Less than a week before the midterm elections, Democrats are heavily favored to retake the House, but the fight for the Senate is much tighter.
Democrats and Republicans expect Senate control to be determined by a handful of states where polls show close races, making it difficult to tell which party will prevail next week.
Democrats need to pick up four seats to retake the Senate. The party has a clear lead in just one Republican-led state, North Carolina, where former governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, is favored to defeat Republican Michael Whatley in the race for an open Senate seat.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates Senate races in seven other states as toss-ups that could go either way, which will have enormous implications for President Donald Trump’s last two years in office.
If Democrats win all seven races, along with the ones in which they are favored, they would secure their largest Senate majority since the Obama administration. If Republicans win all seven races, they would maintain their current 53-47 majority in the Senate, picking up a Democratic-held seat in Michigan to offset a loss in North Carolina.
The battle is being fought largely on Republican terrain. Trump won six of the seven states in 2024, five of them by double-digit margins.
Republicans are outspending Democrats in most of the races, with especially significant advantages in Texas and Ohio. But Democrats hold narrow leads in all seven toss-up races, according to Washington Post averages of recent high-quality polls in each state — though most of them are within the margin of error.
The toss-up races do not include New Hampshire, an open seat that Republicans are targeting but where Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas has led in polls, or Georgia, where Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff is favored to defeat Republican Rep. Mike Collins.
Here are more details on the seven toss-up races.
Alaska
Last time it elected a Democratic senator: 2008.
Presidential margin in 2024: Trump won by 13 percentage points.
Spending advantage: Republicans are set to spend $9.5 million more than Democrats between Labor Day and Election Day, according to AdImpact.
Polling average: Democrats lead by five points.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) persuaded former Democratic congresswoman Mary Peltola to run, describing her recruitment in January as “the last piece of the puzzle” to put Democrats in a position to retake the Senate. Peltola is challenging Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, who is seeking a third term in a state hit hard by rising diesel prices from the war with Iran and other cost-of-living challenges.
The race was scrambled in May by the entry of Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired teacher from Petersburg, Alaska, who will appear on the ballot under the state’s unique top-four electoral system. Republicans have accused the second Sullivan of trying to confuse voters and help Peltola in the tight race, which he has denied.
The Justice Department filed a lawsuit last week seeking to blocking certification of the results if the senator loses, which Democrats promised to fight.
Iowa
Last time it elected a Democratic senator: 2008.
Presidential margin in 2024: Trump won by 13 percentage points.
Spending advantage: Democrats are set to spend $12.9 million more than Republicans between Labor Day and Election Day, according to AdImpact.
Polling average: Democrats lead by two points.
Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson is facing Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek in the race for an open Senate seat in Iowa, which President Barack Obama carried twice but which has turned redder in the Trump era.
Both candidates are running on bipartisanship. Hinson pledged in a debate to push back on Trump when she thinks he is wrong, and Turek has run ads touting how often he voted with Republicans in the state legislature. But the race is hardly Iowa nice: Turek has attacked Hinson for her family’s growing net worth since she was elected to Congress, while Hinson has criticized Turek for missing votes in the legislature.
Kansas
Last time it elected a Democratic senator: 1932.
Presidential margin in 2024: Trump won by 16 percentage points.
Spending advantage: Democrats are set to spend $18.3 million more than Republicans between Labor Day and Election Day, according to AdImpact.
Polling average: Democrats lead by one point.
Neither party viewed the race in Kansas — where no Democrat has won a Senate seat in nearly a century — as competitive earlier this year. But polls show Adam Hamilton, a Democrat running as a moderate, in a close race against Republican Sen. Roger Marshall.
Republicans have accused Hamilton, a Methodist pastor who leads the state’s largest church, of pretending to be a moderate, citing his past comments in support of Black Lives Matter and for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. However, Hamilton’s campaign has raised far more money than Marshall’s this year, helping to make Kansas one of two toss-up states in which Democrats are outspending Republicans in the home stretch before Election Day.
Maine
Last time it elected a Democratic senator: 1988. (Although, Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, won Senate races there in 2012, 2018 and 2024.)
Presidential margin in 2024: Kamala Harris won by seven percentage points.
