2026 Senate Race Predictions

As is my tradition, I'm making my final predictions for the 2026 Senate races a couple of weeks earlier than most people do.  My position has always been that it feels like cheating if you wait for the weekend before the election, but that position has evolved in recent cycles.  The 2024 cycle was a classic example where an imagined narrative took hold in the closing days of the campaign with no basis in reality, sweeping up one side in irrational exuberance and leading to bonkers predictions.  Making my predictions before that closing weekend window helps me to avoid the kind of insanity we saw in early November 2024, where Democrats convinced themselves based on flimsy data points that Kamala Harris was surging to the finish line with blistering momentum.  I didn't buy into it as much as most, but even I would have likely tweaked some margins in my final predictions if I'd waited three weeks.  The gravitational pull of the prevailing narrative was just too strong to resist.

My intuition has led me to pretty good predictions in the last few cycles.  I've rarely taken the bait on too-good-to-be-true contests but have let the fundamentals and trend lines in past elections guide the predictions, and it's suited me well.  Frankly, it's easy when Donald Trump is on the ballot.  You always know that the polls are too friendly toward Democrats and that Republican voters are gonna show up in much greater numbers than expected on election night.  Midterms have gotten trickier after the Trump realignment though as his voters haven't been showing up at the polls in the necessary numbers to score GOP wins.  With Trump's approval rating in the toilet heading into this midterm and Republican enthusiasm ebbing, that generally bodes very poorly for his party, meaning my predictions are poised to be more bullish for Senate and gubernatorial races this year than they'd have been in most cases two years ago.

On the other hand, several of this year's key Senate battlegrounds are states that have shown some of the most substantial polling errors in the last decade, and almost always favoring Democrats.  That lowers my confidence considerably and is tugging me in different directions, forcing me to go with my gut on what the electorate might look like on November 3 for a number of key races.  Let's get rolling on this thing and see how I do....

 

Alabama--However high the Democratic tide rises next month, don't expect it to rise high enough to make the Yellowhammer State competitive for Democrats.  Retiring incumbent Republican Tommy Tuberville will be decisively replaced by fellow Republican Congressman Barry Moore from Alabama's Wiregrass region.  Even in this encouraging environment for Democrats, the best they could do as a token challenger to Moore in this open seat was Birmingham attorney Everett Wess.  I'll be curious to see if the prevailing political winds move the needle even a little. Prediction:  Moore by 28.

Alaska--This was a race I pegged early as a top Democratic pickup opportunity.  I don't know a lot about two-term Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan and I sensed people from his state probably didn't know as much about him as they might prefer either.  He's hardly an institution and seemed like exactly the kind of Republican who could be felled in a toxic political environment, and the Last Frontier seemed like exactly the kind of state where it could be done as it's one of the few red states trending less red.  Democrats scored their dream recruit with former Congresswoman Mary Peltola, who had already slayed the dragon of Sarah Palin in a previous statewide run.  Every indication is that Peltola is poised to get the job done as she's posted consistent polling leads, albeit in a state where polling is difficult and comparatively sparse.  I wouldn't be shaken to my core with confusion if Sullivan found a way to win, but despite the "bitch boss" revelation story by the New York Times, I think Peltola is gonna beat the incumbent.  Prediction:  Peltola by 3   Running Total:  Dems +1

Arkansas--Unlike Alabama, Arkansas Democrats deserve some credit for fielding a strong candidate here.  Democratic candidate Hallie Shoffner is a farmer from Jackson County (formerly the Democratic heartland in rural northeastern Arkansas) who has become an outspoken advocate against tariffs after leaving her family's farm last year due to the financial strain.  She's young, attractive, and a perfect counterpunch to two-term incumbent Republican Tom Cotton, a hawkish Trump disciple and avatar of everything people generically consider wrong with Washington.  If she came onto the scene in 2018, it's not out of the question that Shoffner might have pulled this off.  Unfortunately, Arkansas is almost assuredly too far gone at this point.  Shoffner's candidacy is impressive enough that I won't fully rule this out as a sleeper that breaks late in an intensely Democratic national environment.  But I suspect the Democratic Party lacks the infrastructure to identify and get out its vote strongly enough to make this competitive even in a perfect storm.  I'm baking in a last-minute outside-money flourish by Shoffner in my prediction but I still think she falls short of the losing numbers Mark Pryor got in 2014.  Prediction:  Cotton by 19.

Colorado--I regularly forget that Democrat John Hickenlooper is a United States Senator.  It's rather astonishing how anonymous he's been in his first term after taking out a Republican incumbent in 2020.  The fact that Hickenlooper's name has come up exactly zero times in discussions of 2026 Senate battlegrounds tells you all you need to know about how competitive Colorado looks to be this fall.  Republican state Senator Mark Baisley is the sacrificial lamb trying to deny Hickenlooper a second term but he's not gonna get the job done.  Considering how badly the gubernatorial race seems poised to go for Rocky Mountain State Republicans, coupled with the ugly national environment for the GOP, this race could well be the most lopsided Democratic Senate win in Colorado in my lifetime.  Prediction: Hickenlooper by 22.

Delaware--It's been more than a decade since any statewide race in the First State has had any level of suspense at all.  Don't expect this year's Senate race to break that streak.  Democrat Chris Coons is running for a fourth term and can be expected to bulldoze his Republican challenger, former state Senator Michael Katz.  Prediction:  Coons by 23.

Florida--The Sunshine State's evolution to Alabama, ongoing throughout the 2010s, reached its completion on the other end of the pandemic.  It's unwinnable terrain for Democrats, and particularly unwinnable when Democrats nominate an unflinching DSA socialist as they inexplicably did in August.  The tone-deafness of nominating a self-described socialist in present-day Florida speaks volumes of the problems that the Democratic Party is gonna face in trying to rein in its base in 2028.  Angie Nixon is very likely to complicate the re-election efforts of embattled incumbents like Jared Moskowitz and Darren Soto, whose backs are already against the wall because of the gerrymander that turned their formerly blue districts a Trump shade of red.  The best Democrats can hope for is an emaciated GOP turnout that holds down the margins for Republican quasi-incumbent Ashley Moody going for her first full term in Marco Rubio's old Senate seat.  As anonymous as Moody is generally and as bad as the environment is for Republicans, I still think having Nixon as a foil will spike turnout among South Florida Cubans and greedy geezers in The Villages alike.  Had Democrats nominated Alex Vindman, I suspect they'd have held Moody's win to single digits and potentially saved a couple House Democrats embattled by the new map.  But with Nixon, the only thing preventing a 2022-style blowout in Florida will be the toxic national environment and demoralized GOP base.  Prediction:  Moody by 12.

Georgia--Of all the races where my intuition last year has failed to live up to the reality on the ground this year, the Peach State is at the top of the list.  Democratic freshman Jon Ossoff seemed like a long shot for re-election even in the Trump era because I questioned whether black turnout would be sufficient in a midterm for a white Democratic Senator to prevail.  Ossoff has made a believer out of me, stepping up his game rhetorically and as a fundraiser and riding the wave of his state's steep demographic shifts.  Georgia has been marching to the left at a dizzying speed and it feels as though the Democratic ceiling has been raised to the point where statewide victory no longer needs to be by the skin of their teeth.  All signs point to Georgia in 2026 crossing the threshold that Virginia did in 2008, where its battleground status takes on a bluer shade of purple.  At this point, the bigger question is not whether Ossoff wins, but whether he wins by so much that he drags Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms across the line in the gubernatorial race.  Prediction:  Ossoff by 7.

Idaho--On paper, veteran Gem State Republican Jim Risch seems like exactly the kind of incumbent who might be vulnerable in a wave election.  In a year like 2006, before the inelastic tribal fault lines took hold, such a perfect storm might have been doable.  After all, token Democratic challenger David Roth dropped out and threw his support to an independent, former state representative Todd Achilles.  After the surprise success of Dan Osborn in Nebraska in 2024, Democrats have warmed up to the idea of running trojan horse Democrats as independents in bright red states with the hope that the stain of the national Democratic Party's reputation won't stick to them.  In the case of Achilles, he's run as both a Republican and a Democrat in the past before switching to independent.  That could either help persuade voters he's truly unaffiliated with either party and might govern as a moderate or it could lead voters to presume he's an opportunistic grifter content to go whichever the way the wind is blowing.  None of it will be enough to overcome Idaho's blistering Republican advantage, but I think it'll be the closest Senate race in nearly 20 years in Idaho, for whatever that's worth given that it'll still be a blowout.  Prediction:  Risch by 22.

Illinois--It's rather astonishing how below the radar the contest for this open seat vacated by long-time Democratic Senator Dick Durbin has been.  It's not as though this race was ever gonna be winnable for Republicans, but it's striking it hasn't even been part of the conversation since Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton scored her upset win in the Democratic primary.  Former Republican state party chair Don Tracy has proven to be just as limp of a challenger as anticipated, but I'm still expecting a Stratton margin of victory considerably closer to Kamala Harris's soft 2024 win than Obama's 2008 Presidential margin.  The "wave" tendency of this election seems increasingly likely to be a matter of red-state overperformance by Democrats while blue states tread water.  In much of Middle America, we can probably expect to see some unexpected vote in backlash to Donald Trump, but in a place like downstate Illinois, I expect we'll see the priority continue to be a backlash to Chicago.  Prediction:  Stratton by 13.

Iowa--Every indication is that my adopted home state is gonna be a bloodbath for Republicans this year in the aftermath of its decade-long stampede to the right.  And I certainly do believe Democrats will see considerable gains, but will it be enough to turn retiring Republican Joni Ernst's Senate seat blue?  It's certainly possible.  In fact, as of this writing, Democratic state representative Josh Turek holds a narrow lead in most polls against Republican Congresswoman Ashley Hinson.  Both have proven to be adept candidates running solid campaigns.  However, every election cycle going back to 2014 has seen Democrats polling much better before election day than on election day.  Graveyards are full of Democratic candidates thought to be competitive in October who were beaten in November, including Bruce Braley, Fred Hubbell, Theresa Greenfield, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris.  This track record leads me to believe Josh Turek will join these previous Democrats in the graveyard.  It's entirely possible that the polling in Iowa will be right this time, but since it hasn't been in the last six cycles, the safest bet is go with the GOP when it looks like a tie.  Prediction: Hinson by 2

Kansas--Just like Dan Sullivan in Alaska, I identified Republican freshman Roger Marshall as vulnerable more than a year ago, even as everybody else was saying "yeah but it's Kansas".  Marshall is an arrogant, tone-deaf Senator who underperformed the baseline six years ago and would be easy to catch napping if Democrats nominated somebody good.  And even though it came late in the process, Democrats did nominate somebody good in Adam Hamilton, the pastor of the largest church in Kansas and their unlikeliest competitive nominee at least since Jim Webb in 2006.  Hamilton has put forth a great campaign and Marshall is on his heels, doing all the things a desperate Senator does when he thinks he's a month away from losing.  While Kansas polls have underestimated Republicans in the past, including the previous time Marshall ran statewide, I'd be surprised if they could stop Hamilton's momentum at this point.  I suspect Hamilton will be a pain in the ass for his party once elected, but I nonetheless expect he'll be the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Kansas since 1932.  Prediction:  Hamilton by 4.  Running Total:  Dems +2

Kentucky--The biggest suspense related to the Bluegrass State's Senate contest will be whether retiring Republican incumbent Mitch McConnell lives long enough to finish his term.  Democrats were never credibly positioned to win statewide federal office this year regardless of the partisan tide, but Democratic primary voters' selection of losing 2022 nominee Charles Booker over losing 2020 nominee Amy McGrath undoubtedly dug their hole deeper.  The east Kentucky conservative Democrats who could theoretically tip the race into the Democratic column would never go for a black Democrat from Louisville.  Furthermore, Republicans nominated a strong candidate in Congressman Andy Barr, who has represented the Lexington-area 6th Congressional district, which is as close as Kentucky gets to a battleground, for more than a decade.  I'm not anticipating this race will run much closer for Democrats than recent federal races in the state.  Prediction:  Barr by 21.

