The Democrats’ one neat trick to try to win a Senate majority
A Democratic Gambit in Red-State Senate Races
Qwenews.com – In three states heading into the 2026 midterms — Idaho, Nebraska, and South Dakota — the Democratic Party is pulling its nominees aside so that independent candidates can take their place on the ballot. The logic is straightforward: if a Democrat almost certainly cannot win in a deep-red state, perhaps an independent can at least make the Republican incumbent sweat. Whether that calculus actually pays off, however, remains an open question.
The Candidates Stepping In
Dan Osborn, a Navy veteran and union organizer who previously ran in Nebraska, is making another bid in 2026. Todd Achilles, a former member of the Idaho state House, occupies the independent slot in that state. In South Dakota, Brian Bengs — a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who once sought the Senate as a Democrat — has taken up the independent banner.
What the Track Record Actually Shows
The most consequential prior attempts at this playbook have produced results that, while short of victory, were nonetheless notable for how badly they dented Republican performance in states the party normally dominates.
Osborn's 2024 Nebraska run stands out as the closest the strategy has come to success at the federal level. He lost by seven points, but in doing so he capped GOP Senator Deb Fischer at 53 percent of the vote — a figure well below the 59 percent that President Donald Trump collected on the same ballot. By comparison, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris fell short by 21 points. Fischer's showing marked the weakest Republican Senate result in Nebraska since Democratic Senator Ben Nelson last carried the state two decades earlier.
Evan McMullin's 2022 Utah campaign followed a similar pattern. He finished within ten points in a state where Democrats had lost each of the two preceding presidential elections by margins exceeding twenty points. That result constituted the poorest showing for a Republican Senate candidate in Utah in half a century — stretching back to 1976. Once again, locating a worse GOP performance required reaching back to an era when the state still had a Democratic senator.
Greg Orman's 2014 Kansas effort was less spectacular in purely historical terms, yet still remarkable given the political climate. His eleven-point deficit mirrored the margins Democrats had suffered in 1996 and would later absorb in 2020. The complication: 2014 was a year in which the Republican Party captured nine Senate seats. Against that backdrop, holding the incumbent to a single-digit-plus loss was no small feat.
Taken together, the pattern yields the worst GOP Senate performance in Nebraska in twenty years, the worst in Utah in fifty years, and one of the worst in Kansas in thirty years — all in years that were, by and large, favorable to Republicans.
Alaska: A Different Ballot, A Different Outcome
Alaska offers two instructive data points, though neither maps cleanly onto a Senate contest. In 2020, Al Gross secured the Democratic nomination despite not being a registered Democrat and appeared on the ballot as the party's candidate. His nearly thirteen-point loss was unremarkable by the standards of the other examples above.
The state's most recent instance of this strategy producing an outright victory came in a governor's race. Independent Bill Walker won by two points in 2014 after the Democratic nominee withdrew and accepted the vice-gubernatorial slot. The distinction between that outcome and the Senate results above may be telling.
Why Senate Races Resist Crossover Voting
Historical evidence suggests Senate contests are more polarized than gubernatorial ones. Voters tend to treat the ballot as a referendum on party rather than on individual candidates, and the crossover votes that might rescue an independent are scarcer. This dynamic may also explain a recurring anomaly: in the cases of Orman, Gross, and McMullin, pre-election polling hinted at a possible upset, yet each candidate ultimately lost by a wider margin than the numbers suggested. Conservative voters, it appears, recalibrated their ballots once they registered that a vote for the independent would effectively cost their preferred Republican a seat.
The Optimistic Case for 2026
Idaho and South Dakota, in particular, may simply be too deep in the red for any version of this strategy to succeed, even under ideal conditions. Yet one contextual detail deserves emphasis: none of the years in which the tactic was genuinely deployed — 2014, 2022, 2024 — were favorable for Democrats. The 2022 cycle came closest to a competitive environment, and even then it split fairly evenly. If the strategy managed to produce those results in years that were, on balance, anti-Democratic, the optimistic argument holds that a more favorable national climate could push the margins further. At minimum, the maneuver strips Republicans of seats in states where a straight Democratic nominee would have had no realistic path to victory.
The question is not whether the independents will win. It is whether they can make the incumbent's re-election costly enough to matter.
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