Good morning, and welcome back to The Wolf’s Den.
I hope you had a good Fourth. We got fireworks, we got a genuinely ungodly-priced flyover of fighter jets over Washington, D.C., and — maybe best of all — we got a real, honest conversation online about what this country actually is: a remarkable place, blemishes and growing pains and all. That part was inspiring to watch.
But let’s get to the thing I actually want to talk about this week, because it matters more than almost anything else on the 2026 map: moderation is working. Not as a vibe. Not as a scold aimed at the base. As a winning strategy — one that is pushing our candidates to the front of the polls in states that are supposed to be out of reach.
I will break down everything you need to know about this below.
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The math is unforgiving
If Democrats want the Senate back, the path is narrow and there’s no way around it. We hold what we’ve got in Michigan and Georgia — I’m hopeful we will — and then we flip four more seats. Four.
Those seats are out there: North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Maine, Nebraska, Alaska. If North Carolina comes home, we need three of the remaining five. That’s the entire ballgame.
So the only question worth asking is the practical one: How do you actually win in places like that? And race after race, the answer is turning out to be the same.
The evidence is stacking up
Start in North Carolina, where Roy Cooper isn’t squeaking by — he’s running away with it. In the latest polling he’s up around eight points in a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in a very long time. How? By running a common-sense, pro–law enforcement campaign that gives moderates and independents no reason to be afraid of him. This is Thom Tillis’s open seat. Cooper is treating it like it’s winnable, and by doing that, he’s making it winnable.
Go to Alaska, where Mary Peltola is up five. Her whole campaign might as well be summed up as family, friends, and fish. She’s a gun-rights supporter who stands squarely by the Second Amendment — and that is not a footnote, it’s a big part of why she keeps winning where other Democrats simply don’t. She was the first Democrat in years to win statewide in Alaska, and she’s on track to do it again in November. She’s going to need every one of us.
Look at Iowa — and look closely, because there are two lessons there. For everyone spending this week talking about socialists winning in New York City: the Elizabeth Warren–backed candidate in the Iowa Senate primary lost. The moderate, Josh Turek, won. Turek is a wheelchair basketball player and a sitting state senator who has already won inside a district Donald Trump carried. If you want to know how you flip Iowa, that’s the blueprint — not a rerun of a coastal primary fight.
The second Iowa lesson is Rob Sand, running for governor, who has picked up endorsements from more than a hundred Republican elected officials. Let me say that again: over a hundred Republican officials. You do not get that kind of cross-partisan support by accident, and you sure don’t get it by running as “the Democrat.” Sand isn’t running to be the Democratic governor of Iowa. He’s running to be the Iowa governor. That distinction is the whole thing.
And then there’s Texas, where James Talarico is running neck and neck — in Texas — by leaning into the issues most Democrats would rather not touch, chiefly the border and the real need for border security. He understands the assignment: you cannot win Texas with Democrats and independents alone. You have to peel off actual Republicans, and he’s doing it. It helps that his opponent is Ken Paxton, whose own senior staff went to the FBI on him and who was impeached by his own party’s Texas House — about as damaged as a statewide candidate gets. But that race is close because Talarico did the hard work of moderating and convincing people outside his base to give him a look. The polls are reflecting it.
The pattern nobody wants to name
Here’s the through-line, and it’s worth saying plainly because a lot of people don’t want to hear it: winning in hard places doesn’t come from winning more Democrats. It comes from winning independents and moderate Republicans.
I know the counterargument by heart. It’s a turnout game. Just fire up the base and they’ll come. In a lot of these swing states, that is simply not true. There is no bottomless well of Democratic voters sitting at home waiting to be activated — the votes you actually need are in the middle. And the candidates who understand that are exactly the ones climbing in the polls right now. Cooper. Peltola. Turek. Sand. Talarico. Every one of them is running to win, not to make a point.
That’s how you swing seats. That’s how we take back the Senate. And that’s how we win the presidency in 2028. The candidates doing this deserve our praise and our support heading into the midterms — not our suspicion.
I’ll keep you up to date on the latest. Like, share, and follow wherever you find me, and I’ll see you later today.
-Ethan
