rating of 27 points — which is basically unheard-of and a testament to the power of the $10 million in positive TV ads from the primary. Those ads introduced him to voters as someone who won two gold medals for wheelchair basketball at the Paralympics. (His problem is that he still trails the Republican.)
The second is the result in Ohio, where, despite the brightening environment for Democrats, Sherrod Brown, a former senator, received the same level of support as he did when he lost re-election in 2024.
LL: Iowa stood out to me, as well. I was struck by how much Turek appeared to be outperforming his party. Fifty-seven percent of voters said the Democratic Party was too far left, but only a quarter said the same about Turek. To me, that indicated that even as Democratic candidates are, in some cases, overperforming, the party still has a ways to go to fix its image after the bruising it took in 2024.
Definitely. The midterm results may well paper over deeper problems Democrats have yet to solve. Are there any nuggets in the cross-tabs either of you are fascinated by?
SG: A couple of interesting cross-tab slices: Platner has made being the working-class candidate central to his image. But he was winning only 37 percent of non-college voters in Maine. One of his challenges is how much voters respect Collins’s character: 66 percent said she had “good character,” the highest of any candidate in either party in any of the states. The two Democrats who came closest were Peltola (65 percent) and Cooper (64 percent).
The poll, of course, was conducted before the latest report about Platner’s conduct with women.
That is really interesting. One big question for Collins, of course, is how voters in that Democratic-leaning state weigh questions of character versus which party they want to control the Senate.
Lisa, any favorite nuggets?
LL: Digging into the cross-tabs, I was struck by how Republicans face erosion from voters who backed Trump in 2024. After that election, there was a real question about whether Republicans now owned these voters as part of their coalition but had been essentially renting them for one race. These polls hint that they may have been renters. There’s been notable decline in Republican support among Hispanic, young and even white voters who didn’t go to college.
Thank you both so much for chatting with me.
How Trump is trying to tip the midterm scales
Taking steps to nationalize elections. Trying to tighten voting restrictions. Pushing for unusual, politically weaponized redistricting.
President Trump is trying to use the levers of the federal government, along with his influence over state and local lawmakers, to reshape the rules governing the 2026 midterms and future elections in extraordinary ways, my colleagues Karen Yourish, Nick Corasaniti and Charlie Smart write.
Quote of the Day
“So, who do I vote for here?”
That was Mia Taylor, a voter from Los Angeles, asking Claude, an A.I. chatbot, for counsel as she looked at her primary ballot.
Voters are increasingly turning to A.I. tools to serve as nonpartisan researchers, my colleague Jennifer Medina reports. But some experts warn that these tools are far from foolproof for people trying to be informed citizens in the voting booth.
ONE LAST THING
So much for a World Cup without major Trump drama
Die-hard fans of the U.S. men’s national soccer team have a new, unlikely and perhaps uncomfortable ally in their quest for a deep run at the World Cup: President Trump.
Trump, hardly an avid follower of the world’s game, intervened after the U.S.’s star striker received a red card in its last game, which would have forced him to sit out a highly anticipated Round of 16 game tonight against Belgium.
Trump, my colleagues Tyler Pager and Tariq Panja reported, placed a call to his friend Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA. The organization agreed to review the red card, and a few days later — in the first nullification of a red-card suspension at the World Cup since 1962 — the player, Folarin Balogun, was cleared to play.
“Thank you to FIFA,” the president wrote on Truth Social, “for doing what was right and reversing a great injustice.”
Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.
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