Let's Go Win the F*ing Senate

Voters think Democrats are weak. Writing off an entire chamber of the legislature 18 months in advance won't help.

It’s Friday, so I’m going to try something different and keep this post (slightly) shorter.

I keep finding myself thinking about something Tim Walz said a few weeks ago while on a panel at Harvard. “I think we will take back the house. I am very pessimistic about the Senate, just to be honest with you.”

I like Walz. I thought his convention speech last year was the highlight, for Democrats, of the 2024 campaign. But with that said:

1. Politicians should almost never try to be pundits, any more than NBA players should do color commentary mid-game.

2. The reason I can’t stop thinking about Walz’s remarks is that so many other people say similar things. His comment is a reflection of conventional wisdom - near-certainty about the lower chamber, near-fatalism about the upper - that seems to have set in despite the midterms being 17 months and two weeks away.

Yes, winning the Senate will be harder than winning the House. But it’s not impossible. And one helpful secret to winning to stop telling ourselves - and others, in public - that we expect to lose.

Let’s go win the Senate.

The (Reality-Based) Case for Pessimism

A friend of mine in Democratic politics once told me the secret to being a successful campaign strategist. “Figure out who’s going to win anyway, and work for them.”

Is that cynical? Is it humble? Both. More important, it shows that in campaigns - especially among high-level party operatives - there’s a lot of interest in picking winners.

If you’re a Democrat picking a winner for 2026, I could see why you might ignore the Senate and focus on the House.

The reason the Senate is tough for Democrats is simple: America’s states are substantially more conservative than its people. Trump won less than 50% of the popular vote in 2024. But he won 62% of the states. Even in 2020, when Trump lost, he won half the states.

In other words, because every state gets two Senators, for Democrats to get to 51 votes in the Senate they need to run the table in Biden states, plus win at least one seat in a Trump state.

No wonder the 2026 Senate map is tough for Democrats.

But also, every Senate map is tough for Democrats.

The House, meanwhile, should be easy for us to win. Given the trend against the incumbent president’s party in midterm elections, if Democrats don’t win the House in 2026, something’s gone very wrong. (Either Trump basically rigged federal elections, or somehow became extremely popular, or a combination of the three.)

An aggregate of betting odds puts Dems’ chances of winning back the House at around 80 percent. That seems about right. Maybe a little low.

You would think that having such a good chance of winning the House gives Democrats leeway to set their sights on a more audacious goal. But I worry it’s the opposite: they’re becoming fixated on the lower chamber and pretending the upper one doesn’t matter.

There are several reasons for this.

The aforementioned tendency to pick winners is one. Also, there’s an internal power struggle within the Democratic Party between the center-left and left. The best way expand influence within the party is to get likeminded people into the legislature. And it’s easier to do that - especially if you’re Bernie or AOC, tbh - by helping an ally win a primary in California or Illinois than a general election in Iowa.

Finally, Democrats can win the House without making tough choices about who we are as a party. Which is code for, “Without having to appeal to the more white, more populist, less college-educated electorates in the states that decide the Senate.”

Change is hard. And winning the House while ignoring the Senate allows Democrats to avoid having to change.

Counterpoint: Winning Elections is Good

Right now, MAGA is trying to push a bill through Congress that will hand trillions of dollars to rich people while cutting Medicaid for working Americans. If Democrats win the House, they won’t be able to do stuff like that any more.

Also, the House could theoretically subpoena Trump officials and launch investigations.

But winning the Senate is wildly important, too.

1. Because Trump 2.0 is all about doing things through the executive branch, the Senate’s power over nominations matters more than ever.

2. Right now, the only thing keeping America as we know it on life support are the courts. If we can block Trump from confirming MAGA judges, there’s a much better chance that the rule of law will survive until 2028.

3. If we win the Senate in 2026, there’s a much higher chance we hold it in ‘28, when we might elect a Democratic president. Unless our plan is to have the next Democratic president act as king-like as Trump, we’re going to need to pass some laws. And you can’t pass laws without the Senate.

