Democrats are heading into Election Day feeling hopeful — a strange sensation for the party during the Trump era.
The feeling is cautious. It’s quiet. It’s tempered with caveats. But it’s real.
“We are in a state of nauseous optimism,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, told me this evening.
Two years after their party was soundly rebuked in the 2024 election, losing the White House and the Senate to Republicans, poll after poll is telling a story of a stunning reversal of fortune — and key party leaders are acting accordingly.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who could be the first Black speaker of the House if Democrats flip that chamber, has been breezily projecting confidence for weeks as his party competes in districts President Trump won by double digits in 2024.
The Senate battleground has grown, as national Democrats pour money into places like Kansas and South Carolina. Heavyweight surrogates like former Vice President Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg have deployed to outer-band reach states like Mississippi.
“We had to look at states that we usually couldn’t win, and Trump’s and the Republicans’ liabilities and actions that hurt those states helped us as well,” Schumer said.
The optimism reaches so far that Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, is spending election eve in Oklahoma — a place that hasn’t elected a governor from his party in 20 years.
Nobody, though, and certainly not your neighborhood newsletter host, is projecting certainty about the results. That expanded battlefield means Democrats are competing in red states where Republicans have longstanding advantages in voter registration and outside spending.
And as expansive as the map has gotten, the races are close.
Why Democrats are dreaming so big
For much of the election cycle, Republicans have taken comfort in the map itself. To keep control of the Senate, all they had to do, really, was not lose races in states where they don’t tend to lose races. For Democrats to have even a chance of reclaiming the chamber, everything would have to go right for them.
Which brings me to The Times and Siena University’s final battleground poll.
If the final results look like this, it will be because everything did go right for Democrats — and not just in the past few weeks.
Since Trump’s victory in 2024, he has made a series of decisions that complicated his party’s path to holding power. Last year, he threatened to support a primary challenger to Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican; Tillis announced his retirement, and the Democrat Roy Cooper has led Trump’s handpicked nominee so soundly that national Republicans have all but given up on the race. In Texas, Trump backed the scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton, over the incumbent Senator John Cornyn; Paxton has consistently trailed the Democrat James Talarico in polling.
Then there was the Iran war, which drove up the cost of energy, pushing prices higher and pulling Trump’s popularity ever lower.
“We made costs, chaos, corruption our issue,” Schumer said.
Schumer recruited candidates like former Representative Mary Peltola in Alaska, former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and former Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina. Other strong candidates like Adam Hamilton of Kansas and Talarico emerged from primaries.
Democratic voter enthusiasm appears to be high. The party’s turnout surged in the primaries. A rush of early voting, too, shows promising signs for Democrats.
The party now believes it has a once-in-a-generation chance to shake up the Senate map, and to prove its candidates can win up and down the ballot in rapidly changing Southern states.
But with all that optimism, as my colleague Lisa Lerer wrote, comes the risk of overheated expectations. Modest gains — like picking up Senate seats but falling short of a majority — could feel like a crushing defeat in the moment.
What Republicans see
Democrats have managed to make major messes on their way to Nov. 3. Representative Haley Stevens — who was Schumer’s preferred pick for the Senate in Michigan — broke with the Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, over the weekend, imperiling her party’s bumpy push for unity in that state. (You can read all about their feud here.)
And in Maine, Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, has been running competitively against Troy Jackson, who replaced Graham Platner, Maine voters’ first choice for Democratic nominee, after he was accused of rape. (Platner denied it, but dropped out.)
Republicans also believe their Senate nominees in states like Minnesota and New Hampshire can run ahead of expectations.
Their biggest hope — and Democrats’ biggest fear — is that the polls are wrong. My colleague Nate Cohn explained late last week that Democrats have become likelier than Republicans to respond to polls. In our final Times/Siena national poll, he wrote, white Democrats were about 30 percent likelier to respond than white Republicans. Pollsters weight their results to account for this:
The persistence of nonresponse bias absolutely introduces the risk that the polls will underestimate Republicans, but it doesn’t doom the polls either. Back in 2022, white Democrats were likelier to pick up the phone at a pretty similar clip, but the polls wound up being solid in the end.
But the polls wouldn’t have to be off, necessarily, for the outcome to look different from the polls. Republicans are spending heavily to turn out their base of voters — more heavily, in most cases, than Democrats. They’re hoping they’ve done enough to make sure their supporters turn out.
Number of the Day
95%
More than 7.7 million people have voted early in Texas. That’s 95 percent of the state’s total turnout in the 2022 election, according to an early-vote tracker from the University of Florida — before even a single Election Day vote has been cast.
Times reporters are also keeping track of early voting in Senate battlegrounds, and my colleagues note that Texas’ vote count more closely resembles a presidential year than a midterm, with turnout especially high in Hispanic areas.
Get Caught Up
Nevada: It can seem like no state is more susceptible to the whims of the economy than tourism-powered Nevada. That may be why Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, is locked in one of the nation’s most competitive races.
New York: Bruce Blakeman is leaning in on a crime message that worked for Republicans in the last midterms — though the math hasn’t exactly mathed in his effort to unseat Gov. Kathy Hochul.
In One Graphic
Megadonors are playing an outsize role in these midterms: The top 20 contributors have poured roughly $2 billion into federal races this cycle, Matt Zdun and Teddy Schleifer report. See their full list here, which also explains where all this money is going.
Quote of the Day
“It’s a middle-aged ass. I should know, I have one.”
That was Karen Tetrick, 52, an apartment complex owner in Ohio, talking about the backside of Senator Jon Husted.
People across Ohio have started taking note of Husted’s physique. That’s because the president seems to bring it up every chance he gets, offering fawning praise at campaign rallies (even in other states) and on social media. The comments reliably get a laugh from the crowd. But they have also elevated the profile of a Republican incumbent who had, until now, toiled in relative anonymity.
On the final day of the midterms, Trump hosted several virtual rallies but just one in-person event. Where did he deliver his speech today?
Click an answer. We’ll take you to the story so you can see if you’re right.
Taylor Robinson contributed to this newsletter.
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