As long as we have a country, we will combat corruption. It is a uniquely American right of passage, and it takes place in every facet of our society. While no one could have foretold the complete destruction of the Senate majority down to 44 seats, corruption is doing exactly what I imagined it would do in the Alaska Senate race, which is down to the wire:

I don’t know what is going to come from the Trump administration on election integrity in the next few months. I have devoted the last six years of my life to that very cause, and will take the president’s side in reminding you that he has in fact done everything possible to remedy this issue, only to be thwarted by courts and his own U.S. Senate majority botching the SAVE America Act. Trump is currently busy posting on social media about Texas; perhaps it will bring attention to what has everyone reeling and give definitive answers. My recommendation is that a GOP candidate that won his or her race volunteer for some sort of an audit. A lot of you want answers not only on Texas, but need answers on Kansas, South Carolina, Mississippi, and many other places, too. There are legitimate political factors tied to midterm swings that played a role in these races, and when the time comes, I will discuss my findings in detail.

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In 2013, the year I left the Army, I was stationed in Alaska. When considering where to put down roots, all blue states (as we knew them then) were off the map. I received an offer to work in Houston’s oil and gas industry, and there we went. Two of my children were born there, and I viewed Texas as a safe haven from all of the left-wing insanity that was unleashed during the Obama administration. As I grew to understand politics more and more, I realized I was living under a naive assessment. 90% of Texas is urban and suburban. Any large urban swell or change in minority voting patterns could give you a close result, and over the long run, change everything you thought you knew.

Those shifts were delayed as more and more Americans fled their homes in failing blue states to live in Plano, Frisco, Denton, San Marcos, New Braunfels, Weatherford, and Burleson. They thought they were moving to an impenetrable fortress; what they were moving to is the Democrats’ ultimate prize. Don’t misread what I’m telling you - I am not telling you to pipe down about your concerns over this week, nor am I telling you that American elections are secure. They are not.

But what I am telling you is that this week’s outcomes in many states tell us that there can be no more running away.

Every time there is an election in California, people look for me to give them assurance that Republicans will be taking the state back. I consult the registration data, and demonstrate that there are roughly exactly as many Republicans living in the state today as there were when George W. Bush was president. Our most populated state has lost millions of GOP voters (registered Republicans or right-independent) to other states. When you’re already the underdog and then you take away what resistance you did have, you have no shot.

The left has created a perfect storm by chasing and catching the car this week. They will now be encouraged to invest heavily in a number of states they found success in, and in doing so will rattle the psyches of those who thought they had escaped the fray by moving there. You will be forced to care, forced to dig in, and forced to fight for what you believe in, or you will be overwhelmed and defeated.

Contrary to what you may believe, it is not a curse. It is the providence of God to build your character, regardless of how you may feel about that.

Because you have trusted in your own way and in the multitude of your warriors, therefore the tumult of war shall arise among your people, and all your fortresses shall be destroyed... Hosea 10:13-14

…They will demolish with the sword your fortified cities in which you trust. Jeremiah 5:17

‘In that day,’ declares the Lord, ‘I will destroy your horses from among you and demolish your chariots. I will destroy the cities of your land and tear down all your strongholds. Micah 5:10-11

This is not to say that anyone who has moved a family from a secular hellhole to Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, Tennessee, Florida, or Arizona is wrong for having done so. Our friend David Clements has never abandoned New Mexico, and carries on the fight while being a part of his local community. We are called to be salt and light, and if you read the piece below, you’ll understand why this has been pressed upon my heart.

No, we don’t have to like how the midterms went down. We don’t have to suddenly think elections are fair, and that all results fully encompass the intent of the voters - clearly they don’t in Alaska, and in other states that run terrible elections like Nevada and Colorado, which both had their fair share of results that overran the wildest expectations of race raters and forecasters. But if the Democrats are seated in Congress in their predicted numbers, and a number of states are now infested with and governed by people who despise your way of life, you have no choice but to stand up, be heard, take risks, be targeted, and potentially persecuted or you will lose everything by default.

We didn’t want to rebuild anything after 2024. The political future was bright, the coalition strong, and many goals were within reach. Still, we must adapt for the future and outsmart the enemy, and now we have an opportunity to do it everywhere and go on offense instead of worrying about what we may lose. For all of my political life, this movement has been about fear of loss rather than reaching out boldly in faith, trusting that we may make lasting change in society that will impact the political outcomes we desire.

Rachel is now free of her office; we prayed for God’s will to be done in her election, even if it hurt and wasn’t what we campaigned for. The answer was clear. We are preparing a plan to go big with dreams to recapture what we have lost, to pursue churches, which have countless members who sit out and don’t vote, to develop a working urban strategy to stop forfeiting such large margins that put states on auto-pilot. We will be in search of serious financial partners for these goals, so if this is something you have interest in helping us with, please do not hesitate to chime in or contact me (skeshel@protonmail.com).

We are in a tough spot, and there is no guarantee that everything will right itself in any short period of time; our children and grandchildren may be the ones who benefit from what we do today. Things are terrible in the Senate, and for all appointments for the foreseeable future. But you were created to go through this time, and you have no choice. I spent my requisite period of time this week feeling sorry for myself, and concluded once again that I have nowhere else to go.

These quotes inspire me:

There will be those of you who find this message to be “cheerleading” and “coping.” Fine. I don’t need you to agree with me. If you discard it, you’ve agreed with the inevitable fate that you will willfully allow yourself to become a subject with no say in government. If you accept what I have to say as the truth, you will find your heart for this battle, and find a way to make lasting change that empowers the passive to find their voice.

Seth Keshel, MBA, a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran, is the author of The American War on Election Corruption and the bestselling newsletter, Captain K’s Corner.

_{Captain K’s Corner is a Polymarket partner newsletter.}

One of those books is The Fourth Turning:

Neil Howe and William Strauss

A well-known classic in some circles that is often branded as conspiracy, but the generational cycles and their supporting theories are laid out in convincing fashion. The reader will discern that western, especially American, civilization is in the thick of a Fourth Turning, which is a conclusion to an 80-year cycle that has governed history for centuries, if not longer. I found it most interesting when the authors clearly described the three full cycles of American history concluding with the American Revolution, Civil War, and World War II, respectively, all roughly 80 years apart. This read is fascinating, but a bit dry and may be best on audio.

It sounds a little kooky and contrived, but when you read through the authors’ points, you’ll see that their cycles have come to fulfillment over and over again for centuries. The surviving author, Neil Howe, wrote a book called The Fourth Turning is Here in 2023, and believes we entered it around the start of the Obama era. The generational theories assert that there are four cycles lasting roughly 20 years each in a saeculum:

• First Turning - the period after the climax; a time of unity and peace. Consider the post-WWII boom in America with her emergence as world super power.

• Second Turning - the period of challenging and testing of institutions. Think of the radicals of the 1960s, with America still strong.

• Third Turning - the period of decline. This began in the 1980s, with many negative trends related to family life, divorce, disease (AIDS epidemic), and public morality (Clinton in office). The country still has strength.

