The explanation for this systemic imperative is a bit complicated, so first, let’s understand the lay of the land.

Toward that end, from among a number of excellent Republican challengers for Democratic-held Senate seats, David McCormick in Pennsylvania and Mike Rogers in Michigan look from a distance like particularly worthy candidates in tight but eminently winnable races. Others who aren’t as well-known commodities also seem to offer solid chances both to win and to serve with distinction, among them Sam Brown in Nevada and Eric Hovde in Wisconsin. Hung Cao in Virginia has a more uphill battle but has mightily impressed this observer, and Larry Hogan is a mensch fighting longer odds in Maryland.

In Ohio, challenger Bernie Moreno has nearly even money chances of upending progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown, who is insufferable. And in New Mexico, Nella Domenici is a solid candidate in a state her father, Pete Domenici, long represented in the Senate. New Mexico has moved leftward enough to make her race a difficult struggle, but it is still conceivably winnable.

Oh, and here’s a shout-out to former baseball superstar Steve Garvey, giving a good try in California, but, well, California isn’t very competitive.

Meanwhile, most observers believe Gov. Jim Justice will easily win an open Democratic seat in West Virginia and that challenger Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL, has an edge against incumbent Democrat Jon Tester in Montana, albeit with less confidence in the latter. With Republicans now stuck at 49 seats in the 100-seat Senate, those two victories, unless an incumbent Republican loses elsewhere in an upset, would give the GOP a bare 51-49 majority. For systemic purposes, this would be reassuring but not comfortably so. Two of those 51 Republicans would be Susan Collins in Maine and Lisa Murkowski in Alaska. Both of them are women of integrity, but neither of them is identifiably conservative.

Now, why should the partisan makeup matter? Is this column a plea for voters to elect Republican Senate candidates across the board? No. For example, there are plenty of conservatives who believe Republican Kari Lake, in an otherwise winnable race in Arizona, would bring discredit to her state, her party, the Senate, and her country. Her multiple controversies, just Google them, should make her anathema.

Nonetheless, constitutionalists should consider it essential for as many as possible of these other GOP contestants to win their elections. This also means that for the millions of voters who are thoroughly unenamored of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris but who intend to vote for her anyway in order to stop Republican Donald Trump from returning to the White House, it would be advisable for them to consider partisan ticket-splitting. In other words, even if they vote for the Democrat for president, they should vote for the Republican for Senate.

Here’s why.

A good case can be made that both Harris and Trump, in different ways, threaten this nation’s constitutional balance. With Trump, though, the danger is that he’ll try to ignore the system or trample the system to settle political scores, probably in ways that apply more to particular opponents or subjects rather than to broad swaths of the population. If so, then the courts, the states, and the military all may be called on to stop his abuses. But not the Senate. Trump won’t be asking the Senate to enable him to change the system; he’ll be bypassing Congress altogether for intensely personal purposes.

On the other hand, many of the constitutional or systemic abuses of which Harris is capable will depend on the Senate to change the system itself. If she is president with a Democratic Senate majority, Harris will support and succeed at the elimination of the Senate filibuster. If Democrats take the House, too, they will ram through the most far-left slate of policies this nation has ever seen and also will pass legislation to “pack” the Supreme Court. The law will be unconstitutional, but there is a scenario whereby, through other legerdemain, it gets implemented anyway.

With a packed Supreme Court and several conservative justices near retirement age anyway, Harris could fundamentally upend the constitutional balance of power in ways about which progressives have dreamed ever since the days of President Woodrow Wilson.

In short, whereas Trump’s potential abuses could be awful, they also are more likely to be more personal and less likely to be enshrined into permanent structural change. Harris, though, is aiming at the latter, but she can’t do it without the Senate. The Senate isn’t essential for Democrats to have a check against Trump if he wins, but it is essential for Republicans to have a check against Harris if she wins.

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Moreover, some of these Republican Senate candidates are particularly impressive. The Pennsylvanian McCormick was a West Point graduate and Army Ranger who served in the first Gulf War, earned a Ph.D. from Princeton, served as an Undersecretary of the Treasury during the G.W. Bush administration, and has been a wildly successful businessman. The Michigander Rogers is also an Army veteran, was a special agent with the FBI, and earned bipartisan plaudits for sober, thoughtful leadership as chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Intelligence. The Virginian Cao is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and 23-year service veteran. The Nevadan Brown also was an Army officer and a survivor of an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, and he had a successful business career after earning an MBA.

These are good men, serious and steady. They would be a credit to the Senate, and they might be needed to keep a President Kamala Harris within proper bounds.