Senate Democrats Keep Getting Lucky

But all they do is coast off it.

Republicans currently boast a 53-47 majority in the Senate, which is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a larger majority than Democrats had during the Biden era, and it gives the party breathing room on tough votes.

The size of the GOP advantage ensures that any party-line votes needing a simple majority will succeed unless four Republican senators defect (which is a rare occurrence). That gives the party a comfortable security blanket when it comes to confirmations, which require only majority support. (Hence Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks getting confirmed.) But it doesn’t help much with approving legislation, which generally requires 60 votes to break a filibuster.

But what if I told you that the Republican Senate majority could easily be even larger? If the party had made a few key choices differently in the last five years, the GOP could credibly have notched a filibuster-proof majority by now, allowing the party to approve a much more sweeping legislative agenda than just the idiosyncratic items that can make it past the Byrd Rule in the reconciliation process.

Bringing the world of baseball to elections, the analysts at SplitTicket have developed a political “Wins Above Replacement” model, which accounts for factors like incumbency, fundraising, and a state’s partisan lean and demographic makeup in order to deduce which of a party’s congressional victories come down to those “fundamental” factors and which can be attributed to a specific candidate’s strength (their ability to outperform a replacement-level candidate).

Which races “should” the party have won that they lost, because their candidate was uniquely weak (or the opposition was uniquely strong)? Which races did they lose that they “should” have won? And which races did they win or lose that were always going to come out that way, no matter who each party fielded as their candidates?

Their finding: Republicans have lost seven Senate seats in the last three cycles that they “should” have won according to the fundamentals.

That’s both Senate seats in Georgia and Arizona, plus one seat each in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, in which the bare facts of a contest — stripped of any knowledge of who each party nominated — favored the GOP to win, only for the party to come up short because they ran a comparatively weak candidate.

In fairness, Republicans also won seats in Maine and Pennsylvania that the fundamentals say they “should” have lost, the two recent examples of an edge in candidate quality resulting in wins for the GOP.

That means, if the most recent races for all 100 Senate seats had been run between a completely generic Democrat and a generic Republican, considering only the environmental factors of the contests, SplitTicket’s modeling would expect Republicans to control a 58-42 Senate majority right now. Instead, they are a full five seats weaker.

This isn’t just some idle inconvenience for the GOP. In a hypothetical universe where Republicans won all 58 Senate races they were favored to win over the last three cycles, while also maintaining their wins against the odds in Maine and Pennsylvania — not an impossible scenario to imagine — Republicans would currently be the owners of a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate.

That would likely be enough votes to overcome the filibuster and enact a sweeping border security bill, a national voter ID bill, and a federal ban on transgender athletes in school sports, among other conservative priorities.

Instead, Republicans have passed only five laws in the last four months. When they’ve tried to pursue the aforementioned priorities, they’ve had to do so through executive order, a path that is much more vulnerable to being overturned in the courts or by the next administration.

Those elections have shaken out how they have both because Senate Democrats have punched above their weight in terms of candidate quality in recent elections, and because Senate Republicans have punched below theirs. Democrats have nominated strong candidates like Mark Kelly (WAR +6) and Ruben Gallego (WAR +7.2) in Arizona, Raphael Warnock (WAR +6.5) in Georgia, and John Fetterman (WAR +5.5) in Pennsylvania, but also Republicans fielded predictably weak candidates like Blake Masters, Kari Lake, Herschel Walker, and Mehmet Oz to run against them.

In many cases, these Republicans trailed their Democratic competitors for months before the election, but Republicans nominated them anyways (sometimes over potentially stronger contenders), creating entirely avoidable defeats. Just last year, Democrats won four Senate contests in states that President Trump won on the same ballots, the exact type of races you’d expect the GOP to win in our Republicans Run Better Candidates scenario.

There are already early signs this pattern might repeat itself yet again in the 2026 Senate elections.

The best one came on Monday, when Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) announced that he won’t be mounting a campaign against Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), one of the cycle’s most vulnerable incumbents.

“I have decided that being on the ballot next year is not the right decision for me and my family,” Kemp wrote on X.

This is a huge blow for the GOP’s hopes of ousting Ossoff. Kemp is a remarkably popular governor, boasting a 62% approval rating in an evenly divided state. There’s a reason Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), the chair of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, had called Kemp the party’s “Number One recruit” and had spent considerable time coaxing him to run. The Atlantic Journal-Constitution recently polled four potential GOP competitors against Ossoff; Kemp was the only one who outperformed the incumbent.

