Why I'm obsessed with winning the Senate

You can't defend democracy if you don't win elections

One of the most frequent questions I get is why I’m not spending more time sounding the alarm about Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and his threat to the stability of American democracy.

One reason is temperamental. But a much bigger reason is that, analytically, I don’t think that telling my audience to become more alarmed is generally a very productive course of action. On the contrary, I actually think that increasing their level of alarm — which, to be clear, is generally already quite high — can be counterproductive.

Trump’s budget bill, for example, is bad for America and also unpopular. It’s also not as salient as I would like it to be amongst the broad public. One thing that could make the bill more salient would be if America’s hospital sector, for whom it is straightforwardly bad, was investing time and energy in telling people about how bad this bill is. But for a long time, the American Hospital Association seemed to be behaving in a remarkably low-energy way about a core issue. Over the past couple of weeks, they’ve stepped up their activity, which is good. But why weren’t they more vocal earlier? Why isn’t the tech industry talking more about the adverse impact of the bill on electricity prices? Why didn’t the pharmaceutical industry lobby against RFK Jr.?

The thing you hear time and again from stakeholders who are not part of the progressive movement is that they’re afraid of Trump.

Which is to say that while progressives want it to be the case that “sounding the alarm” causes an increased level of anti-Trump political engagement, for lots of stakeholders, it has the opposite effect. The thing that would be constructive would be to convince more people to practice normal politics and complain vocally when Trump does things that are bad for them. For Elon Musk to stand by his criticisms of Trump rather than apologizing. For the Chamber of Commerce to say, “We love that you’re not a Democrat, but your trade policies suck.”

But the final, related, reason that I’m not “sounding the alarm” more is the same reason I’m leery of anti-ICE protests and a lot of other activity happening on the left: I am profoundly obsessed with the Senate map.

And the reason I’m obsessed with the Senate map is that I am, in fact, alarmed about Trump’s threat to democracy and the rule of law. The good news is that so far, the judicial system continues to do its job and Trump is losing in court, even before judges who were appointed by George W. Bush or by Trump himself during his first term. The bad news about judges is that the president gets to appoint new ones. And unlike during Trump 1.0, Senate Republicans are not constraining Trump here. He has an unqualified lackey as Secretary of Defense. He fired the Chair of the Joint Chiefs for no reason to install a loyalist. He has a stooge running the FBI.

These are legitimate uses of presidential power in a constitutional sense, but the Senate is supposed to prevent the president from wildly inappropriate appointments.

They’re not doing that, in part because a lot of them are now genuinely in the MAGA cult, but also because basically nobody in the GOP caucus is all that worried about losing elections to Democrats. This means that over time, the judiciary will be increasingly MAGA-fied. It also means that executive branch officials who decline to follow inappropriate directives will be fired and replaced by those who will.

Which is just to say that the crisis of the rule of law, democracy, and the constitutional order is not some separate issue — it’s Democrats’ inability to compete credibly across enough states that is making the crisis so severe.

No excuses for the midterm

Democrats seem to be convincing themselves that winning the House while failing to gain much ground in the Senate would constitute a good midterm. They think, rightly, that it’s not especially plausible to gain many Senate seats vis-a-vis the 2026 Senate map. But the problem with that reasoning is that while the 2026 map is terrible, it’s not uniquely terrible.

Check out the 2028 map. The best pickup opportunity for Democrats here is Wisconsin, a Trump-Biden-Trump state. But Democrats are defending three seats — Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania — in Trump-Biden-Trump states. Plus they need to defend the Clinton-Biden-Trump state of Nevada. You could easily imagine this map generating one or two net seats for the GOP, even in a scenario where J.D. Vance loses the election narrowly.

And the 2030 map isn’t any better either. Once again, there is a single somewhat vulnerable GOP incumbent in a Trump-Biden-Trump state. But this time, it’s three Democratic incumbents in Trump-Biden-Trump states, plus a fourth in Nevada.

All of which is to say that the problem with the 2026 Senate map isn’t unique to the 2026 cycle. All the maps are like this. And the reason the maps are like this is that even in 2020, when Joe Biden won the popular vote by a healthy margin, he only carried 25 out of 50 states. The entire Biden legislative agenda was carried forward by legacy seats in Montana, West Virginia, and Ohio.

I’m not going to be a doomer who says that Democrats can never win the Senate again. And I’m not going to pretend that I can forecast the future.

What I am saying, though, is that 2026 is as good a time as any to contest the Senate majority, and that to win a Senate majority, either the national image of the Democratic Party needs to change substantially or they need to recruit candidates who are seen as very different from baseline Democrats or both. To put it another way, the big problem for Democrats right now is that if you ask for examples of successful overperforming moderates in the caucus, you get Elissa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego. I like both of them, but a Slotkin-level overperformance gets Democrats at best a 50-50 Senate, and that’s only if they beat Susan Collins. Gallego-scale overperformance would be enough to win in North Carolina, but that requires running against a candidate as weak as Kari Lake, and that’s not what Democrats are up against there.

Democrats’ saving grace in recent Senate races has been poor candidate selection by Republicans. And there’s a real chance of a repeat in 2026 in Texas, where Ken Paxton may beat John Cornyn in the primary. But even if Paxton is as bad as Lake, a Gallego-scale over-performance might not be enough.

No bullshit from the left

In 2016, Bernie Sanders launched a protest campaign against Hillary Clinton that unexpectedly caught fire.

Caught off-guard by Sanders, Clinton both started hitting from the left on cultural issues and making an electability argument to Democratic Party primary voters. These contradictory messages, combined with a growing swirl of scandal around Clinton and her years of negative press coverage and the fact that she’d voted for the Iraq War, created a weird confluence of circumstances in which Sanders would arguably have been the stronger general election candidate.

