What's the plan to win the Senate?

The status quo isn’t going to work

Republicans have a very narrow majority in the House of Representatives, Donald Trump is unpopular, the president’s party typically faces backlash in the midterms, and Democrats now have the coalition that’s easier to mobilize in off-year elections. For all those reasons, I think Hakeem Jeffries is quite likely to be Speaker of the House in 2027, even without Democrats having done anything particularly brilliant to address the doubts the electorate expressed in 2024.

The Senate, though, is different.

I don’t want to say that Democrats have a zero percent chance of winning a Senate majority in 2026. But I do think that Democrats’ chance of winning a Senate majority in 2026 is nearly zero unless they do something dramatically different.

They need to win four seats to secure a majority, of which the most promising on paper is Maine, because Kamala Harris won Maine. But Susan Collins is incredibly hard to beat, and despite all of our supposedly large disagreements about electoral strategy, everybody knows that she’s incredibly hard to beat because everybody knows that a reputation for moderation is valuable in an election.

After that, Democrats’ best shot is North Carolina, a state Trump won three times in a row, but by relatively modest margins, and where the party is nearing their dream of recruiting former governor Roy Cooper. But it’s hard to win that North Carolina seat, even in a good national environment. More to the point, though, winning a hard race in North Carolina isn’t remotely enough. The next best shot after that is Ohio, a state that Trump won by 11 points in 2024.

To put that in context, Trump won Ohio by a larger margin than Harris won New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, New Jersey, Virginia, New Hampshire, or Maine.

Given the national climate, Democrats are clearly favored to hold the seats in Georgia and Michigan, both of which Trump won. But what’s more likely: a sea change in the national environment that makes it possible for Democrats to win in Ohio and Iowa and Texas and thereby secure a majority… or a shift of the political tides that puts the GOP in a position to win in Michigan or Georgia? I think clearly the latter.

That’s a grim scenario for Democrats. And the news doesn’t get much better in 2028, when the odds of wildly overperforming the national partisan baseline get worse because it’s a presidential election year.

And what’s driving me crazy about the current state of factional politics in the United States is that as far as I can tell, nobody in the caucus is seriously talking about how to the party can compete in Ohio, Iowa, Texas, Florida, Alaska, and Kansas in the 2026 and 2028 cycles.

The Bernie faction is trying to score the Michigan nomination for one of their own, but they’re not even purporting to have someone in the field who can win in Iowa. And the establishment is just kind of drawing dead. Colin Allred is talking about running again in Texas. I like Allred. He ran a decent race and overperformed in 2024. But he only overperformed by a little. To win in Texas, he’d need to overperform by a lot. Or realistically, he would need the national party baseline to be higher in Texas, and then he’d need to overperform that baseline by a decent margin.

And what’s happening on that front?

Who is working to make the national Democratic Party’s position on guns and fossil fuels more palatable to the voters of Texas, such that a really good candidate who runs four points ahead of the national party could win there? And if that’s not the answer, what is?

The Osborn option

To the extent that anyone I know in the funder or strategist community has any plan for this, it’s to try to replicate what Dan Osborn did in Nebraska last cycle.

But what happened there is that Democrats didn’t run a candidate.

Osborn ran an independent campaign as a cultural moderate with a vaguely populist economic platform. Specifically, he was pro-union and aggressive on antitrust, without committing to the standard Democratic Party idea of a trillion+ dollar expansion of the social safety net. Which is just to say that even though he got a lot of left-wing media personalities to say nice things about him (a legitimate accomplishment), he ran on an economic agenda that said media personalities would normally find tepid and objectionable. At any rate, Slow Boring recommended donations to Osborn, and he did run well ahead of Harris.

Of course, he ran way ahead of Harris in Nebraska, which is an out-of-reach state.

Someone who put up an Osborn-level overperformance in Iowa or Ohio might be able to win in a strong cycle for Democrats. Some people want to try to do just that — run Osborn-style candidates in more feasible states and break the GOP majority that way.

I’m not against this. If Nathan Sage were to announce he’s changing up and running this campaign as an independent, I’d be all for it.

But I find the strategy fundamentally puzzling. The people I know who are bullish on it like the idea of recruiting independents to run in the pivotal states because they believe that the Democratic Party as currently constituted is unelectable in the key AK/TX/FL/OH/IA/KS battlegrounds, and that convincing party leaders to make the kinds of changes that would be needed to compete in those states is too hard. The problem is that the independent strategy only works if Democratic Party leaders cooperate. Dems were willing to stand down in Nebraska because the state was obviously unwinnable. But if you can convince Democrats that this logic should apply to Senate battleground states, why can’t you convince the party to change its positioning to be less unelectable?

