On the menu today: Yes, it’s quite early to be thinking about the 2026 midterms, but if you’re the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the map already looks more difficult than it did at the beginning of the year. On Wednesday, New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen announced her retirement, on the heels of Gary Peters of Michigan and Tina Smith of Minnesota, creating three purplish-state seats that need defending. What’s more, if former New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu decides to run for the open seat in his state, the GOP odds of a pickup improve tremendously. Meanwhile, former Secretary of Delayed Transportation Pete Buttigieg says he won’t run for the Michigan Senate seat because he’s (chuckle, snicker) focused on his 2028 presidential campaign. It all adds up to a very steep climb for Democrats hoping to win four seats and control of the chamber in 2026. There’s still a lot of road ahead, but right now there are decent odds that Donald Trump will have a GOP Senate for his entire second term.
Senate Democrats Have a Tough Road Ahead
In my Washington Post column published February 18, I wrote about the retirements of Senate Democrats Gary Peters of Michigan and Tina Smith of Minnesota and noted the departures might not stop there. “At the end of 2024, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) had $1.45 million in cash on hand, which is a bit low for a senator entering an election cycle.” When a 78-year-old three-term incumbent slacks off on fundraising heading into a reelection period, that’s an indicator that the willingness to put up with the stress and aggravation of another campaign is waning.
Yesterday, Shaheen made it official — she’s not running for another term. “After careful consideration, I’m announcing that I have made the difficult decision not to seek reelection to the Senate in 2026,” Shaheen said. “It’s just time.”
This creates a golden pickup opportunity for Republicans, and in particular for New Hampshire’s former governor Chris Sununu, who was already handily beating Shaheen in head-to-head polling. (The former governor is perhaps best known for being one of just seven guests in the history of the Three Martini Lunch podcast.) Sununu said Tuesday he has not ruled out running for the Senate as Washington Republicans urge him to throw his hat into the ring, the Washington Times reported.
We should heed Dan McLaughlin’s warning that Senate Democrats might be calculating that 2026 is going to be a good cycle for their party and thus this is a good time to retire; Dan theorizes that “politicians are absorbing the Ruth Bader Ginsburg lesson not to lose a valuable seat by clinging to it too long.”
But the fact remains that most incumbents who run for reelection win, and win handily; in 2024, 95 percent of incumbents in all offices at all levels won their reelection bids. The last incumbent senator to lose a reelection bid in New Hampshire was Kelly Ayotte in 2016, and she lost by 1,017 votes. (Things turned out okay for now-Governor Ayotte.)
As I noted in the Post column, at the exact moment that Democrats and the anti-Trump resistance are crying, “All hands on deck!” a bunch of Democratic senators have answered, “Nah, we’re out.”
Being in the minority in the Senate is not fun, and incumbents probably start to wonder if there are other, more productive ways they could be spending their life. Their legislative proposals are likely going nowhere unless they can convince the majority their bill is a good idea. On paper, they should have some influence over spending through the appropriations process, but these days almost everything gets rolled into giant omnibus bills and continuing resolutions to keep the government operating. And if you’re in the minority, you spend a lot of time voting “no” on cabinet and judicial nominations that are almost certain to be confirmed. (Just think, if the Democrats controlled the Senate, Trump’s cabinet would look awfully different right now.)
Oh, and this week, Senate Democrats have the choice of either allowing seven defections to pass the continuing resolution to keep the federal government funded, or going through with another government shutdown. No wonder a bunch of Democrats are contemplating an exit.
With JD Vance as the tiebreaking vice president, Democrats need to pick up four seats to regain control of the chamber in January 2027. While midterms are often hard on the party that holds the White House, Republicans gained two Senate seats in the 2018 midterm elections.
On paper, Republicans should feel pressure heading into the midterms, defending 22 of the 35 Senate seats up in 2026. But most of those GOP seats are in pretty deep-red territory; Susan Collins of Maine is the only senator in one of them who represents a state Kamala Harris won in November, and the last time Collins was up for reelection, she crushed polls showing a Democrat beating her.
Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff will have a tough race, particularly if Republicans nominate term-limited governor Brian Kemp. (Maybe Kemp will make some news at next week’s National Review Institute Ideas Summit! Sources close to the guy scheduled to interview him say he’s very interested in asking about this topic!)
In Kentucky, Mitch McConnell is retiring; Democrats haven’t won a U.S. Senate race in that state since Wendell Ford won reelection 1992. Next year Jon Husted in Ohio and Ashley Moody in Florida, (the appointed replacements for JD Vance and Marco Rubio) will face the voters for the first time, but those are two pretty deep-red states.
It’s not all bad news for Democrats. In North Carolina, former governor Roy Cooper is reportedly considering running against two-term incumbent Republican Thom Tillis. Tillis has won his share of close races — it helps when your opponent both gets into a sex scandal and commits heresy in the Tarheel State’s barbeque community by posing with a gas grill while wearing an apron proclaiming himself “Ambassador for North Carolina BBQ” — but a challenge from Cooper would be the toughest race of Tillis’s career. Last summer I was fairly high on Cooper as a running-mate option for Kamala Harris; in seven (!) statewide races since 2000, Cooper won all of them.
A continued GOP Senate would have a lot of consequences, but perhaps none more consequential than on the federal judiciary. Ballotpedia says Trump made 245 judicial appointments in his first term; Pew Research puts the number at 226; its count “excludes judges appointed to certain specialized courts, such as the U.S. Court of International Trade, and appointees to non-Article III territorial courts in Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands.”
During his one term, Joe Biden appointed 228, according to Pew Research. Trump has not yet made any judicial nominations, but I expect that will pick up soon. There are currently 44 federal judicial vacancies.
Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices; many speculate that while Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have indicated they have no intention of retiring anytime soon, they would likely retire when the GOP controls the Senate and Trump could appoint a like-minded replacement.
The Supreme Court currently consists of 70-year-old Chief Justice John Roberts, 76-year-old Clarence Thomas, 74-year-old Samuel Alito, 70-year-old Sonia Sotomayor, 64-year-old Elena Kagan, 57-year-old Neil Gorsuch, 60-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, 53-year-old Amy Coney Barrett, and 54-year-old Ketanji Brown Jackson.
It is conceivable that if Trump serves a full second term and Thomas and Alito retire during that term, Trump will have appointed a majority of the Supreme Court, the first president to do so since Dwight Eisenhower.
ADDENDUM: Greg and I don’t have guests on the Three Martini Lunch program often, in part because we’re highly selective and in part because I’m extremely lazy when it comes to booking them. This means that we simply don’t have bad interviews — from Bob Costas; to the late Joe Lieberman; to New Hampshire’s former governor Chris Sununu; to former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino; to author, historian, and Die Hard enthusiast Tevi Troy; to actor, singer, and Die Hard veteran Robert Davi; to Michele Tafoya.
Tafoya’s been mentioned as a potential Republican Senate candidate in Minnesota. If Sununu and Tafoya both run, 28 percent of the guests in the history of our podcast will be running for Senate this cycle.