From coast to coast, House and Senate, the results of the midterms could make waves through 2028 and beyond.
The 2026 midterms are about as high-stakes as elections can be.
Thirty-five Senate seats are up for grabs next November, as are all 435 House seats. Republicans currently hold slim majorities in both houses of Congress — one that could get even slimmer with the coming resignation of Marjorie Taylor Greene. The results of the elections could shape the final two years of President Donald Trump’s time in the White House. The midterms will also loom over the 2028 presidential election, particularly for Democrats, who do not have an obvious candidate waiting in the wings.
We’re still a ways out, but many of the most crucial races are already heating up. Here are five races to keep an eye on.
The cycle’s most heated election began months ago when Trump ally and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a challenge to longtime Sen. John Cornyn.
Paxton has argued that Cornyn is too establishment to continue representing the state, saying that “Cornyn’s Swamp friends are spending tens of millions of dollars to attack me.” Cornyn in turn has called Paxton a “conman and a fraud,” the Associated Press reported earlier this year.
The winner of that primary will face off against either Colin Allred, a former congressman, or State Rep. James Talarico, who made national headlines in 2021 when he and a group of Democrat colleagues fled Texas to prevent the state legislature from voting on bills they opposed. More recently, Talarico — who has pitched himself as a Christian Democrat — came under fire after it was revealed that he followed a number of OnlyFans models on Instagram.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, whose radical outbursts are almost too numerous to mention, is also weighing entering the race — which has Republicans thrilled.
Like John Cornyn, Susan Collins has caught plenty of flak from her fellow Republicans in recent years. But the moderate senator’s main concern as she runs for a fifth term comes from Democrats, not a primary challenger.
Maine Governor Janet Mills lost an early lead to populist upstart Graham Platner — though the oyster farmer blew an early lead with a series of scandals, including resurfaced Reddit posts in which he slammed cops and called himself a “communist,” and the revelation that he had a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest.
Platner has been bleeding staff in the wake of these revelations, including his campaign manager, political director, and national finance manager.
Despite all this, Platner still seems to be the Democrat to beat — though a recent poll found that voters favor Collins the more they learn about Platner.
In Michigan, Rep. Haley Stevens, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, and Abdul El-Sayed are seeing who can run furthest to the Left.
McMorrow recently held a fundraiser with a leftist blogger who mocked Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Stevens, who endorsed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), once screamed at her constituents for supporting the Second Amendment. And El-Sayed, who’s backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), blamed Israel for “invading” Gaza in October 2023, failing to mention that the “invasion” in question was a military response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians.
Whichever Democrat emerges victorious from the fray will face off against Mike Rogers, a Trump-endorsed former congressman who lost his 2024 Senate race by a tiny margin.
Rogers isn’t the only lawmaker staging a political comeback in 2026. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown — a longtime leftist fixture in the Upper Chamber who fell last year to Republican Bernie Moreno — is running against Republican Sen. Jon Husted, who was tapped to fill Vice President JD Vance’s seat.
Brown was dogged with allegations of hypocrisy throughout his time in the Senate, something The Daily Wire frequently covered. The leftist was slammed for taking donations from drug companies at the center of the opioid crisis and attending a ritzy Hollywood fundraiser while constituents worried about the water quality at their home after the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine.
Of all the House seats up for grabs in 2026 — and, remember, that’s all of them — the most closely-watched is California, where Democrats are fighting to fill former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s soon-to-be-vacated seat.
Pelosi reportedly wants San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan to succeed her. But the candidate to beat is California State Senator Scott Wiener, a man so radical that even the New York Times has its doubts about him.
From radical trans activism to legalizing prostitution and pedophilia, there’s almost nothing Wiener doesn’t want the state to permit — unless of course parents don’t want their minor children to undergo radical gender procedures, in which case he thinks the state should be able to take custody of those children.
Wiener’s record is almost too insane to believe, but The Daily Wire recently published the definitive account of this wannabe congressman. Give it a read here.
Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff will be defending his seat against a Republican challenger yet to be determined. The current frontrunners are Reps. Mike Collins and Derek Dooley, and former University of Tennessee football coach Buddy Carter.
The race is expected to be extraordinarily expensive, as Ossoff already has $21 million in cash on hand, according to Federal Election Commission data. Although it’s unclear who the nominee on the Republican side will be, millions are already pouring in for the individual candidates at this stage, The Daily Wire reported in October.
Ossoff most recently made waves for his vote against reopening the government, a vote that Republicans will likely lord over him throughout the cycle.
North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is set to square off against Republican Michael Whatley. Former Senators John Sununu and Scott Brown are duking it out in a New Hampshire primary. Redistricting battles are sure to make house races spicy in Texas, Indiana, North Carolina, and more. And just for fun, the weirdest scion of the Kennedy family is running alongside about a dozen other Democrats to represent a district in the heart of Zohran Mamdani’s Manhattan.
It’s going to be a heck of a cycle. Stick with The Daily Wire, we’ll be covering it all!
