Too Soon? Nope. (Part 1)

Efforts toward winning the 2026 election should be happening now. Opportunities abound.

Related Post: Too Soon? Nope. (Part 2)

We’re living in a time in which many of us dread reading the morning newspaper or turning on the evening news because we know we’ll learn of some new horrible thing that our government is doing in our names. New cuts to vital services, new illegal detentions and deportations, new lies being told to our faces.

Doom scrolling has become a national pastime.

It feels important, then, to spend some time mining some positives from the news ecosystem and to focus on some of the things we can still do to staunch the bleeding and offset some of the horrors.

I’m not advocating burying one’s head in the sand or plugging one’s ears. It’s almost unavoidable for some of the negativity to enter our consciousness. But for there to be a viable opposition that carries some political clout (and for one’s own sanity), it’s crucial to direct some of our focus toward the positive.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the 2026 election and its potential for putting the brakes on some of Trump’s most irrational and destructive actions. The possibility of tilting Congress more in the Democrats’ favor — and more in the direction of decency and sanity — is pretty appealing. It’s also well within reach.

Current makeup of the U.S. Senate.

The Democratic National Committee has identified five opportunities for tipping Senate seats toward the blue side of the aisle. From their fundraising emails:

“[T]hese five states could change everything:

Georgia
North Carolina
Texas
New Hampshire
Michigan

Flipping the Senate means defending our seats in Georgia, New Hampshire, and Michigan, while flipping North Carolina and Texas.”

I’m not discounting the DNC’s goals but, quite honestly, I think those are fairly modest aspirations. Nevertheless, it helps to understand the landscape in each of these races.

Georgia

Need to retain seat. Sen. Jon Ossoff will be running against an as yet unknown Republican, yet somehow polling is already close — likely a reflection of deep Republican roots in Georgia. Recent polling still gives Ossoff still gives him a lead of a few points, but that’s against a generic Republican.

Needless to say, the campaign hasn’t even begun, and Republican strategists are already identifying the race against Ossoff as a potential win, hoping to pick up a seat in the Senate to hold onto their majority. Of course, Ossoff’s chances depend upon who he’s running against, and that won’t be decided until the Georgia Republican primary. (There’s also even a possibility that the highly regarded Ossoff will have primary opposition of his own.)

North Carolina

Need to flip seat. Sen. Thom Tillis has announced his retirement/resignation from the Senate as of the end of this term. Since that announcement, he’s been quite outspoken in his distaste for the current state of the Republican Party and, specifically, for the big bad budget bill that has now passed both houses and has been signed into law. (Ain’t it funny how Congressional Republicans are only willing to speak the truth when their own jobs aren’t at risk?)

North Carolina has been a purple state in the last 20 years, with mostly Democratic governors. In that same time period, the two parties have shared dominance in the state legislature — mostly Democratic in the earlier part of that 20-year period, mostly Republican in the later part.

Population in North Carolina has grown by approximately 900,000 people in the last decade, with most of that growth happening in cities like Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, and Greensboro. In general, urban areas are more likely to have educated populations and are also more likely to vote for Democrats.

Texas

Need to flip seat. Incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is running for another term, but extreme right factions in Texas politics want to run Texas AG Ken Paxton against him in the Republican primary. Should Paxton prevail in the primary, it benefits the Democratic candidate greatly, because Paxton carries a whole lot of baggage.

Paxton has been surrounded by scandal for years. As you may recall, he was indicted federally on two counts of first degree security fraud. He reached a plea deal a couple of weeks before his trial was about to start, which consisted of community service and payment of restitution to the tune of $271,000. Not a bad deal, considering he would have spent a decade or more in prison if he had been found guilty.

Additionally, he’s the subject of a lawsuit for illegally firing four deputies who reported him for improperly using his office.

Texas is its own animal, so anything can happen. But a strong Democratic candidate stands a good chance of winning against Paxton and an fairly good chance of winning against Cornyn, whose overall disapproval numbers stand at 46% and those numbers have been on the rise since the beginning of the year.

New Hampshire

Need to retain seat. Three-term Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen has announced her retirement at the end of the term. Waiting in the Democratic wings is a strong contender for the seat — Representative Chris Pappas. His likely contender is Scott Brown, another Republican with plenty of electoral baggage, having previously run and lost in New Hampshire against Shaheen, after being elected in a midterm special election as a Tea Party darling Senator in Massachusetts, then losing a regular election to Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Michigan

Need to retain seat. Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is also set to retire at the end of the current term. Of these five seats, the Michigan race seems the most vague at this early stage. We’re still awaiting the primaries, so we don’t know for certain who is running from either party.

That said, Democrats have fared well in Michigan in recent years, with a majority of Democrats in the state Senate and a popular Democratic governor.

There’s another factor in Democrats’ favor in all these races — that midterm elections historically have favored the party that is out of power in D.C. Given how chaotic and scandal-ridden the presidency has been and given how little Congressional Republicans have done to mitigate the chaos and scandal, we can probably expect that historical norm to prevail.

The exact degree of disgruntlement with Trump and MAGA is largely unknown, but we do know that there’s been some significant rifts among Trump’s base, particularly in light of the hypocrisy around Trump and his administration’s hypocrisy around the Jeffrey Epstein records. Trump has not been able to suppress the buzz around the so-called Epstein files among his base, and at least Democrats have been able to use this issue to gain some political leverage.

Those fissures among the Trump faithful are bound to have at least some effect at the polls, either from crossover voting or from Trump supporters who abandon politics altogether. (Many in the MAGA movement had previously never been active in politics and may choose not to participate in elections due to their disappointment and sense of betrayal.)

If one of these races is in your state, it’s not to early to participate in organizing for the Democratic candidate. This may sound like hyperbole, but this may be the last chance for us to prevent our democratic government from turning into an autocracy.

Those five Senate seats are the ones the DNC is currently talking about. However, we shouldn’t overlook other vulnerable and perhaps flippable Republican Senatorial seats. I’ll convey some thoughts on those additional seats in Part 2 of this post.