Throughout the 2024 cycle, analysts have been justifiably pessimistic about Democrats holding the Senate, where they currently have a slim 51–49 majority, factoring in independents who caucus with them. With a brutal map that has Democrats defending twice as many seats as Republicans—many of them in states that Donald Trump won once or even twice—a Democratic Senate majority in 2025 has always been a heavy lift. But the party has made an odd strategic decision not to make serious investments in the only two meaningful Democratic pickup opportunities, against Republican incumbents Ted Cruz in Texas and Rick Scott in Florida, instead staking virtually everything on a high-risk gambit of running the table with their own vulnerable incumbents. That is a losing strategy that should change as soon as possible if the party is serious about maintaining its majority.
But that’s not how party leaders currently see things. “Well, I don’t have unlimited money, so right now we’re focused on our incumbent states,” Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chair Sen. Gary Peters recently told the Washington Post when asked about the neglect of races in Texas and Florida. In fairness to Peters, the Senate landscape is bleak this year, and Peters is basically trying to defend a city with a few battalions against a full-scale invasion force. Democrats are guaranteed to lose their seat in West Virginia, where retiring independent Joe Manchin will be replaced by popular Gov. Jim Justice unless the country is struck by an asteroid or Justice is photographed drinking a Bud Light while reading a copy of White Fragility. The Cook Political Report labels the race as “Solid Republican.” The Democratic nominee, Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliott, trailed Justice by 33 and 34 points in the only two post-primary public polls of the contest.
Democrats are more capably defending seats in a slew of other tough races. In Pennsylvania, three-term incumbent Sen. Bob Casey is a clear favorite over challenger Dave McCormick, and in Wisconsin, incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin has maintained a smaller but consistent lead over Republican Eric Hovde. Michigan Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin has consistently topped polling to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow over her opponent, former Republican representative and CNN commentator Mike Rogers. And Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego is up big over Republican Kari Lake as they seek to replace retiring incumbent Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona. (Democrats had an incredible stroke of good fortune when the state’s Republican primary voters picked Lake, the most inept and repellant candidate possible, just two years after she blew the gubernatorial race.)
That would get them to 48 seats, assuming that Democrat Angela Alsobrooks beats former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan in Maryland. And that’s where the going gets really, really tough for Democrats. Their chances ultimately depend on a level of ticket-splitting (voting for one party’s candidate at the top of the ticket and another party’s candidate down-ballot) in red states that we haven’t seen in two decades. In Ohio, three-term incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown is facing a stiff challenge from Trump-backed Republican Bernie Moreno, a former car dealer and businessman who was widely considered the GOP’s weakest candidate. Nevertheless, Brown is in the fight of his life in a state that has gone from bellwether swing state to MAGA stronghold in the span of a decade, and the race is considered a toss-up. And then there’s Sen. Jon Tester (first elected along with Brown in 2006) in Montana, who held on to his seat in the 2018 Democratic wave election but who has trailed most recent polls against businessman Tim Sheehy, the GOP nominee.
Tester, one of the party’s most naturally talented politicians (along with Brown), is running the Democrats’ long-standing playbook to survive in hostile partisan territory—he hasn’t endorsed Kamala Harris for president, he’s adopted hard-line positions on immigration and other issues where the Democratic party line is radioactive in Montana, and he touts his willingness to work on legislation with Donald Trump. This strategy has failed much more often than it has succeeded in recent years, from Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas to Claire McCaskill in Missouri. But it isn’t clear that there is a viable alternative, other than seeing if several hundred thousand California liberals would like to establish residency in Missoula tout de suite.
Of course, Tester shouldn’t be counted out quite yet, and the party definitely should not bail on him. Incumbent senators do sometimes outperform expectations, none more famously than Maine Republican Susan Collins, who beat Democrat Sara Gideon handily despite trailing in every single public poll conducted for the race in 2020, even as Biden carried the state decisively by 9 points. But Democrats have effectively put all their eggs in Tester’s basket, and they should take a fresh look at perennial tormentors Florida and Texas if they want to create other pathways to retain their majority.
Six years ago, former Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke turned himself into a national sensation in his race against unpopular incumbent Ted Cruz. While Cruz led almost every poll of the race, O’Rourke came agonizingly close to unseating him after raising tens of millions of dollars from Democrats all over the country who thought of beating the unlikable Cruz—the runner-up in the 2016 Republican nomination fight—as too delicious an opportunity to pass up. Cruz would win by just 2.6 points, nearly breaking what is now a 30-year-long Democratic losing streak for statewide office in Texas that goes back to Bob Bullock’s election as lieutenant governor in 1994.
