Chuck Schumer is so sure of a Senate takeover that his allies are buying TV ads in deep-red states.
The cable chatter and the betting markets have already handed him the majority leader’s gavel.
And Schumer’s own hometown paper found a few problems his party would rather nobody noticed.
The Paper of Record Pops the Blue Balloon
Nobody has ever accused The New York Times of rooting for Republicans.
So it landed with a thud when the paper ran a long piece by national political reporter Lisa Lerer asking whether the blue wave Democrats keep bragging about could end up looking more like a splash.
Lerer started with the stuff Democrats love to repeat. The party leads by 11 points on the generic ballot, according to the Times, and President Trump is campaigning in deep-red places he carried easily two years ago. Prediction markets, social media, and plenty of cable pundits treat a Democrat Congress as a done deal.
Then she spent the rest of the story poking holes in it.
To take the Senate, Democrats need to flip four Republican seats and hold every single seat they already have. Four of the 10 battleground races feature GOP incumbents: US Senators Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Jon Husted (R-OH), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Roger Marshall (R-KS). Five of those battlegrounds sit in states Trump won by 11 points or more in 2024.
Republican strategist Liam Donovan put it plainly. “Structurally, the Senate is built to be Republican, and the question is whether this wave can breach that levee,” Donovan told the Times. “It is incredibly hard.”
Schumer Went Shopping in Mississippi
This is where US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) comes in.
Senate Majority PAC, the main super PAC for Senate Democrats, started running $1.2 million in television ads in Mississippi. Voters there haven’t sent a Democrat to the US Senate since 1982.
Two years ago, Republicans and even some Democrats chuckled when Schumer talked openly about recruiting a Senate candidate in the Magnolia State. Now his allies are spending real money on the idea. A retired cotton farmer outside Greenwood might call that a long drive for a maybe.
But Schumer already has his explanation loaded in case the long drive comes up empty.
“The election can be summed up in the following sentence: Can huge amounts of Republican money defeat huge Democratic advantages in issues, candidates and political climate,” Schumer told the Times.
Read that one twice. In Schumer’s telling, Democrats own the issues, the candidates, and the political mood. Republicans just own a checkbook. Any GOP win gets booked as a purchase, never as a choice voters made.
Democrats Drafted the Alibi Before Anybody Voted
Howard Wolfson, a veteran Democrat strategist and political adviser to Michael Bloomberg, took the excuse-making a step further.
“There will be two explanations if the wave is just a ripple,” Wolfson told the Times. “One is there is a massive polling error. The second is that the Democrats didn’t have enough money to put enough races into play and make the races that were in play sufficiently competitive.”
Notice what never made his list. Wolfson didn’t leave room for the simplest explanation of all, that a voter in Kansas or Iowa might just prefer the Republican.
And the money excuse comes with an awkward asterisk attached. Bloomberg alone spent about $80 million propping up Democrats this fall, according to the Times.
But the bigger asterisk has a name. Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion in roughly 15 weeks in 2024, more than double what Trump’s campaign brought in, according to federal filings reported by multiple outlets. Politico reported her campaign still finished at least $20 million in debt.
One Biden staffer summed up the party’s mood afterward to The New Republic: “How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the ****?”
So the next time a Democrat insists money decides elections, somebody should ask him about 2024.
Republicans do hold a money edge this cycle, and nobody should pretend otherwise. AdImpact counted roughly $650 million more in GOP general-election advertising across federal and state races, and more than $320 million more in the seven Senate races the Cook Political Report rates as toss-ups. Elon Musk has put more than $276 million into a Republican turnout operation, the Times reported.
“I have never seen more money spent on the ground in my life,” Michigan-based Republican strategist Jason Roe told the paper. “If you are a Republican voter, you are going to get harassed to no end to turn out.”
Grandma in Wichita can expect a few extra knocks on the door before November 3.
Red-State Polls Keep Flattering Democrats
The Times also pointed to a historical review of congressional polls by The Economist. The more partisan the state, the more the polls underestimated the dominant party. Apply that pattern to this year, and Democrat dreams in Alaska, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, and Kansas start to shrink.
Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini spotted a similar habit, according to PJ Media. His analysis found red-state Senate polls overstated Democrat support during the summer months across the last four election cycles, with the same pattern showing up again in 2026.
The track record backs him up. After 2020, Pew Research found polls overestimated the Democrat advantage by an average of about 4 points across 12 battleground states.
Polls don’t always miss in the same direction, of course. Pollsters underestimated Democrats in the 2025 governor races in Virginia and New Jersey, as a column in The Hill noted. But those were blue-leaning states in an off year. The Senate fight runs straight through Iowa, Kansas, and Ohio, places where the misses have run the other way.
“Trump is probably going to do some good in these red-leaning states when he comes in,” Iowa Republican strategist David Kochel told the Times. “There’s still a lot more Republicans in Iowa and Kansas than there are Democrats.”
Trump seems to know it. At his rally in Sioux City, he told the crowd, “I’m asking you to pretend I’m running.” Then came the punchline: “Pretend I’m on the ballot.”
The Number Democrats Can’t Buy Their Way Past
Here’s the figure Schumer would love to skip. Just 28 percent of voters told the latest New York Times/Siena poll they’re satisfied with the Democrat Party. That trails satisfaction with the Republican Party by eight points, and it trails Trump’s job approval by the same margin.
Even the Democrats’ own pollsters are nervous. Molly Murphy, who worked on the 2024 campaigns of both Joe Biden and Harris, told the Times, “I am concerned that we have an overheating of expectations.”
“People often assume in a wave you win everything, and what happens in a modern wave is you win far more than normal,” Murphy added.
That’s quite a warning from somebody who watched the Harris numbers up close.
And then there’s Third Way, the think tank that sells itself as the Democrat Party’s centrist conscience. Vice president Matt Bennett now worries that far-left Senate nominees like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine are running behind Democrats competing in traditionally red states.
Funny time to notice. Democrat primary voters picked those nominees, and the self-described moderates in the party went right along with the result. Bennett isn’t ruling out a strange split where Democrats win red states and barely hang on in blue ones.
“Every single one of the Senate races is on a knife’s edge,” Bennett told the Times. “The results could be super weird.”
Strategists in both parties do think the House looks rough for Republicans. But the Senate decides judges, cabinet picks, and treaties. And a House majority without the Senate gives Democrats a lot of hearing rooms and very few new laws.
Expect a familiar pattern if the Senate wave fizzles. Democrats will blame the polls. They’ll blame Musk’s checkbook. Then they’ll call for new limits on political spending, aimed squarely at the donors who back the other side, while Bloomberg’s $80 million gets waved through as civic duty.
Schumer still gets to keep his optimism, and his allies can keep buying airtime in Mississippi. The voters will settle the rest.
In 2018, the last midterm everybody called a wave, Democrats picked up 41 House seats. Republicans picked up two Senate seats.
Sources:
“Why Democrats Could Find It Hard to Win the Senate Despite Their Strong Polls,” The New York Times
“Harris campaign raised $1 billion, ends $20 million in debt: Reports,” Straight Arrow News
“Harris Raised $1 Billion. Where Did it All Go?” The New Republic
“Democrats Are Falling for It Again, and That’s Great News for Republicans,” PJ Media
“Pollsters face midterm polling challenges,” The Hill
Pew Research Center, analysis of 2020 preelection polling