2026 Midterms Elections: The Senate Races That Decide Everything
In Texas, a state where no Democrat has won a statewide race since nineteen ninety-four, the Democrat running for Senate has raised more than seventy million dollars, and about half of his early money came from outside Texas.
Tonight, three things. The Senate races that decide who runs the Senate, and who is paying for them. The House fight, including the stock trading ban Senate Democrats blocked last week. Then what the Democrats have said they plan to do if they win.
Fifty-Three to Forty-Seven
Republicans hold fifty-three seats in the Senate. Democrats hold forty-seven. To take control, Democrats need a net gain of four seats. Most of the thirty-five seats on the ballot this year are safe for one party or the other. A handful are close, and those decide who runs the Senate.
Texas and the Out-of-State Money
Texas is on the list because of money. The Republican is Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, who beat Senator John Cornyn in the primary runoff on May twenty-sixth. The Democrat is James Talarico, a state representative from Austin and a former schoolteacher, who beat Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic primary in March.
Talarico has raised more money than any Texas candidate for a general election in the past decade. He took in twenty-seven million dollars in the first three months of the year, more than any federal candidate in the country. He took in thirty million more from April through June. His campaign says he has raised more than seventy million dollars in total.
His campaign says ninety-seven percent of his donations were one hundred dollars or less, and that he takes no corporate PAC money. A lot of that money is not Texan, though. Fox News reported that roughly half of his first-quarter money came from donors outside Texas. The Texas Tribune found the biggest share of his out-of-state money came from California and New York. In September, he flew to Los Angeles for a high-dollar fundraiser with Hollywood donors. His biggest outside backer is a super PAC funded by several billionaires. The Cornyn campaign put it this way: Talarico is raising massive amounts of money through ActBlue and major donors in New York and California.
Paxton raised about nine million dollars from April through June, the best quarter of his career and more than any Republican Senate challenger this year. A Supreme Court ruling in June lets national party committees spend in coordination with their candidates, and Republicans plan to use that to close the gap. A group tied to the Senate Leadership Fund has committed about sixty million dollars in Texas, and the President's super PAC, Make America Great Again Incorporated, put in ten million.
Talarico's record gives Republicans plenty to run on. In twenty twenty, at a climate forum, he called for dismantling capitalism and called it an oppressive system. His campaign has tried to put distance between him and those words. Republican ads also hit his vote on a bill to ban the sale of Texas land to people and companies tied to China. His most viral campaign ad showed him driving a Dodge Ram pickup, and it came out that the truck was not his.
Talarico's attack on Paxton is corruption. His first big television ad calls Paxton the most corrupt politician in Texas and points to the impeachment. In twenty twenty-three, the Texas House impeached Paxton on sixteen articles. The Texas Senate held the trial and acquitted him on every one of them.
Paxton is running on the border. As attorney general, he sued the Biden administration more than one hundred times, many of those cases over the border. The numbers on the border have changed since then. Customs and Border Protection reports sixteen straight months of zero Border Patrol releases into the country. Border encounters last fiscal year were the lowest since nineteen seventy, according to the Pew Research Center.
Talarico has challenged Paxton to three televised debates. Paxton's campaign says he will debate, but it has not agreed to a date. The polls are close. A New York Times and Siena poll this summer had both men at about forty-seven percent. Betting markets in July gave Paxton about a sixty-one percent chance of winning. Texas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since nineteen eighty-eight. In twenty twenty-four, Democrat Colin Allred raised about twenty-one million dollars more than Ted Cruz and lost by eight and a half points. In twenty eighteen, Beto O'Rourke raised about forty-five million more than Cruz and lost too.
Maine After Platner
Maine is the seat Democrats have to win to take the Senate. Susan Collins has held it since nineteen ninety-seven.
The Democrats' first pick blew up. Graham Platner, an oyster farmer and Marine veteran, won the Democratic nomination and then dropped out in July after a sexual assault allegation. That came on top of old social media posts and a tattoo that looked like a Nazi symbol. Maine Democrats replaced him with Troy Jackson, a former logger and former president of the Maine Senate, at a convention on the twenty-fifth of July.