In fact, it seems to be that securing cooperation on the independent strategy is harder, because part of making the strategy work is maintaining the pretense that you’re not cooperating with the national Democratic Party.

What’s more, I don’t think it’s clear that Osborn’s independent status actually played a huge causal role in his over-performance.

The number one top Senate over-performer of the 2024 cycle, after all, was Larry Hogan, who ran in Maryland as a moderate Republican. And everyone agrees that it’s hard to beat Susan Collins as a moderate Republican. I think Osborn saying things like “law-abiding citizens have, and must always have, the right to bear arms” and “illegal immigration creates a pool of cheap labor with no rights and is detrimental to every American worker” does more work to explain it.

I also want to be clear that I, personally, do not agree with Osborn about either of those things. On the internet, the idea of Democrats being as moderate as Matt Yglesias often plays as an outlandish suggestion. But I happily voted for Kamala Harris despite some disagreements. The point of looking at the map is that Democrats need the votes of lots of people who are substantially to the right of Matt Yglesias, which means you need candidates who (like Dan Osborn) outline some cultural positions that I think are too right-wing, while also largely eschewing the welfare state expansion policies that I favor.

At least that’s how it seems to me.

What is the plan?

I have, of course, my own thoughts about what might make sense as a set of policy positions for a Democrat to run on in Texas. And some thoughts about a slightly different set of policy positions that might make sense in Ohio. And, of course, my views about how the national party could change to facilitate that kind of recruiting.

Not everyone is going to agree with my ideas, of course, and I think it would be a little bit silly for me to put myself forward as an expert on what the voters of Iowa or Florida want. So right now, I just want to ask everyone else: What’s your plan for addressing this? Since the election, I’ve seen a lot of conversations that focus on two kinds of questions:

1. The Bernie Movement continues its quest to build factional power, perhaps electing a second aligned Senator and setting the stage for AOC to run in 2028.

2. Mainstream Democrats are having a lot of narrowly tactical conversations that essentially address the question of how Kamala could have won narrowly rather than lost narrowly.

I don’t 100 percent understand the purpose of the Bernie crowd’s singular focus on factionalism, since you obviously aren’t going to pass Medicare for All with 53 Republicans in the Senate. But I do respect its coherence.

On the mainstream front, though, I think we’re missing the forest for the trees.

Everyone is thrilled that Democrats have, without retooling their policy positions at all, gotten to a point where Trump is unpopular and Jeffries is favored to be Speaker of the House. And while nobody knows what will happen in 2028, you could absolutely imagine turning the 1.5 percentage point loss of 2024 into a victory simply by having a better look or a slightly more skillful nominee.

But if Trump is unpopular and Republicans lose the House in the midterms, while the GOP retains control of the Senate, Trump can keep stocking the judiciaries with hand-picked lackeys who help him shred American democracy. And that doesn’t seem like a great outcome. And if you avoid ideological change, win the 2028 presidential election, but don’t have a Senate majority that could pass bills or confirm nominees, then what was the point of sticking to your guns on policy?

People like to psych themselves up by talking about how there’s no point in winning elections if we’re not going to stand up for our core values, but the converse is equally if not more true — there’s no point in articulating a policy agenda that stands no chance of being enacted.

So this is genuinely my question to anyone in politics who isn’t out there pushing for broad moderation and a much bigger tent on policy: What’s the plan?

I’m not against having all these other tactical discussions about podcasts or younger candidates or whatever else. But Nathan Sage’s launch video for Iowa is already really good. Democrats have a pretty high level of technical campaign proficiency. The problem with a launch video, though, is that of course you don’t mention the issues that give Democrats trouble in Iowa. That’s a no-brainer. But you can’t run a whole campaign without getting questions about those troublesome issues, and you need to decide how to answer them. If you make the decision to give answers that are popular with the voters of Iowa, then the national audience of donors and nonprofit staffers and social media junkies needs to decide how to respond to that.

I think they should respond positively, articulating the idea that the Democratic Party is a big tent that welcomes both politicians and voters with those views. Clearly, lots of important people disagree with that, which is why it hasn’t happened over the past few cycles.

But what’s the other plan?