There’s exactly one Republican-held U.S. Senate seat rated as a 2026 “toss-up” by the Cook Political Report: that of retiring North Carolina senator Thom Tillis. Democrats got some great news this week when it was reported that popular former two-term governor Roy Cooper has decided to run for the seat. With Republicans likely to unite around Trump’s designated candidate, RNC chairman Michael Whatley, North Carolina is set for what should be an epic senatorial race in which Democrats have a real and rare chance to flip a seat.
North Carolina has become a highly competitive state at every level; last year, Trump carried it by just over 3 percent even as Democrat Josh Stein won the governorship, defeating Trump’s guy, Mark Robinson, by 15 percent. A bitterly divided North Carolina legislature is controlled by the GOP, as is the North Carolina Supreme Court. Suffice it to say politics is rough in the Tar Heel State, and the midterm Senate clash should be expensive and vicious.
But in Cooper, Democrats have their ideal candidate. When he hit a two-term limit as governor in 2016, he had been running for office for 30 years without ever losing. He served in both state legislative chambers and was attorney general for four terms before his tenure as governor, often running well ahead of the national Democratic ticket. Generally considered a centrist Democrat, he was on Kamala Harris’s initial short list for the 2024 vice-presidential nomination but quickly withdrew from consideration. He’s got a pretty good eye for contests he can win. At the age of 68, he’s a bit long in the tooth for any ambition to become a freshman U.S. senator, but presumably he’s answering his party’s urgent call.
Cooper’s almost-certain general-election opponent offers quite the contrast. At 57, Whatley has never run for public office, though he’s been in the background in many GOP campaigns at the state and national levels. His sole credential for the job he’s running for is the support of Donald Trump, which should be enough to chase away the many GOP elected officials who would otherwise run for Senate. Indeed, it’s generally assumed that had his former RNC co-chair Lara Trump chosen to run for this seat, the nomination would have been hers — but the president’s daughter-in-law had other fish to fry. Whatley will be a stolid party-line candidate in a race that could turn on national trends (generally negative for the party controlling the White House).
To be clear, even if Cooper snags Tillis’s seat, Democrats will have a tough row to hoe in trying to flip the Senate. The only other race for a GOP-held Senate seat that Cook rates as competitive is the Maine seat of five-term incumbent Susan Collins; her race is rated “Leans Republican,” mostly because she’s survived reelection challenges before and also declined to vote against Trump’s megabill. Trump may be tempted to back a primary challenger, but party leaders will almost certainly convince him Collins is the best they can get from Maine, which has gone Democratic in every presidential election since 1988. On the other hand, the seat could drop like a ripe plum into Democratic hands if Collins, who hasn’t formally announced her plans, surprises everyone by retiring.
Taking Collins down and flipping North Carolina would still leave Democrats two seats short of gaining control of the chamber and having the power to deny Trump crucial confirmations of Cabinet and judicial nominations (Vice-President J.D. Vance has the tie-breaking vote). There are no other blue-state Republican Senate seats up in 2026. So flipping the chamber would mean at minimum somehow making two other red-state Senate races competitive.
The map isn’t promising for Democrats, at least on the surface. These are their best prospects:
- IOWA: Senator Joni Ernst has had a very difficult year in 2025 and might even choose to retire. But Democrats haven’t won a Senate or gubernatorial race in Iowa since 2008, and Trump carried the state by 13 points last year.
- TEXAS: Republican senator John Cornyn is in a very tough and fractious primary fight with scandal-plagued mega-MAGA attorney general Ken Paxton. But Texas Democrats have been disappointing their troops and their national donors with underwhelming performances in statewide races since the days of Ann Richards and Lloyd Bentsen, and appear to have lost a lot of ground among Latino voters in the state in 2024.
- OHIO: Making a serious challenge to Ohio’s appointed Republican senator, John Husted, would appear to rely almost entirely on former senator Sherrod Brown attempting a comeback. But Brown (who will be 73 in 2026) may give it a pass or run for governor.
- NEBRASKA: There’s a buzz around the candidacy of independent Dan Osborn, who threw a scare into Republican Deb Fischer in 2024 and is running against her colleague Pete Ricketts in 2026. But Ricketts, a former governor, is a much-better-known commodity in Nebraska than Fischer and has personal money to burn. It’s also likely that if Osborn somehow wins and control of the Senate depends on him, he’ll be the object of a high-stakes competition for his allegiance that Democrats won’t necessarily win.
That adds up to a lot of iffiness for Democrats hoping to flip the Senate. And that’s even before you factor in the four Democratic-held seats (in Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota) that will be challenged in competitive races. It will require a lot of skill and luck (and probably a very strong anti–White House midterm wave) to take away John Thune’s gavel and deny J.D. Vance his occasional moments of relevance.
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