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By now, people who have been paying close attention to this year’s midterm elections have a pretty good idea of the state of play: Democrats hope to gain four seats in the Senate and three seats in the House to flip both chambers and have more power to check President Trump’s policy agenda. Republicans, fearing a rout amid the Iran war and its impact on Americans’ lives back home, are hoping to hold on where they can.
But the national picture tells only part of the story. When reporters talk about “what voters want,” they are really talking about individuals living lives in different contexts. Every House and Senate race has a unique flavor depending on local problems and which candidate voters believe can help solve them.
This week on Radio Atlantic, my colleagues Russell Berman and David Graham join me to zoom in on the races they are paying special attention to as November approaches—for their national implications this time around, and for 2028 and beyond.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Russell Berman: The map has become so wide for Democrats, and this is the big surprise of the year right now, as we’re talking in early October. It’s possible that Democrats could lose Michigan and still win the Senate. They have a chance in other red states—Texas, Alaska, even Kansas seems to be very close and competitive right now.
Adam Harris: Control over the House and Senate hangs in the balance of this upcoming midterm election. Republicans hope to retain thin majorities in both chambers. But Democrats are hoping to gain four seats in the Senate and three in the House of Representatives, control Congress, and curb President Trump’s power in his final two years. That’s the big picture, but it doesn’t necessarily offer the texture of why Democrats believe they can win back power. The national trends give some indication; Democrats are focusing their message on salient issues: the price of gasoline and household items—often boiled down to the catchall of affordability—and the president’s sinking approval ratings in the shadow of the war in Iran. But national trends can only explain so much.
This is Radio Atlantic, I’m Adam Harris, and this week, my colleagues, Atlantic staff writers Russell Berman and David Graham, join me to share the five races they are following most closely this midterm cycle. We’ll discuss why they’re following these contests—beyond the fact that the polls say the races are close—and what they’ll be looking out for in the closing weeks of the campaign.
Let’s get to questions. David, Russell, thank you so much for joining me today.
Russell Berman: Great to be here.
David Graham: My pleasure.
Harris: So over the weekend we asked you to think about the five most interesting races to you, and we appreciate your doing so. And today, we’re gonna work through those lists together. We asked you not to share your lists with each other, so everybody’s coming to this fresh. David, I’m going to go to you first. What’s the first race that you want to talk about that you think is important and why?
Graham: Let’s talk about the Maine Senate race, which is maybe one that people will be familiar with, but I think one that is just really important and worth talking about. This is where Susan Collins, the longtime Republican incumbent, is running for another term. And she is, after a raucous primary and then withdrawal by Graham Platner, facing off against Troy Jackson, who is another sort of populist Democrat in, I think, an interesting test of both national currents. And also, Maine is a weird state politically, and I think we’re gonna see how that plays out in this race.
Harris: Yeah, Russell, I saw you nodding as well. It seems that Maine was on your list too.
Berman: Bingo! That was my first one as well. This one should be one—on paper, it should be an easy one, or maybe the easiest, for the Democrats to flip. It is by far the bluest state of the Senate seats where Republicans have an incumbent on the ballot.
But as David mentioned, Susan Collins has become a white whale for Democrats over the course of her career. In 2020, she won the state; she beat the polls; she won the state by nine points on the same day that Joe Biden won the state by about the same amount. And that was a huge shocker. And we don’t see as much split-ticket voting as we used to. And so she’s certainly not only one of the more moderate Republican senators, but perhaps the most resilient.
And Jackson is more authentically working-class than the last candidate that the Democrats had, Graham Platner. He’s less flawed, as far as we know, but he’s also less charismatic. And so I think that’s one reason why we’re seeing the race go down to the wire, even though the environment is so favorable to Democrats.
It was unthinkable that the Democrats could win back the Senate without Maine. And now it’s possible that even if the Democrats win the Senate, as we’ll talk about in other races, they still might have trouble beating Susan Collins.
Harris: Why is Susan Collins so strong politically in Maine? Why does she have such staying power?