Cruz’s ongoing unpopularity problem and Texas’ leftward shift make it all the more puzzling that national Democrats have failed to coordinate a better effort behind Rep. Colin Allred, the party’s nominee. Allred has disappointed progressives by running a more conservative, less outspoken campaign than O’Rourke did in 2018, but it seems to be working. Last week, a Morning Consult poll found Allred leading Cruz 45 percent to 44 percent—a slim lead within the margin of error, but a better result than Tester has seen in weeks. In the RealClearPolitics average of the race, Allred is down just 5 points—slightly closer than Tester is to Sheehy as of this writing.
Why exactly the party wants to max out the credit card fighting for Tester’s seat while leaving Allred with scraps is an enduring mystery. Texas is an expensive media market, but the party isn’t exactly hurting for cash after relieved rank-and-file supporters opened up their wallets when President Joe Biden stepped aside for Harris. Money can be moved around or borrowed. And a bigger investment from national Democrats would match Allred’s impressive fundraising haul that has seen him dramatically outspend Cruz on the airwaves. Cruz, though, currently has more cash on hand than Allred, a situation the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee could help rectify if it so desired. The $25 million the DSCC just split among 10 races is not going to cut it.
Democrats have also soured on doing much of anything in Florida. Trying to win there feels, understandably, like heading straight for the casino cashier to buy another thousand dollars in chips after you’ve lost your shirt on a series of bad bets at the poker table. After Trump won the state twice despite favorable preelection polls for Hillary Clinton and then Biden, Florida seemed to lurch even further to the right in 2022, giving incumbent GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis a 19-point margin of victory that instantly made him a top-tier presidential candidate. Sen. Marco Rubio scored a win nearly as large over his generously funded challenger, Democratic Rep. Val Demings. Especially given that Democrats also came up just short in both gubernatorial and senate races in 2018 despite a very favorable national environment, you can certainly understand why the party doesn’t want to light stacks of cash on fire in a quixotic bid to unseat Scott. But that’s exactly what they need to do, for both long- and short-term reasons.
The Democratic nominee in Florida is Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, an Ecuadorian immigrant who came to the United States when she was 14. A former member of the House who was unseated in 2020, Mucarsel-Powell has for some reason been an even bigger afterthought for national Democrats than Allred. She and her allies have spent just $5 million on ads. That’s just not going to get it done. And yet she’s hanging around the race in a way that should invite a more significant investment from the DSCC and various Democratic-aligned outside groups. An early September survey from the Hill/Emerson had her within 1 point of Scott, and overall she’s behind in the RealClearPolitics average by just 4.3 points. Again, that’s closer than Tester. The odious Scott, who made his fortune defrauding the elderly as CEO of a for-profit health care company, is unloved by Floridians; he has a 35 percent approval rating according to an August USA Today/Suffolk University/WSVN-TV survey. Yet as of mid-September, he had outspent Mucarsel-Powell 4-to-1.
In the long run, both Florida and Texas are more fertile ground for Democrats than Montana, whose only comparative advantage is that it is cheaper to advertise there. In Texas, Democrats were disappointed by Trump’s relatively decisive victory over Biden in 2020 when polls showed a dead heat. Nevertheless, the diverse, rapidly growing state has been trending inexorably blue over the course of the 21st century, with the Republican presidential margin dropping from almost 23 points in 2004 to just under 6 in 2020. The same thing has been happening, in fits and starts, in the Senate. In 2006, sitting Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison beat her token Democratic opponent by more than 25 points. Her retirement opened the seat up for Cruz, who won it by under 16 points in 2012, and then under 3 in 2018. The trendlines are still unmistakable, and the time to give up on the state is definitely not now, especially with the state’s Republican Party consistently distinguishing itself as the country’s most unhinged and extreme.
Even Florida, which is diverse and where Democrats have a long record of competitiveness, is a more plausible place for Democrats to break through in the coming years than Montana. With the exception of 2008, Democratic presidential candidates have gotten blown out in Montana throughout the century, with no sign that things are heading in a different direction. With ticket-splitting still in terminal decline, the prospects of winning Senate seats in Montana in the medium term are not great. In Florida, the GOP’s 2022 rout feels more like a fluke driven by an unlikely confluence of circumstances—ideologically-minded domestic migration driven by COVID polarization, as well as a profoundly inept and demoralized state Democratic Party—than a fundamental reorientation. And even if they suspect Florida is gone for good, isn’t it worth directing some cash to Mucarsel-Powell to find out for sure?
You don’t need David Muir and Linsey Davis to tell you that I would be lying if I said I expect to wake up to Democratic senators-elect in Montana, Florida, and Texas on Nov. 6. These are all long-shot bids. But if Democrats hold the rest of their seats, they only need one of the three to keep their majority.
And when you’re facing long odds, three chances are better than one.