Finally, and most importantly - if we succeed in winning the Senate in 2026 it would mean, almost by definition, we tried. And a party that tries is vastly more compelling than a party that gives up in advance.

When Did Democrats Become the Party of the Bare Minimum?

“We don’t have to win every vote. Just get to 50+1.”

This was a mantra I learned on the Obama campaign in ‘08. At the field-organizer level, it meant, “Don’t have long conversations trying to convince hardcore Republicans to support a guy with the middle name Hussein. Politely move on and find the persuadable voters.”

Good advice.

But since then, “50+1” has become a kind of mantra for Democratic strategists, and, I worry, a mindset for the party. If politics is, the art of the possible, we focus entirely on the possible while ignoring the possibility of art.

To put it differently, “get to 50+1” is a good way to think about allocating the budget for a campaign. But it’s a terrible way to think about who Democrats are and what our message should be.

First of all, because America’s states are more conservative than its people, if we get to 50+1 nationwide, or even in the electoral college, Republicans will win the Senate every time. We have get way over 50 in order to win both chambers.

Second, think about the message a 50+1 attitude sends to voters. On one hand, we’re telling people, “Trump is out of control, this is unprecedented, every American is going to suffer because of his lawlessness and incompetence.”

Then, simultaneously, we’re saying: “Despite all this, we think our ability to persuade is so limited - or the voters’ ability to recognize Trump’s self-evident awfulness is so limited - that we take for granted we can’t win a Senate election in states Obama won twice.”

Right now, most of the voters who decide elections think the Democratic Party is weak, out-of-touch, and condescending. And Democrats sit around wondering why.

I don’t think we should go all-out to win Oklahoma. But I do think that instead of being a 50+1 party, we need to be a 60/40 party.

In other words, we need a message we believe ought to resonate with 60 percent of voters. Or, in Senate terms, we should act as though we have a shot anywhere Trump won by less than 60 percent of the vote, which is 38 states.

To expand our appeal to the electorate in this way, we’d have to make some hard choices in ways that will require compromise from both the center and the left. We have to have a bigger tent, which probably means more public disagreement. We have to be willing to go out and find candidates that appeal to the average Iowan or Texan and Ohioan or Floridian or South Carolinian, whether or not they appeal to the average Democrat.

This will take discipline.

But it will lead to a much more muscular than we have today. It will project confidence not just in ourselves, but in the American people. And that strength and confidence will pay dividends in races everywhere.

Dare to Be Disappointed

Not too long after President Obama won re-election, I went to a polling briefing for the White House speechwriters. The lead slide from that briefing was “2014 is Not 2010.”

This was true. Obama’s second midterm election was nothing like his first midterm election. It was worse.

Now let’s apply that to Trump. In 2018, Democrats were excited about a blue wave washing deep into Trump Country. Instead, we lost statewide elections in Georgia and Florida. Beto O’Rouke lost to Ted Cruz in Texas. The day after the midterms, Democrats felt deflated, even though we won the House.

And maybe that will happen again. But there are some reasons to think Trump’s second midterm, like Obama’s, will be worse for him.

• Trump is going full mad king. It’s reasonable to think that his unprecedented actions will lead to an unprecedented reaction, too.

• The economy might not be helping Trump this time round.

• While there are huge problems with Democrats becoming the party of the college educated, it’s the group of people most likely to turn out in midterms. Trump, meanwhile, got elected thanks to two overlapping demographic groups: voters less likely to vote in midterms, and voters who don’t think of themselves as partisan and are thus most likely to sour on Trump. That should worry MAGA.

In other words, despite all the danger the country is in, and all the awful things happening daily, this is the perfect time for Democrats embrace the art, focus less relentlessly on the possible, and take a serious run at Senate seats conventional wisdom thinks are out of reach.