Graham: You have this kind of politician that just sticks around forever, and I think she is one of the few remaining of that type. And to the questions about how Maine is an unusual state—from a national perspective, she does look like a flip-flopper and she has these weird views and she expresses concern about things like Roe v. Wade, but then votes for justices who most people believed correctly would vote to overturn Roe. So she’s in this strange place. But I think maybe that represents some Mainers accurately. And I also think that Maine is a small enough state that she is somebody who people feel like they know. And so she has a credibility with voters that extends past the brand of the Republican Party and extends well before the Trump era as well.
Berman: I would add that Democrats in New England in particular—it’s a little bit of a weird thing, which is such a blue area—they like voting for Republicans or moderate Republicans occasionally. So you see this in Vermont, where they’ve elected and reelected a moderate Republican, Phil Scott, as governor, even though they elect and love Bernie Sanders, the most progressive, as of now, senator in the country.
And then in Massachusetts, fairly recently, they elected a moderate Republican governor, Charlie Baker, as well. We’re seeing that less in Congress and on the federal level, but Collins is sort of the last of this breed of Republican in New England—or one of the last. And her approval ratings are lower now than they were six years ago, so that’s giving Democrats some hope that this will be different. But Republicans say that the Democrats are basically running the same campaign they’ve run in the past against her and just hoping it’ll work this time.
Harris: And does Troy Jackson’s late entry into the race actually change the context of anything? Does it put him in a disadvantage against Collins?
Berman: I think it does because Platner was such a lightning rod, obviously, but he had such deep support among people, and it seemed like people who weren’t regular voters and the type of low-propensity voters that Democrats need to get. And Jackson is not as well known—he was a logger before he entered politics up in the northern, more rural part of Maine. He talks like he’s from northern Maine. So that can be compelling but, of course, people have to get to know him, and he hasn’t had as much time. It’s a little bit of the Kamala Harris effect that we might see from two years ago.
Harris: So Russell, we’re gonna move out of Maine into your next pick. What’s the next one on your list?
Berman: Well, I’ve got one that, Adam, you and I have talked about before—the Michigan Senate race. As we’ve talked about, Democrats need to flip four Republican seats, but that’s only if they hold all of their own seats. And Michigan is the one seat that they currently hold—where the incumbent, Gary Peters, is retiring—that Republicans have a decent chance to flip. And of course, the candidates are Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers.
And the big question is whether Abdul El-Sayed, somebody as progressive as he is—he’s another Bernie Sanders type of Democrat. He’s running on Medicare for All. He’s a harsh critic of Israel. He would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. And can he win in not a blue state like Vermont, but in a purple state like Michigan?
And Rogers, of all the Republican candidates—aside from maybe Susan Collins—in the races that we’re watching, is a really strong recruit for Republicans. He is supportive of President Trump, but not super MAGA. He doesn’t have a ton of scandals in his past. He’s a former longtime member of the House with national-security experience, and most importantly, nearly won the state’s other Senate seat just two years ago; he lost narrowly to Elissa Slotkin. And so he’s a middle-of-the-road in this modern era of Republicanism. The polls have El-Sayed up, and I think that’s partially because the national environment is so favorable for Democrats. So this is one that, even though he has a lead, is worth watching until the end.
Harris: David, it seemed that Michigan was also on your list.
Graham: It was also on my list. And I think it’s interesting—to Russell’s point, I think Mike Rogers is maybe about as close as you can get to a generic Republican in a race. He is a conservative, but he’s not wildly out-there. He is supportive of Trump, but he is not a very clear MAGA candidate. And so you have this almost generic Republican, albeit one with a long reputation in Michigan politics, running against a Democrat who is very much atypical. In his background, he is a medical doctor. He’s atypical in his politics. He’s run for positions before but hasn’t won a statewide race. And so I think it’s a very interesting clash of different styles in that race.
Harris: If Democrats lose the seat in Michigan, is there another likely pickup for them? Is there somewhere else that they would be looking if they don’t feel that the seat is as secure?
Berman: Well, the map has become so wide for Democrats. And this is the big surprise of the year right now, as we’re talking in early October, is that the answer is yes. Like with Maine, it’s possible that Democrats could lose Michigan and still win the Senate. Now, could they lose Michigan and Maine and win the Senate? Probably not. But they have a chance in other red states—Texas, Alaska, even Kansas seems to be very close and competitive right now. North Carolina is one that they’re probably going to win if the polls are close to right. So it’s possible that they might not need Michigan, but they certainly don’t want to take that risk.