Jackson comes with his own record. In twenty twenty-one, he threw a water bottle during a session of the Maine Senate. A Republican ad also goes after his son's lobbying work while Jackson sat in the statehouse. Jackson ran for governor this year and lost the Democratic primary.
Collins runs on what she delivers. She chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, which writes the federal spending bills, and her ads point to the money she brings home to Maine. She also pushed for every ICE agent working in Maine to wear a body camera, and they now do. Jackson's main attack is that she votes with the President ninety-six percent of the time.
The money in Maine is huge for a small state. Collins started the general election with about eleven million dollars. Republican groups have pledged more than sixty million on top of that. The main Democratic super PAC, Senate Majority PAC, has booked thirty-three million dollars of television time, and Jackson says he has raised about seven million since he became the nominee.
The August polling average had Jackson up about two points. Collins has also built a record of crossing her own party when Maine wanted her to, which is why she keeps winning a state that votes Democratic for president. Collins has been behind in polls before. In twenty twenty, polls showed her trailing the speaker of the Maine House, and she won by nearly nine points.
North Carolina's Open Seat
North Carolina is open because Thom Tillis retired. The Democrat is Roy Cooper, the former two-term governor. The Republican is Michael Whatley, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, endorsed by the President.
Republicans are running on crime, and the record gives them an opening. In twenty twenty-one, during COVID, Cooper's administration agreed to let thirty-five hundred inmates out of prison early, to settle a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The deal covered people convicted of nonviolent crimes. The Senate Leadership Fund has put seventeen million dollars behind ads on it.
Whatley's other crime issue is personal to the state. Iryna Zarutska, a twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was stabbed to death on a Charlotte light rail train last year. The man charged had been arrested more than a dozen times before. North Carolina passed a tougher law in her name, and Whatley says one of his first acts in the Senate would be a federal version of Iryna's Law. The state troopers' association has endorsed him.
The two men are also fighting over Hurricane Helene. In twenty twenty-four, Cooper vetoed a bill that carried storm relief money for western North Carolina. Cooper says he vetoed it because the bill also stripped power from the incoming Democratic governor. The Republican legislature overrode his veto and it became law anyway. The President rallied for Whatley in Gastonia in September. Whatley ran the Republican National Committee through the twenty twenty-four election, when Republicans won the White House and the Senate, and he built the party's election integrity operation, with poll watchers and lawyers in every swing state.
Cooper has led in the polls since February. He has also had more money behind him, with Democrats putting about forty-two million dollars into the race so far.
Georgia and the Epstein Vote
Georgia is the Republicans' best chance to take a seat. Democrat Jon Ossoff won it in twenty twenty-one. His Republican opponent is Congressman Mike Collins, who has promised to vote with the President one hundred percent of the time.
Ossoff has the money. His campaign raised twenty million dollars in the second quarter and had forty-two million in the bank. His ads say Collins voted to cover up the Epstein files. The record: Collins voted against releasing them at first, and voted for releasing them once the President dropped his objection.
Collins says Ossoff is using the seat as a stepping stone to a run for the White House, which Ossoff denies. In September the two held dueling events in Athens. Collins toured a nursing school with a top administration official to show off new federal health care money. Ossoff called himself the check on the President that Georgia needs.
Ossoff has a voting record to answer for. In the Senate, he voted for the American Rescue Plan in twenty twenty-one and for the Inflation Reduction Act in twenty twenty-two. Both passed with no Republican votes, and both come up again later in this episode.
Four more races sit just behind those.
In Ohio, Senator Jon Husted, the state's former lieutenant governor, was appointed when JD Vance became Vice President. He faces former Senator Sherrod Brown in a special election. Ohio voters threw Brown out in twenty twenty-four for Republican Bernie Moreno. Brown is back two years later asking for the other seat. Like Ossoff, Brown voted for the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act.
In Michigan, Democrat Gary Peters retired. Former Congressman Mike Rogers faces Abdul El-Sayed, a former Detroit health director running from the progressive wing of his party. El-Sayed is endorsed by Bernie Sanders and supports Medicare for All, which would replace private health insurance with a single government plan. Rogers lost Michigan's other Senate race in twenty twenty-four by about a third of a point.
