This time last year, hardly anyone imagined that Democrats would be on the verge of winning the Senate. The map was just too stacked against them.
Not only were Democrats defending seats in states President Trump won, such as Michigan and Georgia, but to have any hope of winning a Senate majority, they had to defeat a strong, longtime incumbent in Maine, Senator Susan Collins, and flip Republican-held seats in deep red states like Alaska, Ohio and Texas.
The best-case scenario for Democrats was that they would win pickups in North Carolina and Maine. The rest would be a wash. Democrats might get lucky in Texas or Ohio, but it was nothing to count on. Republicans would begin the next Congress with their Senate majority intact, trimmed by a seat or two.
But here we are now, weeks before Election Day, and it looks more and more possible that Democrats will defy the odds and win a Senate majority.
Not only is the party on target in states that were always on the table, but Democratic candidates are ahead in states that were thought to be a significant reach, including Alaska and Texas.
There is also a set of newly competitive races — in Iowa, Kansas and even South Carolina — where Democrats are running neck and neck with their Republican opponents. And this is to say nothing of contests, such as the one in Nebraska, where an independent, Dan Osborn, is in a close race with the incumbent Republican, Pete Ricketts.
Most forecasts show either a tossup or a slight-to-modest advantage for Democrats. But this might change, in the Democratic Party’s favor, if fuel prices stay high and Trump continues to sink in popularity. There is a world in which Democrats don’t just win control of the chamber but their largest Senate majority since the 111th Congress began in 2009, a high-water mark for the party (and one they’re unlikely to beat now or in the near future).
Not long after the 2024 election, I observed that if Trump’s second term were to unfold anything like his first, it would be characterized by chaos, extremism and a total indifference to governing that would tank his standing with the public and open up the Republican Party to electoral disaster.
It’s almost as if it were a pattern. When Trump is a candidate, he is an appealing idea, a potentiality that promises prosperity. But when Americans are forced to deal with the reality of Trump governance — a dysfunctional and chaotic White House staffed by the worst sycophants, ideologues and extremists imaginable — they quickly turn on him and look for ways to limit and restrain his authority.
You could see the pattern emerge early in his second term. By the summer, after unpopular moves like the rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the disastrous Liberation Day tariffs, it was abundantly clear that Trump would be at least as unpopular now as he was in his first term.
Democrats’ gains in last November’s elections reflected the president’s sinking standing. And the successive calamities of his second year — the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the war in Iran and the endless parade of corruption, lawlessness and criminality — have only accelerated the president’s political collapse.
If you looked at the 2024 presidential election as just another contest — one in which the public saw two suboptimal choices and chose Trump out of an almost totemic belief in his ability to create wealth — then all of this should have been pretty easy to predict.
The Trump administration itself, of course, seems blindsided by the prospect of a Democratic Congress next year. That might explain the aggression with which the president lashed out over the past week. His administration has announced a live-streamed public execution (which would be the first military execution by firing squad since 1945), abandoned any pretense of holding Vladimir Putin’s Russia at arm’s length and raided the home of Representative Ilhan Omar in a frenzied attempt to substantiate a right-wing conspiracy that she, somehow, fraudulently obtained American citizenship as a 12-year-old.
Trump is behaving, in other words, like a cornered animal: someone who knows that real political opposition, if not outright accountability, can be glimpsed over the horizon.
It is almost an understandable reaction. In all the years that he has been in office, Trump has never actually faced a unified Democratic Congress.
With the House and Senate in hand, Democrats would have an opportunity not just to check the Trump administration, but to neuter it: to halt the confirmation of new judges, to block his attempts to appoint more unqualified toadies to key offices and to focus the investigative fire of both chambers on every aspect of this White House. Should Democrats find the will to do so, they could launch the kind of full-court press that no president has faced from the opposition since Barack Obama had to contend with a Republican Congress in the last two years of his administration. The difference is that Democrats will have real corruption and malfeasance to work with.
A Democratic Congress, should it materialize, will be a lifeline for American democracy. It will not save it, but it may begin to stem the bleeding — an emergency tourniquet for a patient on the verge of bleeding out.
One takeaway for Democrats is that they must not fall for the fantasy that there is a constructive relationship to have with either Trump or the Republican Party over the next two years. In the face of investigations and legislative scrutiny, Trump is quite likely to escalate his assault on the rule of law. Democrats will need to make the most of whatever majority they have, wielding the full suite of Congress’s powers to constrain the president and restore constitutional government.
Rank-and-file Democrats — and, I’d wager, a substantial portion of the voting public — do not want compromise and cooperation. They want accountability. And if we hope to confine Trumpism to the ash-heap of history, then accountability is the only choice there is to make.
In 1864, as Union soldiers were dying by the tens of thousands, President Abraham Lincoln won a hard-fought second term. Republicans increased their numbers. This was not preordained. Lincoln genuinely feared defeat at the hands of his former general-in-chief, George B. McClellan, who spoke for the many Americans who wanted peace at all costs and were willing to give the Confederacy some of what it wanted to end the bloodletting.
As important as it was, however, Lincoln’s victory was not the end of the war. Nor was it the beginning of the end of the war. There was still much fighting to follow and much work to be done. What Lincoln had won — what the Union had won — was a chance to do that work.
Should Democrats win Congress, what they will have won is the chance to do the work that must be done. Anything less would be a failure and betrayal.
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