Harris: So David, what’s the next one on your list? We’ve got Maine and we’ve got Michigan.
Graham: That’s actually a good segue to my next one. I have flagged the Ohio Senate race. And part of this is just home cooking; I grew up in Ohio, so I feel a little bit parochial about this one. But I think this is a really interesting race.
We have former Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, running against current Senator Jon Husted, a Republican. Polls have been close. They suggest that maybe Brown is up a little bit in some polls, but it’s fairly close.
I think this is interesting. Brown has been such a dominant figure in Ohio politics for a long time. There was a story recently about how voters think of him as the incumbent and don’t really realize that Husted is the incumbent.
Berman: That was fascinating; I remember that.
Harris: Is it because of the name ID, or?
Graham: Yeah. Husted has been in state politics for a long time, but doesn’t have the same sort of name ID and has just been in the Senate for a short time. The last Democrat to win a statewide race in Ohio was one Sherrod Brown. That was in 2018, when he won a Senate seat that he then lost six years later, two years ago.
And so to see someone from the Democratic Party win, even one as unusual as Sherrod Brown, I think would be a remarkable moment. I don’t know if it would be a turning point for Ohio politics or just another weird outlier. But I would note that Amy Acton, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, has also been leading in some polls against former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, which is not something I would have predicted six, eight, 12 months ago, certainly.
Harris: Russell, did you have Ohio?
Berman: I didn’t, but only because I was pretty sure David would, given his pedigree in Ohio. But no, it’s a very important race. This part of the country is where Democrats are trying to win back. Iowa is another place where Trump has won after Obama won twice that Democrats might be on the comeback trail.
I think the governor’s race, as David mentioned, is fascinating. The other thing for Republicans is that they don’t seem to love any of their candidates, or a lot of their candidates in Ohio. There’s Ramaswamy, and Ramaswamy has other issues in that he can come off kind of arrogant, and he was flying out to the U.S. Open in the middle of the campaign to have a prominent seat there, which wasn’t a good look.
And so there’s a question of whether the Republican base, the turnout in Ohio, is worth watching. And so that you might have an interplay up and down the ballot for some of these races.
Harris: So what was the third one on your list then?
Berman: For me, we have to talk about Texas, right? Is this the year that Texas goes blue? And Democrats, in politics we’ve been watching this for the better part of a decade now, with demographic trends and watching the Hispanic vote, which is obviously huge in Texas. And Democrats have kind of needed a perfect storm, and they might actually have it this year.
They have a strong candidate in James Talarico, who’s young and charismatic. They have a ridiculously flawed Republican opponent in Ken Paxton, the attorney general, who had a messy divorce, where his wife is now actually on camera in an ad telling Republicans to vote for the Republican ticket without mentioning the fact that she sued her ex-husband for divorce and he’s the Senate candidate. And then, of course, the Democrats need a strong national environment, and that’s what it looks like they have here.
The Hispanic vote is gonna be key. We’re seeing polling out of some House races in southern Texas that looks like the Hispanic vote is swinging back pretty hard toward Democrats after trending toward Republicans in the last couple of elections. And it would just be a huge—to use the cliché—a huge tsunami politically if Democrats did win this Senate seat. We’ve talked about the importance of each of these races for the balance of power, and of course that’s important, but more the symbolic significance of Democrats winning Texas. Then we’d immediately start talking about whether Texas is in play on the presidential level in 2028, which would change the entire political map for both parties. And then, of course, Talarico, if he were to win, would immediately go into the conversation for future national office—because that’s how things work these days—whether it’s in 2028 or later. But Texas is big for a reason, and the Senate seat is fascinating.
Harris: David, it seems like Texas was in yours as well.
Graham: I did not have the Texas Senate race, partly because I suspected Russell might, but I have a third race that is also in Texas, which is the Fifteenth House District. And Russell is sort of touching on this. This is where Monica De La Cruz, a Republican incumbent, is running for reelection. She won, I believe by 14 points, two years ago; Trump won this direct district by 18 points. And it’s in the Rio Grande Valley, an area that non-Texans got to learn about after the 2024 election as a place where there’s a huge swing from a historically Democratic area toward Republicans and toward Trump, and we were talking a lot about Hispanic shifts in the vote and how enduring this would be.