In Alaska, Senator Dan Sullivan faces Mary Peltola. Alaska voters took her House seat away in twenty twenty-four, when Republican Nick Begich beat her. Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, and Republicans there have often trailed in summer polls and won by double digits in November.
In Iowa, Republican Senator Joni Ernst chose not to run again. Congresswoman Ashley Hinson, a former local television news anchor endorsed by the President, is running for the open seat. Iowa has voted Republican in every presidential race since twenty sixteen, and the President carried it by about thirteen points in twenty twenty-four.
Two Hundred Twenty to Two Hundred Thirteen
The House is even closer. Republicans hold two hundred twenty seats. Democrats hold two hundred thirteen. Democrats need a net gain of three. The Cook Political Report rates fewer than twenty seats as true toss-ups.
The Stock Ban Democrats Blocked
In July, the House passed a Republican bill to stop members of Congress, their spouses and their children from buying stocks. It passed two hundred thirty-two to one hundred ninety-eight. The bill was written by Wisconsin Republican Bryan Steil.
On Wednesday, Senate Democrats blocked it. The vote was fifty-three to forty-seven, short of the sixty needed. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer led the opposition. Democrats objected that it let members keep stocks they already own, and that it carried a requirement to show photo identification to vote.
Both parts of that bill are popular. Gallup found eighty-four percent of Americans support photo identification at the polls. Polls on banning stock trading by members of Congress run around eighty percent and higher. Members of Congress made more than thirteen thousand stock trades last year, worth about six hundred thirty-six million dollars.
Pennsylvania's Eighth
One of the closest House races is in Pennsylvania's Eighth District, around Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. Republican Rob Bresnahan flipped it in twenty twenty-four after promising to ban stock trading by members of Congress. Once in office, his account made about six hundred fifty trades between January of last year and February of this year. He says his financial advisers made every trade without his input, he introduced his own ban bill, called the TRUST Act, and records show he stopped trading by this year.
His opponent is Paige Cognetti, the Democratic mayor of Scranton. She is running as the corruption fighter. Politico reported that as mayor she helped secure a state grant for a bank's new headquarters, and her husband's uncle sits on that bank's board. A Public Policy Polling survey had her ahead by two points.
The Other Seats to Watch
The Eighth is not the only close seat in Pennsylvania. In the Tenth, around Harrisburg, Republican Scott Perry faces a rematch with Janelle Stelson, a former local television anchor he beat in twenty twenty-four. In the Seventh, in the Lehigh Valley, freshman Republican Ryan Mackenzie holds one of the few true swing seats left in the country.
In Arizona's First District, around Scottsdale, the seat is open because Republican David Schweikert is running for governor. He held it by less than four points last time.
Two more seats come down to the new maps. In North Carolina's First District, Democrat Don Davis is running in a district redrawn to favor Republicans. In California's Forty-Eighth District, Republican Darrell Issa is running in a district Proposition Fifty redrew to favor Democrats.
Who Drew the Maps
Several states redrew their House districts in the middle of the decade, which almost never happens. Texas Republicans went first in the summer of twenty twenty-five and drew about five more Republican seats. Texas House Democrats left the state for two weeks to stop the vote and failed. Florida added about four Republican seats. Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee each added about one.
California Democrats answered. Governor Gavin Newsom put Proposition Fifty on the ballot, voters passed it last November, and it drew about five more Democratic seats. A court ruling in Utah added one for Democrats. A Democratic redraw in Virginia was blocked in court. Add it up, and Republicans come out about seven or eight seats ahead on the maps before anyone votes.
The Social Security Line
Democrats in close races are running the same line they run every election. Republicans want to take away your Social Security and your health care.
Take Social Security first. The big tax and spending bill Republicans passed last year did not cut Social Security benefits. It did not cut Medicare. It added a six thousand dollar tax deduction for people sixty-five and older, which wipes out the tax on Social Security for most seniors. The same bill ended federal income tax on tips and on overtime pay, and made the interest on car loans tax deductible for new cars built in America.