Spending advantage: Republicans are set to spend $11.8 million more than Democrats between Labor Day and Election Day, according to AdImpact.
Polling average: Democrats lead by two points.
Democrats worked as hard as they could to oust Republican Sen. Susan Collins when she was up for reelection in 2020 — only for Collins to win by nine points, even as Joe Biden carried the state. Now Collins is seeking a sixth term, and Democrats are trying again to defeat the only Republican senator who represents a state that Harris carried in 2024.
Schumer recruited Democratic Gov. Janet Mills to challenge Collins, but she suspended her campaign ahead of the primary after running out of money. Graham Platner, a Marine Corps veteran and oysterman with strong grassroots appeal, won the nomination but dropped out in July after he was accused of sexual assault, which he denied.
Democrats united around a new nominee, Troy Jackson, a progressive former state Senate president who polls show is in a close race with Collins. But it is hard for either party to truly trust polling in the state after polls underestimated Collins in 2020.
Michigan
Last time it elected a Republican senator: 1994.
Presidential margin in 2024: Trump won by one percentage point.
Spending advantage: Republicans are set to spend $23.5 million more than Democrats between Labor Day and Election Day, according to AdImpact.
Polling average: Democrats lead by four points
Michigan is Republicans’ best pickup opportunity this year. Abdul El-Sayed, a former Wayne County public health official who won a fractious Democratic primary in August, is facing former Republican congressman Mike Rogers. Some Democrats have refused to support El-Sayed, though, over his strong criticism of Israel and his controversial comments in the wake of an attack on a Michigan synagogue.
In polling, El-Sayed has underperformed Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic nominee for governor, but he could still prevail in a state that has not elected a Republican senator in decades. Democrats feel slightly more confident about winning Michigan than the other toss-up races, based on polling and early-voting trends, according to two Democratic strategists, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.
Ohio
Last time it elected a Democratic senator: 2018.
Presidential margin in 2024: Trump won by 11 percentage points.
Spending advantage: Republicans are set to spend $71 million more than Democrats between Labor Day and Election Day, according to AdImpact.
Polling average: Democrats lead by four points.
Former Democratic senator Sherrod Brown spent 18 years in the Senate before losing reelection in 2024 with Trump at the top of the ballot. Brown is running again this year, challenging Republican Sen. Jon Husted, whom Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine appointed last year to fill Vice President JD Vance’s Senate seat.
The race has become blisteringly expensive. More than $360 million in ads are set to run between Labor Day and Election Day, according to AdImpact — more than any other Senate race in the country. Brown has spent millions of dollars on ads attacking Husted over his support for data centers, which the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned in August could cost Husted the race. Husted, meanwhile, has criticized Brown for spending 50 years in elected office. (Brown won a seat in the state House in 1974.)
Texas
Last time it elected a Democratic senator: 1988.
Presidential margin in 2024: Trump won by 14 percentage points.
Spending advantage: Republicans are set to spend $159.1 million more than Democrats between Labor Day and Election Day, according to AdImpact.
Polling average: Democrats lead by three points.
No Senate race has proved more frustrating to Republicans than Texas, where Trump endorsed Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, over Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary runoff despite warnings that it could cost his party the seat. Now Paxton is locked in an expensive race with state Rep. James Talarico, who could become the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Texas in decades.
Republicans have an enormous spending advantage in the state after Elon Musk gave $158 million in September to a Republican super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, which transferred the same amount to a group aiding Paxton. But the money did not arrive until Talarico’s campaign had spent months airing ads, while Paxton’s campaign was not on the air.
Talarico has criticized Paxton for his indictment on securities fraud charges and for being impeached in 2023 by the Texas House of Representatives, among other scandals. (A judge dismissed the fraud case against Paxton after he completed a pretrial diversion program without admitting guilt; Paxton was acquitted by the state Senate after his impeachment.)
Paxton has lambasted Talarico for calling on Americans in the past to eat less meat and emit fewer greenhouse gases to fight climate change.
“Oil. Beef. A way of life,” one recent Paxton ad says. “But radical James Talarico wants to set it ablaze.”
Scott Clement contributed to this report.
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