If this race is an indication, it may not be all that enduring. Democrats have a really strong candidate, they believe: a guy named Bobby Pulido, who is a well-known Tejano singer; he has a couple Latin Grammys. He’s a moderate Democrat. I think he’s a really compelling individual, and he seems to be a relatively compelling candidate also. This race looks really close. I think a Pulido win would be a huge moral victory for Democrats and contribute to a potential House majority. I think even if he loses, seeing where the vote comes out in that district will be a really interesting indicator of the Hispanic vote and of the Rio Grande Valley and maybe of the future of Texas as well.
Berman: The Democrats actually put out an internal poll—so take it with a grain of salt—that had Pulido winning by 13 points in this race. And this is not, was not seen as like a toss-up race, like one of those dozen or so races that we knew were gonna be close. This is a race that started pretty favorably for Republicans, in part because I’m pretty sure it was made even redder in their gerrymander that they did last year.
But of course, when Republicans did all that gerrymandering in Texas, they were basically betting that the Hispanic shift that we saw in the last couple of elections would hold. But if it doesn’t hold, then they could be up the creek, so to speak. This could be a big problem. There’s a couple of other house races in Texas where we could see Democrats win that Republicans kind of thought that they had put in the bag.
Harris: When we come back, we work through the rest of David and Russell’s lists.
[Music]
Harris: So David, we have Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Texas House. Russell, so far we have Maine, Michigan, Texas Senate. Russell, what’s your fourth?
Berman: My fourth is another red state where Democrats have a decent chance to win for the first time in a while, and that’s all the way out in Alaska. They have a pretty strong centrist type of candidate in Mary Peltola. She has won statewide in Alaska before. She briefly held the at-large House seat there. She lost narrowly in her reelection bid in 2024. And she’s going up against the incumbent, Dan Sullivan, who’s a fairly standard-issue Republican, similar to Mike Rogers in Michigan. But the crazy thing about this race—one of them—is that he’s not the only Dan Sullivan on the ballot. There is another Dan Sullivan who, much to the chagrin of Republicans in Alaska and nationally, was able to get on the ballot. And he could siphon away votes from the senator Dan Sullivan in a close race.
The other wrinkle with Alaska is that they use ranked-choice voting. And so it’s possible—we’ve seen ranked-choice voting, as a system, does not advantage either party. But in Alaska, it has seemed to help the more moderate candidate, which tends to be the Democratic candidate, or the other one example there is Lisa Murkowski, who is another moderate survivor among Republicans in the Senate.
And so Alaska is one of these states—because the population is so small, it doesn’t take a big shift of voters for it to go the other way. And that’s what Democrats have seen here. On the presidential level, it hasn’t looked completely out of reach. Democrats, some of them joke that they really just need to take, like, 50,000 Democrats from Brooklyn or Washington, D.C., and have them move to Alaska and it could really change the entire equation for them.
So this one is interesting. And the Democrats did—unlike in Texas, more recently at least than in Texas—they won a Senate seat in Alaska during a good Democratic year. I believe that was in 2008 with Mark Begich, and he served for a term before losing his reelection bid. So those are the dynamics there. And again, this is one of those races that either could pad—if the Democrats have a really good night—their majority or make their majority. Or it could save their majority if they end up losing in one of these other races that we talked about, like in Maine or Michigan.
Harris: All right, we are down to our final race for each of you. David, I’m gonna go to you first. Where are we on the map?
Graham: I am once again doing some home cooking, and I’m hoping I can keep Russell on his toes a little bit with this one. I’ve picked out North Carolina’s First District. He saw this coming, probably.
Berman: Not exactly, not exactly, but I was like, There’s one of those House races. He’s going against the grain here. (Laughs.)
Graham: So in this race you’ve got Don Davis, who is a moderate Democrat who is running for reelection against Laurie Buckhout, who is a Republican. And he’s running for reelection, but it’s not really in the same district. So this is a race that was—we talked about this a little bit with Texas. This is a map that was redrawn by North Carolina Republicans when President Trump was pushing a lot of Republican legislatures and Republican states to redraw their maps.