Louisiana--A slightly more interesting contest has come together in the Bayou State after two-term Republican incumbent Bill Cassidy was tossed out of office in this summer's primary, just as I predicted would happen in February 2021 when Cassidy voted to impeach Trump.  Congresswoman Julia Letlow, ordained by the party's master as MAGA's preferred candidate, is the Republican nominee.  Just as in neighboring Arkansas, Democrats are running a farmer, in this case black farmer Jamie Davis from northeastern Louisiana.  I haven't seen or heard Davis in action so I have no basis to judge his aptitude, but a couple of questionable polls have come out showing him only a few points behind Letlow.  Ultimately, I'd be shocked if this race ended up being close as I'm sure Letlow will consolidate the undecideds, but I can imagine there's some establishment Republicans butthurt about Cassidy's ouster who are still cool toward Letlow at this stage.  Many of them may even sit this election out.  Between that and the general hostile climate toward Republicans, I could see Davis making some inroads along the margin, particularly in New Orleans and Baton Rouge suburbs, but it won't be enough for this contest to be anywhere near as close on election day as polls are showing now.  Prediction:  Letlow by 16.

Maine--I just don't get it!  What is it about the doddering grandma routine of five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins that voters in the Pine Tree State are so smitten with?!  Democrats narrowly averted the disaster of a Graham Platner nomination and settled upon former state senator Troy Jackson, who on paper seemed like the perfect alternative to thread the needle between progressivism and electability.  In practice, however, Jackson is at least as charmless and charisma-free as Collins and while he leads narrowly in most polls, he hasn't come close to putting this race away.  Collins managed an even bigger come-from-behind win in 2020 than what she needs here, although that was with the uniquely terrible polling of the 2020 cycle.  Can she defy gravity again?  It's possible, but I stand by my early intuition that she's outlived her usefulness in this blue-trending state in such a toxic environment....but I'm standing by my intuition with considerably less confidence than I'd have anticipated three months ago.  Prediction:  Jackson by 2.  Running Total:  Dems +3

Massachusetts--As it applies to the Bay State, disregard my previous predicted metric of less movement toward Democrats in blue states this cycle.  Democratic forever incumbent Ed Markey prevailed handily in his primary last month and will have just as easy of a time winning the general election as Republican attorney John Deaton, who was beaten by Elizabeth Warren two years ago.  With that said, I'm not expecting Markey to win by the 2-1 margin he did in 2020 because there's a third-party nominee running on the "Socialism and Liberation" party line this year.  Given the affinity for socialism among younger college students, of which Massachusetts has many, I'm expecting at least a mid-single-digit showing for that candidate, taking votes exclusively from Markey.  Prediction:  Markey by 28.

Michigan--The open seat in the Wolverine State, vacated by retiring two-term Democrat Gary Peters, might be the toughest race to call in the country because of the "Bradley effect" filtered through Islamophobia.  There's no question that we saw it in the Democratic primary where progressive doctor Abdul El-Sayed was ahead by double digits in the polls against fellow Democrat Haley Stevens, but he only eked out a 1-point win to get the nomination.  Fast forward to October and El-Sayed has a small lead in the polls against his Republican challenger, former Congressman Mike Rogers, but can the polls be believed?  I'm not convinced they can.  El-Sayed is a controversial figure but is well-spoken and has run a mostly strong campaign, probably winning over some skeptics in the last few months.  But based on the lopsided primary polling error and my intuition, I don't think he's won over enough. Prediction:  Rogers by 1.  Running Total:  Dems +2

Minnesota--In a showing of pure hubris, Minnesota primary voters handed Democratic Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan a landslide victory in the August primary over a more electable challenger, pretending as though the light blue state of Minnesota is Massachusetts.  Predictably, general election voters didn't warm up so quickly to the selection of an unpopular Lieutenant Governor with lackluster communication skills whose office is bedeviled by a major fraud scandal.  And here we are, a little over two weeks before the election, with the race to replace retiring Democrat Tina Smith that should have been put away by the Democrat weeks ago a statistical dead heat.  Republican challenger and sports broadcaster Michelle Tafoya is essentially a white board that status quo critics can project their aspirations onto as she sleepwalks through the campaign hoping nobody notices that she knows nothing about policy.  And it might work.  If it wasn't for the Democratic mood nationally, it absolutely would work.  I'm not confident what the Minnesota electorate will look like this year, but if the Democrats' new base in outer suburbia decides they're more upset about the homegrown fraud scandal than they are with Trump, Tafoya could win.  Right now, I'm sticking with my intuition that the Democratic national tide is strong enough that it even manages to sweep Flanagan into office.  Prediction:  Flanagan by 2.

Mississippi--There was a scenario where the Magnolia State could have been competitive this year.  Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith is a notorious underperformer unlikely to inspire base MAGA voters.  If an energized Democratic base showed up in lopsided numbers while white Republicans stayed home, there was a 2% chance Hyde-Smith could have been upset.  But that long shot scenario required a unified non-Republican vote, which we somehow didn't manage to get.  Former Democratic nominee Ty Pinkins is running as an independent and will almost certainly poach votes from this year's Democratic nominee Scott Colom.  The result will be a race that's not likely to be as close as the 2020 Mississippi Senate race when Hyde-Smith was last on the ballot.  Prediction:  Hyde-Smith by 12.

Montana--While there are number of instances where independents running as trojan horse Democrats in red states have left the GOP uniquely vulnerable, the situation in the Treasure State appears poised to install a Republican in an open seat who might have been beatable in a head-to-head race.  Two-term Republican incumbent Steve Daines resigned last spring in the sleaziest possible way, surprising everybody with his intent to retire on the day of the filing deadline and ensuring that his chosen successor, U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme, would be the only Republican with the time to file and preventing any high-profile Democrats not already in the race to reconsider.  If former Democratic Senator Jon Tester or former Democratic Governor Steve Bullock had any advance warning and been convinced to run here, they could easily have made this race competitive in this environment.  Fortunately, the Democrats had an insurance plan for this race with University of Montana President Seth Bodnar running as an independent but with the backing of Tester and most other Montana Democrats.  In a perfect storm, this could have set them up with a challenger capable of beating Alme.  Unfortunately, Democrats also had a token candidate named Alani Bankhead who formally got her party's nomination.  The result is a three-way race where Alme is putting up strikingly weak numbers, but is still running well ahead of the divided opposition.  With a head-to-head race between Alme and a Democrat or a trojan horse Democrat running as an independent, I suspect this race would have been a 50-50 crap shoot.  Since I don't see a consolidation of the non-Alme vote coming in these final weeks of the campaign, we're probably looking at a race that isn't close at all but where Alme prevails with well under 50% of the vote.  Prediction:  Alme by 11.

Nebraska--The last time I took a peek at the Senate races, I was too bullish on the Cornhusker State.  Independent candidate Dan Osborn, the trojan horse Democrat who came within 7 points of beating Senator Deb Fischer two years ago and outran Kamala Harris more than any non-Republican in the country, is running again this cycle, this time against Nebraska's junior Senator and former Republican Governor Pete Ricketts.  If the environment is as ugly for Republicans as pollsters are telegraphing, there's still an outside chance Osborn could pull this off, but I fear his timing was wrong.  If it was Fischer he was running against this year rather than 2024, I suspect he'd have won.  But between the novelty of Dan Osborn having worn off a bit on his second run and facing a stronger challenger in Ricketts, it's not looking so good for him now.  Public polling shows Osborn only a few points behind but the lack of outside investment in the race is quite telling.  I'm still holding out some hope for this one but I think Osborn will fall short.  Prediction:  Ricketts by 5.

New Hampshire--Just as I'll never understand why Mainers love Susan Collins so much, I'll never understand the hold that the Sununu family holds over voters in the Granite State.  To be fair, former Republican Senator John Sununu is less obnoxious than his father or brother, but it's still rather astonishing that he's made a race out this open Senate seat vacated by Democrat Jeanne Shaheen.  There's some indication that Sununu peaked too soon though.  A month ago, this race was considered a tossup, but Democratic Congressman Chris Pappas has opened up a lead in recent weeks.  I still don't think Pappas has put this race away as he probably would have against a challenger without the Sununu surname, but I also don't think it's as strong of a GOP pick-up prospect as Michigan or Minnesota right now.  Democrats should feel fortunate that Sununu's attempted comeback didn't happen in 2014 or 2022 as he probably would have won those contests.  Prediction:  Pappas by 4.

New Jersey--What a difference two years makes!  In 2024, a surge of Hispanic support helped Donald Trump get within 6 points of victory in the long-blue Garden State, signaling a trend toward competitiveness.  The trend stalled pretty quickly though, as evidenced by the GOP's almost comically limp effort to unseat three-term Democratic incumbent Cory Booker.  Justin Murphy, the deputy mayor of Tabernacle, was the best the Republicans could do against the oily Booker this fall.  I expect Murphy to win the usual places Republicans win given how fixed the Democratic ceiling has become in New Jersey, but there's a reason this race is vastly quieter heading into election day than Republicans likely hoped it would be two years ago.  Prediction:  Booker by 17.

New Mexico--The last I had heard, freshman Democrat Ben Lujan didn't have any Republican challenger at all this year, but apparently an oilman named Larry Marker won a write-in vote in the otherwise empty Republican primary ballot. A generation ago, we would have expected something close to a clean sweep of every county for the incumbent, but we're too polarized for that nowadays and Marker will still probably win at least a dozen counties in the Land of Enchantment.  Still, it's a remarkable state of affairs that the underperforming Lujan, who won by only 6 points in 2020, was effectively unopposed in a state that's long been on the periphery of the battleground.  Particularly with the expected anti-Trump Hispanic voter backlash, Lujan will likely get the most decisive Democratic win since Tom Udall 18 years ago.  Prediction:  Lujan by 16. 

North Carolina--Last year at this time, I was convinced the race to replace retiring Republican Senator Thom Tillis would be close given the trajectory of the Tar Heel State and its internal realignment that has allowed the Republicans to remain a half-step ahead of Democrats for nearly 20 years now.  For what it's worth, I still anticipate the race to be closer than most polling shows, but the Republicans wouldn't be triaging their nominee Michael Whatley if they thought there was any lingering chance that the race would be competitive.  Former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper will almost certainly be the next Senator from North Carolina and the Democrats' surest flip of a GOP-held seat.  Prediction:  Cooper by 6.   Running Total: Dems +3

Ohio--The special election for J.D. Vance's old Senate seat has been moving in the Democrats' direction according to polls, but it wouldn't be an even-numbered year without an election in the Buckeye State where Republicans outperform their polling by several points.  The Democrats landed a heavyweight candidate with former three-term Senator Sherrod Brown while Republicans are stuck with appointed Senator Jon Husted trying to fill out the remainder of his term.  It requires some serious second-guessing to try to parse the mood of the electorate in a cycle like this and try to figure out if Brown's modest polling lead is real.  Given the substantial and consistent Republican overperformance of polling in Ohio going back to 2014, I'd normally be inclined to bet on Husted pulling this out, but in this case I think the MAGA turnout will fall short and just enough of Brown's old industrial city voter base turns out for him, with a surge in support from upscale suburbs, and it's decisive enough for him to squeak by.  I wouldn't be the least bit surprised though if Husted still found a way to win, and win rather decisively for that matter.  And given that even if Brown wins, it'll merely be a two-year rental until the seat comes up again in 2028, this race is a lower priority for me than most.  Prediction:  Brown by 1.  Running Total:  Dems +4

Oklahoma--The open seat to fill the Senate seat of Republican Markwayne Mullin, promoted to the Trump administration, should remain safely in Republican control.   Republican Congressman Kevin Hern is the GOP nominee while the Democratic nominee is a nurse named N'Kiyla Jasmine Thomas that seems likely to rival the New Mexico oilman who won the GOP nomination as a write-in candidate as the year's most anonymous major-party nominee.  Not that long ago, Oklahoma Democrats were at least trying.  Prediction:  Hern by 33.

