Five weeks out, Democrats have a real path to the Senate majority, and they’re walking it without a single veteran. We checked for Senate veteran nominees in every race Cook Political Report rated Toss Up or Lean as of 23 September. That’s nine contests: Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas in the Toss Up column, North Carolina leaning Democratic and Kansas leaning Republican. The Democrats running in them are a former congresswoman, a state legislator, a former state Senate president, a physician, a congressman, a former senator, a teacher turned state legislator, a former governor and a pastor. Yet none of them has served in uniform.

So the veterans in those races are all Republicans. Alaska’s Dan Sullivan retired from the Marine Corps Reserve in February 2024 as a colonel after 30 years. Michigan’s Mike Rogers served in the Army before he became an FBI agent and a congressman. Kansas’s Roger Marshall spent seven years in the Army Reserve and left as a captain. Marshall leads a Lean Republican race. Sullivan and Rogers trail.

That isn’t the map Democrats drew a year ago. In fact, the party started the cycle with veterans running for Senate in Maine, Florida, Iowa and Massachusetts. Each one is gone, and each for a different reason, which we’ll come back to. First, the polling.

Decision Desk HQ’s polling averages from 25 September have Mary Peltola ahead of Sullivan 50 percent to 48 in Alaska. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed leads Rogers 47 to 44. DDHQ’s forecast also gives Peltola just over a three in five chance of winning. Those averages include only polls that meet AAPOR disclosure standards, which is why we’re using them in place of any single survey.

So the fairest comparison is with states that lean the same way. DDHQ groups four toss-ups in states Trump carried by 11 to 14 points: Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and Texas. But only Alaska has a veteran on the Republican side.

In DDHQ’s averages, Sullivan trails by two points in Alaska, while Ashley Hinson trails Josh Turek by two in Iowa. Jon Husted trails Sherrod Brown by three in Ohio, and Ken Paxton trails James Talarico by four in Texas. The gaps are close. So the Marine colonel is running about where three Republicans who never served are running. Any edge his service gives him this year is too small to see in these numbers.

Kansas is the one competitive race where the Republican veteran leads. A co/efficient poll taken 8 to 10 September, of 915 likely voters with a margin of error of 3.2 points, had Marshall ahead of Adam Hamilton 49 percent to 44. Hamilton is the pastor of the country’s largest United Methodist church, according to Baptist News. No Democrat has won a Senate race in Kansas since 1932. So Marshall’s lead says more about Kansas than about the Army Reserve.

We should be careful with that comparison, because Sullivan isn’t running against a generic Democrat. DDHQ calls Peltola one of the party’s best recruits of the cycle, and she’s the only Democrat to win statewide in Alaska since 2010. An AARP survey of 800 likely voters, taken 8 to 11 September, has a margin of error of 3.5 points. It found her net favorability at plus six and his at minus four. It also found Sullivan strongest among men and voters over 50. So a veteran who runs even with other Republicans against a stronger-than-average opponent could be getting some help from his record, and we can’t rule that out.

Michigan is murkier still. Rogers lost the 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA officer who is not a veteran. Now he’s running against a progressive physician who won his primary narrowly. A Fox News poll taken 24 to 28 September, from a sample of 1,203 registered voters, had El-Sayed ahead 50 percent to 49 among likely voters. That’s a coin flip. Still, nothing in the polling points to Rogers’s Army years as the reason he’s close.

What the numbers do show is narrower. For now, neither Republican veteran is running ahead of his party’s other candidates in similar states. And on the Democratic side the question never got asked, because no Democratic veteran reached a competitive general election.

It would be easy to read that list as proof that Democratic voters have turned on veterans. The details don’t support it. Sage ran out of money before a single vote was cast. He was the first Democrat into the race, in the spring of 2025, and both of his main rivals, Turek and state Sen. Zach Wahls, outraised him. Platner won his primary by a wide margin, then left over an allegation that had nothing to do with his service. Vindman lost to a progressive who spent less than a tenth of what he did, in a primary where he never debated her. And Moulton was challenging an incumbent senator inside his own party, and that’s a hard race to win whatever is on the challenger’s resume.

Two of those, Vindman and Moulton, do fit a pattern this site has written about before. Military service has a much better record in general elections against Republicans than in Democratic primaries. Inside the party, an established name or a sharper ideological message has beaten it twice in New Hampshire and once each in Massachusetts and Florida. That’s a real weakness in the veteran model, because a strategy that wins general elections only helps if the candidate survives the primary.

If a service record were a structural advantage, Sullivan and Rogers should be outrunning their party, and they aren’t. If Democrats needed veterans to win red and purple states, they shouldn’t be leading in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and Texas with a former congresswoman, a state legislator, a former senator and a former teacher. The simpler story is that a president at 38 percent and an unpopular war set the terms of this election. Candidates of both parties rise and fall with that tide, whatever they did before politics.

We accept most of that for the Senate, since the 2026 numbers point the same way. Statewide races are also more national than they used to be, as DDHQ notes about Alaska, and this year’s national mood is strong enough to swamp most biographies. Even so, two things keep us from dropping the thesis. First, the evidence for it has always come mostly from House races in districts that lean against Democrats, and that’s where it’s being tested now. On 25 September, for example, Cook moved Rebecca Bennett’s race in New Jersey’s 7th District from Toss Up to Lean Democratic, and Bennett is a Navy veteran. Second, a wave year is the wrong year to measure a candidate effect, because the effect matters most when the margin is thin.

Still, we’d rather say it plainly than bury it. If Democrats win the Senate in November, they’ll have done it without a veteran in any of the races that decided it. One of the seats may even have come from a Marine colonel.

Until Election Day, the Iran war is the cleanest test left. Sullivan voted no on the war powers resolution that failed 49 to 50 in the Senate on 24 September. VoteVets launched a $225,000 ad buy in Alaska in August tying his votes to the price of gas and groceries. The ad told voters he “voted a dozen times for this war,” according to Semafor. In Michigan, Rogers was an early backer of the war and released a video last week saying it “needs to end,” the Deseret News reported. So a Marine colonel who stayed with the war and an Army veteran who backed away from it are now taking opposite paths to the same goal.

If Peltola wins, the site’s thesis takes a fair hit. A non-veteran Democrat will have beaten a Marine colonel in a state Trump carried by 13 points, with the Iran war on the ballot. If Sullivan holds on, his record will get some of the credit, and we’ll say so. Either way, the lesson for Democrats is about timing. Those who want veterans in the Senate after 2026 will have to recruit them earlier and protect them through primaries. Montana shows the other way it can go wrong, where an Air Force veteran won the nomination and party leaders wanted her to step aside for an independent.

Until then, the polls will keep moving. Both races are close enough that a few points either way would change this picture, so we’ll rerun the comparison when DDHQ updates its averages. If Rogers pulls ahead, we’ll look hard at whether his Army years have anything to do with it.