WASHINGTON — Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson is urging his party to treat retaking the U.S. Senate as the make-or-break fight of the 2026 midterms. He argues the chamber’s control over budgets and lifetime judicial confirmations could shape policy and the courts for years, Dec. 30, 2025.
Speaking with Chatham House’s The World Today, Jentleson — founder and president of the Searchlight Institute and a former aide to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — said Democrats should measure success less by viral moments and more by whether they can win governing power. “If the Democrats can’t take back the Senate … we’re really in trouble,” he said.
Why the 2026 midterms are a Senate firewall
Midterm elections often punish the party holding the White House, but the Senate is harder to move than the House. Only one-third of the chamber is up every two years, and the map can force one side to defend multiple seats while still needing pickups to win control.
The Senate’s Class II lineup shows much of the terrain for the 2026 midterms. Democrats will defend seats held by Sens. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Gary Peters of Michigan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Republicans on the ballot include Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Joni Ernst of Iowa and John Cornyn of Texas, among others — the kind of roster that can turn a handful of states into the entire national fight.
North Carolina has also moved into sharper focus after Sen. Thom Tillis said he will not seek reelection, creating an open-seat contest. CBS News reported Tillis announced his decision after a clash with the White House over a sweeping tax-and-spending bill.
Jentleson frames the stakes as structural: Senate control means control of the confirmation pipeline, from district courts to the Supreme Court. That reality, he argues, is why the 2026 midterms should be treated as a referendum on long-term governing capacity, not just as a protest vote.
Jentleson’s blueprint for the 2026 midterms: supermajority thinking and affordability
Jentleson’s prescription centers on what he calls “supermajority thinking” — building a coalition durable enough to govern, rather than stitching together narrow wins that collapse in the next cycle. He argues Democrats have leaned too heavily on being “anti-Trump” without giving persuadable voters a simple reason to choose them on kitchen-table issues.
In a public-radio report, he said, “Americans do not like what Republicans and Donald Trump are offering,” while warning that voters still often rate Republicans more highly on major issues such as the economy, crime and immigration. That disconnect, Jentleson argues, is where Democrats can lose the plot heading into the 2026 midterms.
His example of message discipline has included New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whom he described as consistently steering conversations back to “affordability.” Jentleson argues that kind of repetition, more than a long list of policy goals, is what breaks through.
The approach has sparked backlash inside the party. A profile in The Atlantic described Searchlight as urging Democrats to take more “heterodox” positions and to ignore pressure from some ideological factions — an argument critics say risks confusing persuasion with moderation for its own sake.
A longer argument about the Senate, revisited
Jentleson’s warning about the 2026 midterms also builds on years of his public critique of Senate power. The New Yorker examined his 2021 book “Kill Switch,” which traced how Senate rules can entrench minority leverage, while a Guardian review argued the filibuster often shapes what majorities can accomplish. The Washington Post framed the filibuster as “chief among” the problems he identified in explaining modern Senate dysfunction.
Now, Jentleson is translating that institutional critique into an electoral bottom line: If Democrats want lasting leverage, they must win the Senate in the 2026 midterms — and do it with a message broad enough to hold.