Oregon--While there's undoubtedly some degree of exhaustion with Democrats in the Beaver State, there's no question that three-term Democratic incumbent Jeff Merkley will be handily re-elected to a fourth term against his challenger, Republican state Senator David Brock Smith.  It'll be a tall order for Merkley to top his performance against Jo Rae Perkins six years ago even in this strong Democratic environment, but I'll guess he matches it.  Prediction:  Merkley by 18.

Rhode Island--A lot of veteran Senators are retiring this cycle but not five-term Democratic incumbent Jack Reed, renominated for a sixth term against Republican challenger Raymond McKay, a former state GOP committee member.  Reed has always dominated his previous races and, despite a noticeable lurch to the right by the dark blue Ocean State in 2024, I doubt this will be the year that breaks Reed's streak of dominance.  Prediction:  Reed by 30.

South Carolina--This one is fool's gold.  Darline Graham is a genuinely horrendous candidate for the Republicans, but she isn't Roy Moore.  The perfect storm turnout model required to elect Democratic nominee Annie Andrews, with a surge in Democratic base enthusiasm and a collapse in Republican base enthusiasm, would require Darline Graham to be as uniquely terrible as Roy Moore.  The Palmetto State's comparatively low floor for Democrats, as red states go, can be deceptive in convincing Democrats from time to time that they have a chance here.  But the Republican vote is unmovable and is growing rather than shrinking proportionate to the Democratic base.  South Carolina is more like Florida than North Carolina or even Mississippi.  Bet on this seat staying in the hands of someone from the Graham family.  Prediction:  Graham by 7.

South Dakota--There have been whispers that the Senate race in the Mount Rushmore State is on the periphery of the 2026 battleground according to some private polls.  I won't discount the possibility entirely given that past Democratic nominee Brian Bengs followed Dan Osborn's lead, shedding his toxic (D) label and running as an independent.  If this was 20 years ago, I could absolutely imagine a scenario where South Dakota casts a protest vote against its Republican incumbent and sends a trojan horse Democrat (or a real Democrat for that matter) to Washington, but the brand has become so radioactive in the state during the Trump era that I suspect they'll default to the red.  Two-term Republican incumbent Mike Rounds probably seems harmless enough to keep around.  Even if South Dakotans might prefer a little more independence from the administration, it's a safe bet Rounds' campaign will effectively portray Bengs as the trojan horse Democrat that he is for him to win or even come close at the end.  Prediction:  Rounds by 17.

Tennessee--A case could be made that the Volunteer State has become the most inhospitable state in the country for electing a Democrat.  At the very least, there's no other state of its size in the country where a Democratic victory is as unthinkable as it is in contemporary Tennessee.  After all, they just cleanly gerrymandered the state's Congressional map to where all nine districts are double-digit GOP strongholds, locking out any Democratic hopeful from building a resume before a statewide run.  Odious freshman Republican Bill Hagerty will easily pull off a second term, and will be able to get it against the same fourth-rate Democratic challenger he had in 2020, activist Marquita Bradshaw.  Prediction:  Hagerty by 32.

Texas--The Lone Star State may finally be cracking for Republicans after more than 30 years.  I'm not fully convinced that it is because I think the Hispanic vote, particularly in Texas, has become so dynamic that it's nearly impossible to correctly model in polling.  And frankly, after that 2024 Republican blowout, it's really hard to imagine Texas is so quickly at a place where it can pivot to blue.  It's a unique situation though.  If Minnesota Democratic primary voters displayed a brash hubris in nominating Peggy Flanagan, Texas Republican primary voters exceeded them by orders of magnitude by tossing out four-term incumbent Senator John Cornyn in favor of scandal-plagued Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.  Most cycles, Paxton would still be able to find a way to win in Texas despite his warts simply because of the (R) next to his name.  And victory would be typically be a slam-dunk against liberal State Representative James Talarico, his challenger.  It isn't gonna be a slam-dunk this year though as the national mood seems to be even more lopsidedly problematic for Republicans in Texas.  I haven't been quite there yet in terms of predicting Talarico gets this, but the moment has now come where I'm forced to choose.  With a consolidation of the suburban managerial class and disaffected Hispanic voters returning in droves, there's an undeniable path for Talarico.  The polls show Talarico ahead and the campaigns are sure behaving like those polls are right. I won't fully believe it until I see it but I'm tilting this race in favor of Talarico right now, against all odds.  Prediction: Talarico by 1.  Running Total:  Dems +5

Virginia--The Old Dominion is another example of a blue state where I expect the forecasted Democratic wave fails to crest as high as it does elsewhere.  Newly installed Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger is off to a shaky start and the Democratic effort to draw up a lopsided mid-decade gerrymander instigated a fair amount of ill will, particularly after it was all for nothing.  None of this is to say three-term Democratic incumbent Mark Warner will be denied a fourth term.  He'll have another dominant win.  But he'll be lucky to prevail as strongly as he did six years ago let alone his first-term blowout win of 2008.  There's nothing specific about his Republican challenger, Army General Bert Mizusawa, that should engender any anxiety in Warner, but I expect a modest chunk of independent voters to be more likely to cast their ballot against Spanberger than against Trump.  And just like 2014 when Warner had a shockingly narrow win because his was the only high-profile race on the ballot, I also expect low turnout in Virginia that also stunts Warner's margin.  Prediction:  Warner by 13.

West Virginia--One demographic of voter whose voting behavior this cycle has me the most curious is Appalachia, and the West Virginia Senate election is as good of a proxy for the demographic as is possible.  There's no doubt whatsoever that two-term Republican incumbent Shelley Moore Capito will be safely re-elected to a third term, but will there be a noticeable shift to her Democratic challenger, former Morgantown councilwoman Rachel Fetty Anderson?  Or more likely, will there be a collapse in Republican turnout that creates a mirage of nominal Democratic momentum.  I think the second scenario is quite likely and I highly doubt that Capito will win by 43 points like she did six years ago when she was able to ride Trump turnout coattails.  Prediction:  Capito by 34.

Wyoming--Republican Cynthia Lummis is retiring after a single term, leaving an open seat in the Equality State.  Not unexpectedly, the seat is not being seriously contested in the most Republican state in the country.  Wyoming's loathsome at-large Congresswoman Harriet Hageman, who unseated Liz Cheney just two years ago, is going for a promotion to the Senate and will easily get it against her challenger, former Democratic state representative James Byrd.  It won't be close.  Prediction:  Hageman by 43.

 

I'm being unusually bullish and predicting that Democrats net five Senate seats on November 3, but I'm really on the fence with five races.  Of those five, I gave the Democrats three wins.  And I more confidently gave Dems both Alaska and Kansas, which are by no means sure things.  It wouldn't blow my mind if the Dems won all seven of the races mentioned but it also wouldn't blow my mind if they only won one or two of them.  So it goes when the polling is both close and untrustworthy.

If I'm right and the Democrats net five seats, they'll hold 52 Senate seats, insulating them from a John Fetterman party switch which I suspect will come if the Republicans either hold the Senate or if Democrats merely prevail 51-49.  Netting five seats would make 2026 the Democrats' best night for Senate pickups since 2008.

I don't think I'm all strung out on hopium to come to this conclusion either as the fundamentals really are terrible for Republicans, with an 11-point party ID advantage for Democrats according to Gallup's large sample earlier this month.  Even if Gallup's sample is two or three points too high, that still portends a significant advantage for Democrats where standard consideration for "polling error" at the state by state level is somewhat negated.

Of course, the usual caveats still apply here.  I'm only predicting what happens with election night results.  The conduct of Donald Trump, John Thune, and Mike Johnson to negate election outcomes they don't like, and a Supreme Court that will let them get away with it, is another story altogether. 

 

 

Who Is And Isn't Gonna Change Their Minds This Midterm?

We continue to hear a broad spectrum of pollsters and analysts telling us that a wave midterm election favoring Democrats is less than a month away, and most data points are clearly trending in that direction.  I caution that we never know what kind of electorate is actually gonna show up on the first Tuesday in November so my confidence level is never gonna be higher than a 5 out of 10 going into elections this year or for the foreseeable future.  I'll get to my formal Senate and gubernatorial race predictions in the weeks ahead, but before I do, I thought I'd single out a half dozen voting demographics that I predict are most likely to switch partisan allegiances next month in the largest numbers and in the smallest margins.

Most Likely To Swing Toward Democrats

#1. Hispanics

Arguably the biggest misjudgment by the Democratic Party in the last decade is that Hispanic voters were poised to behave more like black voters than Caucasian voters in the voting booth, remaining a loyal and unwavering Democratic constituency rather than integrating ideologically into the majority culture of the moment the way that most previous immigrant groups have.  As it turns out, people of Latin and Spanish descent were just as incapable of assessing the risk potential of putting a malignant narcissist in the most powerful position in the world as populations with ancestry from northern Europe.

The transformation of Hispanic voters into a swing constituency occurred more quickly than I expected, but it's hard to deny we're there now and likely will be in the cycles to come.  It was crazy to think Hispanics wouldn't become a swing constituency given the swings from left to right and back in Latin American political leadership over the decades, or for that matter, the visible integration we see between Latin and Anglo culture in pretty much every nook and cranny of the country.  Just yesterday, I walked past a homecoming party in central Iowa taking photos of one another, with three white guys who had three Latin girls on their arms.  Seeing this was a good anecdotal reminder that the left's "BIPOC" framing of the victimization pecking order was out of touch with the demographic reality.

With that said, it seems as though Trump's maximalist deportation strategy has touched a nerve with Hispanic voters, who feel personally singled out in a way that should have been obvious to them at this point two years ago.  Polling of Hispanics nationally and in Hispanic-heavy battleground states and districts seems to confirm a double-digit swing back to Democrats is likely forthcoming next month.  And yet, polling is not showing a Hispanic advantage as lopsided as we saw as recently as 2018.  A significant chunk of the 2018 Hispanic vote appears to have more decisively realigned regardless of Trump's aggression lopsidedly impacting their communities. Keep in mind that even with the elevated Hispanic margins of 2018, Beto O'Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Bill Nelson still lost.  That puts into question how consequential it will be if Democrats merely split the difference in 2026 between their 2018 and 2024 margins among Hispanics.  Still, any good Democratic night on November 3 will require robust shifts in the Hispanic vote, and I think that, for the most part, they're gonna get it.

#2.  Young Voters

Besides the neck-snapping swing by Hispanic voters toward Trump two years ago, the other big story that Democratic operatives finally discovered a month before the 2024 Presidential election was that young voters were also swinging decisively in Trump's direction.  It was mostly young men, including young men of color, but also included a measurable share of young women.  It was broadly underestimated how dissatisfaction with the status quo among the most formative demographic of voters would manifest itself into alignment with the opposition, no matter how grotesque that opposition happened to be.

The same principle is likely to lead to a seismic snapback by these same voters two years later as most of Gen Z is even more dissatisfied with the American status quo in 2026 under Trump than the 2024 status quo under Biden.  I'm putting an asterisk here, however, in that I think the pecking order of movement by young voters toward Democrats will have a steep gradient.  Young men of color will likely show the biggest shift toward Democrats.  Young women are already heavily Democrat and will continue to be, but by even sharper margins.  White young men, however, will likely only contribute to a hypothetical Democratic midterm victory by staying home in disproportionate numbers rather than swinging toward Democrats.  

