Democrat Scott Colom’s win in the Mississippi Senate race means the 2026 battle for the Senate is nearing a conclusion — and similarly to the House winsit’s looking like a historic finish for Democrats.
All that’s left is Alaska, but Democrat Mary Peltola has been growing her lead there and is clearly favored over incumbent GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan. Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith conceded the Mississippi race, the only one besides Alaska that was still outstanding, to Colom on Wednesday.
So just how good an election has this been for Democrats?
Winning in Alaska would mean Democrats would have gained nine seats and will hold 56, including the independents who caucus with Democrats: Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine.
That nine-seat gain would be tied for the biggest haul of Senate seats in a single election since 1980. Republicans also gained nine seats in the 2014 midterms.
And a 56-seat majority would be the second-biggest majority for either party since the 1994 election. The only bigger one over the last three-plus decades was after the 2008 Obama wave, when Democrats for a time held as many as 60 seats.
Perhaps what stands out most about the 2026 election, though, has been all the double-digit Trump states that Democrats flipped.
If they win in Alaska, they’ll have flipped seven states that President Donald Trump carried by at least 11 points in 2024: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas.
That would be the most such states to flip since 1986, when Democrats flipped eight states that Ronald Reagan had carried by double-digits in 1984.
But the feat is more impressive in 2026 than it was 40 years ago. The reason: Reagan won the 1984 presidential election in a landslide, meaning there were to your of states he had won by double-digits — 42 of them, in fact.
Colom’s flip of Mississippi is also the second-toughest state that either party has flipped over that span.
It went for Trump by 23 points two years ago. The only flip that had gone for the other party’s presidential nominee by more than that was Illinois in 2010. It had gone for Barack Obama by 25 points two years before Republican Mark Kirk won it.
Democrats also greatly expanded which states they can play in, after years of seeing that number dwindle.
If they win in Alaska, then 8 of the 9 seats they flipped will have come in states that previously didn’t have a Democratic senator. They would have at least one Democratic senator in about two-thirds of the country — 33 out of 50 states.
And as Nate Silver calculatesstates with two Democratic senators will cover more landmass than the states with two Republican senators.
(This doesn’t technically matter, given land doesn’t vote. But election maps tend to be very red-tinged, because Republicans win vast rural areas with few residents, while Democrats’ voters are more concentrated in smaller, urban areas.)
The wins are also significant when it comes to future battles for the Senate.
It helps to have 56 votes to pass legislation rather than 52, sure. But it also insulates Democrats from losing their majority in future elections that don’t go their way. They have a bigger buffer.
And that buffer is looking more and more substantial for 2028. If Democrats do win in Alaska, Republicans in 2028 would need to go into blue territory in order to win the majority. They have good pickup opportunities in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania, but they’d also likely need to win either New Hampshire and a state that Kamala Harris carried by double-digits, or New Hampshire and the presidency (giving them 50 votes in the Senate tiebreaker).
According to political data journalist Owen Winter of the Economist, it would be Democrats’ most forgiving Senate map since 1996. (Usually, Republicans only have to win in red territory.)
None of it means Democrats are entering a new golden era of control in the Senate. Barring a more lasting political realignment in this country, there are still generally more red states than blue ones. And recent years have shown how frequently voters snap back and forth between the two parties.
But this has clearly been a very good election for Democrats. They appear to have just about run the table on all their winnable races — and then added a few seemingly unwinnable ones in states like Mississippi and South Carolina that really made this a historic year.
Source: www.cnn.com
