To win back the Senate, Democrats need to hold every seat they have and flip four held by Republicans. Less than a month before Election Day, polls have them ahead in enough states.

Polling averages compiled by the website FiftyPlusOne show Democratic candidates ahead in Texas, Alaska, Ohio and North Carolina, as well as neck and neck with Republicans in Maine, Iowa and Kansas. Democrats also lead in three competitive seats the party is defending: Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire.

Some of those leads are small, given historical polling error — less than four points in Texas and Michigan, for example — and polling in several races has been sparse. But the numbers point to a political environment that could cost Republicans dearly in November, a striking turn in a cycle that began with Democrats facing a daunting map.

Each polling average comes with a range of uncertainty of a few points, which incorporates each individual poll’s margin of error. That means that Democrats’ razor-thin leads in Maine and Iowa’s averages are still within range of a GOP win.

Republicans won the majority in 2024, flipping an open seat in West Virginia and ousting Democratic incumbents in Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. They now hold 53 seats to 47 for Democrats and the independents who caucus with them. A 50-50 split would leave Republicans in control, with Vice President JD Vance breaking ties.

Any path back to power for Democrats runs through Trump country. Two of the four most competitive Democratic-held seats, Georgia and Michigan, are in states President Donald Trump carried in 2024. So are six of the seven Republican-held seats where Democrats now lead; Maine is the lone exception.

Of those four Democratic seats, Georgia looks safest. Sen. Jon Ossoff leads Rep. Mike Collins by nine points.

Much Republican attention has been trained on Michigan, where the party has not been able to win a Senate seat in more than 30 years. Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is clinging to a roughly three-point lead there over former Rep. Mike Rogers.

Minnesota, where the state’s progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan is running against Republican former NFL reporter Michele Tafoya, has the potential of being anxiety-inducing for Democrats heading into November, given Democrats’ vulnerability on fraud issues under the government’s watch that have haunted them in recent years.

On offense, North Carolina is Democrats’ best opportunity. Former Gov. Roy Cooper, a top recruit, is leading former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley by about 10 points.

Maine could be a heavier lift. While a reliably blue state in many ways, Democrat Troy Jackson is leading Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, by about two points in FiftyPlusOne’s average. But Collins, a moderate, has outrun her polls before: In 2020, she won re-election comfortably after polling showed signs of potential struggle.

Whether Democrats can win their way back to power in the Senate may then hinge on how their candidates perform in the Trump carried states of Ohio, Alaska, Texas and Iowa.

Despite being red states now, Ohio, Iowa and Alaska have all had a Democratic senator within the last 15 years. Former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown even outperformed his party’s presidential nominee in 2024, but he still lost his Ohio seat.

In Alaska, Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola, while having served in the House, does have the ability to say she’s won statewide in Alaska, given that it only has one at-large district, as she attempts to unseat incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan.

Iowa, with its heavy importance on agriculture, has been one of the cycle’s less predictable races. Democrat Josh Turek is leading Rep. Ashley Hinson by less than two points. In the campaign’s final weeks, Hinson has tried to strike a bipartisan tone. Early in her House tenure, though, the Bipartisan Index compiled by the Lugar Center and Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy rated her middling to low compared with the rest of Iowa’s delegation in the chamber.

Plenty of time and attention from Republicans has gone into helping save Ken Paxton in Texas, with the impeached and acquitted state attorney general who defeated incumbent GOP Sen. John Cornyn in a primary runoff earlier this year struggling against Democratic state representative James Talarico. Yet no Democrat has won a Senate race in Texas since 1988, and the party has seen its hopes crushed by a narrow loss in the state back in 2018 during Trump’s first midterms as president.

If Democrats end up in a blue wave scenario, they could threaten the re-election chances of Republican incumbents in the likes of Kansas, South Carolina and Florida as well, with an independent backed by Democrats in Nebraska also able to potentially do the same in these now reliably red parts of the country, each of which Trump won by double digits two years ago.

But even though polling averages show a close race in Kansas, a win for Democrats would represent something deeply elusive for the party going their way in the state. The last time a Republican nominee lost a Senate race in the state was nearly 100 years ago in 1932.

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