The same cultural forces that drove young white men to both Trump and to personal crisis in 2024--isolation, underachievement, and radicalization from Big Tech's algorithms--have not improved and may in fact have worsened.  Trump's message drove them to the polls in a vote of no confidence two years ago.  His failure to rectify their concerns are more likely to demoralize them out of participation than signing on for what the Democrats are peddling.

#3.  Farmers and Farm Workers

It was estimated that 85% of American farmers went for Donald Trump in 2024, choosing to believe he would not pursue his loudly and constantly stated campaign promises that would unquestionably imperil their livelihoods.  The gamble didn't work as Trump went full steam ahead with policies that has submerged the American farm economy into the worst recession since the mid-80s farm crisis.  The mid-80s farm crisis altered farmer voting behavior in neck-snapping ways.  Among other things, it led to Iowa becoming Michael Dukakis's second-best state in 1988 and turning every single legislative seat in southwestern Minnesota blue back in 1986.

We're not gonna see anything like that in 2026.  Farmers and adjacent farm-industry workers will remain overwhelmingly Republican this year, with most of them confident that bottomless federal welfare checks will insulate them from any and all self-immolating choices they make in the voting booth.  Nonetheless, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska Senate races would not all be competitive this year if Trump exhaustion among agriculture workers wasn't a real thing.  Perhaps the Republican lean of the farm vote shifts this year back to what we saw in 2014 rather than 2024.  

The rural vote has always fascinated me most on electoral county maps, and this year I look forward to seeing how counties in the American heartland compare this year to 2024 or 2022.  Will the precinct data look more like Kamala Harris's 2024 results in Nebraska or more like Dan Osborn's 2024 results in Nebraska?  If it looks more like the Dan Osborn results map as I suspect, that will make for a good night for Democrats.

 

Pivoting to the inverse, here are the voting demographics I suspect will be the most static in their alignment with the GOP this midterm.

#1.  Blue Collar and Union Workers

For generations, the Democrats kept conservative blue-collar workers in their coalition by being the most populist on economic issues while Republicans repeatedly played to type by aligning themselves with the priorities of big business.  In many ways, Trump has held serve with prioritizing business interests, but he's challenged them on the very issues that, rightly or wrongly, feel most sincere and most tangible to blue-collar workers.  And nothing that today's Democrats are saying or doing seems likely to alter this perception.

Blue-collar workers have long believed that their negotiating power in the workplace is enhanced if they're not competing with immigrants for jobs.  Because of Trump, there's far fewer immigrants competing with them for jobs.  They're not unhappy about this.  And while they may grumble about the inflation that's come in large part because of Trump's tariffs, they still see them as a net positive and believe they will work as intended in forcing domestic investment into a production economy that will benefit themselves and their kids and grandkids.  Trump is serving up the exact template of policies that blue-collar workers have waited for and believe in their souls will be what's best for them and their communities.  Even if the evidence of these policies' effectiveness is not necessarily compelling, they still believe Trump is a fighter on their behalf and haven't seen enough fallout yet to lose faith in their convictions that strident protectionism is the best policy for American workers.

#2.  Jews

I suspect Jewish voters will be the only demographic that trends decisively more Republican this year than Democratic.  Fortunately for Democrats, they're small in number and mostly concentrated in blue cities in blue states, with limited reach in battleground districts.  There are some isolated examples of where a slumping Jewish vote will be a problem for Democrats though, as we were reminded of last week when former Florida Democratic Congressman Peter Deutsch endorsed current Democratic Congressman Jared Moskowitz's Republican challenger because he doesn't want Democrats to control the House of Representatives due to their escalating anti-Israel posture.  Moskowitz already has his back to the wall this year with his south Florida district getting gerrymandered decisively redder.  If you consider that Deutsch is not likely on an island in being an older Jewish voter incensed by Democrats' shift against Israel, that's gonna make Moskowitz's job much harder along with David Jolly or anybody else with the unenviable task of trying to win statewide in Florida as a Democrat.

Deutsch endorsed Trump two years ago as well so he probably represents the core pro-Israel Jewish voter that the Democrats lost a few cycles ago, but millions of less hawkish Jewish voters are undoubtedly at their wit's end with the open displays of antisemitism and acts of violence against Jews taking place since October 7, 2023. Given that we're very likely to see more in the weeks before the election, the prospect of a modest Jewish voter realignment becomes more foreseeable.  The inherent liberalism of the majority of Jewish voters--along with equally virulent antisemitism coming from the political right--will likely keep the bottom from fully falling out for Democrats in the cycles ahead, but the demographic's loyalty to the Democratic Party is absolutely gonna be put to the test as the Democratic base voters increasingly consolidate their support around the Palestinians.

#3.  Evangelicals

It's ironic that Jewish voters are likely to become more Republican out of resistance to the holy war being waged against them while evangelical Christian voters will continue to align with both Israel and Republicans because of their desire to accelerate the pace of the holy war, believing it will bring about the Rapture and their own ascent to heaven.  It's the ultimate example of politics making the strangest bedfellows.

Ultimately though, for a demographic whose reputation is tireless adherence to their allegedly rigid principles, evangelicals are in reality the most moldable and transactional voters in the country.  Any given cycle, wherever the Republican Party needs them to be, they're gonna be.  If George W. Bush's Republican Party needs evangelicals to be on board with waging war against Iraq, evangelicals will be there for him.  If Donald Trump's 2016 Republican Party needs evangelicals to wash their hands of supporting war in Iraq, evangelicals will be there for him.  If Donald Trump's 2026 Republican Party needs evangelicals to do a heel turn and be back on board for waging war on Iran, evangelicals will be there for him.  If Donald Trump were to hypothetically change his position and support allowing transgender males on their daughter's sports team, I have no doubt whatsoever that evangelicals would find a way to get to the position that the leader of the Republican Party endorses.

This is why I can't see how the seemingly workable math in picking off Senate seats in South Carolina or Mississippi is ultimately able to work even in a best-case scenario.  The majority of the white vote in both states is evangelical, and if they're convinced that God himself is guiding the political party they're aligned with, then they're not gonna be movable under any circumstance.  The only question is whether evangelical turnout declines enough for Democrats to sneak a few wins on the edges, but it's highly unlikely it's gonna happen in any major statewide races.

 

Those are the macro voting trends I'm expecting to see next month.  My formal predictions for every Senate and gubernatorial races are coming in the next few weeks. 

 

 

Both Parties Are In A Really Bad Place Heading Into This Midterm

After Tuesday night's Delaware primary, the general election field is now set in all 50 states and the midterm is less than seven weeks away.  But even living in Iowa with multiple battleground races and a saturation of television advertising for the candidates, it doesn't feel like an election is less than seven weeks away.  In my decades of experience with elections, you can feel it in the air for months when the country is itching to get to the polls to vote.  There's an intangible energy and contagious enthusiasm that trickles beyond hard-core partisans and finds its way to Main Street.  Just about every house in the neighborhood has yard signs for their preferred candidate.  Campaigns are active enough that they even find their way to my slum apartment building to knock on doors.

I'm not seeing that in September 2026.  Not any of it.  

And honestly, the clearest unscientific metric I use to determine midterm election enthusiasm is what the lead story on the Sunday morning news shows happens to be in the weeks after Labor Day.  If the lead story is the midterm elections as it was in 2006, 2010, and 2018, the enthusiasm for the election is likely palpable.  If the lead story on "Face the Nation" is the Ebola virus in Africa as it was at this time in 2014, election enthusiasm is probably muted.  Supply and demand have a funny way of finding each other, even if unintentionally, and if there's less demand for election news, there will probably be a diminished supply that breaks through.

So what were the lead stories on "Face the Nation" and "Meet the Press" this Sunday? The media finally got the memo that AI is gonna kill us all.  Obviously, a big story, but it was nonetheless striking that it wasn't until after the third commercial break on "Face the Nation" that anybody had a word to say about the midterm elections.

How has this phenomenon played out in past midterm cycles?  Well, in 2014, when the media spent most of the fall discussing Ebola and the first "caravan" of Central American asylum seekers rather than the elections, turnout was the lowest of any midterm in the 21st century.  Obviously this is a pretty small sample size, but the warning sign is there that lackluster enthusiasm could lead to disappointing turnout.  I'm definitely not expecting 2014-level low turnout, but I'm certainly not expecting to be too impressed by the number of people who show up either.

And honestly, nobody should be surprised by this.  Politics has become emotionally exhausting, and whether it's the Democrats who are rightfully terrified by Trump's authoritarian tactics or Republicans disappointed by his broken promises, there no longer seems to be a reasonable means of controlling our collective destiny by who we elect to govern us.  Republicans who climbed aboard the snake oil wagon of the "I alone can fix it" huckster are disappointed to discover Trump is, shockingly, somehow not the messiah who turns water into wine that they signed up for. And most Democrats don't really believe that putting Hakeem Jeffries in charge of the House of Representatives or Chuck Schumer in charge of the Senate will have any meaningful impact in reining in Trump's authoritarianism.  Independents were already cynical and have been given no reason to be less so by anything going on in this campaign.

It certainly seems as though the downscale-skewing Republican coalition is most likely to be disappointed and demoralized heading into November so it does seem like the GOP is at greatest risk of a turnout collapse and a poor election night showing....with the usual caveat that Trump's dirty tricks arsenal will dramatically escalate in the weeks ahead and likely keep even a worst-case scenario election night for Republicans from looking as bad as it should.  But anybody who needs any further proof of how weak the Democratic opposition's hand is can look at any poll from the past year and a half showing voters more unhappy with the current composition of the Democratic Party than the GOP or the Trump administration.  This is true even in polls showing Trump with approval ratings south of 35%.  

That doesn't bode well for an enthused Democratic base pining to show up at the polls between now and November 3.  Perhaps negative partisanship will awaken some lethargic Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents from their slumber in the next seven weeks, but I expect it to be less than one would expect given the fundamentals.  Democrats are still likely to have a decent night, but it's hard to believe a blistering turnout is forthcoming at the behest of an opposition party with a higher unfavorable rating than Trump.

It all speaks to a uniquely beaten-down voting public terminally unhappy with their lives who see an even darker future on the horizon and no realistic path to ameliorate it with their choices at the ballot box.  Republicans who threw in with a cult-of-personality would-be messiah are instead getting a self-serving crook of unprecedented magnitude whose criminality exceeds my wildest expectations even when I was shouting from rooftops about it two years ago.  And Democrats....haven't really decided what they want.

The faction of Democratic voters that does envision a post-Trump escape hatch to their misery skews younger and is successfully edging the party dramatically to the left, often in the form of unashamedly embracing socialism.  This is to the chagrin of the grizzled pragmatists and independents who think even the establishment Democrats are too far to the left.  All of this is playing out with the backdrop of the Israel and Palestine civil war as a de facto fault line that will quite neatly break down the factions in the years ahead.  The two factions MIGHT be able to successfully unite against a shared enemy in Trump this autumn, but they're gonna absolutely tear each other's eyes out in the fight for the 2028 Presidential nomination that begins next year.

The uncertainty of AI adds another splash of cold water onto both parties' picnics.  Trump's unwavering advocacy of expanding a technology with growing public opposition will increase his party's vulnerability in the years ahead.  But the left-trending Democrats' multi-trillion-dollar safety net expansion promises will hit the brick wall of reality if, or more likely when, the AI revolution dramatically increases public need while dramatically decreasing revenues.  Whichever course we chart in the coming election cycles, the grouchy voters of today may be looked back upon by political parties as a comparatively more innocent time next to the grouchy voters they're gonna find down the road.

