For everything Democrats seem to have going for them heading into the November midterm elections, political strategists stress that individual candidates can make or break a race.
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Candidates are critical for Republicans, too, who are trying to keep their control of Congress and hold on to power in some states while being weighed down by an unpopular president leading an unpopular war and an economy many voters don’t feel good about.
Here are some of the most interesting candidates of 2026. This is not an exhaustive list and will be a recurring feature. (Here are some other interesting candidates.)
Iowa is a surprisingly competitive state in these midterm elections. It has an open governor’s race, an open Senate race and several competitive House seats. Iowa voted for Donald Trump by 13 points in 2024, but the state’s farmers have been hit hard by the president’s tariffs and the price of fertilizer amid his war with Iran.
State Rep. Josh Turek is trying to become the first Democrat elected senator from Iowa since 2008. He’s a former Paralympian gold medalist and represents a district in the state legislature that voted for Trump. He was born with spina bifida and says his father’s exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam was one of the reasons.
“I’m an example of the living consequences of these forever wars,” Turek said last week.
Turek may be one of the most moderate Democrats on the ballot in this election. He ran an ad in which he said of the nation’s immigration system: “I’ll work with anyone to fix it, including President Trump.” He has talked a lot about the sky-high cancer rates in Iowa, which some researchers think are linked to Big Agriculture.
Turek is running against Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), who has Trump’s endorsement and recently appeared with him in the Oval Office. Yet she has also carefully criticized high prices and called for ending the Iran war quickly. Trump recently promised a $15 billion steel mill in the state, and Republicans, including the president’s super PAC, have spent more than $100 million in Iowa.
If there’s a bright spot for Republicans this year, it could be in Minnesota. Republicans have their strongest chance in decades to win a Senate race with former TV sports broadcaster Michele Tafoya, a self-described “pro-choice” Republican and a regular on football fans’ TV screens (though she has largely stuck to conservative media and podcasts).
Minnesota regularly elects Democrats, but Trump lost the state by only four percentage points in 2024, and Republicans are excited by Tafoya’s fundraising ability and her attempts to link the Democratic candidate, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, to the state’s welfare fraud scandal.
Tafoya’s success will depend on convincing voters that she’s not too closely linked to Trump: “When something is right, I will go with it,” she said. “When something is wrong, I have the spine to stand up to it.”
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Dan Osborn is an independent challenging Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska), who is uber-wealthy. Osborn ran and lost a Senate race in Nebraska just two years ago, but political strategists took notice of how the union leader won over a number of Trump voters. (Democrats have not fielded a candidate in the race this year.)
This time around, Osborn has come under attack for privately saying that some Trump supporters’ lives “probably suck.”
When The Washington Post asked him about it last week, Osborn simply responded: “My life sucks too,” citing the cost of living.
It’s not clear which party he’d caucus with if he won this race, but a win in Nebraska — while a reach — would help Democrats knock off yet more Senate Republicans in the efforts to win back the majority.
Sen. Susan Collins is a unicorn. She is one of the last remaining Senate candidates in the country to represent a state that consistently votes for the other party. Collins has been a senator for Maine since the ’90s, a stretch during which the state has consistently supported Democrats for president.
Republicans say she’s a textbook example of how to find common ground and a connection with voters who normally vote for the other side while holding on to her values. Democrats maintain the exact opposite: that Collins is far less independent than she portrays herself to be.
This year, she’s in one of her toughest reelection battles. This is her first reelection fight since the Supreme Court overturned national abortion protections. Before her last reelection campaign, Collins was the decisive vote to put conservative Brett M. Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, a source of great controversy for her in Maine and something she has had to defend ever since.
Senate Democrats’ hopes of winning the majority almost certainly run through Maine, and polling shows it a very tight race despite 2026 quickly becoming an extraordinarily unfriendly political environment for Republicans.
Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.
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