I’m a glass-is-half-empty sort of guy when it comes to elections.
I always see the race that could go wrong, the supposedly safe seat that isn’t safe, and the political wave that could disappear before reaching shore.
But pessimism isn’t the same thing as denial. Republicans need a sober, detached assessment of 2026 because nobody who isn’t being paid to say otherwise will say that 2026 is a good year for Republicans.
It isn’t.
The national environment is tilting Democratic. The RealClearPolitics average has Democrats leading Republicans by 7 points on the generic congressional ballot.
The warning signs are everywhere.
Republicans are having to pay attention to Senate races in Montana, Alaska, and Iowa — states President Donald Trump won overwhelmingly. Democrats are even making noise about Mississippi, although that is surely a ruse intended to make Republicans spend money defending territory that shouldn’t require defending.
But North Carolina? That’s real.
Former Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper is running strongly for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Thom Tillis. Had Tillis remained the Republican nominee, does anyone seriously believe North Carolina would look as bad for Republicans as it does today?
Then there is Texas.
Democrat James Talarico is leading the Republican nominee, state Attorney General Ken Paxton. This is Texas, a state where Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in 32 years.
Republicans should ask themselves whether they would be spending August worrying about Texas had Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) survived the Republican primary.
That is political malpractice. And yet Democrats have their own candidate problem.
In fact, 2026 increasingly looks like it could become the Democrats’ version of 2010.
The tea party wave that year was enormous. Republicans delivered then-President Barack Obama his famous shellacking. But they left Senate seats on the table.
Sharron Angle lost a winnable race in Nevada. Christine O’Donnell knocked off then-Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware’s Republican primary, only to lose a seat Republicans otherwise might have won to Chris Coons. Ken Buck, then a county district attorney, lost in Colorado.
Two years later, Republicans repeated the mistake when then-Rep. Todd Akin transformed Missouri from a Republican pickup into a Democrat landslide.
The tea party didn’t fail. It simply failed to reach its full potential. Democrats may be about to do the same thing.
Exhibit A is Michigan.
Democrats nominated Abdul el Sayed for the Senate in a state Trump carried two years ago. El Sayed isn’t merely liberal. He comes from Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) wing of the party and has taken positions considerably to the left of the Wolverine State’s famously ticket-splitting electorate.
Michigan should terrify Democrats. In theory, the race should be theirs in this environment. Instead, they nominated perhaps the one candidate capable of turning it into a Republican pickup.
The irony is delicious.
For years, Democrats laughed as Republican primary voters nominated candidates who could win applause at rallies but couldn’t win enough independents in November.
Now Democrats are discovering the same intoxicating temptation: ideological purity feels wonderful until the votes are counted.
Democrats should have a big year. They could win the House. They could win the Senate.
But House redistricting has narrowed their path. And candidate quality matters enormously when only a handful of Senate races will determine control.
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Republicans have plenty of problems. Democrats’ biggest problem may be themselves.
If Republicans wake up Nov. 4 still controlling one or both chambers of Congress, it probably won’t be because 2026 suddenly became a Republican year. It will be because Democrats found a way to blow their own wave.
Dennis Lennox (@dennislennox) is a political commentator and public affairs consultant.