How resounding was the Republicans’ 2024 victory?
Consider this: One opinion writer believes the GOP has secured near-permanent control of the Senate.
In a piece for The Hill published Thursday, Ilani Nurick, a Yale Law student and opinion contributor to the Beltway-centric publication, noted that, “For the first time in a century, there is not one Democratic senator from a reliably red state.”
That means the 53-47 majority the Republicans hold might hold for quite a long time, particularly since one of the reasons why the left was able to take control of the Senate so frequently was because of popular red-state Democrats.
“For decades, Democrats relied on popular Democratic senators in deep-red states — for example, Tom Daschle in South Dakota (lost in 2004), Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas (lost in 2010), Mary Landrieu in Louisiana (lost in 2014), Claire McCaskill in Missouri (lost in 2018), and Jon Tester in Montana (lost in 2024). In recent years, these red-state Democrats were critical to holding the Democratic majority,” Nurick wrote.
“The final nationalization of the Senate in 2024 with the ousting of Tester and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and the retirement of Joe Manchin in West Virginia, shifts the path to a Democratic Senate majority entirely to blue and purple states. This makes the Democrats’ task nearly impossible,” she wrote.
The math doesn’t look great for the Democrats, either, when you factor in swing states.
“Even if Democrats sweep every swing state contest (and oust Susan Collins in Maine), they can win at most 52 seats in the Senate,” she wrote.
“That includes both seats in North Carolina. If Republicans were to win all the Senate seats in all of those same swing states, they would control 62 seats.”
Did you expect Republicans to win the Senate?
And such a shift won’t happen anytime soon, either.
Take, for instance, the 2026 midterms. That’s the opportunity for the Democrats to score a seat by unseating a Republican in a deep-blue state by ousting Maine Sen. Susan Collins. The other opportunity on the board for them seems to be Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a purple state which trended redder in 2024.
However, they would also have to offset potential losses. In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff is one of two Democrats who scored surprise victories in runoffs in the turmoil after the 2020 election.
Unlike Sen. Raphael Warnock, who at least has some charisma and survived a 2022 challenge from a flawed GOP nominee, Herschel Walker, Ossoff has distinguished himself primarily by being a hole in the air in the upper chamber, and popular GOP Gov. Brian Kemp has signaled a willingness to challenge the first-term Democrat.
In battleground Michigan, which has also trended Republican in recent races, Gary Peters has to defend his seat against a strong GOP bench. Rep. Elissa Slotkin barely won an open Senate seat there despite being heavily favored and a rising party star. Peters, again, is mostly just a blob of carbon that’s good for a Democratic vote — hardly the kind of material you want defending a seat in a state that’s trending redder.
In New Hampshire, which leans slightly Democratic, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen has been a relatively popular incumbent — but the safety of her seat depends on whether popular exiting GOP Gov. Chris Sununu declares for it. He’s said he wouldn’t, according to Fox News, but Joe Biden said he wasn’t going to pardon Hunter and look how that turned out.
This isn’t even counting states that are shifting Republican, such as New Mexico and Virginia, where the GOP has been making steady gains over the past few years. The point is, even with a blue wave, there’s not likely to be a shift in 2026 — or anytime in the future, for that matter — which gives the Democrats control of the upper chamber.
And mind you, this has happened before.
“There is a historical analog to this emerging phenomenon: the Permanent Democratic Congress. From 1954 through 1994, Democrats controlled the House for 40 out of 40 years, and 58 out of 62 years until 1994. Only recently have we entered an era of congressional oscillation between parties, an era that came to an end this November,” Nurick noted.
Except back then, there was the divide between the more liberal Democrats and the segregation-friendly Dixiecrats. This time, the realignment caused by Brown, Manchin and Tester getting booted is going to have considerably more import, Nurick said.
“First, any incoming Democratic president will enter the White House with a severe handicap, limiting the enactment of broad campaign promises. Instead of enjoying a mandate reflected by majorities in Congress, the far likelier scenario is a Democratic president immediately vying against a confident and combative Republican Senate,” she wrote. “Any partisan campaign promise — from a public option to progressive tax reform — is dead on arrival. The same hostility President Obama faced after losing the Senate in 2014 will be the presumptive landscape.”
Furthermore, the idea of packing the judiciary with far-left justices isn’t an option, considering the Senate is the body that confirms them: “Republicans no longer have any incentive to confirm Democratic judicial nominees, knowing a Republican-controlled Senate can outwait a Democratic president.”
And remember the Democrats’ hatred of the filibuster? Expect that to change, said Nurick, and change fast.
“The filibuster derives its power from the majority party’s recognition that someday soon, they will likely find themselves in the minority. When that day comes, the filibuster will be a valuable asset ensuring the minority’s perspective is heard,” she wrote.
“But the filibuster’s threat and power hinge on the shared belief that each party will eventually rotate in and out of the majority. In the new age ushered in by the 2024 elections, Republicans have little reason to believe Democrats will take the Senate back anytime soon.”
Now, granted, life moves pretty fast, especially inside the Beltway. Why, just think — on June 26, President Joe Biden was as sharp as a tack, running for four more years, and ready to decimate Donald Trump in a debate the next day.
A few months later, he wasn’t the nominee, Kamala had lost to The Donald, and four out of the five swing Senate seats — Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin — had gone red. Not only that, but races that were deemed to be safer Democrat holds — Arizona, Michigan and Nevada — were surprisingly close, so much so that some additional resources on the ground in any one of those three states might have produced an additional seat or two.
That being said, that’s why Donald Trump and the GOP didn’t just snatch the Senate for the next two years. Without a serious political realignment unlike anything we’ve seen before, the party now likely has control over the body for the foreseeable future. Get ready for the lefty paeans to the filibuster to begin in earnest quite quickly.
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