Dem
47
GOP
53
While Donald Trump won all seven swing states, mostly by fairly small margins, his coat didn't have much of a tail. Yes, Republicans flipped Senate seats in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia, but these are deep-red states and it was inevitable that both senators would eventually be Republicans. What is surprising is how long the Democrats held out there in hostile territory.
Yet despite Trump's wins in all the swing states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona are sending Democrats to the Senate. The only swing state where a Republican was probably elected to Senate is Pennsylvania, and it is so close there that the race hasn't been called yet. Four states splitting their presidential and Senate tickets is the most since 2012.
The message here is that despite Trump's wins in the seven swing states, they are still very much purple swing states, and there is certainly no guarantee a different Republican could win them next time, or even that Republicans will do well in the next round of gubernatorial or senatorial races. Trump personally won those states, the Republican party did not. He outperformed the Republican Senate candidates in every swing state. This confirms what we have seen before because this is the fourth straight cycle in which Republicans have struggled in Senate races in purple states.
In 2026, Trump will not be on the ballot and, historically, the first midterm is tough for a president, in no small part because every presidential candidate overpromises and underdelivers and part of his base is disappointed and doesn't show up. The 2026 Senate map is favorable to the Republicans but the entire House is up. In 1994, Bill Clinton's first midterm, the results were disastrous for the Democrats and again in 2010, Barack Obama's first midterm. If Trump fails to deliver on his many promises, or if he succeeds in imposing heavy tariffs and that ruins the economy, Republicans are likely to pay the price.
One thing the Republicans learned from previous losses is that candidate quality matters. Consequently, they actively denounced candidates who couldn't win a general election and boosted those who could. They did it very effectively, for example, keeping Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) from running in Montana and Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke from running in Wisconsin, although the guy who did win the primary in the latter, Eric Hovde, lost anyway.
The vote totals in some of the states are interesting. The Democratic Senate candidates in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada ran even with Kamala Harris, but their Republican opponents ran tens of thousands of votes behind Trump. That means that many people marked the ballot for Trump and then went home. These are clearly not dyed-in-the-wool Republicans. In Arizona, Ruben Gallego ran 90,000 votes ahead of Harris and Kari Lake ran 165,000 votes behind Donald Trump. (V)