• Fourth Turning - the crisis period. If we consider WWII’s end the climax of the last Fourth Turning, then we are now 80 years in the future and arguably at the climax of this crisis period and perhaps nearing the onset of the next Fourth Turning.

The three previous crisis periods in American history ended in our favor:

• World War II

• The Civil War

• The American Revolution and the Founding of the Republic

What’s the Crisis?

Ever since I found out about the “Fourth Turning” theory a decade ago, I have been anxiously awaiting what could be the climax point. There is no guarantee it will resolve well, but if the pattern holds true, this period of great anxiety may be accelerating events that will come to pass in the very near future. As I pondered the outcome of Tuesday’s elections, it dawned on me.

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Then, on November 5, I had my awakening moment. I believe it had to have been the call of the Holy Spirit to put on the armor and stand up for what I knew was right. God wrote the rest of my story. Right now, I’m waiting on my next “November 5” to roll around. I’d be lying to you if I told you I don’t feel that flicker of doubt and fear within me after last night’s electoral bloodbath.

People are looking to place blame for last night. Was it Trump? Was it Thune? How much of this can be attributed to the political pendulum, which is what I’ve been referring to as the likeliest cause for what I saw as a Democrat House takeover, or have people been radicalized to burn it down?

I’m about to take today’s post down a very personal pathway. On November 5, 2024, I posted this:

In it, I called all 312 electoral votes correctly for president. In doing so, I trumped The New York Times, which had written a special hit piece just for me the month before. People were blown away by the level of research and how I could account for each county’s ballot counts based on what type of laws are on the books. I have maintained since the early days of the Trump 47 administration, even when people were still happy, that Democrats would likely win the House. Yesterday, I gave them a range up to 229. They have now not only reached that number, but have surpassed it and taken many seats in such crimson-shaded Trump-won territory that not even the most ardent leftists online would have expected to gain. But now, I’m a “garbage analyst” to some because I expected the Senate to behave like it did in 2018, with states aligning with presidential baselines despite many competitive House seats flipping. Not even the most disenchanted people on the right expected to lose some of the Senate seats that were lost last night, or lose the ones they were worried about by the margins by which they were lost.

This wave cleaned out a lot of dead weight within the Republican Party. Unfortunately, it also took out a lot of amazing freedom fighters. Despite being one of the most highly regarded voices for liberty in any legislature anywhere, Rachel is going to lose her seat here in Arizona, along with her running mate, a talented guy named John Winchester who had been looking to knock the Democrat out of the other (Arizona has two representatives per legislative district). I turned down an opportunity to do Election Night with Dan Bongino in his studio because this time around, I wanted to be with my wife at her watch party. We came into it together, and we went out of it together. What she said to me last night is something I want you to take to heart.

We left the watch party after it became a funeral, with everyone watching the results come in while being heckled and jeered by leftists who crashed the event. After we left, I missed my turns many times and drove past my exit twice trying to get us home - all in a state of shock. The thing I admire about Rachel the most is that she hates politics, isn’t owned by lobbyists and special interests, and only wanted to run this once more out of hope of serving with Andy Biggs, who also lost. I masked my feelings because she’s the one who put her life on hold to run to represent We The People, but she leaned over to me when we laid down last night and said, “What’s the verse you always remind me of?”

I thought for a minute, then said: For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

2 Timothy 1:7. This, from the lady who did everything warranting reelection yet stands to be swept out of office in a giant wave, with Democrats taking legislative majorities here for the first time in many decades.

I am a truly rich man and no election outcome changes that.

There will be time to analyze results. It will be hard, infuriating, and arduous - but necessary. We are afforded our rights to address our grievances with government by political means. Those who do not wish to take part in the political process invite an accelerated destruction of the concept of self-government, and will be greatly troubled by what I believe is right around the corner. It will be a period of tribulation that will break more minds than all of the chaotic events of the past 18 months, including the killing of Charlie Kirk and all of the insane conspiracy theories that emerged from that event.

Two years ago, we were celebrating. Trump had returned to office, and brought majorities in both chambers with him. Now, despite the Senate map being overwhelmingly against Democrats and the House appearing to afford only a modest majority, things were far worse than anyone could have imagined. My expected margins for Republicans I favored in all Senate seats that were lost were slim, but in line with the 2018 baselines.

A lot of you are angry. But if we are supposed to have a spirit of power, love, and sound mind, then I can’t help but wonder if last night’s outcomes were ordained to tell us to stop finding our security in election wins and rely on the only power that can truly transform society. We have been trying to stave off our political demise for years. Now we get to come face to face with that which we fear, and the person in the mirror is responsible for how we respond to that.

You can and should take time to feel the sting of defeat. It is part of what makes you human, and as much as I hate it, it is nowhere near the most painful event in my life. I said goodbye to a terminally ill father when I was 25 years old so I could go spend a year in Afghanistan, knowing I’d never see him again. Those times hardened me, and so did my own failings and lessons learned over the years. The human inside of me being called dumb for under-pricing the extent of the Democrat House victory I expected, and for expecting Republican Senate seats to resist a wave as they did in 2018, doesn’t want to face the day. I understand if you want to stop sponsoring my newsletter because I missed the impact on the Senate, but for those of you who choose to continue to support my work - I will carry on the fight once again and continue to give you my best efforts as a watchman on the wall.

It is when we think things are darkest that God does what no man can, and I trust in His provision for our country and our future.

Seth Keshel, MBA, a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran, is the author of The American War on Election Corruption and the bestselling newsletter, Captain K’s Corner.

_{Captain K’s Corner is a Polymarket partner newsletter.}

Roughly one in eight midterms sees the president’s party gain seats. This hasn’t happened since 2002, but this year’s midterm affords Republicans a far greater chance to hold the majority than a standard cycle because of the massive redistricting efforts undertaken by many states that have pulled about 90% of seats completely out of competitiveness. Even Ronald Reagan’s GOP lost the 1986 midterms when the President enjoyed a 63% approval rating. History tends to do what history does.

Polymarket bettors follow the historical pattern and heavily favor Democrats (albeit by too much given the state of the map):

As I wrote in my estimate for the Senate:

I’m here to give you what I believe is a balanced view free of polling noise and narrative propaganda.

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ENTRY POINT

The House is the more volatile chamber of Congress. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who is fighting for her political life in IA-1, won her seat by 6 votes in 2020 - out of roughly 400,000 cast. There will be races this year that are decided by potentially hundreds (if not fewer) of votes. For this reason, my running scale of House estimates is more turbulent than my Senate estimates (which more closely resemble the presidential disposition of an entire state rather than a district voting on local issues).

The map below, where marked for a party, does not mean a seat is 100% safe and out of range for an upset. This is just a starting point for which seats I consider highly likely to align with Democrats or Republicans:

201 Democrat, 198 Republican

Remember, these solid reds and blues do not all align with a predicted margin. They simply create the initial boundaries for the overall assessment. They include some seats on the periphery of being flippable in a wave environment, such as AZ-2 (Eli Crane, Republican), MI-4 (Bill Huizenga, Republican), and KY-6 (open).