Even in the best-case scenario for humanity where a controlled rollout of AI generates less employment disruption than expected and is respected by the governments that possess it to abstain from an end-of-times arms race, it's still hard to imagine a scenario where most people won't feel displaced....aliens among their own species watching from afar as the life they were promised passes them by.  This is especially true of younger people, for whom the diminished value of their labor will exacerbate inequality and leave them fighting for table scraps with their homeowner grandparents sitting on portfolios with enough presence of Nvidia stocks to keep them hanging on to the middle class with their fingernails.

How does either party function in this environment?  For Republicans, the playbook will be as simple as it always is.  Identify the prime sources of financial and cultural friction and use them to pit enough groups against each other to cobble together an aggrieved majority.  In the abstract, this is likely to work for them with the regularity that is has since Nixon, but the complicating factor for the GOP will be a smaller-scale version of what will most bedevil the Democrats.  It's just hard to see how rising public needs have any chance of being met in the era of scarcity that comes in an aging population where deaths outnumber births, retirements outnumber college graduations, nursing home admissions outnumber new job creation, and the value of human capital sinks to new depths.  Republicans will have obligations to fewer demographic groups than will Democrats, but they'll still have to deliver something to somebody to motivate them to vote.

I think the majority of voters intuitively sense most of this in the fall of 2026.  They're probably not as pessimistic as me about the future, but they're acutely aware of their shrinking pool of options in fomenting change in the present.  At this point, I think the best that Democrats can hope for is that there's a critical mass of voters out there motivated to cast a vote of no confidence against a narcissistic madman running an international crime syndicate rather than running the country.  If Democrats need more votes than that to turn seats from red to blue across the country in seven weeks, they might be in some trouble, because people who believe that anybody in government has the ability to improve their lives are gonna as scarce as oysters with pearls in the foreseeable future. 

Stay tuned for my predictions in the Senate and gubernatorial races forthcoming in October. 

 

Why Have We Given This One Word So Much Power?

There are plenty of ways in which the American culture of my youth has little resemblance to the realities of American life today.  One that really jumped out at me after comparing it to recent headlines is the cultural presence of the "N-word".  In February 1991, the youth-coded TGIF comedy "Family Matters" did a Black History Month-themed "very special episode" where the N-word was spray-painted across one of the major characters' lockers is large, bold letters.  We're talking about "Family Matters" here, the show that brought us the iconic live-action cartoon sitcom nerd Steve Urkel.....and it was hardly alone.  It wouldn't take too deep of a dive into movies or TV shows from the 80s and 90s where a character said the N-word.  It only started causing some tangible controversy by the time Andy Sipowicz said it in a late 90s episode of "NYPD Blue".

Fast forward to 2026 and a Minnesota woman was just prosecuted--and convicted--for disorderly conduct for saying the N-word to a child in a park.  There wasn't even an attempt to layer on additional context to frame the defendant's language as being tangibly threatening.  The foundation of the legal case was that vocalizing the N-word to an autistic eight-year-old child by itself constituted a crime.  Back in 2020, it would have seemed hard to top refusing to say that COVID started in a lab in Wuhan as a jump-the-shark moment in indulging racial sensitivity, but criminally prosecuting somebody for verbalizing the same word Dave Chappelle has deployed in his comedy show for the last 20 years takes the trend to an even more intoxicating level.

I don't use the N-word and I don't believe there was ever an instance that I did unless I was directly quoting somebody, even in an era where its casual usage was more widespread.  I strongly suggest you don't use the N-word either, and not just in terms of self-preservation.  The word represents a chapter in American history that deserves to die, and the denormalization of its usage by cultural gatekeepers has served a moderately valuable purpose.  But the gatekeeping has become a very unfunny parody when the word has assumed a level of power that no other word in our nation's 250-year history has been given.

The Constitution of the United States is our guidepost here, especially the First Amendment that guarantees free speech.  Even those who defend the cancel culture that's arisen to enforce usage of this word in polite society should concede that criminal prosecution is a bridge too far, and by no small amount.  There was never a constitutional carve-out for the free speech qualification of unfashionable words in the past and we shouldn't be allowed to invent one now, shoehorning its utterance into a false flag example of disorderly conduct.  On July 24, 2026, we did invent such a carve-out in Rochester, Minnesota, and I really hope it gets overturned on appeal.

And it should come as no surprise that this news story went national and brought out the worst of all parties, highlighting the extremes of our national discourse and the cold civil war we've been dancing on the periphery of for the better part of a decade.  The mother who hurled the racial epithet to a child went viral for her racist outburst and, when the predictable backlash ensued, she took to social media and turned it into a fund-raising opportunity.  A few months later, she'd collected more than $800,000 from fellow bigots and left Rochester, Minnesota, for a rural sanctuary with "excellent demographics".

We'll show her, responded those who still wanted to make an example of her, reimagining the recorded incident as disorderly conduct and then subjecting her to a manipulative form of lawfare. And now we've endured the indignity of this episode living on in the news cycle for additional weeks this summer with the wrongheaded verdict finding the defendant guilty of disorderly conduct.

It all feeds in to the kind of misguided and ultimately counterproductive backlash to Trumpism that we encountered during his first term, back when #MeToo was claiming every scalp in sight no matter thin the case and when the rise of identitarian wokeness began to be unmistakable.  The ruthless beatdown that Trump's critics were treated to in November 2024 has led to some soul-searching by the left since then, but not enough.

Last night, the marquee swing state of Wisconsin narrowly avoided nominating a candidate who called publicly called for canceling Thanksgiving and lamented her own biracial son's "proximity to whiteness".  The fact that this woman got within 20 points, let alone 3,000 votes, from being the Democratic nominee for Governor in Wisconsin is a reminder that the left's bad instincts for gauging the public temperature have not been resolved.

Meanwhile, next door in Minnesota, I suspect the new Minnesota state flag could be a sleeper issue that the Republicans are able to hang around the neck of Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, who won the nomination for the open U.S. Senate race in Minnesota by a shockingly robust 20 points last night.  I discussed a few months ago how the new state flag has become a mindless culture war flashpoint in the Gopher State, and people seem to be voting with their feet with a preference for the old state flag.  This puts Flanagan in a vulnerable spot having argued against the old state flag as an example of Manifest Destiny.  If the GOP highlights this, and honestly they'd be crazy not to, the roughly half of Minnesotans who favor the old state flag are gonna be a little less likely to vote for her, knowing that she considers them racists for favoring it.

Even if one thinks these dots shouldn't be connected, the legacy of the late 2010s and early 2020s looms large and we're probably not done suffering the downstream consequences of them yet.  There are millions of voters out there who know in their gut that there's something tangibly and irreversibly wrong with the stewardship of the country under Trump and his ideological brethren, but they remain a hard sell for their political opponents to win over.  Prosecuting and criminalizing someone for a racial slur surely isn't helping that cause.  Nor is referring to a popular state flag as racist.  Nor is calling for the cancellation of Thanksgiving.

Given what's at stake with an omnipotent strongman determined to run roughshod over every constitutional and institutional guardrail imposed to prevent autocracy, the persistence of racial and ethnic score-settling is a luxury we can't afford.  And yet, it seems as though those who claim to be most committed to taking down the omnipotent strongman can't control themselves from continuing to touch that stove and expecting a different result. 

America at 250: Are We Really That Special?

I was out of the country on July 4, 2026, the day the United States officially commemorated its 250th birthday.  In the weeks leading up to the 4th, I felt a little disappointed about this.  I was born a year after the 1976 bicentennial and would be nearly 99 years old if I survive long enough for the tricentennial, so this month would likely be the closest I'll get to inaugurating a benchmark national birthday.  Still, I always got the sense that national polarization, cynicism, and apathy was gonna snuff out any sense of collective patriotic enthusiasm for this 250th birthday, so I didn't sense I would be missing anything iconic in the way that I would have if I'd fled the continent on July 4, 1976.

It sure seems as though I made the right call.  Between the intense heat canceling events, poorly timed thunderstorms disrupting timelines for fireworks shows across the country, and Donald Trump doing his thing and making the festivities all about himself, the postmortem on the nation's 250th birthday is that it was a bit of a bust.  Everybody I've talked to across the political spectrum said it felt no more electric than a typically July 4, if not a bit less so.

As I said, I wasn't yet alive for the 1976 bicentennial, but the secondhand accounts I've come across point strongly in the direction of it being a momentous national gathering above and beyond the traditional July 4 festivities.  This seems particularly impressive when recalling that 1976 was only a few years removed from the massively divisive Vietnam War and a couple of years removed from the demoralizing resignation and near-impeachment of Richard Nixon.  Add in high inflation, high interest rates, soaring crime rates, and rising unemployment, and Americans had a lot of reasons to be in a bad mood in July 1976,  And yet every indication is that they came together for a national event and didn't let politics get in the way of it.

I suppose I should feel a sense of disappointment that the country couldn't find its pulse heading into an iconic birthday, but I can't say that I do.  I've never been a particularly patriotic person.  While I don't begrudge those who are patriotic from proudly showing off their colors to some degree, there's a cult of narrative that can easily grow out of blind patriotism that I don't think is healthy.  There's gotta be a respectable middle ground between systemically denigrating our national history for imperfections in our past, as is often done in contemporary institutions of higher education, and stifling dissent from engagement in idiotic wars based on "supporting the troops" or circling the flag.  We can never consistently find that middle ground though, and tribal politics stands poised to make it worse.

Does that mean Americans were right to largely sit this national celebration out to the shocking degree that they did? A fairly good case can be made that we should be more focused on reflection than celebration this July.  And it may be a cliche to lead with this, but President Donald J. Trump stands alone at the top of the list on why this republic has less reason to celebrate itself than nearly any other time in its 250 years.  For as much credit as is rightfully given to our founding fathers for putting together a thoughtful constitutional framework, it isn't exactly working as the bulwark against corruption and authoritarianism that we were always assured it would.

At the doorstep of our 250th birthday, it was revealed that the Trump family grifted fully $2.2 billion in 2025 by directly turning the White House into an ATM machine for personal gain.  The founding fathers had anticipated that a con man, career criminal, and/or populist huckster could at one point attain office, but we were told the other branches of government would effectively counter that poison with the needed medicine to redeem the republic in good faith.  It hasn't worked that way because tribalism has led the legislative branch to defer its responsibilities to the executive branch en masse while the judicial branch has, for the most part, run interference for the executive branch in truly astonishing ways.

The result:  A President leads an insurrection to have an agitated mob of his own supporters attempt to execute his own Vice-President, an insufficiently onerous threshold is not crossed in the legislative branch to oust said insurrectionist President through a broken impeachment process, and the judicial branch carves out an exemption for all future Presidential criminal prosecution just in time for the insurrectionist and career criminal to begin his second term.  It's not a formula for a country whose government is healthy enough to have its national birthday celebrated with any kind of earned legitimacy.

Meanwhile, the corrupted judicial branch's unfitness was reinforced only days before the nation's 250th birthday.  I've always thought the concept of birthright citizenship was highly questionable and probably something the founding fathers got wrong when they put it into the constitution.  With that said, the language is very clearly and unambiguously in the U.S. Constitution.  Any attempt to change that needed to be done through legislative process.  The Trump administration's efforts to weaponize the Supreme Court to circumvent birthright citizenship would have constituted a historically unprecedented threshold of judicial activism and triggered the clearest constitutional crisis in my lifetime.

Nonetheless, less than two weeks ago, three of nine Supreme Court justices did just that.  Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, who long bemoaned the Blackmun Court for inventing a constitutional right to abortion in the 1970s, not only invented a prohibition to birthright citizenship in the 2020s, they ignored existing language explicitly granting birthright citizenship.  If there's any precedent for judicial activism this overt, I'm not aware of it. Fully one-third of the United States Supreme Court ignored direct constitutional language over something they personally didn't like, prepared to remove the legislative branch's role in amending that language entirely.  One-third of the Supreme Court wasn't enough to get the job done, but the close call reinforces how close we are to not only having a dysfunctional government 250 years into our national experiment, but having no constitution at all.