On Medicaid, the bill added work requirements for able-bodied adults without young children, and cut back what Washington sends the states. It set aside fifty billion dollars for rural hospitals. The Congressional Budget Office projected about ten million more people would be uninsured over time. Republicans say the people coming off the rolls are people who were never supposed to be on them, or who can work and won't.
Obamacare premiums jumped this year for a reason Democrats rarely mention. The extra subsidies they passed in twenty twenty-one were temporary, and Democrats wrote the expiration date into their own law. Those subsidies ran out at the end of last year. Premiums for people buying their own coverage rose about twenty-two percent, and about three million fewer people signed up.
Promises With No Numbers
On the fourth of September, in Plattsburgh, New York, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer was asked what a Democratic Congress would focus on. His answer was lowering people's costs: health care, electricity, the grocery store and the gas pump. He said the tariffs have to go. He did not give a number for any of it, or a date.
Last December, Senate Democrats launched what they called their cost-cutting initiative for twenty twenty-six. Five areas: health care, energy, housing, groceries and tariffs. Schumer said plans would roll out issue by issue. The one grocery bill he has put forward goes after what he calls monopolistic corporate middlemen in the food supply. It comes with no dollar figure.
House Democrats did put out one plan with a price tag. They call it the American Affordability Act, and its first item is making the Obamacare subsidies permanent. That would lower premiums for people who get the subsidies. Taxpayers would pay the difference, every year, with no end date.
Democrats have already shown what they will shut down to get those subsidies. Last October, Senate Democrats refused to pass a bill to keep the government funded unless the Obamacare subsidies were extended. The shutdown lasted forty-three days, the longest in American history, and ended in November without the extension they wanted. Federal workers missed paychecks, food aid for low-income families was held up, and the Federal Aviation Administration ordered airlines to cut flights at major airports because air traffic controllers were working without pay.
The Democrats' own record on prices is on the books. Consumer prices rose an average of about five percent a year during the Biden presidency. They rose about one point nine percent a year during President Trump's first term, and about two point nine percent so far in his second. Those figures come from the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, using the government's consumer price index.
The Record Republicans Are Running On
Republicans are running on a different set of numbers. Last week, the Labor Department reported that new jobless claims fell to one hundred ninety-seven thousand, the lowest since November nineteen sixty-nine. The Commerce Department revised economic growth up for the first half of the year, to two point five percent in the first quarter and two point two percent in the second. Private employers added ninety thousand jobs in September.
The crime numbers have moved too. The Council on Criminal Justice found that murder rates in big American cities fell in twenty twenty-five to their lowest level since at least nineteen hundred.
On the border, the White House says no illegal crossers have been admitted in seventeen months.
Republicans also point to the bills Democrats have blocked. Besides the stock ban, Senate Democrats have refused to take up the SAVE Act, which passed the House and would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Every state already requires citizenship to vote. The SAVE Act would require voters to prove it.
What They Do Have a Plan For
Democrats do have specific plans in one area. In August, Reuters reported that Democrats are preparing investigations of the President's family businesses if they win the House. Congressmen Robert Garcia and Jamie Raskin are already sending letters to lay the groundwork for subpoenas. The named targets include Donald Trump Junior's investment firm, Seventeen Eighty-Nine Capital, the donors behind the White House ballroom, and companies like Palantir, BlackRock and Tesla. Reuters reported that Democrats chose investigations instead of impeaching the President right away. Right away leaves impeachment on the table. House Democrats impeached the President twice in his first term, in December twenty nineteen and January twenty twenty-one. The Senate acquitted him both times.
The Filibuster, New States and a Bigger Court
In the Senate, most bills need sixty votes to pass. That rule is the filibuster, and it forces the majority to get some votes from the other side. Democrats were the first to break it. In twenty thirteen, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid ended the filibuster for most presidential nominees. Republicans later extended that to Supreme Court nominees in twenty seventeen.
Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin has said Democrats should get rid of the filibuster when they win back power, and make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico into states. That would add four senators. Washington, D.C. voted about ninety-two percent for Kamala Harris in twenty twenty-four. Statehood for the capital has been in the Democratic platform for years. Democratic strategist James Carville has called for adding four seats to the Supreme Court, taking it from nine justices to thirteen.