While I would not consider 201 seats the floor for Democrats, who as the out-party have the tailwind in competitive seats, I would say 198 seats is the absolute bottom of the barrel for the Republican Party. This is not my prediction, but it should help you understand that I view the insane betting market projections showing Democrats over 240 seats as implausible, if not fundamentally impossible. This is because of the strength of redistricting done by both parties. Obama took office in 2009 with 257 Democrats in the House; Trump took office in 2017 with 241 Republicans in the House. Those days are long gone, because parties are fighting for small majorities until at least the next reapportionment.

LEANERS

207 Republican, 204 Democrat

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I’m here to give you what I believe is a balanced view free of polling noise and narrative propaganda.

ENTRY POINT

Practically all analysts of all ideological backgrounds agree on the starting point:

44 Republican/43 Democrat

Florida, thanks to the Democrats’ poor candidate, will be a bigger blowout than it would have been against Alexander Vindman. You can read about it here:

REPUBLICAN TIER ONE

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I. The Race

Ken Paxton (Republican) is the Attorney General of Texas, and has won three statewide races for that office. He knocked out four-term incumbent John Cornyn in a run-off earlier this year to win the party nomination for the General Election.

James Talarico (Democrat) is the Texas state representative who defeated Jasmine Crockett in the Democrat primary earlier this year to earn the party’s Senate nomination. If elected, he will be the first Democrat since 1994 to win a statewide race.

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II. State Profile

From my forecast of the gubernatorial race:

The overwhelming theme of all 2026 analysis of Texas should be the same - if all of that red votes, then Texas will be red. The struggle with all of the work put into that endeavor so far ties directly to the fact that Texas has open primaries and does not register voters by party, whereas Florida closes primaries and does have party registration. We can watch it live as every vote comes in and know definitively in which direction the electorate is headed.

Texas’s presidential baseline is perhaps more imposing to Democrats’ long-term hopes than any before it, even those elections George W. Bush won by more than Trump’s +13.7% margin in 2024. The bedrock of that victory was a historic performance with Latino voters - 55% of them backed Trump:

While some of its urban counties, especially Dallas and Travis, have gone the way of their counterparts in the past 20 years (mega-blue), Harris (which contains Houston) and Bexar (San Antonio) have large working-class populations which have kept the county margins from getting out of control against Republicans. The rural areas of Texas are overwhelmingly Republican, and even more so now that rural South Texas has lurched in the same direction.

Democrats must have low Republican turnout, large swings in a small handful of counties, and overwhelming turnout in four blue bubbles (Harris, Bexar, Travis, Dallas Counties) to win a statewide election in Texas - something they haven’t done since 1994.

2026, thanks to its place on the calendar and in the electoral cycles, gives them their best shot in years to do just that, and they mostly have their eyes set on the Senate race between James Talarico and Ken Paxton, which I will profile after the end of in-person early voting.

Presidential Margins

2016 Trump +9.0%

2020 Trump +5.6%

2024 Trump +13.7%

Key Statistics

• 40.2% Hispanic, 39.3% White, 11.6% Black, 5.1% Asian

III. Market Assessment

Despite most of the bets being on Paxton, whales are betting on Talarico and creating an illusion that has little basis in a historical concept, given no Democrat wins statewide in 32 years.

IV. History

Democrats last had a United States Senator representing Texas in 1993, when Bob Krueger lost a special election to Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison. Krueger had replaced Lloyd Bentsen, Michael Dukakis’s choice for vice president in 1988, who had become Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton earlier that year.

Hutchison then proceeded to be elected for a full term in 1994, then reelected by massive margins in 2000 and 2006. She had expected to turn the seat over to David Dewhurst, but Ted Cruz got in the way, won the nomination, and has sat in that seat ever since first elected in 2012 and seated in 2013. As a side note, Cruz is perhaps the most annoying senator in the Republican universe, and I hope to see him appointed to the Supreme Court so we can avoid having to listen to him doom on and on about Texas:

Cruz and practically every other shaky Republican appearing on cable news is spooked about this year’s race because of this result from 2018:

The seat Paxton and Talarico are vying for has been in Republican hands since John Tower was elected in 1961 to finish the term begun by none other than Lyndon B. Johnson, who vacated it to become John F. Kennedy’s vice president. Tower made the handoff to Phil Gramm in 1984, and in 2002, John Cornyn was elected to take over. While I’m on the topic of Cornyn, if for some reason Talarico defies the odds and wins this seat, you can blame Cornyn and his endless millions spent on attack ads against Paxton when he should have just retired after giving us this garbage:

Yes, Cornyn had his worst years of voting in the four years of the Trump 45 administration, yet he sits online like a scorned teen wondering why the GOP primary voters rejected him - all while praying Paxton loses.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

Both sides had damaging primaries, the Republicans more so.

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I have now completed individual assessments for the 24 races I consider decisive in 2024. That is to say they are the most likely seats that will determine the winner of the coming majority. Still, with so many races, 435 in all, upsets can happen. Here is how I see the races in these 10 seats I think are on the bubble:

CO-4

Boebert (R-inc.) vs. Laubacher (D)

• Party registration has slipped left from 2024, but is still R+18.3% in a district covering rural eastern Colorado

• Laubacher is flush with cash and running in a state with Universal Mail-In Voting, which gives her a chance to sneak up

RATING

75/25 Boebert (R) - too rural and too red

FL-14

Beltran (R) vs. Castor (D-inc.)

• GOP leads party registration by more than 9 points in seat redrawn to push Castor out of Congress

• Early voting not as impressive in Florida as hoped for, leaving Castor some optimism as a well-known incumbent

RATING

60/40 Beltran (R) - Florida Republicans have all the momentum, and I feel good about their odds of flipping the toughest seat, FL-25. That means they should get FL-14, too.

FL-22

Askar (R) vs. Dandiya (D)

• FL-22 is redrawn and includes a heavy Republican vote from Collier County and moderate portions of Palm Beach and Broward County; district is more than 8 points in favor of GOP by registration

• Dandiya’s hopes rest on low turnout on Election Day for GOP

RATING

65/35 Askar (R) - Askar has a big financial edge and isn’t facing the incumbent.

IA-2

Mitchell (R) vs. James (D)

• This seat came open due to Ashley Hinson’s run for Senate

• Republicans have added to their voter registration lead in this Trump +10 seat since November 2024

RATING

65/35 Mitchell (R) - I have Democrats favored in IA-1 and IA-3, but IA-2 is a bridge too far as Democrats have collapsed after a fast start in early voting.

NH-1

DiLorenzo (R) vs. Shaheen (D)

• Seat open for new representative thanks to Pappas running for U.S. Senate

• Daughter of Senator Shaheen is Democrat nominee and will benefit from mother’s political network, but DiLorenzo has the funds to make this race interesting

RATING

65/35 Shaheen (D) - New Hampshire likes to favor the out-party, especially when Republicans are in the White House. Shaheen’s name recognition will likely carry her across.

