Senate Democrats have already drawn up the investigation list they intend to open if they win the Senate on Tuesday — and on Thursday, the aide in charge of preparing it said so out loud, by name, in public. Daniel Goshorn, the chief investigative counsel for Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, told an event at the Mayer Brown law firm that private equity would be a first target: how its financial structures bear on healthcare costs, housing and other essentials. "Private equity is a big focus of a lot of the Senate members," he said, pointing to "the way financial structures in private equity might affect healthcare costs, housing, and other essentials like that." Data centers and how they are taxed would follow, along with what he called responding to the public outcry around artificial intelligence.
Two subjects would be investigated even though they have nothing to do with the cost of living, Goshorn said: Jeffrey Epstein, and President Trump's use of pardons. Reporting this month counted scores of pardons for public officials charged with or convicted of corruption-related crimes, the vast majority of them Republicans or vocal supporters of the president — and Democrats intend to go through that list name by name. A Democratic victory would hand the Finance Committee itself to Senator Ron Wyden, and Goshorn made clear the committee would not stop at the administration's front door: if officials refuse to cooperate, banks and financial institutions can expect requests for the records anyway.
The arithmetic is tight enough to make all of this real. Republicans hold the Senate 53 to 47, and 35 seats are on Tuesday's ballot — 22 of them defended by Republicans. Democrats need a net gain of four seats, not three: a 50–50 Senate would leave Vice President JD Vance breaking ties, and Republican control, intact. Analysts generally expect Democrats to take the House and rate the Senate a genuine contest; betting markets currently give Democrats a better-than-even chance of sweeping both chambers. More than 44 million Americans have already voted.
None of this is news to the president, and his closing week is what a man campaigns like when he has priced it in. Trump has been telling his voters for weeks exactly what a Democratic Congress means for him. At a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, earlier this month he put it in one sentence: "Pretend I'm running, please, because I am on the ballot. And if we don't win, they'll end up impeaching me." That is his argument, and he has made it the engine of the whole homestretch: lose the Senate and the investigations stop being a Democratic plan and become his daily reality — hearings, subpoenas, blocked nominees, and a third impeachment fight hanging over his final two years.
His answer has been to campaign like his name really is on the ballot. Since October 1 he has held 25 rallies in 19 states. He was in Chillicothe, Ohio, on Wednesday and in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on Thursday — his second trip in a fortnight to defend a Senate seat in a state his party once counted as safe, where the polls are tied. On Friday he is in Daytona, Florida. And when the weekend came, his team traded the last two in-person stops — Salina, Kansas, and Dubuque, Iowa — for tele-rallies in at least 19 states, so his voice lands in more states in the final 96 hours than any plane could reach. "I don't feel like I have to go to Kansas," he told reporters. The schedule is the strategy: be everywhere at once, and turn out voters who usually only turn out for him.
History says what he is attempting barely happens. The president's party almost always loses ground in a midterm — an average of about 27 House seats since 1934 — and it has gained House seats only three times in that span. In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt's Democrats gained in both chambers in the depths of the Depression. In 1998, Bill Clinton's Democrats gained House seats while the Senate stood still, as voters recoiled from the impeachment drive against him. In 2002, George W. Bush's Republicans gained in both chambers in the shadow of September 11. That is the whole list. For Trump, even holding both chambers on Tuesday would break the normal pattern of American politics; gaining ground would put him in the company of 1934 and 2002.
For ordinary voters, what is being decided is plainer than the history. Democrats say the investigations are about the bills families actually pay — what private equity's presence in hospitals and housing does to prices, what data centers contribute in tax, and who answers when AI disrupts people's work — with the pardons and Epstein as questions of corruption on top. Trump says a Democratic Congress means two years of investigations aimed at him instead of the agenda he was elected on, and he is asking his voters to treat Tuesday as a vote about him personally, because the consequences land on him personally. Whether the Senate flips, and whether any of the promised investigations then happen, is exactly what Tuesday decides — and, on the evidence of this week, both sides already know it.
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