The Tribune

By Charlie Harper

Someone was asking earlier this week why the US House of Representatives doesn’t impeach president Donald Trump again.

“Look at the obvious corruption!” she exclaimed. He’s accepting an entire airplane from a foreign country. He’s spending millions of dollars to go over to Scotland for a game of golf and to promote business at a golf course he owns. He’s promoting crypto-currency schemes whose major outcomes appear to profit his own family.

“When is this going to stop? Why doesn’t the legislature impeach him?”

The answer to that not unreasonable question is, of course, that the Republican Party of Donald Trump enjoys slim but decisive margins in both the US House and the US Senate. And until next November’s elections, this isn’t going to change.

Furthermore, because of those looming elections, any Republican running for reelection lives in fear of defying Trump because of the real threat that he will promote a primary challenger who would either bankrupt the incumbent’s campaign or weaken the incumbent against a Democratic challenger in the November 2026 general election – or both.

What about the November 2026 elections? We’ll deal with House later.

In the Senate, the consequences of the late 18th Century deals brokered by the framers of the American constitution retain vivid and current.

In order to get smaller states like Delaware and Rhode Island to support the idea of a confederation that eventually grew into the transcontinental colossus that the US is today, constitutional framers had to figure out a way to persuade the smaller states that they wouldn’t become vassals of titans like New York in the new arrangement. That idea also informed the great American expansion across the North American continent in the 19th Century.

Thus, every state gets two senators in the American legislative upper house – even places like Wyoming and Idaho that boast lower population than many of the larger American cities including the federal capital Washington DC that remains without voting representation in either American legislative chamber.

While biennial US House elections generally track the national mood on key economic and social issues, often to the disadvantage of the party then occupying the White House, the US Senate is another story. And the math there for decades has generally favoured the GOP.

This is because most of the time, Democrats defending Senate seats in Republican-leaning states outnumber Republicans defending Senate seats in Democratic-leaning states. Such is the case next year, and the prognosis is for the Republicans to retain and possibly even expand their control in the Senate.

Today, Republicans control the Senate by 53–47, with the Democratic total including “independent” senators from Vermont and Maine who almost always oppose the president’s policies and nominees.

Let’s take a closer look at this. Four Democratic incumbents are retiring next year, in Michigan, Illinois, New Hampshire and Minnesota. It would be a surprise if the Dems lost any of these seats, although Trump and the GOP will probably invest heavily in contesting them, and New Hampshire in particular often becomes a close race at the finish line. Michigan has the potential to be competitive, but the Democratic Party will really fight hard here at the heart of the American labour movement.

In another nine states, Democratic incumbents are running for reelection. These states are Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware and Georgia.

Here’s a guess that you’ve already picked out the one state in that bunch where the Democrats are vulnerable – Georgia. The incumbent here is kind of an accidental senator, Jon Ossoff, whose election six years ago resulted from an astounding and virtually unprecedented combination of events that are unlikely to be repeated next year.

Trump single-handedly intervened to promote personal favourite candidates and messed up both 2020 Senate races in Georgia for the Republicans, giving the Democrats a slim Senate edge for the first two years of the Joe Biden administration. The president is unlikely to repeat that mistake next year.

Still, while left-leaning Atlanta is the capital, biggest city and most influential political area in the state, Georgia is still a Southern state, and since Richard Nixon led the Republican takeover of the political south after the transformative civil rights legislation enacted under Democrat Lyndon Johnson 60 years ago, the South has been a GOP stronghold.

So it would be unwise to project a Democratic victory there, despite very popular incumbent Republican governor Brian Kemp’s decision not to enter the Senate race against Ossoff.

So far, of the 13 Senate Democratic seats on next year’s ballot, 12 look reasonably safe with Georgia uncertain.

Bearing in mind that because former senator and current vice president JD Vance can cast the decisive vote in a tied Senate, the Democrats need to gain at least four seats in November 2026 to regain control of the upper house, in addition to hanging on to Ossoff’s seat in Georgia.

That’s not very likely to happen. Here’s why.

We mentioned that four Democratic senators are retiring. Three Republicans are joining them, in Alabama, Kentucky and North Carolina. Former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville has represented Alabama with no distinction and indeed some embarrassment, and his main qualification has been unfailing allegiance to Trump. But Trump often cites Alabama as his favourite state. He may be more popular there than anywhere else.

Venerable Mitch McConnell is finally retiring from his Kentucky seat, and pundits are hopefully urging popular Democratic governor Andy Beshear to run. But despite the prospect of a bruising GOP primary fight likely to be decided by Trump’s endorsement, Beshear says he won’t run; he hopes for the Dem nomination for president in 2028.

Only in North Carolina among this group do the Democrats have a chance to gain a seat. There, former governor Roy Cooper has said he will run. Tall, elegant and well-spoken, the centrist moderate Cooper would present a real challenge to any GOP opponent and he might well win.

So far, that’s a projected potential gain of only one seat for the Dems. How about states where GOP incumbents running for reelection?

Here’s the list: Alaska, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming; South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska; Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana; Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina and Florida; Ohio, West Virginia and Maine.

Most prognosticators frown on any chance of a significant Democratic pickup among these states, but the chances are not negligible, and there’s no telling what the US economy might look like a year from now. If Trump’s tariffs and general unpredictability unsettle the American economy to a degree that even his loyal voters feel the pain, all bets might be off.

But for now, the best Democratic prospects might be in Maine, where redoubtable Susan Collins has persevered and won twice before in elections where the Republicans generally fared poorly. Still, if the Dems can nominate and unite behind someone with good credibility, an upset is possible here.

In Ohio, very popular maverick and labour hero Sherrod Brown lost his Senate seat last year to an auto dealer favoured by Trump in an election that was a well-deserved national repudiation of the feckless Democrats. If Brown decides he’s up for another run for office, this might be a potential gain for the Dems.

There will be speculation about numerous other Republican incumbent races, likely in Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas and possibly others. In many cases, this will be driven mostly by a media collective desperate for viewers on television and on line.

Pundits will blather on about disappointed Trump voters in the farm belt in the Midwest. A potentially divisive Texas GOP primary election will inspire fantasy prognostications about a Democratic return to power in the Lone Star state. If the Dems decide to back a popular independent in Nebraska, can the incumbent be unseated? Will South Carolina voters finally tire of the turnabouts of mercurial senator Lindsay Graham?

There will be breathless speculation about whether the black majority among Mississippi voters will finally produce results at the ballot box. Will Trump’s willful disregard of the need to protect the environment turn off too many voters in tourism-reliant Alaska?

It will all make for good theatre. But barring some kind of economic calamity which Trump will work hard to avoid, the GOP is going to retain control of the Senate next year.