OH-1

Conroy (R) vs. Landsman (D-inc.)

• Ohio legislature didn’t cut deep enough into the new OH-1 boundaries, otherwise they could have guaranteed a flip

• Landsman is a tough incumbent in a district Trump won narrowly; he is not invincible, because urban turnout is terrible in Ohio - including in Cincinnati (the heart of the district)

RATING

60/40 Landsman (D) - Landsman would have a considerably higher rating if Cincinnati turnout wasn’t poor heading into Election Day.

PA-1

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I. The Race

Juan Ciscomani (Republican) seeks his third term representing AZ-6 in the U.S. House. He won the seat in 2022 in the first election held under its current boundaries after having served as an advisor to former Arizona governor Doug Ducey. Ciscomani is the first naturalized immigrant from Mexico to serve in Congress from Arizona.

JoAnna Mendoza (Democrat) is a Marine Corps veteran who found her way into politics after retirement from the military. She has worked extensively as a lobbyist and ran unsuccessfully for the Arizona Senate in 2020.

The ballot also includes potential spoilers for both candidates - especially Green Party candidate Gary Swing (who would exclusively siphon votes from Mendoza).

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II. District Geography

Arizona’s 6th Congressional District (AZ-6) is wedged into the southeast corner of the state and stretches across five counties: all of tiny Greenlee County, and fragments of Cochise, Graham, Pinal, and Pima Counties. The Pima portion includes chunks of northeast Tucson, the sole reason the district is competitive in any way and the portion Mendoza rests her hopes on for unseating Ciscomani.

Mendoza is originally from Eloy in Pinal County, so she will look for extra support in that part of the district while looking to leverage her military service to sandbag Ciscomani’s margins in Cochise County, which is home to Fort Huachuca - the headquarters of the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Corps (where yours truly was twice stationed).

The shift against Trump in northeastern Tucson and its suburbs (which includes my wife’s district, Legislative District 17) dramatically reduced the presidential margins of these boundaries:

As you can clearly see, Trump went from winning these boundaries by 5.7% in 2016 to carrying them by less than a point in 2020 and 2024, running behind Ciscomani in the latter run. Whereas he has continuously improved with Latino voters, he has backtracked with affluent former Republicans of the Flake/McCain variety. It truly takes a skilled political toolset to succeed in this district, and it would be difficult to draw a more complex and competitive district than AZ-6. The winning candidate must have an excellent overall game that includes rural outreach and urban strategy.

Key Statistics

• 63.1% White, 24.7% Hispanic

• 96.8% Urban, 3.2% Rural

III. Market Assessment

Polymarket bettors have their money on the out-party candidate, Mendoza, but have her significantly overvalued against a candidate who has figured out how to thread the needle in the Trump era.

IV. History

The latest redistricting of Arizona drastically altered the composition of the suburban Tucson district. The remainder of Tucson, the urban core and its heavily Hispanic working-class vote in the southern end of the metro, has long been given over to the Grijalva political family, which rules over its subjects with an iron fist.

In 2016, Cochise County and northeastern Pima County made up AZ-2 (AZ-2 is now Eli Crane’s district in northern Arizona). Incumbent Martha McSally won the seat by 14 points, at the same time Trump lost the district by 5. That is one of the biggest red flags possible looking back at the 2018 cycle (Trump massively underperforming the GOP House candidate), and when McSally vacated the seat to run for U.S. Senate, all hell broke loose. Democrats won the seat by 9.5%.

Cochise County, while weaker in margin, wasn’t the problem. It was northeastern Pima County, which is still in Ciscomani’s district today. The middle swung hard to the left and contributed one more to the Democrat count on their way to a strong House majority win. Ann Kirkpatrick, who took the seat, held it by 10.2% against Republican Brandon Martin in 2020’s crooked election.

Arizona redistricted, and with Kirkpatrick retiring, Ciscomani and Kirsten Engel battled for the seat in the 2022 midterms. Despite Arizona elections being a disaster once again, Ciscomani narrowly defeated Engel in what was a surprise to many.

Ciscomani then held the seat in 2024 by a larger margin against the same opponent, with his win being the seat that led media networks to call the House for the GOP:

History suggests to us that an elastic portion of the electorate in Pima County can swing hard in a midterm, but also that Ciscomani has found success in a district that has been resistant to the MAGA agenda.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

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I. The Race

Scott Singer (Republican) is a south Florida native and attorney who served three terms as the mayor of Boca Raton. He chairs the Mayors’ Council of the America First Policy Institute and is looking to represent the newly redrawn FL-25 in Congress.

Jared Moskowitz (Democrat) was elected to represent the old FL-23 in 2022 and is one of the smartest Democrats in Congress. He was twice appointed to special roles by Governor DeSantis before entering Congress; once he was there, he supported the DOGE push to maximize government efficiency and was part of the bipartisan task force investigating the assassination attempt against President Trump.

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II. District Geography

Florida’s 25th Congressional District (FL-25) isn’t even in existence yet; this is the first General Election held under these boundaries following Florida’s 2026 redistricting effort that looks to give Republicans up to four additional U.S. House seats. These efforts upended Moskowitz from his old boundaries and prompted him to file for the race for this new FL-25.

This district looks like a skinny, vertical sliver spanning three counties - Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. It avoids the major cities of those counties (Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach, respectively) and includes cities like Miami Beach, Boca Raton, and other communities situated along the shoreline.

These boundaries create a district that reminds me a lot of the new TX-34, another decisive U.S. House seat that is thought to be competitive because of the major progress President Trump made with Latino voters. The only difference is that in South Florida, you’re talking about Venezuelans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans more than Mexicans in Texas. On paper, these boundaries went red enough for President Trump that they seem like automatic GOP pickups; a closer look at the trends and down ballot impacts suggests otherwise even though this new district is much whiter (non-Hispanic, anyway) than TX-34 is.

Presidential Margins

In his 1.2% statewide win of then-battleground Florida in 2016, Trump lost these boundaries by 12.3%. Then, with progress made in a 3.4% statewide win in 2020, Trump lost them by 5.7% - narrowly missing out on a flip of Miami-Dade County. Trump’s huge margins in 2024 everywhere in the Sunshine State brought new optimism for another GOP district in South Florida; his +8.9% margin in the new boundaries sits 21.2% to the right of where it was in 2016.

Singer’s challenge, not being named Donald J. Trump or Ron DeSantis himself, will be to hold the Trump coalition together against the Democrat-blowing headwinds of a midterm - especially against a Democrat who notably displays no Trump Derangement Syndrome. Both candidates are Jewish in a 25% Jewish district.

Key Statistics

• 54% White, 28% Hispanic, 18% Black/Other

III. Market Assessment

Despite the major progress made within these new boundaries, Polymarket bettors favor Moskowitz four-to-one.

IV. History

The district as presently drawn for the 2026 election was broken up over other districts in 2018, most notably what was then FL-25 in the north end of the district, and what was then FL-27 in the southern end of the district, extending down into parts of core Miami. Representative Mario Diaz-Balart held his seat in FL-25 by an impressive margin of 21 points, only down a few notches from 2016.

