A tour of the 7 key Senate races

There’s a 71 percent chance this is where control of the chamber is decided.

In case you missed it, we launched our 2026 election forecast — now named FLIPR — on Tuesday. On balance, the model is bullish on Democrats’ chances in November. But while it currently rates the House as “likely D”, the Senate is still in true tossup territory.¹

Why is the upper chamber so competitive? Well, it’s pretty simple. True, the GOP has few solid pickup opportunities, but they already have 53 senators and a tie-breaking VP. Democrats need to net at least four seats, mostly from states that Donald Trump carried handily in 2024. If the national popular vote comes in anywhere under D +6, Republicans are the clear favorites to retain the Senate.

But Democrats are on track to beat that number, perhaps by a wide margin. As of today, our forecast for the popular vote is D +7.2. That’s a big enough blue wave to give Democrats a real shot at winning enough competitive seats.

Some of the data can also seem contradictory, however. Just this week, Fox News released polls showing Democrat Sherrod Brown leading by 8 points in Ohio — but Abdul El-Sayed trailing by 4 points in Michigan. In the context of a presidential race, that wouldn’t make much sense, since Michigan is the considerably bluer state. Senate races are different, however. Particularly if you believe that moderation matters, El-Sayed is arguably a weaker candidate than Brown.² Brown is also a more familiar face, having served in the Senate from 2007 through 2025.

Outcomes in congressional races are correlated with one another, although considerably less so than in presidential races. Still, the more advanced versions of FLIPR are a little bit skeptical about taking these polls at face value. It’s not that they’re necessarily wrong about what might happen in an election held today. But El-Sayed has several months to repair the damage from a bruising Democratic primary, while Republicans have time to bring the race more in line with fundamentals in Ohio.

So for my first model talk of the 2026 cycle, I’m bringing back a popular article format from 2024 and taking you on a tour of the seven most likely Senate tipping-point states (plus some honorable mentions at the end). We’ll look at where polls and fundamentals are in tension with one another, like in Michigan, and where they’re more aligned. Combined, these races have a 71 percent chance of deciding which party controls the Senate after 2026.³

Full disclosure: we’re cheating just slightly here. In terms of tipping-point probabilities, there’s really a Big 6 rather than a Big 7, with a drop-off after the 6th-most-likely tipping point state, Alaska. Then there’s another tier of roughly half a dozen races, each with around a 4 percent chance of being the tipping point.

For purposes of this article, we’ve promoted North Carolina from that tier into the Big 7. Our model doesn’t think NC is a particularly likely tipping point because it’s pretty confident that Democrat Roy Cooper will win, perhaps comfortably. Still, nobody should take North Carolina too much for granted: it has only voted for Democrats once for president since 1976 (it went for Barack Obama in 2008) and has frequently been a close-but-not-quite state for Democrats in federal races. So it deserves some attention as we explain why FLIPR thinks this might finally be the year for a Democratic breakthrough.

But let’s begin with Democrats’ white whale: Texas.