Vice President JD Vance said this week that Democrats want to make it so Republicans can never win another national election. The plan he is describing is the one Martin and Carville laid out themselves.
The Last Time They Had It All
The last time Democrats held the White House, the House and the Senate, the filibuster and two of their own senators were the only things in the way.
Build Back Better started at three and a half trillion dollars. Free community college, paid family leave, universal preschool and a large expansion of social programs. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia killed it in December twenty twenty-one.
In January twenty twenty-two, Senate Democrats tried to change the filibuster rule to pass two election bills. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona voted no, and it failed.
Statehood for Washington, D.C. passed the House twice, in twenty twenty and twenty twenty-one. The filibuster stopped it in the Senate.
President Biden set up a commission in twenty twenty-one to study adding justices to the Supreme Court.
Democrats tried to put a fifteen dollar minimum wage into the American Rescue Plan. The Senate's rules officer ruled it out.
The President's student loan plan, about four hundred billion dollars, was struck down by the Supreme Court in twenty twenty-three. He kept going through other programs. By the time he left office, his administration had canceled about one hundred eighty-eight billion dollars of student debt for about five million people. At an event in twenty twenty-four, he said it out loud. The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn't stop me.
Then there is what they did pass. The American Rescue Plan, one point nine trillion dollars in March twenty twenty-one, passed with no Republican votes. It sent three hundred fifty billion dollars to state and local governments, many of which ended up with more money than they needed. It put about eighty-six billion dollars into bailing out failing union pension funds. Larry Summers, Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary and a top economic adviser to Barack Obama, warned at the time that it was so big it could set off inflation. In June twenty twenty-two, inflation hit nine point one percent, the highest in forty years. The Inflation Reduction Act followed that August, also with no Republican votes, with Vice President Harris breaking the tie in the Senate.
In twenty twenty-one, as prices started climbing, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen both called the inflation transitory. They said it would pass quickly. It did not. Prices kept rising for more than a year, and Yellen later said she had been wrong about the path inflation would take.
Neither Manchin nor Sinema is in the Senate now.
Where the Party Is Heading
The newest face of the Democratic Party is in New York City. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won the race for mayor last November. He ran on free city buses, a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments, and city-run grocery stores, paid for with higher taxes on the wealthy.
Democrats running for Congress this year are being asked whether they agree with him. Some keep their distance. Others, like El-Sayed in Michigan, are running on ideas from the same wing of the party. In California, Democrats like Congressman Ro Khanna are backing Proposition Forty, a one-time five percent tax on the total wealth of the state's billionaires, on the same ballot as the midterms. Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, moved out of California before the tax's cutoff date.
My Read
What follows is my opinion.
The Democrats are running on lower costs and have not put a number on a single thing. A number can be checked in two years. A slogan cannot.
The one area where they do have a plan is the President. The letters are going out and the targets are named. They spent his first term on investigations and two impeachments, and they are telling us they will do it again.
The part that worries me most is the filibuster. Last time, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema stopped the wish list. Neither of them is there now. If Democrats win both houses and kill the filibuster, they can add two states, add four senators and add four justices, and rewrite the rules so the other side never gets back in. Their own party chairman said it. I believe him.
The American Rescue Plan was sold as rescue. A big share of it went to state governments that did not need it and to union pension funds, and the whole country paid for it at the grocery store.
In Texas, the Democrat calling himself the people's candidate is running on Hollywood and New York money. In Maine, the Democrats' first nominee had to drop out. In the Senate, Democrats just blocked a stock trading ban that eight in ten Americans want.
The Republican record is jobless claims at a fifty-five year low, murder rates at their lowest in more than a century, and a border that is shut. That is a record worth running on.
That is the record. Election Day is the third of November.
Where This Landed
The Senate comes down to a handful of races, from Texas, where the Democrat is out-raising the Republican with money from California and New York, to Maine, where Democrats had to replace their nominee in July. The House comes down to fewer than twenty seats, a map fight Texas started and California answered, and a stock trading ban Senate Democrats blocked last week. The Democrats' plan has names on its investigations and no numbers on its promises.
Early voting has already started in some states.
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