2018’s FL-27 is the portion of the present district (FL-25) that gave Republicans fits. The retirement of GOP Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who won by 9.8% in 2016, left an open seat for Democrat Donna Shalala and Republican Maria Elvira Salazar (the amnesty queen now representing today’s FL-27) to battle over. Shalala won by six points, representing a 15.8% swing from 2016.

Moskowitz won his current seat (FL-23 before the change) by 4.8% in 2022, then again by the exact same margin in 2024:

Trump only lost those boundaries by 1.9%.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

Fortunately for Democrats, especially in a state trending as hard to the right as Florida, Moskowitz soundly defeated radical left-winger Oliver Larkin in the Democrat primary.

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I. The Race

Rick Jackson (Republican) is a billionaire healthcare executive who came out of nowhere to take the GOP gubernatorial nomination from a crowded field of candidates, including Trump-endorsed Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones. He has a relatable story from growing up in poverty and contributed large sums of his own money to finance his campaign.

Keisha Lance Bottoms (Democrat) was once mayor of Atlanta (2018-2022) and later worked in the Biden administration. Her campaign is very loudly anti-Trump to distract from her lack of meaningful achievement as Atlanta’s mayor; if elected, she would be the first black woman to govern an American state.

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II. State Profile

Simply put, Georgia is a looming catastrophe of epic proportions for the Republicans. Perhaps not this year for governor, but almost certainly for U.S. Senator. Without a major change in racial voting patterns, Georgia looks like a blue state to me by 2036 - close enough to get excited about when the first votes drop, but urban and polarized enough to remember better days not so long ago.

President Trump carried Georgia by 5.1% in 2016, and barely had to campaign there despite his lack of political experience. Trump then gained a massive heap of net new votes and ran into Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s corrupt elections system and a 634 percent increase in mail-in ballot usage from 2016 to 2020. He managed to keep driving up his vote total in a re-try in 2024, and despite a prodigious performance, carried the Peach State by a measly 2.2%.

Presidential Margins

2016 Trump +5.1%

2020 Biden +0.2%

2024 Trump +2.2%

If you want to get into the weeds and details of the 2020 election in Georgia and other states, read my book, The American War on Election Corruption.

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Georgia still has plenty of issues with public confidence in election results, but its political problems remain. The Atlanta metro dominates the rest of the state. Fulton and DeKalb Counties are the two Democrat strongholds making up core Atlanta. They are flanked by Cobb and Gwinnett Counties, two former Republican strongholds of the suburban variety that both flipped in 2016 and gotten bluer and bluer. The graphic below illustrates just how badly President Trump has been smoked in metro Atlanta:

Southern black voters are more loyal to Democrats than black voters anywhere else. In Georgia, from the 1990s until only recently, they were easily outvoted by the extremely conservative white voter base. Unfortunately for Republicans, the turn to Republican populism (“MAGA”) has created a moderate wing of the party that is confined to metro Atlanta that has been instrumental for declining margins not only in northern Fulton County, but also in suburban counties like Forsyth and Cherokee Counties.

The rural counties of Georgia (outside of the “Black Belt” rural counties that support Democrats) are overwhelmingly red. The issue is that they are maxed out and practically incapable of producing notably larger margins in absolute votes. Any major growth in Atlanta without progress with voters there, or further slippage in suburban counties, makes a blue Georgia increasingly likely in coming years.

Key Statistics

• 53.2% White, 32.3% Black, 10.5% Hispanic

III. Market Assessment

Polymarket bettors favor Bottoms, but Jackson is still considered competitive and subject to the same wild swings in these markets impacting all GOP candidates.

IV. History

Georgia’s gubernatorial history closely resembles Texas’s, even if the current chapter started eight years later than the Lone Star State’s. In 2002, Sonny Perdue was elected governor of Georgia, defeating Roy Barnes. In winning that race, Perdue became the first Republican governor of the Peach State since Reconstruction. He served two terms and gave way to Nathan Deal, a former Democrat, who won in 2010 and took over in January 2011.

In 2018, the first electoral test of the state since Trump’s election win, Secretary of State Brian Kemp was the GOP nominee for governor in a race everyone overlooked. It nearly backfired, but Kemp held on by a tiny margin over progressive favorite Stacey Abrams.

Just 54,723 votes, 1.4%, separated Kemp and Abrams, thus preventing the good people of Georgia from having this individual as their governor:

Kemp wound up waffling on his pledge to root out the corruption of the 2020 election and sided with Raffensperger over Trump; this earned Trump’s ire, so he endorsed former Senator David Perdue to primary Kemp in 2022. Kemp throttled Perdue, then wen t on to beat Abrams soundly in a rematch in the General Election (+7.5% margin).

To conclude, the modern history of Georgia suggests the state prefers Republican governors. It should not surprise you that an anti-Trump state rewarded the governor who stuck it to Trump the most, and this is an important thing for understanding how things next week will likely unfold.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

This is going to highlight a major Republican problem that will be a recurring theme in Georgia.

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I. The Race

Mike Rogers (Republican) has been at the political game a long time. He is a former Army officer and FBI agent who then served seven terms representing the old MI-8 in the U.S. House. He ran “unsuccessfully” for Michigan’s other Senate seat in 2024, which was “won” by Elissa Slotkin with late mail dumps after Trump had been declared the winner of the state. Now he takes aim at the other seat, which is open due to the retirement of Democrat Gary Peters.

Abdul El-Sayed (Democrat) is 42 and born in Michigan to Egyptian immigrants. He calls himself a “physician” due to his medical education, but is not a licensed practicing physician. If elected, he will be the first Muslim U.S. Senator, but he must first get past the obstacles of many Democrat groups opposing his candidacy and his DSA-aligned positions like the abolition of ICE and adoption of Medicare-for-all in a Trump-won state.

II. State Profile

Michigan has come the longest way from the pits of a massive Obama margin than any other state. Here is what the state looked like for a +16.4% Democrat win in 2008:

Obama won 46 of Michigan’s 83 counties that year; for context, Kamala Harris only carried 9 counties in 2024. He even had more votes in 2008 than Donald Trump did in 2024. This is largely owed to the disintegration of the Democrats’ stranglehold over the white working class voter, which we’ve also seen take place in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. This trend began with the 2010 midterm Tea Party wave and was visible in Michigan’s 2012 presidential returns when Obama still won the state by a comfortable margin (+9.5%), but coughed up 26 counties he had carried in 2008:

Along came a GOP presidential nominee who, unlike Romney, picked up these disaffected former Democrat voters in droves and snuck past Hillary Clinton in 2016:

Trump “lost” the state in the criminally corrupt 2020 election, which saw the use of mail-in ballots double from 2016 and his massive lead reverse itself while America slept, but made things “too big to rig” in 2024. Here are Trump’s presidential margins in three races:

2016 Trump +0.2%

2020 Biden +2.8%

2024 Trump +1.4%

In the old school of Republican thought, the way to make Michigan red was to use Monroe and Macomb Counties to cancel out Wayne County, and then ride the tide in the rest of the state. Democrats get most of their punch from Wayne (Detroit), but also huge margins from Oakland (the former Republican suburban county north of Detroit) and Washtenaw Counties (home of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan. Macomb County, which features the key House race for MI-10’s open seat, is perhaps the most instrumental county in Trump’s transformation of the Great Lakes State:

Macomb, essentially the home of the “Reagan Democrat,” has gone from giving Obama a margin of +36,121 in 2008 to +69,683 for Trump in 2024. That’s a movement of 105,804 net votes toward Trump from the 2008 Obama blowout (and this is even counting the Democrat mastery of mail-in ballot collection in the Midwest, so it would be much higher).

