Michael Cook

Amidst all of the chaos of the final days of the campaign, it’s worth taking a step back and recognizing how insane it is that Democrats are even in a position to flip the Senate at all, let alone win 52+ seats. It was basically unthinkable a year ago. Brian Kemp & Chris Sununu seeing the writing on the wall and deciding not to run for Senate was huge. Mary Peltola, Roy Cooper & Adam Hamilton are freakishly good candidates. Schumer getting Sherrod Brown to run again was huge. Dems managing to force Graham Platner off the ballot just in time and replace him with Troy Jackson was huge. James Talarico beating Jasmine Crockett — and remember, she was favored to start off the race! — in the primary, and running an objectively fantastic campaign, was huge. John Cornyn losing to Ken Paxton (with Trump’s assistance) was huge. Darline Graham winning the nomination was huge. Nominating Scott Colom, Jamie Davis & Annie Andrews — all strong candidates — just in case it was a wave year to make Republicans (at the very least) sweat and spend money in the Deep South was huge. Some things didn’t go 100% perfectly (they never do), but man what a turnaround from the utter despair we were looking at facing this extremely tough map coming out of the 2024 election.