In a Thursday press release, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee announced that it was placing a multimillion-dollar ad buy in Florida and Texas to boost the campaigns of Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX), who are seeking to unseat Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) respectively.

There is no way for the Democratic Party to sugarcoat the long odds it faces of maintaining control of the Senate in November. The party currently holds a 51-49 seat majority, but with the retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV), it has already effectively surrendered a seat to the Republican Party.

To keep the Senate at a 50-50 tie, Democrats are facing increasingly long odds of holding the Montana senate seat currently held by Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), and also face a challenge in holding the seat of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). Both men represent states that are all but assured of being won easily by former President Donald Trump in the concurrent presidential race and must rest their hopes for another term on the willingness of Trump voters to vote for Democrats downballot.

But in the 12 years since the Class I senators last shared the ballot with presidential candidates, only one senator has managed to win a race that saw the other party’s nominee win the state in the concurrent presidential election: Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who won reelection in Maine in 2020, even as President Joe Biden carried the state in the Electoral College.

Which is why the Democratic Party’s decision to invest in Florida and Texas makes little sense on its surface, but is effectively the only option the party is left with if it wants to retain control of the Senate.

Tester currently trails Republican challenger Tim Sheehy by five points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls, and there has not been a poll of the race in a month. Scant polling is also plaguing the Ohio race, where Brown leads Republican challenger Bernie Moreno by slightly less than four points. Only three polls have been conducted over the past three months, with the last one coming at the beginning of September.

If either Tester or Brown lose and Democrats fail to pick another seat elsewhere to offset the loss, the party will lose control of the Senate for at least two years, and possibly more. The Senate elections in 2026 and 2028 offer the party precious few easy pickup opportunities. To compound the problem, Democrats are also defending seats in the swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where the outcome of the presidential race could easily cost the party more seats.

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If there is any consolation for Democrats, it is this: Republican senate candidates in competitive seats are currently running several points behind Trump in polls. Still, the scarcity of ticket splitting means that the party desperately needs Vice President Kamala Harris to win several swing states to give Democrats a shot at keeping the Senate by pulling off an upset in unfavorable territory, assuming ticket splitting does not make an unexpected comeback.

By all accounts, Cruz and Scott are the only Republicans that Democrats could reasonably target for an extremely narrow but plausible path to victory. A handful of recent polls have indicated both races are competitive, but the Democratic Party’s investment in Florida and Texas is more an act of desperation from a party that knows it is unlikely to win the seats it needs to keep control of the Senate.