Why Republicans think their Senate majority could last the decade: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, senior national politics reporter Sahil Kapur explores why it won’t be easy for the Democrats to claw back control of the Senate anytime soon. Plus, politics reporters Allan Smith and Vaughn Hillyard examine how Donald Trump’s transition team is turning to the much-maligned Project 2025 to fill jobs in the administration.

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Senate GOP campaign chief: Our majority could last all decade

By Sahil Kapur

Outgoing National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines is throwing down the gauntlet, predicting that the GOP’s newly won 53-seat majority in the 2024 election could give the party control of the chamber for several cycles to come.

“We’re grateful that we have those additional seats beyond the 51 majority. I think it bodes well for us to keep the majority through the rest of the decade,” Daines, of Montana, told NBC News. 

Republicans picked off four Democratic-held seats in the red states of West Virginia, Montana and Ohio, and the purple state of Pennsylvania. The GOP held serve in red-leaning Florida and Texas, where Democrats were hoping for a miracle. For their part, Democrats held their ground in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, despite Donald Trump carrying all of those states.

But what about Daines’ prediction? It’s bold, yet plausible.

Democrats just had a nightmare of a map, so the landscape will only get better from here. But not that much better in 2026 or 2028, barring a dramatic political realignment.

The 2026 map follows the 2020 cycle, in which Democrats won 50 seats and flipped the Senate with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. The party’s best hope of a pickup in two years is in Maine, where the long-serving centrist Republican Sen. Susan Collins has proven to be a challenging target. Another is North Carolina, a battleground state where Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat since 2008 and fell short of unseating GOP Sen. Thom Tillis four years ago.

From there it gets tougher: Alaska, Iowa, Kentucky, Texas. All states Trump won comfortably in all three of his elections. 

In 2026, Democrats will also have to defend seats in the swing states of Michigan (Sen. Gary Peters) and Georgia (Sen. Jon Ossoff). Both will be top Republican targets.

Then looking further down the road to 2028, Democrats’ best pickup opportunities are in North Carolina (Sen. Ted Budd) and Wisconsin (Sen. Ron Johnson). But they’ll have to defend seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Bottom line: Unless Democrats find a way to expand their appeal among white voters without a college degree, their prospects of proving Daines wrong look daunting. Those voters carry disproportionate influence in the two-seats-per-state Senate, given the large number of rural states with small populations. 

The silver lining for Democrats is that their new coalition — which relies heavily on high-propensity college-educated voters and enduring support from Black voters — is well suited to turnout patterns in off-year or midterm elections, like 2026. And down-ballot Republicans have struggled to replicate Trump’s coalition for their own races, especially without him running alongside them. 

Trump’s transition team turns to Project 2025 after disavowing it during the campaign

By Allan Smith and Vaughn Hillyard

Donald Trump and his allies disavowed the conservative Project 2025 during the election, seeing the conservative transition plan and policy blueprint as a liability after Democrats used it to attack his campaign. Some close to Trump even suggested that those tied to the effort would be shut out of a potential administration. 

“They made themselves nuclear,” Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition and his nominee to serve as commerce secretary, told CNBC in September.

But with the campaign over, Trump’s transition team is turning to Project 2025 to help staff the next administration. Already, transition officials are taking suggestions for potential hires from the extensive personnel database created by Project 2025, a person familiar with the situation told NBC News.

While Project 2025’s massive book of conservative policy recommendations received most of the attention from Democrats, a central part of the effort was putting together a database that officials had framed as a conservative LinkedIn to help staff an incoming Republican administration. 

Individuals helping to fill out the personnel teams for the Trump transition operation have sought and used information from the Project 2025 database because of the enormity of the task of filling out the more than 4,000 political appointee jobs that will become vacant in 2025, this person said.

The receptiveness to using the Project 2025 database for potential hires comes as the transition has already shown it is open to tapping contributors to the effort for administration jobs, including Tom Homan as border czar, Brendan Carr as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and John Ratcliffe as CIA director. Both Homan and Ratcliffe were listed as contributors to Project 2025, while Carr wrote a chapter on the FCC. 

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