And as is usually the case when poison is injected into the national nervous system, everybody gets sick.  The normalization of Trump's thuggery has primarily transformed the flag-waving masses of the political right into something no longer recognizable, but last week's Graham Platner embarrassment was a good reminder that when one side makes excuses for bad people, the other side is gonna surrender its aspirations for decency as well.  In no way am I putting Graham Platner or his supporters on even footing with Trump and his supporters, but the left's refusal to disavow the unfit Platner earlier than was absolutely necessary was a black eye for their judgment and, worse yet, a sign that they'll make excuses every step of the way for their own version of Trump if, or more likely when, he arises.  That's the price of tribalism, and it's a price no healthy republic can sustain.

Of course, the easy part is to criticize your own neighborhood but the harder part is identifying how your neighborhood compares with everybody else's.  In other words, is anyplace on the globe better than the U.S.?  That's a tougher call having never lived anywhere but here and only having spent a substantial amount of time in a couple of other places.  There's no doubt that most people who tried living abroad would be able to relatively quickly compile a list of pros and cons of what makes life in America better or worse than elsewhere on the globe, and it would almost certainly be a list divided.

Having taken multiple visits to Uruguay in the last few years, I can attest to the fact that even a small country with an economy a fraction of the size of America can, at least on the surface, make us look not so special. As the U.S. willfully outsources its commerce sector to Jeff Bezos, small downtowns and suburban malls alike continue to thrive in Uruguay.  As the U.S. spends twice as much money on health care as any other country in the world while still closing a quarter of its rural hospitals and clinics, Uruguay manages to have universal coverage with private insurance supplements that cost pennies on the dollar and serve every small city with Urgent Care equivalents that are now two-hour drives for Americans to access in comparably sized towns.  And you can buy a new car in Uruguay for what it costs to replace your air conditioning unit in the United States.

A long-time online contact of mine who currently lives in Japan but grew up in Louisiana has served up a similar diagnosis after a decade in the land of the rising sun.  He's not at all dismissive about his adopted country's challenges and drawbacks, but has concluded that average-income Japanese from every demographic are able to live with much more stability there than in the U.S.  He frequently brings up his working-class brother in Lafayette, Louisiana, earning a healthy $22 an hour at a blue-collar job but still coming up short of financial stability or conventional "American dream" aspirations on every metric.

It's reasonable for people to dismiss these anecdotes as whitewashing the downsides of life in the other countries, but it's likewise reasonable to dismiss the unconditional supremacy of America based on footage of European visitors in awe over the size of frozen pizzas available at our Costco stores.  We've been subjected to some of that with the documentation of foreign visitors arriving here for the World Cup these last few weeks, but it's a good bet that the visitors wealthy enough to fly overseas and buy tickets for World Cup games will return to their country of origin when the World Cup is over, prioritizing their pensions and universal health care over larger frozen pizzas.

Without question, however, most countries overseas have their own challenges, both superficial and systemic.  If I was stuck in a 400-year-old stone house without air conditioning during Paris and Berlin's heat wave last month, I'd probably surrender my narrative questioning American greatness somewhere around 2 a.m. lying on my sweat-soaked mattress pad.  Similarly, the demographic cliffs coupled with unsustainable welfare states in most of our economic competitors in Europe and East Asia present no good solutions.  When your options are either enduring rapid aging and depopulation with no strategy for rising birth rates and a coolness toward immigration or cultural change, as is the case with Japan, or willfully importing millions of violent African Muslims with the hopes of assimilation and sustained economic competitiveness, as is the case in most of western Europe, it becomes clear that the global community's pending challenges are at least as intimidating as those of the United States, if not more so.

Still, if there's a tiebreaker in regards to where in the world will offer the highest quality of life in the next 50 years as opposed to the last 250 years, it's hard to ignore the pending artificial intelligence revolution and the tea leaves available for reading in the revolution's early stages.  As discussed before, it's impossible to know the magnitude of disruption awaiting the global economy as we turn this page, but the warning signs about the devaluing of human capital are stark and imposing.  Or I should say, they're stark and imposing if you're not part of the American investor class....the same people who brought us private equity and NAFTA, and now stand poised to consolidate an even more dangerous share of the economy's value into their own accounts while passing along the higher electric bills to the very people being displaced and financially destroyed.

To be sure, the "creative destruction" brought upon by AI will be felt across the globe, but everything about the current trajectory of technology and our nation's history of embracing short-term disruption for alleged long-term benefits suggests America will be at the tip of the spear.  It'll be our tech barons who become the first five trillionaires in global history.  It'll be the same 10% of our investor class population already responsible for more than half of all consumer spending who will see that share rise to 75% in a generation.  And it'll be our income-earning population who will face pink slips and home foreclosures earlier and much more aggressively and without apology than our NATO and trans-Pacific allies.  As most of our competitors are likely to scramble to avoid incurring wreckage on their people, it's quite easy to imagine their governments offering helping hands and not difficult at all imagining the American government offering nothing but a middle finger.

Of course, this has long been a point of distinction between the U.S. and other advanced economies.  You can say it stems from endemic greed or an outsized willingness to accept risk for higher long-term reward, but the bottom line is that the United States has long been okay with shafting the very people most likely to wave its flag in commemoration of the 250th birthday.  Our national track record of shrugging off a notion of responsibility for the well-being of our people will really be put to the test if the AI revolution materializes to even a fraction of the extent many are predicting.  If we don't pass this test as a country, it's a pretty safe bet there will be even less enthusiasm for widespread national celebration on July 4, 2076, when the nation turns 300. 

Will Voters Forgive Trump For Iran?

Polling, special election results, and primary results have thus far converged to show a very coherent conclusion:  Donald Trump is unpopular and Republicans in Congress stand poised to be punished as a result of that unpopularity come November.  The magnitude of cheating before and after the election will undoubtedly blunt the impact of any Democratic victory, but it's hard to deny at this point that the Republicans are gonna get spanked.  Any hope of a snapback for the GOP ahead of the election probably vanished into the ether when Trump invaded Iran, leading the global economy down a long-term rabbit hole of higher energy prices and inflation.

It certainly seems as though it's too close to the election for voter dissatisfaction to be assuaged, but damn if I'm not seeing a framework of scenarios unfolding where GOP losses are more manageable than the fundamentals would suggest. Let's break it down:

First of all, we're dealing with an electorate that forgave Donald Trump for not only refusing to accept his undeniable defeat in the 2020 Presidential election, but leading an insurrection against the U.S. Capitol with the goal of assassinating his own Vice-President in response to that refusal to accept his defeat.  As I've written before, contemporary voters are too myopic and cartoonishly selfish to care about any of that, but it's nonetheless astonishing to consider having happened in a Western democracy, and speaks to how much will be tolerated in the interest of hardened partisanship and petty self-interest perception.

Second, the same judicial system that two years ago granted Trump a lifetime get-out-of-jail free card for all current and future crimes is predictably twisting itself into a pretzel to rig the election on behalf of the incumbent party, green-lighting efforts by red states to change their maps while roadblocking efforts by blue states to modify theirs.

Third, the Democrats are well positioned to win by default this year but their voters' addictions to questionable choices put them at a deficit.  Graham Platner, Peggy Flanagan, and Abdul El-Sayed being the likely nominees for three must-win Senate races says all you need to know about a Democratic base that's lost touch with voter priorities during the MAGA era, where the consequences of choosing poorly have amplified downstream consequences.

All of that is relatively obvious and well-known, but the wild card here is if the persuadable voters this fall are primarily motivated by the direction the economy is going, it's not as clear to me now as it was even a month ago that things won't be upwardly mobile by fall.  Add in the dumb luck that has followed Trump at every stage of his life (I swear it's like he's holding a new winning lottery ticket every week) and it's easy to imagine a "wave election" for Democrats falling short of expectations.

The first recent development to take shape was the Supreme Court rolling back most of Trump's tariffs.  Ostensibly, they ruled against Trump....and Trump pretended to be enraged by that.  But the reality was that the Court gave Trump (another!) lifeline to save him from himself with tariffs that were unpopular and not working.  With tariffs out of the way, one of the primary anchors on the blistering economic growth that we would be expected to experience right now has been quietly lifted.  Inflation is still rising because of Iran-related energy costs, but a lot of the systemic rot that was festering because of the tariffs is vanishing behind the scenes.  There's a good chance we're now standing poised to straighten out supply chains and stabilize the flow of global commerce in a way that will fairly quickly airbrush the memories of the tariffs from voters' collective psyches.  The issue that just six months ago seemed to be Trump's biggest electoral bugaboo has basically become a footnote as the general election season approaches.

Beyond that, the stock market just won't quit.  Sure, it's entirely the byproduct of the same AI bubble that will be bringing the average person to his knees in a couple short years, but anybody glancing at their quarterly 401K statement won't be connecting those dots.  It's probably only 10-15% of the population feeling any appreciable benefit from the exploding value of Nvidia stock--and most of them are likely to be MAGA-averse professionals--but the lack of expected collapse in the stock market predicted when Trump was imposing six-figure tariffs last year will keep Republicans from sustaining the kinds of losses they would from the professional class.  The bottom line is that if you're among the 10% richest Americans doing 50% of the consumer spending, you're not gonna be motivated to punish Trump in 2026.  This could help the GOP on the margins, both in votes and campaign contributions. If the Dow was at 35,000 now instead of 51,000, as seemed all but certain 12 months ago, the GOP would be in a much darker situation heading into November.

Most importantly though, Trump's foolish decision to invade Iran in February is looking less like the anchor that seemed inevitable just a few weeks ago. And nowhere is this less obvious than gas prices.  Last month, I paid $4.49 for a gallon of gas.  Today, I paid $3.35.  Gas prices are now closer to what they were before the war than they were at their mid-May peak.  This speaks to a bit of price gouging on the part of oil retailers as, up until the last few days, the 25+% fall in prices at the pump hasn't been driven by anything real.  With the diminished supply of oil reserves in the last few months, it's entirely possible that prices could go up again, but the $6 per gallon gas that seemed inevitable just a few weeks ago now seems very unlikely.

Everything points in the direction of Trump once again being able to make massive blunders and paying little to no price for them.  Sure, the Democrats are still gonna have an advantage this midterm, but the wholesale abandonment of the GOP that would have come if we were still quagmired in Iran, with soaring gas prices and downstream inflation, seems much less likely now.  Make no mistake that the "deal" that Trump brokered with Iran in exchange for opening up the Strait of Hormuz is as at least as big of a foreign policy face plant as Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, but if it's met with falling gas prices, Trump's soft supporters aren't gonna flee en masse.

As pessimistic as I am typically about American voters' choices in contemporary America, I allowed myself a couple of months this spring to really dream big in terms of the magnitude of the backlash directed at Trump this fall.  It could still happen, but with Trump once again appearing poised to avoid the consequences of disastrous policy choices that would befall basically anybody else in politics, I'm scaling back those aspirations.  A repeat of 2018 in terms of generic ballot advantage for Democrats seemed like the worst-case scenario a month ago.  Now another 2018 is looking more like a best-case scenario.

 

 

 

 

Current State of Play in 2026 Governor Races

For a long list of entirely obvious reasons, the field of play continues to get better for Democrats as we approach the 2026 midterms.  Last month, I previewed (for a second time) my thoughts on the trajectory of this year's Senate races.  This month, as the races begin to take shape, I'm gonna look at the 36 gubernatorial races on tap later this year.

