Tina Smith looks to 2026 re-election bid as she departs DSCC vice chair role

As Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Walz was crisscrossing the country in a bid to win the White House, fellow Minnesotan Sen. Tina Smith was working right below the presidential ticket to try to hold Democrats’ slim majority in the U.S. Senate.

She was tapped by outgoing Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as vice chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) in 2023 alongside chair Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, looking ahead to a map that didn’t favor Democrats.

But now that the elections are over, so is Smith’s time as vice chair of the committee, a role in which she was responsible for helping to fundraise for the committee and guide its political strategy.

“I’m so glad that I had a chance to do it. It was really worthwhile, I think in an election year that clearly was a disappointment for Democrats, the Senate races were a bright spot,” she said in an interview from her Capitol Hill office.

While Senate Democrats lost the majority and return to the minority with 47 members, Smith applauds Democrats for outperforming the top of the ticket in some parts of the country. Though not all of these Democratic candidates won, these small victories happened in Montana, Arizona, Ohio and Wisconsin as well as in Minnesota, where Sen. Amy Klobuchar won a fourth term.

Smith is up for re-election in 2026 and when asked whether she’s fully committed to running again, replied, “that’s my plan.” She was first appointed to the Senate in 2017 by then-Gov. Mark Dayton and elected to her seat in 2020.

With Peters set to depart the DSCC chairman post, Smith said she doesn’t have any plans to vie for the top job herself. “I didn’t want to be chair in 2024 and I don’t want to be chair in 2026,” she said.

She wouldn’t say whether she thinks Democrats could have performed better if President Joe Biden would have gotten out of the race earlier, arguing it was a “really complicated election.” But she does think Gov. Tim Walz was a strong running mate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

“One thing that I believe about this election is that voters wanted a change, and they saw the Biden administration as the status quo and they wanted a change from that,” she said.

“I think that the vice president, in her very, very short campaign — only 107 days — just did not have the time, and wasn’t able in that amount of time, to both introduce herself to the American public and also to make a case and an argument for why she was not a status quo candidate,” Smith continued.

Ultimately, Smith thinks the headwinds Democrats faced this year were too strong to overcome.

“Our Senate candidates and the vice president talked very specifically about how they were going to lower prices, the work that we’ve done to lower prices for prescription medicine and housing and energy,” Smith said. “But I think at the end of the day, it didn’t connect with people.”

She thinks Republicans were able to win where they did because people believed that the GOP candidates have the ability to lower their everyday costs and “make government work better for them.”

“Now we’re going to see what they can do,” Smith said of Republicans. “I’m ready to work with them in all the ways that I can.”

Smith admits she does not have any “easy answers” on what Democrats need to do going forward to win, but said that one of the places her party can start is by making sure voters know Democrats “have their backs.”

Looking ahead to the 2026 Senate map, Smith thinks her party should try to be competitive in places like Alaska and the southern states.

“For the long term, Democratic candidates for Senate need to be competitive in states like Alaska and North Carolina and some of the southern states where we, I think, have a natural affinity with voters, but voters don’t really know who we are,” she said.

So far, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has emerged as someone Schumer may be considering to replace Peters. Smith said it’s still “to be determined” whether another vice chair will be tapped to help lead the DSCC heading into the 2026 cycle. Schumer has not yet decided who will chair the committee, Smith said, but that announcement should come by early January.

Asked whether she’s supporting Gillibrand’s bid for chair, Smith said it’s “really Sen. Schumer’s decision.”

“[Schumer] will make a decision based on who he thinks is going to be best and I’m sure I’ll support that,” she said.