Republicans hold the Senate 53-47 going into Tuesday’s vote, counting the two independents who caucus with Democrats. Because Vice President JD Vance breaks ties, a 50-50 split still leaves Republicans in charge. That’s why the number that matters is four, not three: Democrats need a net gain of four of the 35 seats up for election to take the chamber outright, while Republicans can afford to lose only two. Thirty-three are regular six-year terms; two, in Ohio and Florida, are special elections filling vacancies.
The money chasing those seats has already broken records. AdImpact’s tracker put total ad spending across the midterms at $11.21bn as of October 26, against $3.2bn for the entire 2024 presidential cycle, according to Al Jazeera’s accounting. Three Senate races alone — Texas, Ohio and Michigan — account for more than $1.3bn of candidate and outside-group spending combined: $534m in Texas (Talarico vs Paxton), $435m in Ohio (Brown vs Husted) and $333m in Michigan (El-Sayed vs Rogers). A narrower ad-spend-only measure puts Texas higher still, above $557.6m, and Ohio above $500m — one tally counts every dollar raised and spent, the other only what showed up on air.
| Total spent ($m) | |
|---|---|
| Texas | 534 |
| Ohio | 435 |
| Michigan | 333 |
Source: Al Jazeera analysis of FEC filings and AdImpact data. AdImpact's narrower ad-spend-only tracker puts Texas above $557.6m and Ohio above $500m
In Texas, Elon Musk has put in roughly $150m specifically to help Republican Ken Paxton against Democrat James Talarico, part of $446m Musk has contributed to federal committees this cycle; Talarico outraised Paxton by candidate committee, $146m to $22m, and still trails in outside spending, $80m to $300m. Those are the extremes. Michigan is where the spending has become the story in its own right.
Michigan’s AIPAC math
Abdul El-Sayed, 42, a former Detroit and Wayne County health director, would become the first Muslim member of the US Senate if he beats Republican Mike Rogers, a 63-year-old former congressman and Trump ally who lost this same seat by 0.34 percentage points in 2024 — 2,712,686 votes to 2,693,680, per the certified count. El-Sayed has called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a genocide, aligning with findings from UN investigators and major rights groups, and has tied that war and the US-Israel strikes on Iran to domestic arguments about where tax money should go — healthcare, infrastructure. That position is why the American Israel Public Affairs Committee made Michigan its single most expensive race ever: more than $30m through its United Democracy Project PAC to back Haley Stevens against El-Sayed in the August primary, which El-Sayed won anyway, per Al Jazeera’s reporting.
AIPAC’s money didn’t stop at the primary. It resumed against El-Sayed through a second PAC that doesn’t carry AIPAC’s name, routing roughly $9m to Rogers, and a further $12.7m arrived after the FEC’s pre-election disclosure deadline had passed, including a $5m ad buy in the final days — spending voters won’t see itemized until after they’ve voted. The mechanics are laid out in an earlier accounting of the race. Rogers told a debate audience he’d welcome AIPAC’s help after reports surfaced that his own allies had asked the group to stay out.
The defection
Two days before the vote, Stevens — the House Democrat El-Sayed beat in the primary — appeared with Rogers at a Detroit church service and endorsed him. “Senator, Abdul, said that I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away, and he’s right,” she said, according to a Washington Post report. “And that’s why I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today.” The move followed days of tension that began when her fiancé publicly said he’d vote for Rogers over El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel.
Trump posted that Stevens showed “great and almost unprecedented loyalty” to Michigan. Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin called it “a despicable betrayal”; Chuck Schumer used the same word. El-Sayed’s response: “At the end of the day, I actually don’t think about Haley Stevens.” None of that changes the arithmetic Stevens is reacting to, but it puts a sitting Democratic House member on camera at a Republican’s side two days before polls open — the kind of thing that travels faster than any ad buy.
Maine’s ticket-splitters, still splitting
Susan Collins, 73, is seeking a sixth term and chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, a post she has used to anchor her campaign in ribbon-cuttings for Maine projects she funded with earmarks, as the Boston Globe reported. Her opponent, Democrat and former state Senate president Troy Jackson, has led most public polling — but by how much depends on who’s counting. A Marist poll of likely voters taken October 22-25 put Jackson ahead 49% to 47%; an earlier Marist poll of registered voters, October 1-4, had him up 51% to 47%. Fox News found the race tied at 49% apiece. That spread is enough to explain why 58% of Marist’s likely voters still expect Collins to win even as Jackson leads their own poll.
| Poll | Sample / dates | Jackson | Collins |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marist, likely voters | Oct 22-25 | 49% | 47% |
| Marist, registered voters | Oct 1-4 | 51% | 47% |
| Fox News, likely voters | late October | 49% | 49% |
Source: Marist Poll; Fox News
York County, where Collins’s 2020 nine-point win was built, is where the mechanism shows: in 2020 the town of Wells split 56% for Biden and 51% for Collins on the same ballot. Unenrolled voters are again tied with registered Democrats as the county’s largest bloc, at 34.5% each, per the Globe. What’s different this cycle, York County voters told the Globe, is that Trump’s second term — the Iran war, tariffs, a fatal ICE shooting in Maine — has made ticket-splitting harder to defend. One Kittery voter who’d backed Collins for 25 years: “To me, it appears she’s more interested in preserving her political power than doing what’s in the best interest for the people in the state of Maine.”
A trade deal arrives two days early
On Sunday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced progress on a US-Canada trade deal, posting that he’d had a “good conversation” with Trump and that negotiating teams would work “in the coming weeks,” according to the Associated Press. Trump told reporters the two sides now have “the concept” of a deal and were “very close.” The timing invites scepticism: talks collapsed in August over tariff relief for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles and what Ottawa called US pressure on French-language protections, and Trump responded with 50% tariffs on roughly $20bn of Canadian goods. Nothing announced Sunday reverses those tariffs or sets a date; “the concept of a deal” is not a deal, as Trump said himself. Tariffs and the cost of the Iran war have already become campaign material in Michigan and Maine, where Democrats have priced the war in dollars at the pump; an announcement of progress, however qualified, two days before voters decide who controls the Senate is not obviously a coincidence of scheduling.
What the turnout says before any vote is counted
Early voting had passed 51 million ballots by Saturday, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, already clear of the 45.9 million cast in all of early voting in 2022. About 23 million were mail ballots — the method Trump unsuccessfully tried to restrict. In states that register voters by party, registered Democrats have cast early ballots at roughly a four-to-three margin over registered Republicans, and advance voting in the four states with the closest Senate races — Maine, Michigan, North Carolina and Kansas — is running more than 30% ahead of the same point in 2022. Early-vote composition is not a result: Republicans have historically caught up on Election Day, and a registration tilt doesn’t tell you how ballots were marked. What it tells you is that more people decided this race mattered enough to vote before being asked twice.
The number to watch after Tuesday isn’t just who wins Michigan, Maine, Ohio or Texas, but what the FEC’s post-election filings show once AIPAC’s post-deadline money, and whatever dark money hasn’t yet surfaced in public records, finally lands.