It's still a bit too early to have solid thoughts on these gubernatorial races as the majority of states have not held their primaries to determine their nominees yet and there's generally a lot of candidates running for the races worth winning, in many cases with nothing resembling a clear winner.  Furthermore, there are a lot of open seats and weak incumbents.  If Kamala Harris had won in 2024, it's a safe bet the Democrats would be poised to take a bath in some of these statehouse races.  Even with Donald Trump as the turd in the Republican Party punch bowl, there's still a degree of separation between federal and state politics.  The line is getting blurrier with politics nationalizing but voters have still shown their capacity to compartmentalize even this decade, so I suspect a few surprises and nailbiters among races that today seem poised to risen or sunk by the partisan tide.  Let's break it down.

Alabama--Long-time Republican Kay Ivey's retirement has created an open seat which will curiously lead to a rematch of the 2020 Senate race where accidental Democratic Senator Doug Jones got crushed by Republican Tommy Tuberville.  Tuberville, the dumbest Senator in America now or possibly ever, is abandoning his post after a single term to run the Yellowhammer State.  That's not likely to end well but it'll nonetheless almost certainly happen.  Jones is the biggest name Democrats could get in Alabama but even the bluest possible political environment isn't gonna make things happen for a Democrat in Alabama this year.   GOP hold.

Alaska--Two-term GOP incumbent Mike Dunleavy is calling it a career and leaving behind an open seat.  It looks as though the race is poised to come down to former Republican Senator Click Bishop and Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Begich.  I have no knowledge of the players or strong feel for what way the wind is blowing in Alaska.  The Begich name is royalty in The Last Frontier and literally crosses party lines, but the risk of nepotism and Begich saturation seems very real.  Plus, Alaska's economy is gonna be booming with the spike in oil prices, meaning there will be less downside for voters there to hold court with the GOP.  Barring further information coming out to confirm or deny my gut, I'll tilt this race toward Bishop.  GOP hold.

Arizona--Democrat Katie Hobbs slipped into the Arizona statehouse in 2022 against the highly controversial Kari Lake and, under normal circumstances, it would be no easy task for her to get a second term in the still-GOP tilting Grand Canyon State.  Working to her advantage, however, is the hostility toward Donald Trump among both upscale country-club Republicans and Hispanic voters that represent the weakest links of Trump's winning 2024 coalition. Also working to Hobbs' advantage is a GOP primary fight between MAGA hard-liner Andy Biggs, establishment Republican Congressman Dave Schweikert, and rich guy/perennial candidate Scott Neely.  Right now, my money is on Hobbs.  Any of her three challengers seems like the wrong candidate for the moment is his own way.  Some would fare better than others but I think they'll all lose by low-to-mid single digits.  Dem hold.

Arkansas--Republican incumbent Sarah Huckabee Sanders runs for a second term in a state that's become such a GOP stronghold that hardly anybody pays any attention to it anymore.  Her opponent is a random black state Senator from Pine Bluff.  It's not gonna be pretty for Natural State Dems again this year.  GOP hold.

California--There's not much I can predict yet about this free-for-all other than my confidence that a Democrat will win in November as a Republican top-two seems unlikely, that Eric Swalwell will definitively not be the next California Governor despite having the momentum a month ago before his abrupt collapse, and that whoever gets the job will be woefully insufficient to effectively take on the Golden State's overwhelming litany of self-inflicted problems.  Whether it's the bland autocrat Becerra, the nasty identitarian Porter, or the hedge-fund rich guy Steyer, California will continue to be the state that most voters and politicians alike aspire to not resemble.  Dem hold.

Colorado--There's some real tension in the Democrat-dominated Rocky Mountain State as seen by the recent censure of two-term Governor Jared Polis, who is not running for re-election.  Joining the pile-on is the current Democratic Senator who is the frontrunner to replace Polis for the open seat:  Michael Bennet.  Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser is another strong candidate running for the position and, unless I'm missing more behind-the-scenes drama, either one should have no problem holding the statehouse against lackluster GOP competitors in a year like this.  At some point, I expect to see a hiccup in Colorado's straight line of realignment to being a solid blue state, but I don't see it happening this year.  Dem hold.

Connecticut--Third terms are often tricky for Governors but Democrat Ned Lamont is going for one anyway in the Nutmeg State.  For years, Republicans were punching well above their weight in Connecticut gubernatorial races but I'm skeptical that will happen in this environment.  Republican State Senator Ryan Fazio doesn't strike me as overly intimidating, but I haven't seen anything of him beyond his fund-raising haul.  Dem hold.

Florida--Two-term Republican Ron DeSantis is termed out this year and leaving behind an open state in Florida, a swing state at the beginning of DeSantis's term that's now bright red in a way that seems largely wave-proof.  MAGA Congressman Byron Donalds cleared the field on the Republican side and will be favored against either of the two highest-profile Democrats, Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings or former Republican Congressman David Jolly who switched parties to become a Democrat after nearly a decade as a talking head on MSNBC.  The only question is whether Florida has become so red that Donalds will win by double-digits this year.  I think it's more likely than not that he does.  GOP hold.

Georgia--A week ago, I'd have predicted that two-term Republican Brian Kemp's open seat was more likely than not to flip now that he's termed out.  After all, the Democrats have been watching the PVI move more to their favor every cycle in Georgia for more than a decade now, and the tea leaves had been pointing to a lopsided enthusiasm gap favoring Democrats.  Even without a formal decision on candidates as the GOP race is heading for a runoff, I'm now more bearish on Democratic chances after this week's primary vote night in which Republicans retained a cluster of state Supreme Court seats that Democrats had a measure of confidence they'd prevail in.  It was a good reminder that Democrats still need a perfect storm to prevail statewide in Georgia and I'm not sure if the scenario unfolding qualifies as that perfect storm.  Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones seems like the frontrunner for the GOP nomination and, as bland as he might be, he'll probably have a lot to work with running against the Democratic nominee, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.  It's very much a winnable race for the Democrats given the environment and how quickly Georgia is changing but right now I'm not convinced Bottoms isn't the underdog.  GOP hold.

Hawaii--There was some chatter of voter discontent two years ago about the way the Maui fires were handled that made me wonder if first-term Democratic Governor Josh Green might be vulnerable.  Going into this year, there's almost no indication that that's the case with only token GOP opposition surfacing.  There are plenty of red states where elected officials have little likelihood of being held accountable by voters because of the (R) next to their name.  Hawaii seems to be one of the few places blue enough to be unreachable for Republicans among blue states.  Dem hold.

Idaho--Republican Brad Little is running for a third state in the Gem State and is almost certain to get it.  I recall Little having a bit of a dogfight for the nomination in 2022 but that doesn't seem to be the case this year.  He has only token opposition from a Democratic attorney.  No exactly headline news that Idaho is poised to stay red.  GOP hold.

Illinois--The Land of Lincoln is one state where the primary was held and the gubernatorial race is settled.  Two-term Democratic incumbent J.B. Pritzker is running for a third term and there's limited likelihood that he'll be denied.  Republican challenger Darren Bailey, the 2022 GOP nominee, is going for a rematch.  Even in a perfect storm, Bailey would struggle to beat Pritzker, but with the partisan tide being what it is, I'm very confident it won't happen this year.  With that said, Illinois has at this point realigned so starkly as "Chicago vs. downstate" that I could see Bailey holding Pritzker to high single digits. Dem hold.

Iowa--For the last few months, the buzz has been that the anti-Trump tide has become so high in the Hawkeye State that Democratic Auditor Rob Sand is a frontrunner to replace outgoing Republican Governor Kim Reynolds.  I've operated partially on that assumption but I've been burned by too-friendly poll results for Democrats in Iowa too many times in the past to be particularly confident.  Someone in the crowded Republican field needs to get more than 35% in next month's primary to avoid selection at a party convention.  Campaign activity points to Congressman Randy Feenstra being the prohibitive favorite, but it feels like he's a bit arrogant and complacent against scrappy young right-wing challenger Zach Lahn who is all over the airwaves and likely finding some support with the red meat Republican appeals.  If I was Sand, I think I'd fear Lahn more than Feenstra in the general, but to be sure, Feenstra will be no pushover with as red as Iowa has gotten in the Trump era.  Still, polling and my gut have had me leaning toward Sand in this race and until I see a reason not to, I'm sticking with that.  Dem gain (+1 Dems).

Kansas--It's interesting that one of the nation's most ancestrally Republican states has had a Democratic Governor for 16 of the last 24 years, including retiring two-term incumbent Laura Kelly.  Still, even with 2026 shaping up to be a strong Democratic year, very few people are of the mind that the Democrats are gonna hold the seat.  State Senator Ethan Corson seems like a major long shot for hanging on against heavy GOP hitters like former Governor Jeff Colyer and state Senate President Ty Masterson.  Until I see any reason to doubt this conventional wisdom, I'll go along with it.  GOP gain (+0 Dems).

Maine--With two-term Democratic incumbent Janet Mills signing out for a disastrous Senate bid, everybody and their brother is trying to replace her.  The Democratic lineup, with names like Troy Jackson, Hannah Pingree, and Shenna Bellows, looks more intimidating than the Republican lineup of Jonathan Bush, Bobby Charles, and Garrett Mason, and that would be true even if 2026 wasn't shaping up to be a strong Democratic year.  This one is far from a sure thing at this early stage but I'd  much rather be running with a (D) than an (R) next to my name this year, especially in New England.  Dem hold.

Maryland--One of the easiest calls to make among this year's slate of gubernatorial races is that Democratic incumbent Wes Moore will get a second term in the deeply blue Old Line State.  It looks like his token opponent in 2026 will be Dan Cox, his same token opponent in 2022.  Dem hold.

Massachusetts--Only slightly less assured of a second term than Wes Moore is Maura Healey in the Bay State.  Neither of her Republican challengers looks very intimidating this year and it strikes me that the Republican brand is probably not gonna sell well in Massachusetts this year.  Dem hold.

Michigan--The Wolverine State looked like the most vulnerable statehouse hold for the Democrats this year a week ago with former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan running as an independent and poaching considerable support from likely Democratic nominee, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, that Benson could not afford to lose in increasingly purple Michigan.  Late last week though, Duggan finally responded to pleas from his party and ended his bid, shaking up the race and significantly increasing Democrats' odds of a third consecutive gubernatorial term with Gretchen Whitmer bowing out after two terms.  At least for now, Benson has to be seen as a slight favorite, especially with two Republicans bloodying themselves up for their pending primary.  Congressman John James seemed like a promising rising star several years ago when he outperformed expectations in two consecutive Senate runs.  Now he just seems like a perennial candidate with a lackluster track record who will have long odds overcoming the national tide against his party.  I suspect he'll beat top challenger Perry Johnson in the primary but if he doesn't, I'm even more confident of a Benson victory in November.  Dem hold.

Minnesota--Gopher State Democrats were sliding toward a disastrous midterm cycle, hoisted by their own petard over lackluster oversight of state coffers leading to potentially billions of dollars worth of theft by fraudsters.  To be sure, that issue will remain a black eye for Minnesota Democrats and threatens to weaken their performance in what's otherwise poised to be a big year for their party.  But two things improved Democrats' fortunes in Minnesota so far in 2026.  First, an autocratic President seeking revenge against the state foisted a masked paramilitary force into the streets that emptied their clips on protestors in cold blood and with impunity.  Coupled with the targeted executive branch disinvestments causing unnecessary financial pain to Minnesota and Trump swamped the potential for Republicans to take advantage of the environment.  Second, beleaguered two-term incumbent Tim Walz (wisely!) chose against running for a third term and is poised to be replaced on the ballot by popular Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar.  Klobuchar is really emerging as the savior here for Democrats and seems poised to take advantage of the significant political capital she's built in Minnesota, particularly against an unimpressive slate of Republican challengers that don't seem well-positioned to seize the moment.  I'm still betting this is a high-single-digit race, compared to the 15+ point blowouts seen in Klobuchar's previous Senate wins, but I'd be surprised if it was any closer than that.  Dem hold.

