Two maps sit side by side here: 1980, when the country went Republican nearly everywhere after a September in which the polls had Reagan a few points ahead and called the race too close to predict, and 2026, as the Senate races stand today. The point, for people who live in nineteen of the twenty-two red states with Senate seats on the ballot this year and for anyone who has written those states off, is that a swing of that size reaches the Senate too, as it did in 1980, and that in 1980 and again in 1994, the two biggest surprises of the last sixty years, it looked smaller from here than it turned out to be on election night.
1980
2026Forecast, not a result
The 1980 map shows the presidential result because that is what turned the map one color. There is no presidential race in 2026, so the second map opens on the Senate races as the Cook Political Report rates them, which it summed up on Sept. 23 as "a true toss up" for control. The fifteen states with no Senate race this year are striped by their current senators. The outlines mark races that any of the three main raters moved in September. The other two views show a count of Cook's close House districts, rated Sept. 8, and, for the nineteen states only, the governor's race where there is one this year (fourteen of them), with the Senate race elsewhere.
1964 is the case you could see coming and 2006 looked bigger in September than it turned out; 1980 and 1994 looked smaller than they were, and 2018 came in about as advertised. The small Senate maps show the winning party in each state with a race that year, black outlines where the seat changed party; states with no race are shown in gray. The 2006 and 2018 results are from the Federal Election Commission; 1964, 1980 and most of 1994 are from Wikipedia's per-year pages, which cite the House Clerk's statistics; those were not checked against the originals here.
| Year | Map | Six weeks out | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1964 | President · Johnson 44 + DC, Goldwater 6 Senate · results by state | Gallup September average Johnson +33 | Johnson +22.6; Democrats +36 or 37 House seats, +2 Senate to 68–32 |
| 1980 | President · Reagan 44, Carter 6 + DC Senate · results by state | Public polls Reagan +3.5; Republicans had counted on four or five Senate seats, as Time reported afterward | Reagan +9.7; Republicans +12 Senate seats and the majority, nine Democratic senators beaten |
| 1994 | Senate · results by state | Gallup September R +4; forecasters expected 25 to 30 Republican House gains | Republicans +52 to 54 House seats and the majority for the first time in forty years; +8 Senate seats, 52–48 on the night and 53–47 after Shelby switched a day later |
| 2006 | Senate · results by state | Gallup early September D +12 among registered voters; one likely-voter reading tied | Democrats +31 House; +6 Senate seats (Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia), taking both chambers 51–49 with the two independents |
| 2018 | Senate · results by state | Trump approval about 40 percent; Cook House toss-ups in Republican seats | Democrats won 23 of Cook's 28 House toss-ups in Republican-held seats, +40 or 41 House seats; Republicans +2 in the Senate, losing Arizona and Nevada and taking North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana and Florida |
| 2026 | Cook ratings, Sept. 23 · governor's race in fourteen of the nineteen states, Senate elsewhere | Generic ballot D +8.1; Trump approval 32–35% in polls fielded Sept. 16–21 | — |
The pattern is not a rule. In 1998, 2002 and 2022 the president's party did better than its September numbers suggested, and 1964 shows a popular president whose party gained. What the three midterm waves above share with 1980 is a sitting president well under fifty percent approval asking voters to treat the election as a verdict on him. Tennessee changed hands twice in 1994, so that map shows seven outlined states for eight seats; Minnesota and Mississippi each held two races in 2018, both won by the same party; Connecticut in 2006 is shown as an independent win, Lieberman's, and not outlined as a change of party. Independents are shown in green.
Forty days remain. That is time enough to move expectations, the story people tell about a race, and votes themselves, and this section puts the vote part in plain numbers. Each bar is one state's 2024 presidential vote laid out left to right, Harris voters then Trump voters, with a line at the point where the two would be equal. The blue stretch runs from where the Democratic vote ended to that line: it is the number of Trump voters who would have to cross for the state to tip, half the 2024 margin. The figures on the right give it in votes, as a share of Trump's 2024 vote, and as a share of everyone who voted. For scale, the generic ballot has moved about eight points toward Democrats since 2024, and a uniform eight-point swing would tip none of these nineteen states on its own; the closest, Ohio, starts eleven points back.
These are nineteen of the twenty-two states where Republicans are defending Senate seats this year, leaving out Iowa, Maine and North Carolina, which were always the main battlegrounds. Across the nineteen, about 105 statewide races are on the November 3 ballot, counting the Senate seats, governors, the other elected executive offices and the supreme court seats chosen statewide, and leaving out Alabama's four appellate seats and the Texas high-court seats, whose candidates are not listed here. At least twelve of those races have no Democrat on the ballot, including the Senate races in Idaho, Nebraska and South Dakota, where an independent is the opposition. Five of the states, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and West Virginia, elect no governor this year. Below the Senate and governor races, only one has a public poll from August or September, the Kansas secretary of state race, and that poll is a Democratic one.
Three things here are checked against official sources: Ohio's candidate list (Erie County Board of Elections), Wyoming's retention justices (Wyoming Secretary of State) and Cook's Senate ratings (Cook's own Sept. 23 chart). Rows marked reported have not been matched to the state's certified list. The 2020 Senate margins are approximate. Two points remain unsettled: Sabato's Ohio secretary of state rating, given as Likely R and Leans R in different places, and whether David Leslie (D) is in the Alaska Senate field.