Democrats need a new strategy

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Going into 2024, a clear pattern had emerged in the Senate map.

In the previous two presidential cycles, 2016 and 2020, the outcomes of all but one of the concurrent Senate elections — 68 of 69 — correlated exactly with the top of the ticket. If a state voted Republican for president, it elected a Republican senator, and vice versa.

Maine Republican Susan Collins was the only exception, winning re-election in 2020 even as Donald Trump lost the state. That fact that she, a senator with a very unique profile running in a very unique state, was the sole outlier seemed to only prove a new political rule had been established.

2024 broke that consensus. Four Democrats won election to the Senate on the same night their states voted for Trump: Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, and Jacky Rosen in Nevada.

The feat was made even more impressive by the fact that it happened as all four states flipped to Trump — historically, winning a Senate seat the same night a state flips to the other party at the presidential level is an even taller task. Before happening four times in 2024, it had happened four times total during the 21st century.

In short, given the circumstances, given the outcome at the top of the ticket, given the whole-sale shredding of the Democratic brand the same night, the results were a coup for Senate Democrats. If nothing else, the party was spared from a nightmare scenario: Had those four races followed the overwhelming pattern of the past two presidential election cycles, in which Senate and presidential results were aligned, Republicans would have entered this Congress with a 57-43 Senate majority, potentially locking in control of the chamber for a decade or more.

Beneath the surface, though, tectonic shifts in American politics are flashing increasingly dire warnings for the party. The reasons are complex but the upshot is clear: If it wants the ability to pass national laws anytime soon, the Democratic Party must find a way to compete for Senate seats in Trump country.

To begin with, an increasing number of voters’ behaviors have calcified around their party identity. Split-ticket voting (the practice of voting for candidates of different parties on the same ballot) has been declining for decades. But 2025 has seen the country reach new heights in polarization. According to data from Ballotpedia, 38 states are now single-party states, with their governorships and state legislatures controlled by one party. That is nearly the highest number in the modern political era, second only to one year ago.

In an even more jolting metric, the current Congress saw just three states send split Senate delegations — one Republican senator and one Democratic — to D.C. That is the all-time lowest number since we started electing senators by popular vote more than a century ago.

The emergence of a less-flexible electorate does have upsides for both parties. For example, Democrats are insulated from any real challenge to their domination in states like Illinois and Maryland. Leftward-moving states like Virginia and Colorado are now reliable suppliers of Democratic senators, no matter how talented or compelling the Republican nominee. The problem for Democrats is that far more states lean Republican than Democratic.

In 2024, 29 states voted to the right of the nation as a whole, providing Trump with a greater margin of victory than his national 1.6% spread. This dynamic, in which most states are simply redder than the sum of the whole country, has been stubbornly true for over a decade now, in years of Democratic victory and defeat. In 2020, 31 states voted to the right of the nation as a whole. In 2016, 32 states did. In 2012, 27 states did.

As a consequence — and given the current partisan coalitions and state populations — Democrats can actually win bigger national victories than Republicans but still carry fewer states. In 2020, for example, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points and carried 25 states. In 2024, Trump won by 1.6 and carried 31 states.

In a chamber that guarantees every state the same number of senators, that conservative tilt has huge ramifications — beginning with the path to a future majority.

In total, 25 states voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Few seem to have processed the full implications of that fact: 50 seats, half the entire chamber, now come from states that backed Trump every time he ran. Moving forward, Democrats could theoretically run the table in the other 25 states, including those that voted for Trump once or twice, but then still need to win at least one more seat.

Right now, the party is a long way from that level of competitiveness. After the 2024 elections, which saw the retirement of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and the defeat of Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, Senate Democrats now hold zero seats from red states, a first for the caucus in the modern era.

Many liberals might be inclined to point out that Republicans are in a nearly identical position, holding only one Senate seat from a solidly blue state (Collins in Maine). In reality, that underscores Democrats’ problem: Simply put, Republicans do not need senators from blue states the way Democrats do from red ones. While 25 states have voted Republican since 2016, just 19 have voted straight Democrat — a difference of 50 to 38 Senate seats.

This asymmetry stems from the combination of two factors: the constitutional design of the Senate, which equally allocates Senate seats equally, and the party’s current coalitions, which have solidified the dominant populations of many small states behind Republicans. Neither condition appears likely to fundamentally change anytime soon, leaving Democrats to face a central fact: The path to a Senate majority now runs through finding victory in at least some reliably red states.

Incidentally, those are the exact areas where the party’s brand is currently the most toxic. The conundrum has led some on the left, including independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, to an unorthodox idea: running populist, Democratic-allied independent candidates not officially affiliated with the party. 

The plan faces some daunting obstacles. For starters, Sanders and Maine Sen. Angus King are the only candidates to win election to the Senate as independents in nearly 50 years, with candidates from Charlie Crist in 2010 to Greg Orman in 2014 to Al Gross in 2020 repeatedly failing to get over the finish line.

In an interview, a DSCC official denied that the group has any plans to aid Democratic-aligned independent candidates. That public stance is not wholly surprising; in the past, the furthest the group has gone is standing down from direct involvement in a race, like in the 2012 Maine Senate election, when Democrats tacitly backed Angus King over Democratic nominee Shenna Bellows.

At the same time, other national groups have shown more willingness to boost independents. Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC aligned with Chuck Schumer, funded ads for Gross in 2020 and Nebraska independent Dan Osborn in 2024 (Osborn, who drew national coverage and overperformed Kamala Harris by nearly 15 points, is planning to run again in 2026).

Some underlying factors may change; eight years ago, few would have expected that Democrats would hold four Senate seats from Georgia and Arizona but zero from North Carolina and Florida. A 2026 wave that flipped the Maine and North Carolina seats, for example, would put the party in striking distance of a majority in 2028. But multiple longshot dominoes would need to fall to structurally change the landscape, making the prospect of a slate of independent candidates as plan as good as any.

And things could become even worse for the party. Six states flipped allegiances in the 2020 and 2024 elections. Right now, Democrats hold 10/12 of those Senate seats, an incredibly good ratio for such purple states.

That dominance is far from guaranteed to continue, leaving the most reasonable assessment of the party’s Senate situation as extremely dire. 

In that way, those four victories last November may end up resembling Democrats’ performance in the 2022 midterms: an expectations-beating overperformance that temporarily papered over a deeper issue. After 2022, many Democrats allowed that experience to lull them into complacency. This time, they need a plan. 

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