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Welcome to Part 2 of our explainer about which party will control Congress after November’s midterm elections. As we wrote earlier this week, Democrats are a virtual lock to flip the House, but the Senate is another story. Despite Donald Trump’s unpopularity, most election observers put the odds of a Dem majority somewhere around a coin toss.

OK, give me the basics.

Right now, the Senate has 53 Republicans vs. 47 members of the Democratic caucus. Given that Vice President J.D. Vance is the tiebreaker, Democrats need to pick up a net of at least four* seats in the midterms (more on that asterisk below).

Where are Democrats on defense?

Defense might be the wrong word in Georgia, where polls show freshman Sen. Jon Ossoff handily beating a Republican challenger who keeps some questionable company. But in the states where incumbent Democrats are retiring, the party probably has to replace all of them to win a majority. Dems are on pretty safe ground in Minnesota, a blue state that bore the brunt of Trump’s immigration crackdown. In blue-leaning New Hampshire, though, some polls show a tight race between Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas and John Sununu, a former senator whose family is a GOP political dynasty there.

The road looks rockiest in the swing state of Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive, faces former Rep. Mike Rogers, whom my colleague Jim Newell describes as “a buttoned-up, country-club Republican from the George W. Bush era.” Rogers only narrowly lost a Senate race there in 2024, so Dems have work........

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