Rogers must keep the Trump coalition intact, and is well positioned to do so given El-Sayed’s various weak points and Rogers’s own establishment Republican leanings, which will play well for him in the traditionally Republican strongholds in western Michigan dating back to the 19th century, such as Ottawa County and parts of Kent County (Grand Rapids), which has been lost in the Trump era.

Key Statistics

• 68.2% White, 15.5% Black, 8.3% Hispanic

III. Market Assessment

Yet another market swung by polling and narratives shows the Democrat nominee significantly over-valued.

IV. History

Michigan’s last Republican Senator was Spencer Abraham, who was elected in the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” He only made it one term before being ousted in 2000 by Debbie Stabenow, who has all the charisma of a cardboard box. Still, she managed to get reelected three times, having the luxury of running with two Democrat midterm tailwinds (2006 and 2018) and alongside an Obama statewide victory (2012). The 2018 margin for the three-term incumbent Stabenow tells us a lot about this year’s race between Rogers and El-Sayed:

Running into a 2018 headwind, up-and-comer John James (who is the Congressman for MI-10 running now for Governor this year) lost to Stabenow by just 6.5% - a margin 3.1% to the right of Gretchen Whitmer’s concurrent first gubernatorial victory. Keep in mind that Stabenow was the incumbent with maximum name recognition running in a year in which these midwestern state’s hadn’t become heavily “MAGA” down-ballot after Trump’s shock victories. This election example alone should rule out some of these ridiculous poll margins El-Sayed has been credited with recently.

Stabenow retired, and then handed her seat over to seditionist Elissa Slotkin, a useless spook who should be prosecuted. Not that I have much of an opinion on the matter:

Turned away in 2024, Rogers is now after the other seat. Democrat Carl Levin won it in 1978, and then held onto it for six terms. Gary Peters ran upon news of Levin’s retirement in 2014 and won an impressive margin despite a dominant GOP year, but then ran into the Trump momentum and barely held on (an election he would have lost if fair) against James in 2020 (1.7% margin). Smelling the coffee of a reddening Michigan, Peters is now moving for retirement and letting Rogers and El-Sayed battle for the prize.

One final note - Gretchen Whitmer would have walked into this seat this year. She didn’t, and that is your tell that she will probably be announcing for president next year.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

Rogers ran uncontested for the GOP nomination. The Democrat Senate primary was a Category 5 dumpster fire that has massive implications for the General Election contest:

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I. The Race

Jon Husted (Republican) is serving out the Senate term won by Vice President JD Vance in 2022, and under Ohio law is required to stand for this special election for the completion of the term. Before serving in the Senate, Husted was Ohio’s Lieutenant Governor.

Sherrod Brown (Democrat) is looking to make his way back to the Senate after having won three terms there (2006, 2012, 2018) before losing to Senator Bernie Moreno in 2024, when President Trump carried the state by 11.2%. If Brown wins, he will have to run again in 2028.

II. State Profile

Ohio was once the premier bellwether state in presidential politics. From 1896 through 2016, Ohio failed to vote for the winner of the presidency only twice - in 1944 and 1960. We all know the 2020 election had its issues, but I tend to believe Ohio would have stuck with its record as an accurate predictor in a fair race.

Kamala Harris won 6 of 88 counties in Ohio’s 2024 presidential elections. Only five of them have meaningful vote counts:

• Cuyahoga County (Cleveland)

• Franklin County (Columbus)

• Hamilton County (Cincinnati)

• Lucas County (Toledo)

• Summit County (Akron)

Contrast the above results with how the map looked in 2008:

The interior of Ohio, while won by McCain, was mostly just pink. Key Trump-backing counties in the northeast, such as Mahoning County, were still plenty blue. Despite being a two-time Obama state, Trump had no trouble carrying the Buckeye State all three times he ran:

2016 Trump +8.1%

2020 Trump +8.0%

2024 Trump +11.2%

The key to understanding Ohio in 2026 is to first recognize it is nothing like the state Brown first won election to the Senate in back in 2006.

Key Statistics

• 69.3% White, 15.5% Black, 8.5% Hispanic

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III. Market Assessment

Polymarket bettors give Brown better than two-to-one odds to unseat Husted and return to the Senate.

IV. History

The seat Brown currently seeks has been in Republican hands since 1998, when George Voinovich won the seat and held it for two terms. He gave way to Rob Portman, who won it in 2010 and 2016 before stepping away for Vance:

It is important to note that Vance, running for an open seat, prevailed over Tim Ryan - who once had impeccable blue collar Democrat credentials that far surpass those Brown seeks to impute to himself.

Brown held the other Ohio Senate seat for three terms after knocking off none other than Mike DeWine, Ohio’s current Republican governor and resident Trump hater in the mold of John Kasich, in 2006. He was reelected in 2012, and again in 2018 with a high turnout:

Those bullish on Brown’s chances today will point to a swing of 14.9% away from the 2016 presidential margin to Brown in 2018, but Ohio is much different today than it was even then and has gone more the way of Indiana than it has remained in the mold of “Trumplican” states like Pennsylvania or Michigan. Just in the map above, it will be difficult for Brown to carry northeastern counties and avoid the crimson-shaded margins of the interior his opponent is likely to pile up.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

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I. The Race

Zach Nunn (Republican) is an Air Force Reserve Colonel with serious combat experience. He was once a member of the Iowa legislature, and has represented IA-3 since first being elected in the 2022 GOP House victory and now seeks his third term.

Sarah Trone Garriott (Democrat) is an Iowa state senator with a background in religious studies. She is running a “kitchen table” campaign that is relatively careful about not becoming “Trump-centered,” with the understanding that Iowa supported Trump by a wide margin. This is her first attempt at Congress.

II. District Geography

Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District (IA-3) occupies the southwestern portion of the state (all but the very corner), and contains the capital city of Des Moines and its most electorally significant suburban areas - and a total of 21 counties. Since Iowa doesn’t gerrymander, this seat (just like IA-1) is extremely competitive. A Republican state that wanted to win would figure out how to split half of Des Moines into IA-4, which is overwhelmingly red. As such, the clash between urban/suburban and farmland produces tight margins in presidential and House elections. Here is how President Trump fared in all three of his races in the current boundaries of IA-3:

IA-3 sits well to the left of the state as a whole. Trump had to carry Iowa by over 13 points in 2024 just to take IA-3 by 4.3%; he hasn’t been helped by the suburban drift of Dallas County, which is just west of Polk County (Des Moines), that has taken place over the past decade. The rurals are about volume of turnout. The metropolitan Des Moines area is about persuasion.