North Carolina has seen a lot of gerrymandering already, and so there was only so much squeeze left in this map. But they thought they had drawn a map that would be very hard for Don Davis to win. Davis decided to run anyway, which not everyone was sure he would do. And he seems to be running a pretty close race. The polling on this—House polling can be really unreliable; most of the polls are partisan. The Republican polls show Laurie Buckhout up; their Democratic polls show Don Davis up. So it’s hard to know. But I think it’s a really interesting test of this Republican gerrymandering and whether we might be pushing into what they call dummy-mander territory, where you just stretch your voters out so much that you end up not being able to win these districts.
I was out in this district a couple months ago, and there were billboards up that said Don Davis, he’s one of us. Not Don Davis, he’s a Democrat, notably. And so I’ll be curious to see also, regardless of who wins this race, where it comes down and what that tells us about the gerrymandering push that we saw around the country.
Harris: And Russell, what’s your big five?
Berman: Well, we’re staying in the same region and we’re going down to South Carolina. And that’s the First District there. This is in and around Charleston; the Low Country, around Charleston, includes Hilton Head.
And so this is the race that is the seat that is currently held by Nancy Mace. She is a social-media star, if you will, but she is not very popular anymore in her district. And she’s not running for reelection—she ran for governor and she lost pretty badly. And the fact that she’s unpopular in her district is one of the factors that’s helping Democrats. And the Democrats have a very interesting candidate in Nancy—another Nancy—a Nancy Lacore, who is a former Republican and she was the chief of the Navy Reserve until Pete Hegseth fired her last year. She was among many military leaders that he fired and continues to fire; many of them are women or people of color.
And this is a seat that’s not a toss-up. This is one where if the Democratic wave is pretty big, it’s going to continue—again the metaphor and the cliché—to wash over places like South Carolina’s First District. Because this is a district that does still lean Republican. Democrats actually won the seat in their last wave year, in the Trump midterm in 2018. A moderate named Joe Cunningham, in pretty big surprise, won this seat, and then he lost two years later to Nancy Mace. And then the Republicans gerrymandered the seat to make it a little bit more Republican and help them hold it. And so that’s making it still a pretty tough seat for Democrats to win.
But the Democrats—as David mentioned, these polls are partisan, but they have a poll showing that it’s very close. They seem cautiously optimistic, in part because of Mace’s unpopularity there. The Republican candidate is a woman named Jenny Costa Honeycutt, who seems to be a perfectly fine candidate, but it’s telling that she’s running a campaign where she is running against what she calls clickbait politics, which seems to be a not-so-veiled reference to, I am not Nancy Mace; I will be a different type of member of Congress. So this is one that I’m actually heading down to report on and I’ll be watching closely.
Harris: We’ve zoomed in a lot, y’all. I wanna broaden us back out to bring it to a close. If you had to draw a through line out from your list heading into the midterms, what is the through line to your list?
Berman: Well, it’s not on all of them, but on a lot of them it’s Democrats trying to make inroads in red areas in a way that can really unlock a lot of new territory for them in future elections. If they’re able to make these connections with voters, if they actually win these races and then govern in a way that the voters like, it could change the political map going forward in a way that we haven’t seen on the Democratic side since really the Obama era in their first midterm win, during the Bush years in 2006 and 2008, with Obama. And so I think that is a through line. And then of course, the obvious one is just how unpopular President Trump is and the impact that’s having on Republican candidates in, again, these states that they usually win pretty easily.
Harris: And David, for yours?
Graham: One other thing that I note going through my list, through most of these races, is just these candidates who have particular connections or routes to electorates. You look at a guy like Bobby Pulido, you look at a guy like Sherrod Brown, who seems to be the only Democrat, maybe, who can win a statewide in Ohio. You look at Don Davis, somebody who’s saying he’s one of us. You look at Troy Jackson, who’s a logger, but also Susan Collins, who’s had that race for a long time.
And so, although there are big national waves and big national currents, and I think the economy and Trump’s unpopularity are so dominant, what does make a lot of difference in these races are the way voters connect with individual candidates and the way candidates can connect with the voters.
Harris: Well, David, Russell, thank you so much for helping us process the big national picture and understand it at a more local, granular level as we head towards the midterm elections. You’ve given a lot for us to think about. And thank you so much for joining me this morning.
Berman: It was great, thanks.
Graham: Thank you.
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