Ever since Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016, the plausible argument that Sanders would have done better than Clinton because he didn’t have the specific baggage of Iraq and the emails scandal, and because he was seen as the less “woke” option at the time, has transmogrified into the ridiculous idea that Democrats could win more elections by being more left-wing.

There is an enormous amount of empirical evidence on this subject. And when it’s detached from intra-party factional fights, nobody even disagrees.

The single worst-performing Democratic Senate candidate in 2024 was Angela Alsobrooks in Maryland. I have literally never heard anyone say that this shows Alsobrooks was a historically weak candidate. The issue is obviously that Larry Hogan was an unusually strong candidate. Similarly, on paper, Democrats’ best chance for a 2026 pickup is in Maine. But everyone knows that Susan Collins will be hard to beat. That’s why no prominent member of the Maine Democratic Party wants to run against her. But it’s also why there’s no Bernie Wing contender out here telling us that Collins’s moderation will depress base turnout and make it easy for democratic socialism to win. It’s also why you’re not seeing leftists champing at the bit to run statewide in the Obama-Obama-Trump-Trump-Trump state of Florida.

My guess is that it’s actually no coincidence that many leading moderates, like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden, were Bernie 2016 supporters. These are independent-minded non-conformists who were not impressed by Clinton 2016’s woker-than-thou tactics. But they also happen to represent Trumpy districts, and they like winning elections.

I think that if people genuinely disagreed with me about what it takes to win in North Carolina and at least compete in Iowa, Alaska, Ohio, Texas, Florida, and Kansas, you wouldn’t see the level of Senate Blindness that is currently afflicting the party.

People don’t want to talk about the Senate because there’s really only one viable conclusion about it, and it’s a conclusion they find unpleasant. It’s a conclusion that, if you articulated it openly, might get you in trouble with your peers, your donors, or the in-crowd on social media. To say “to defend democracy, we need to pander more to the actually existing views of people who voted for Donald Trump three times” is to risk being cast out into the circle of cringe and moderation. You’ll find yourself showing up at WelcomeFest and getting dunked-on in Rolling Stone.

But just giving up on the upper house is not a viable path toward saving democracy.

Only democratic politics can defend democracy

Paul Krugman is a brilliant economist, but I don’t think his political analysis of the standoff in California makes a lot of sense:

If you’re a pundit who thinks that this is over the top, you’re part of the problem (and you have been wrong every step of the way.) If you’re a Democrat who wants to ignore the ongoing assault on democracy so we can talk about Medicaid — important as it is — you’re hiding your head in the sand.

This is the moment. Everything is on the line, right now.

Democrats obviously cannot ignore the explosive events in California. It’s crucial to criticize misconduct when it happens.

But the larger sentiment reflected in Krugman’s post is a story that I think Democrats have told themselves all too many times since Trump launched his first campaign for president — the notion that the fight for democracy is too important to sideline in favor of public opinion.

And yet, we’ve seen in election after election that there are limited returns to making this pitch to the voters. Not no returns, mind you. I think it’s impossible to explain Democrats’ steadily improving results with affluent voters except in light of genuine revulsion at the way Trump is trampling the norms of liberal democracy.

But the basic fact is that you cannot defend democracy if you cannot meaningfully contest a wider range of Senate seats.

If you believe that, then the main focal point of Democratic Party messaging has to be on the issues that you think play best in places like Ohio and Iowa and North Carolina and Texas and Florida. There are voters who voted for Trump who do not agree with him about Medicaid. There are voters who voted for Trump who do not agree with him about the minimum wage. Should Democrats exploit the excesses of Trump’s approach to immigration policy and enforcement? Yes, of course, especially among Latin Trump converts. But fundamentally, people knew Trump was hawkish on immigration and voted for him not despite that fact, but because of it. People knew that Trump was not someone who cared about norms. And they know that Democrats think he’s a threat to democracy.

I am absolutely not saying that Trump is not a threat. And I’m not saying Democrats need to stop saying that he’s a threat.

But I am saying that if you, as a Clinton/Biden/Harris voter, are feeling more alarmed than ever about the threat he poses, you need to ask yourself what you’re going to do differently going forward.

This is the question Democrats up and down the ballot need to ask themselves.

Right now, the entire Democratic Party — not just the left, not just the progressive wing, but the mainstream as well — is just banging their heads against a wall. They know that the party, as currently configured, can’t win a majority in the Senate. And they know that without a majority in the Senate, they can’t defend democracy and they can’t pass progressive policy.

Under the circumstances, it should be a no-brainer for the party to write a more moderate platform and deliberately engage in a loud and proud big tent recruiting strategy. In states where Democrats are struggling to win, there’s nothing to lose by recruiting and standing behind pro-gun candidates, candidates who are friendly to oil and gas, candidates who are okay with late-term abortion restrictions, candidates who have traditional views on gender identity, candidates who are immigration restrictionists, candidates who are old-fashioned deficit hawks, candidates who are vocally skeptical of affirmative action.

But to get from Point A to Point B requires pushing through pain points and enduring bad faith arguments and ignorant criticism. I sincerely believe that every single member of the caucus, from Slotkin to Schumer to Sanders, knows how to read a map and is capable of reaching this same conclusion. But winning will require the party, and its donors, and its staffers, and its cloud of vaguely aligned advocacy groups and pundits, to focus on one question: Does this make it harder or easier to win the Senate?

That, to me, is sounding the alarm. We need to win seats and frighten Republican incumbents, or else we’ll be facing a full federal judiciary of MAGA cronies.