Without Kemp in the race, many Republicans are worried that the party could end up with a much less competitive nominee — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Greene told reporters that she is keeping “her options open,” while boasting that she has strong support in the state. However, the Journal-Constitution poll showed Ossoff beating MTG in a rout (54%-37%), a very different outcome than his polling against Kemp (46%-49%).

“Ossoff just became the luckiest politician in America,” a Republican operative in Georgia told the Journal-Constitution. “And now he wants MTG to run and guarantee he gets even luckier.”

Only one poll of the potential Georgia GOP Senate contest has been fielded, by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group; it showed Greene easily winning a Kemp-less primary, beating her next-closest competitor by twenty points. Without Kemp in the race in Georgia, Republicans might be giving up yet another highly winnable Senate race.

A similar scenario could be playing out in Texas, where Democrats would normally face an uphill battle to unseat Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) — except Republicans might do it for them. Recent internal polls fielded by both parties show Cornyn trailing state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX) in the Republican primary due to frustrations about Cornyn’s record of working across the aisle.

Paxton has been indicted on security fraud charges (he settled before a trial) and impeached by his own party in the state House of Representatives (he was acquitted by the state Senate). He would be a vastly weaker nominee than Cornyn, perhaps the Democrats’ only chance at picking up a seat in Texas: a GOP internal poll found former Rep. Collin Allred (D-TX) leading Paxton in a hypothetical general election, 52% to 37%.

A string of Democratic retirees, including Sens. Gary Peters in Michigan and Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, have also created more potentially winnable races for Republicans.

But, in both cases, Republicans may not land their top recruit. Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), who came within 0.3 percentage points of winning a Senate seat last year, is likely to run for Peters’ seat — but he may face primary opposition from Tudor Dixon, who lost a gubernatorial election by 10.6 percentage points in 2022. And yet, a survey by Trump’s pollster found Dixon leading Rogers in a primary.

In New Hampshire, former Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH) announced last month that he won’t run for Shaheen’s seat, another blow for Republicans.

Sununu and Kemp join a long line of popular Republican governors — the list from previous cycles includes Doug Ducey (AZ) and Phil Scott (VT) — who have opted against Senate runs, helping seed the GOP’s candidate quality problem.

If you’re wondering why Sununu decided not to run, he made it quite clear back in 2022, when he also passed on a Senate campaign. Sununu explained to the Washington Examiner that he spoke with Republican senators and was frustrated with what he heard: “They were all, for the most part, content with the speed at which they weren’t doing anything.”

“I said, ‘OK, so if we’re going to get stuff done if we win the White House back, why didn’t you do it in 2017 and 2018?’” Sununu continued. “Crickets. Yeah, crickets. They had no answer.”

But this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. The GOP won’t be able to get most of its legislative priorities done without a filibuster-proof majority. But the GOP won’t be able to win a filibuster-proof majority without recruits like Kemp and Sununu (who opt against Senate runs because they see that not much is getting done, creating a never-ending doom loop).

Democrats, to be clear, don’t have much of a shot at a filibuster-proof majority without big changes, either. Democrats may get lucky when it comes to Senate races — but they often seem willing to coast on that luck, winning the Senate races Republicans effectively cede to them but evincing little interest in pushing beyond those contests into the more difficult seats that they would need in order to win more than just a slim majority.

As Slow Boring’s Matt Yglesias has noted, Democrats barely have a strategy to win 51 votes in the Senate — which would require articulating policy and fielding candidates who can be competitive in states like Ohio, Texas, and Iowa — much less a strategy to win 60, or even 55.

In this way, both parties have become somewhat unimaginative, comfortable with pursuing the bare minimum when it comes to Senate races, in order to scrape by with a majority, rather than thinking seriously about the type of candidates who could deliver a supermajority and unlock a whole range of policy changes. (And in case that sounds impossible to you: it wasn’t that long ago that the Senate was ruled by a 60-vote majority. The last party to do it was the Democrats, in 2009.)

Content to govern by executive order, instead of legislation, the two parties spend a lot of time expanding their visions of the presidency — but almost never think about their theories of expanding the Senate map, always coloring within the same 50-50 lines that have been drawn on the presidential level.

And thus, the self-fulfilling prophecy continues. Without anyone trying to achieve a 60-vote majority, nothing gets done in the Senate, not only fueling voter discontent, but also making it less likely that party leaders can convince the Brian Kemps of the world — the politicians who have a chance at flipping Senate seats — to move to Congress and help create a 60-seat majority. And, so, we get the MTGs of the world instead.