Senate Majority Comes Down to Seven Toss-Up Races as Voters Head to the Polls

Americans vote Tuesday in midterm elections that will decide control of the Senate, with Republicans defending far more seats than Democrats on a map that has tightened in several states as Election Day nears. Thirty-five of the chamber's 100 seats are on the ballot — 33 regular seats plus special elections in Florida and Ohio to fill terms vacated by officials who moved to the executive branch — according to the current roster maintained by the United States Senate and tallied separately by election trackers covering the 2026 cycle.

Seven races, one majority

Republicans currently hold 53 seats to Democrats' 45, with two independents who caucus with Democrats, meaning Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take the majority. Analysts at the Cook Political Report rate seven races as true toss-ups — Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas — while contests in New Hampshire and Georgia have also drawn heavy spending, even as forecasters have grown more confident that Georgia's Democratic incumbent, Jon Ossoff, will hold his seat. Michigan is the clearest Democratic vulnerability, an open seat where Republican Mike Rogers is facing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. In Maine, Republican Sen. Susan Collins, one of the chamber's longest-serving members, faces a challenge from Democratic state Senate President Troy Jackson in one of the cycle's marquee races.

More than 30 million Americans had already cast ballots as of the final full week of October, according to tallies compiled by the University of Florida's Election Lab and cited in a Scripps News fact-check analysis, with turnout climbing fastest in Texas and Maine compared with the 2022 midterms. States set their own rules and deadlines for voting ahead of Tuesday; the federal government's own voter-information page directs people to their county election office for hours and sites, while states such as North Carolina publish daily absentee and early in-person vote counts that are added to the public record the day after each ballot is cast.

A map shaped by two vacancies

The Ohio and Florida special elections add an unusual wrinkle to the cycle. Both seats are open only because their previous occupants left for the executive branch — one to become vice president, the other secretary of state — leaving appointed successors to defend them in states that lean Republican. Ohio's contest is close enough that Cook rates it a toss-up alongside Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan and Texas, underscoring how a map that looked safely Republican a year ago has tightened heading into Election Day. Democrats need all four of their best-positioned pickups — most plausibly Michigan, Maine and one or both of the two special elections — to fall their way to reach a majority.

What's next

Polls close at staggered times Tuesday evening, with the first results expected from East Coast states around 7 and 8 p.m. Eastern; the outcome in the closest Senate races is unlikely to be clear until well after midnight, and some contests could take days to call if margins are tight enough to trigger recounts. Whichever party ends up with the majority will immediately confront a short-term government funding measure that lawmakers will need to revisit in the weeks after the election, setting up one of the new Senate's first tests before it has even been sworn in.