III. Market Assessment

Polymarket bettors overwhelmingly favor Trone Garriott, who is vastly overpriced.

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IV. History

Des Moines and the rest of Iowa’s districts have moved around a lot in recent decades. In 2010, the last election of the first decade of the 21st century, Iowa’s U.S. House map looked like this:

Iowa lost an electoral vote going into the next decade and then split its lines in a different pattern, putting Des Moines and IA-3 into a district more closely resembling the one Nunn is defending now. Republican David Young, running for reelection alongside President Trump’s first campaign in Iowa, won his 2016 race by 13.7%. Young then turned around in 2018 and lost the seat by 2.2% to Cindy Axne, who proceeded to narrowly defeat him in a 2020 rematch.

IA-3 met the key warning sign for a 2018 flip - a seat with a major metropolitan area in which President Trump massively underperformed the Republican House candidate. The districts were redrawn yet again, and in their current form, Nunn knocked Axne out in the 2022 GOP House takeover, and by a very narrow margin of just 0.7%:

Thanks to Trump’s statewide blowout, Nunn ran up a very impressive margin compared to what IA-3 is normally capable of:

Nunn must hope that rural turnout is overwhelming knowing just how strong the shift in metropolitan Des Moines was in 2018.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

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I. The Race

Greg Abbott (Republican) seeks his fourth term as Texas governor, the office he was elected to in 2014. Prior to that, he served as Texas Attorney General for almost the entirety of Rick Perry’s tenure as governor.

Gina Hinojosa (Democrat) is a union lawyer and sitting member of the Texas House of Representatives. She was first elected to that chamber, and seeks to become the first Democrat to win the governorship since Ann Richards did so in 1990.

II. State Profile

The overwhelming theme of all 2026 analysis of Texas should be the same - if all of that red votes, then Texas will be red. The struggle with all of the work put into that endeavor so far ties directly to the fact that Texas has open primaries and does not register voters by party, whereas Florida closes primaries and does have party registration. We can watch it live as every vote comes in and know definitively in which direction the electorate is headed.

Texas’s presidential baseline is perhaps more imposing to Democrats’ long-term hopes than any before it, even those elections George W. Bush won by more than Trump’s +13.7% margin in 2024. The bedrock of that victory was a historic performance with Latino voters - 55% of them backed Trump:

While some of its urban counties, especially Dallas and Travis, have gone the way of their counterparts in the past 20 years (mega-blue), Harris (which contains Houston) and Bexar (San Antonio) have large working-class populations which have kept the county margins from getting out of control against Republicans. The rural areas of Texas are overwhelmingly Republican, and even more so now that rural South Texas has lurched in the same direction.

Democrats must have low Republican turnout, large swings in a small handful of counties, and overwhelming turnout in four blue bubbles (Harris, Bexar, Travis, Dallas Counties) to win a statewide election in Texas - something they haven’t done since 1994.

2026, thanks to its place on the calendar and in the electoral cycles, gives them their best shot in years to do just that, and they mostly have their eyes set on the Senate race between James Talarico and Ken Paxton, which I will profile after the end of in-person early voting.

Presidential Margins

2016 Trump +9.0%

2020 Trump +5.6%

2024 Trump +13.7%

Key Statistics

• 40.2% Hispanic, 39.3% White, 11.6% Black, 5.1% Asian

III. Market Assessment

Polymarket bettors find Abbott the favorite, but by far lower odds than they would have in any of his three runs had these platforms been widely used in the past.

IV. History

In 1978, Republican Bill Clements rode a midterm wave to become the first Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction. What followed behind him throughout Texas was a windfall very much like the one observers have seen materialize in Florida under Ron DeSantis. In 1980, Ronald Reagan flipped Texas’s electoral votes, thus beginning a streak of 12 consecutive Republican presidential wins remaining intact to this day.

Clements was unseated in 1982, but won the office back in 1987 and served another term. Democrat Ann Richards became the last from her party to serve as Texas governor when she won it in 1990 against human gaffe machine Clayton Williams, whose undisciplined commentary and antics cost him the race. Richards, in hindsight, is more conservative than most governors who call themselves Republican today; however, the partisan realignment caught up to her in 1994 and she was ousted by our future 43rd president, George W. Bush. As indicated above, 1994 was also the last year Democrats carried any statewide offices.

Thus began the stretch of GOP dominance in the governor’s mansion that remains intact today.

Bush won reelection in an absolute massacre in 1998 that is as red as Trump’s 2024 map:

He then won the presidency and handed the office off to Rick Perry, who was then serving as Lieutenant Governor (elected in 1998, first Republican in position since Reconstruction). Perry won the office in 2002 and was reelected in 2006 and 2010. Abbott, if reelected, will pass Perry as longest-tenured Texas governor provided he serves out the entirety of his fourth term.

Abbott swept into office in the 2014 midterm wave, and believe it or not, there was plenty of tough talk about turning Texas blue back then. The Democrats ran a state legislator named Wendy Davis, who earned the nickname “Abortion Barbie” for her looks and views on infanticide. Here is how it worked out for her:

With Trump in office, Texas faced a strong Democrat tailwind for the first time in many years. Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke challenged Ted Cruz for his U.S. Senate seat, and gave him a hell of a run - even exceeding Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential vote count. Abbott faced a weak opponent, former Dallas sheriff Lupe Valdez, and beat her by a margin of +13.3%.

Abbott’s most recent reelection came against O’Rourke in 2022, who ran with faded star power and in the wrong cycle to attempt an upset:

The 10.9% margin of victory was Abbott’s lowest yet, but there was very little expectation that Texas was in play and no one was overly invested in making sure the pedal was slammed to the floorboard like they are today in pursuit of turnout. Trump cleared Abbott’s vote count by more than two million just two years later.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

Abbott faced a primary in 2026, but wound up beating Pete Chambers by over 70 points. Despite the frustration of grassroots Republicans with some of his policies responsible for transforming DFW and Central Texas into unrecognizable messes, the requirement to defeat Democrats will ensure he carries practically every rank-and-file GOP vote.

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I. The Race

Derek Merrin (Republican) is a former member of the Ohio House of Representatives who is locked into a 2024 rematch with Kaptur, but this time with much friendlier district boundaries at his disposal.

Marcy Kaptur (Democrat) is the longest-tenured woman in Congress, and seeking a twenty-third term after barely surviving Merrin’s surge in President Trump’s statewide romp in 2024. For perspective, I turn 42 next month; Kaptur was wrapping up her first term when I was born.

II. District Geography

Ohio’s 9th Congressional District (OH-9) occupies the northwest corner of the Buckeye State and contains Toledo as its major metro area. These boundaries have been redrawn since the 2024 election thanks to the requirements of Ohio law, and OH-9 seems to be the seat in the bipartisan arrangement that was most gift-wrapped for Republicans to take over. OH-13, held by Democrat Emilia Sykes, was close in 2024 but made bluer by the redistricting commission, and OH-1 covering the southwest corner and Cincinnati was weakened (for Democrats) a little, but probably not enough to tip over in the 2026 cycle.

