Seven days to Election Day: how Alaska became the wild card in the fight for the Senate

A week from today the polls close, and the question that has hung over Washington for most of this year will finally get an answer: does the Senate stay Republican, or does it flip? Nobody serious is calling it a sure thing. And one of the closest races on the board is in Alaska.

Here's the setup. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take control, since a 50-50 split would leave Vice President JD Vance with the tiebreaking vote. Early in the cycle, that looked like a steep climb. The map was friendly to the GOP, and plenty of Democratic strategists said as much in private. It doesn't look quite that friendly anymore. The Cook Political Report lists seven Senate races as toss-ups: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas. Several of those states went to Donald Trump by double digits in 2024. That's not where a party defending a majority wants to be spending money in the final week.

1Why the Senate map got tighter than anyone planned

Midterms have a way of turning into referendums on whoever lives in the White House. History is not kind to the president's party in these elections, and this year the numbers give Republicans little cushion. An analysis by The New York Times put Trump's approval rating at around 37 percent in mid-October. Forecasters have also spent months saying Democrats are favored to retake the House, where Republicans currently hold 218 seats to Democrats' 214.

The Senate is a different animal. Democrats have to win in places that don't usually reward them. On Tuesday last week, Cook moved Senate races in Mississippi and South Carolina toward the Democrats while shifting Minnesota toward Republicans. Senate Majority PAC, the Democratic-aligned super PAC, announced a $1.2 million statewide TV buy for Scott Colom in Mississippi, its first statewide ad campaign there. Those are the moves of a party that thinks the field is wider than it expected.

Money tells a similar story. Third-quarter filings showed Democratic Senate candidates well ahead of their Republican opponents in fundraising in states like Ohio and Iowa. Cash doesn't win elections by itself, but it buys ads, field staff and a lot of last-week attention.

Republicans have their own argument, and we'll get to it. First, the two political heavyweights who've spent October crisscrossing the country.

2Trump's 32-day blitz: big rallies, bigger stakes

President Trump kicked off a 32-day campaign push on October 1 with stops in Texas and Oklahoma, and he hasn't really let up since. According to Reuters, he told a crowd at a Peterbilt truck factory in North Texas that "every place I've gone, we win," and said his heart was in it like never before. In September he said he planned to target 35 races in about 30 days, and he has also announced plans to put more than $400 million behind Republican candidates, as the Washington Examiner reported.

The itinerary has been a mix. Early stops were in safe red territory: Oklahoma, Alabama, Nebraska, where Sen. Pete Ricketts is facing a Senate race that has shown signs of tightening. Then came Wasilla, Alaska, on October 13, where Trump appeared with Sen. Dan Sullivan. After that, Northern Kentucky on the 17th, Park City, Kansas, on the 19th, Greenville, North Carolina, on the 20th, and Perry, Georgia, on Saturday. This week the schedule includes Texas, with rallies planned in Waco and Lubbock to support Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton.

Why red states? AFP's read on the schedule is that the goal is less about persuading undecided voters than about firing up loyal supporters, many of whom, the thinking goes, tend to stay home when Trump isn't on the ballot. That's a real phenomenon in midterms. It's also the logic behind a late-October swing through places Trump carried easily: you're not trying to win the state, you're trying to make sure your own side shows up.

The complication

Not every Republican on the ballot is eager to share a stage. Reuters noted that some GOP candidates are unsure whether Trump's presence helps or hurts them. A handful have also broken with him on issues like the war with Iran. Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, who's running for Senate, is one of them.

In Texas, the stakes are especially visible. Paxton, the state's attorney general, faces Democratic state Rep. James Talarico in a race Cook rates a toss-up. NBC reported that leaked audio appeared to capture Paxton telling donors that a recent Republican convention hurt the party's numbers. Texas hasn't elected a Democrat statewide in decades, which is exactly why a close race there says so much about the national mood.

3Obama's return: selective, then suddenly everywhere

For most of the year, Barack Obama stayed fairly quiet. He cut an ad for Iowa Senate nominee Josh Turek over the summer and campaigned with Talarico in Austin in May. Then, in October, something shifted. According to the Associated Press, Obama recorded two dozen ads for Democratic candidates for Senate and governor, headlined a fundraiser for the party's Senate campaign arm, and told donors that races were "on the razor's edge," per ABC News.

Saturday was the big day. Obama, now 65, held rallies in Cleveland and Detroit. In Ohio he campaigned with former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who's trying to unseat Republican Sen. Jon Husted, and with Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor against Vivek Ramaswamy. That race has produced one of the nastier fights of the cycle, an ad campaign featuring Acton's estranged mother that Trump and Vance defended and that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, called on the campaign to pull.