Nebraska--We know there won't be a Walz winning elected office for the Democrats in Minnesota in 2026 but there's a small possibility there will be one in Nebraska.  To be sure, it's not much more likely that Democrat Lynne Walz, a distant relative of Tim Walz, will be winning in the Cornhusker State this year than her cousin winning in the Gopher State.  In bright red Nebraska, expect GOP incumbent Jim Pillen to win a second term by double digits.  GOP hold.

Nevada--For three consecutive cycles, the Silver State has been trending toward the GOP.  With no Senate race this year, 2026 will be the perfect test to see if they'll return to early-2010s form or continue to see their PVI shift rightward.  Republican Joe Lombardo narrowly unseated an unpopular Democratic incumbent in 2022.  Had Harris won in 2024, it's a pretty good bet Lombardo would be cruising toward a second term.  But since Trump won and has governed like a madman just as anybody paying attention was able to predict, Lombardo is perceived as vulnerable with Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford poised to be his likely challenger.  Even when Nevada was trending Democrat a generation ago, Republicans like John Ensign and Brian Sandoval were able to resist wave cycles and find a way to win.  My suspicion is that Lombardo does as well.  I'm not overflowing with confidence about that prediction but I suspect the demographic shift that led to Nevada's softening for Democrats in the Trump era remains in play with plenty of working-class whites fully realigned.  We'll see how far Hispanics do or do not revert to form this year, but I don't envision whatever is left of the Reid Machine to be sufficiently motivated to install Aaron Ford without any Senate race in play.  GOP hold.

New Hampshire--Every two years, my instinct is to predict the Granite State is repelled enough by the GOP's MAGA pivot that their PVI will accelerate its leftward march.  And yet, it keeps not happening.  Particularly at the state level, Republicans have been crushing it in New Hampshire.  While I would hate to be running as a Republican in the northeast this year generally, I don't see a scenario where it trickles downballot to the state level strongly enough to put freshman GOP Governor Kelly Ayotte at much risk.  I don't know much about Democratic challenger Cinde Warmington, but nothing about her biography leads me to believe Ayotte has anything to fear from her.  GOP hold.

New Mexico--Two-term Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham is term-limited out, leaving an open seat in an already blue state where demographics suggest a tough year ahead for Republicans.  Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland seems to be the frontrunner on the Democratic side and a trio of Republicans is competing for their party's nomination.  I'm not very familiar with this race but will defer to the conventional wisdom of Democratic advantage, although I know there was a universal child care plan enacted in the Land of Enchantment and the likelihood of swelling expenses related to that is something that's been on my radar as a potential Democratic vulnerability.  We'll see, but the safe money early on is with the Dems.  Dem hold.

New York--It would have been hard to imagine four years ago that weakened accidental Governor Kathy Hochul would see her political standing greatly improve after her soft five-point winning margin and standing poised to cruise to reelection in 2026.  Even last year, I figured friction with newly elected Gotham mayor Zohran Mamdani would further weaken Hochul.  I also figured that upstate New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik would emerge as a strong challenger capable of taking advantage of Hochul's weaknesses.  None of that has happened.  Hochul and Mamdani have not clashed yet in the way that seemed inevitable and sabotage by Trump triggered Stefanik to drop out of the gubernatorial race entirely.  The GOP is now reduced to expecting a miracle from Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman.  Obviously, a 2024 Harris win would probably have led to a far different reality facing the two parties this midterm, but right now it seems likely that New York returns at least partially to form this year, with opposition to Trump poised to be the driving force that Hochul needs for another full term.  I expect her to get it by at least 15 points.  Dem hold.

Ohio--With two-term Republican Mike DeWine bowing out, the Republican-trending Buckeye State has an open seat.  And on the GOP side, the field was cleared for the odious MAGA ally Vivek Ramaswamy, a deeply flawed candidate who at any other time would have been DOA in a center-right state like Ohio.  If former Congressman Tim Ryan had decided to run on the Democratic side, I think he'd have had a chance, but for some reason Ryan opted out.  Democrats are left with a third-rate former public health director named Amy Acton as their nominee.  I don't know a lot about Acton but with a challenger as viscerally unlikeable as Ramaswamy, her chance is not zero.  Still, even with the mass exodus away from Trump in polling, I suspect the demographic most likely to stand by him is working-class whites.  The very group that stubbornly clung to Democrats in the Obama era are basically the last MAGA warriors on the field heading into 2026, and unfortunately for Democrats, they are more prominent in Ohio than just about anywhere else in the country.  Acton's best chance is outperforming a turnout collapse among the Republican base unimpressed with Ramaswamy, but that seems like a lot to hope for with Trump guaranteed to rally his soldiers.  I think Ramaswamy is more likely to win than not.  GOP hold.

Oklahoma--Another open seat in an even more Republican state.  We've been baited for the last two cycles into the premise that Democrats were poised to be competitive in Sooner State gubernatorial races, but on both occasions, Republican Kevin Stitt managed to win by double digits.  I don't know what the polls will show heading into this Oklahoma gubernatorial election, but I feel comfortable in predicting that GOP Attorney General Gentner Drummond will prevail over Democratic challenger Cyndi Munson by double digits again this year.  GOP hold.

Oregon--Just as I'm always skeptical about possibilities of Democratic gubernatorial wins in Oklahoma, I'm also skeptical of reports of Republican wins in Oregon.  First-term incumbent Tina Kotek is the latest head of state in the Beaver State who hasn't really connected with voters outside the Democratic base, but I still think she's the frontrunner for a second term this fall.  Her Republican challenger Christine Drazan put up a decent fight in 2022 but had the advantage of a third-party candidate poaching disproportionately Democratic votes as well as a better electoral climate for the GOP.  Drazan seems less likely to have either advantage heading into the 2026 rematch.  I'd be very surprised if Kotek didn't win more decisively this year than four years ago.  Dem hold

Pennsylvania--I'm also struck by how much better Democratic politicians who directly govern the Keystone State seem to do compared to national standardbearers, particularly those who have the audacity to run against Donald Trump.  This list includes names ranging from Ed Rendell to Tom Wolf to, until recently, Bob Casey, and now it includes first-term Governor Josh Shapiro.  Shapiro had a huge win in 2022 and has retained high approval ratings throughout his term.  He seems like a cinch for re-election against token GOP opposition this year.  I'd be surprised if he didn't win by double-digits again this year.  Dem hold

Rhode Island--Poor Dan McKee.  I know there's some controversy with a bridge that's largely credited for tanking his approval ratings, but it's not entirely clear to me why he has the lowest approval rating of any Governor in the country.  I'm also not sure why he's running for another term because he seems like a long shot to get it, particularly with a well-funded primary challenge from fellow Democrat Helena Foulkes.  On the GOP side, the distant cousin of former Democratic Governor Gina Raimondo is running as a Republican and could possibly get some traction with that last name if he's somehow able to run against McKee.  I don't see this being a year when Ocean State voters will be overly inclined to reward somebody from the party of Donald Trump though.  Dem hold

South Carolina--Retiring two-term Republican Henry McMaster has some pretty big names running for his old job, particularly on the GOP side.  Congresspersons Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman seem likely to be the frontrunners but Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette probably shouldn't be underestimated either.  Pretty safe bet that the statehouse stays in Republican hands in this increasingly conservative Deep South state, particularly with a token Democratic challenger named Jermaine Jackson that I doubt anybody will mistake for a member of the Jackson Five.  GOP hold

South Dakota--Just like in the Palmetto State, the only contest for the Mount Rushmore State is likely to emerge in the Republican primary.  Incumbent Governor Larry Rhoden got his job when Kristi Noem was appointed to the Cabinet but doesn't go into the race with the kind of advantage an incumbent typically has.  He's facing primary competition from long-time Congressman Dusty Johnson as well as Speaker of the House Toby Doeden and representative Jon Hansen.    One of them will have the distinction of crushing perennial Democratic challenger Daniel Ahlers in November.  GOP hold.

Tennessee--Two-term Republican incumbent Bill Lee is bowing out and leaving behind an open seat.  In most states, an open seat gives Democrats a chance for victory in a cycle poised to be as lopsided as this one, but that seems incredibly unlikely in the Volunteer State which has become one of the nation's most inelastic Republican states in the last decade.  Senator Marsha Blackburn is running and is the heavy favorite for the GOP nomination.  Blackburn has underperformed at various points in the past but there's virtually no scenario where she gets felled by her token Democratic opposition.  GOP hold.

Texas--It wouldn't be an election year if irrationally exuberant Democrats weren't telling us this could be the year where they start putting wins on the board in the Lone Star State.  The drumbeat is loudest for the Texas Senate race but some wild-eyed optimists think that Governor-for-life and scumbag-to-his-core Greg Abbott might be vulnerable this year.  If Abbott gets taken out by Democratic legislator Gina Hinojosa, then there was a Democratic wave large enough nationally to leave us with 54 Democratic Senators and 280 Democratic House members.  Won't happen.  GOP hold.

Vermont--It seems that five-term Republican Governor Phil Scott gets more popular each term he runs for in the most Democratic state in the country.  Not so long ago, he had a basically ceremonial position in a state whose legislature was so Democrat that Scott basically functioned as a figurehead, but after big Republican gains in the state legislature in 2024, Scott goes into 2026 with a somewhat larger footprint.  Was 2024 a tea leaf for a Vermont state government trending center-right the same way neighboring New Hampshire keeps doing or will opposition to Trump register more this year than recent cycles?  There's virtually no chance Scott will be denied another term no matter how intense Trump hatred is, but I will be curious to see how big of an anchor Trump might be for Scott in terms of margin.  GOP hold.

Wisconsin--After two narrow wins in 2018 and 2022, Democratic Governor Tony Evers is retiring, leaving behind an open seat that Democrats seem favored to hold on paper.  I'm not exactly blown away by the political acumen of any of them though, be it Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez, former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, or Madison Assemblywoman Francesca Hong, who just called for abolishing the police like it's 2020 all over again.....because that talking point has aged so well in the six years since its inception.  The winner is poised to take on Republican Congressman Tom Tiffany.  I don't know much about Rodriguez but what I do know about the other two make me think they'd struggle to win a statewide race even in a bullish Democratic year.  I'll lean toward the national trend and predict the Democrats eke out another narrow win here but watch this space as I wouldn't be surprised if the Democrats find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with the candidates they're running.  Dem hold.

Wyoming--The nation's most Republican state will elect another Republican Governor even with two-term Republican incumbent Mark Gordon retiring.  Education Superintendent Megan Degenfelder appears to be the frontrunner.  GOP hold

Kind of crazy that even in what's assumed to be a really good environment for Democrats this fall, a lot of things will have to go right for them to merely break even in gubernatorial wins.  The party is heavily exposed in statehouses across the country and hold a number of states that, on paper, they shouldn't.  The only states one could say they have a reasonable chance of going on offense are Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, and Ohio.  At least at this point, none of the statehouses held by Republican seem like viable options for flipping.  Meanwhile, Democrats are playing defense in a lot of purple and red states, including Arizona, Kansas, Maine,  Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Wisconsin.  Technically, Pennsylvania fits this category as well but Shapiro seems solid enough for re-election in that race that I'm not putting it in the same category as the others.  And while Oregon isn't a purple state, Tina Kotek has to be considered at least nominally vulnerable at this stage of the race.

I don't think I'm being irrationally bearish in predicting no net gains for Democrats in gubernatorial races.  The potential exists for the playing field to expand to places like Alaska, Florida, Texas, or New Hampshire, but it could also realistically expand the other direction to Rhode Island, Colorado, or Connecticut.  To be continued obviously as I'll reassess in the fall, but Democrats come into this cycle already punching above their weight, and the risk is that overperformance this cycle really sets them up for a hard fall in the election that will really count, and that's the 2030 midterms.