Yesterday (in this post which didn’t go up as a BackChannel) I discussed the idea of “strategic depth” as a way of thinking about the sovereignty of the states in the battle against Trumpism. I want to expand on that. Because it’s become pretty central to my thinking about how the United States is going to survive the next three and a half years and begin the process of battling back. “Strategic depth” is primarily a concept for military studies. It refers to the shape and arrangement of the physical territory a country controls and how close its borders, which may be vulnerable to military attack, are to its concentrations of population, political and industrial centers. If all a country’s key stuff is right near a vulnerable border that’s a big problem. But in addition to where its key stuff is, does it have a lot of territory to fall back on if it suffers early defeats?

President Trump has a new post up on Truth Social today in which he claims that states only run elections and count ballots as agents acting at his direction as president of the United States. The key lines are “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tell them …” He claims he’s going to issue an executive order to ban voting by mail and any voting machines he doesn’t like.

Put simply, this is total bullshit.

There’s a long way to go before November 2026. The pace of malign events just keeps increasing. But even with all that I want to mention some significant shifts on the 2026 Senate recruiting front. It’s an article of faith for very good reasons that regaining control of Senate is an almost impossible hill for Democrats to climb given the map in play. Democrats have two challenging holds in Georgia and Michigan. Their best pickup opportunities are in states that have repeatedly eluded them, Maine and North Carolina. Beyond that it’s all reliably red states. All that, alas, remains basically the same. But there are a series of shifts that make Democrats taking over the Senate look more plausible even though the odds remain against it.

Let’s run through some details.