In Detroit, at Cass Technical High School, Obama made the case for Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee running against former Rep. Mike Rogers for an open seat. It was a notable pairing. El-Sayed won a bruising primary by less than a percentage point, and after Obama's 2012 reelection he wrote that Obama wasn't the right choice, only that he wasn't the wrong one. Obama acknowledged that history from the stage. He also pushed back on critics who've called El-Sayed a radical or leaned on his faith. "We have seen this movie before. I starred in it," Obama told the packed gym, according to AP.

The rally landed on the first day of early in-person voting in Michigan, which was not an accident. Democrats were hoping the appearance would help with Black voters in Detroit, a city that's roughly three-quarters Black, where El-Sayed's primary opponent, Haley Stevens, won Wayne County by about six points.

"We have seen this movie before. I starred in it."

Barack Obama, Detroit, Oct. 24, 2026 (Associated Press)

Trump, campaigning in Georgia the same evening, referred to the Michigan event and claimed turnout there was thin. AP's reporting described a packed gym. That dispute is basically a preview of the final week: each side telling you its crowds are bigger and its voters are more fired up.

Obama has a rally lined up in Georgia next, alongside Sen. Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic candidate for governor. An NBC News poll found that 43 percent of registered voters said they'd be more likely to support a candidate Obama endorsed, including 77 percent of Democrats. That cuts both ways, of course. It means a lot of voters, mostly Republicans, say it makes them less likely. The goal of an Obama rally isn't persuasion. It's turnout.

4The Alaska surprise: Mary Peltola vs. Dan Sullivan

If there's a single race that captures how strange this cycle has become, it's Alaska. Republicans have held both of the state's Senate seats since 2014, the year Dan Sullivan first won. Now the two-term incumbent is in a tight race with Mary Peltola, the Democrat who served in the U.S. House and became a household name in Alaska politics. She finished more than eight points ahead of Sullivan in the August primary, and the general election polling has been tough for the incumbent ever since.

Alaska uses ranked-choice voting in general elections, so pollsters often report two numbers: first-choice support and the final-round result once the lowest finishers are eliminated. That makes some polls look further apart than they are. Here's where the public polling stood in October:

Read that table carefully. Peltola leads in six of the seven polls and the seventh is tied. But several of those leads sit inside the margin of error, 

and the sample sizes in Alaska are small. For context, the Times/Siena poll in July had Sullivan up 47 to 45. So this is a race that moved, not one that was always headed this way.

Trump has made Alaska a priority. He endorsed Sullivan and rallied with him in Wasilla on October 13, and the president has said he wants to help both Sullivan and Paxton in Texas, the two Republicans facing the toughest challenges in states Trump won easily. There's also a ballot wrinkle that has drawn attention: the Washington 

Examiner noted that another Republican candidate named Dan Sullivan is in the race, which has created some confusion that campaigns on both sides have had to account for.

Why a close Alaska finish could take longer to call

Ranked-choice tabulation means that if no candidate clears a majority in the first round, the count continues through elimination rounds. In a margin this tight, don't be surprised if the result isn't clear on election night.

5The rest of the toss-up board

Alaska doesn't decide the Senate on its own. Democrats need to flip four seats, which means winning several of the toss-ups

 and holding what they have. Here's a snapshot of the races getting the most attention in the final week.

6The case for each side

What Democrats are betting on

Democrats are leaning on the environment. A president with approval in the high 30s, the usual midterm penalty for the party in power, voter frustration over costs, and a fundraising edge in several states. They also point to the breadth of the map: Senate Democrats are playing in Texas, Iowa, Ohio and Alaska, which they say shows how many Republicans have been pushed onto the defensive.

What Republicans are betting on

Republicans say the public polling is underestimating them, and they've got history to point to. The National Republican Senatorial Committee notes that national polls understated GOP support by about three points in 2014, three in 2016, five in 2020 and three in 2024. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said last week he expects Republicans to outperform the polls and hold the chamber, though he was more cautious in early September, when he admitted he worried about losing the majority. Republicans also argue their candidates are strong, and they've framed the final stretch around turnout among voters who show up for Trump but skip midterms.

A reality check on polls

A poll is a snapshot, not a result. Several Alaska surveys show leads that fall within the margin of error, and polling errors have run in both directions in past cycles. Treat any single number, from either side's favorite pollster, with caution.

7Before you vote: a quick checklist

Whatever happens in the Senate, the real work starts at the polling place. Rules vary by state, so check your own state's election office before you go. Here's what's worth doing this week.