The new map removed the following from OH-9:

• Sandusky County

• The northeastern edge of Wood County closest to Toledo

The map added these counties:

• Henry County (Trump +46.5%)

• Paulding County (Trump +55.9%)

• Putnam County (Trump +68.5%)

Trump won the boundaries of OH-9 as they were in 2024 by 7 points. His performance was not quite enough to get Merrin past the entrench Kaptur.

Here are the approximate recent presidential margins for the new boundaries:

2016 Trump +5.0%

2020 Trump +6.0%

2024 Trump +11.0%

Key Statistics

• 74.5% White, 12.0% Black, 7.2% Hispanic

• 86.0% Urban, 14.0% Rural

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III. Market Assessment

Despite the geographical disadvantage, Polymarket bettors are still throwing in with Kaptur - a heavy favorite in the market.

IV. History

To write a history of OH-9 in its various shapes and descriptions over the past four decades would essentially be to write a biography of Kaptur. She has hogged the seat for far too long as a career politician posing as a public servant.

Prior to the 2024 race, and thanks to much friendlier ideologies and boundaries, Kaptur never had a close call. She often won by Pelosi margins, taking over 70% of the vote. In 2024, with Trump on his way to a +11.2% win statewide in Ohio, Kaptur barely held the line against Merrin:

2,382 votes, just 0.7%, separated her from her GOP challenger. Tom Pruss, the libertarian on the ticket, and given who is voting Democrat in OH-9, I’d bet his presence on the ticket hurt Merrin the most. Either way, Merrin is back for round two, and this time in a district with four more points of presidential margin at his back.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

Kaptur, unlike many entrenched Democrats, faced no challenger in the Democrat primary.

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I. The Race

Jay Feely (Republican) is a former NFL kicker and TV sports analyst now trying his hand at politics. He is looking to replace David Schweikert, who is leaving AZ-1 open after eight terms in the U.S. House because he decided to run for governor and get absolutely destroyed by Andy Biggs.

Amish Shah (Democrat) is a physician and former member of the Arizona House of Representatives. He failed to unseat Schweikert in 2024 and, although he has a reputation as a moderate from the legislature, has recently cozied up to many DSA-adjacent figures and positions.

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II. District Geography

Arizona’s 1st Congressional District (AZ-1) occupies the northeastern corner of Maricopa County, including affluent cities like Paradise Valley, Scottsdale, and Fountain Hills, as well as segments of northeast Phoenix, which are more favorable for Democrats.

Despite its considerable Republican voter registration advantage, this district’s boundaries have been tough for President Trump and aligned Republicans for the past decade.

Presidential Margins

Practically everyone reading this will agree that the 2020 election in Arizona warped a lot of figures, including the margin in what is now AZ-1. Still, the Trump margins for all three of his races run far to the left of the GOP registration advantages for each year, and are mostly linked to GOP defectors in swanky places like Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, which featured nice gains for Trump in 2024 (which I will dive into in Section X).

Key Statistics

• 69.9% White, 16.4% Hispanic

• 91.5% Urban, 8.5% Rural

III. Market Assessment

Polymarket bettors have wagered heavily on Shah, whose shares are clearly overpriced.

IV. History

Prior to the 2022 election, most of the territory of what is now AZ-1 was called AZ-6, represented by Schweikert. Trump won those boundaries even in the 2020 election by roughly 4 points. The redistricting of Arizona post-2020 cut out more Republican-friendly areas of north Phoenix and replaced them with more Democrat-friendly neighborhoods closer to downtown, hence the reason for paper-thin margins this decade. Here is how the old boundaries, which still included the affluent establishment Republican areas in the district today, shifted from 2016 to 2018:

Despite being an overwhelmingly Republican district at the time, the 2016-18 shift met all the warning signs prominent that year. Trump underperformed Schweikert in the district thanks to the McCain feud and his perceived lack of Republican “street cred” in 2016, and in 2018, the margin essentially matched Trump’s. This was good enough to hold the seat, but the gaps in KS-3, CO-6, and other suburban seats weren’t enough to give the GOP incumbents room to breathe.

This anti-Trump trend continued through the awful 2020 election, when Schweikert held on by just 4.4% against Hiral Tipirnini. In two races since the seat has been redrawn, Schweikert’s margins have been equally uncomfortable:

2022 +0.8%

2024 +3.8%

I would have expected Schweikert to have a larger margin in 2022, a GOP House popular vote midterm victory, than I would have thought he’d get in 2024, when he won by 3.8% against Shah; this seems like a positive sign that Shah is seen as out of touch with the district and not likely to capture a tailwind like the one we saw in 2018 (which Republicans also didn’t see as vulnerable, and spend accordingly).

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

Both parties had seriously contested primaries, and Democrats have the worst fallout.

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I. The Race

Michael Whatley (Republican) is an attorney who served in the Bush 43 administration before working in the energy industry and chairing the North Carolina Republican Party. He was RNC chairman during President Trump’s winning 2024 campaign, and now looks to fill the Senate seat being vacated by noted backstabber, Thom Tillis.

Roy Cooper (Democrat) has been a politician for 40 years, serving in the state legislature, as Attorney General, and then as governor from 2017 through 2025, when he was replaced by current governor, Josh Stein. He looks to become the first Democrat elected to represent North Carolina in the U.S. Senate since Kay Hagan, who won her last race in 2008.

II. State Profile

North Carolina has grown tremendously since the start of the century, when George W. Bush won it twice by more than 12 points. It represented, perhaps after only Indiana, Barack Obama’s most significant upset in the 2008 election:

Since then, it has been won by four consecutive GOP presidential nominees:

2012 Romney +2.0%

2016 Trump +3.7%

2020 Trump +1.3%

2024 Trump +3.2%

That 2020 result, which ran 2.4% left of 2016 despite a monumental move in voter registration toward Republicans, has ironically put me at odds with Whatley for five years. I argue that election was tainted by the expansion of mail-in balloting, and he has rebutted my positions repeatedly. Nevertheless, the state is constantly growing and changing, and risks turning into Georgia if Republicans don’t right the ship. The difference between a Democrat presidential win of North Carolina and a Republican one is much different than we would have envisioned it 20 years ago.

North Carolina’s Appalachian west and the southeastern coastal areas have turned a hard shade of red, whereas they were once Democrat-leaning or light pink. In the Trump era, Mecklenburg and Wake Counties (Charlotte and Raleigh, respectively) have become real liabilities - countered only by the reddening of the perimeter of the state. Had Trump won Romney’s margins outside of Wake and Mecklenburg, he’d have lost the state in 2020 and 2024.

North Carolina, as evidenced by their frequent Democrat governors, do split tickets. Here is the map from Stein’s 2024 victory, concurrent with Trump on the ticket:

As I will demonstrate with party registration figures later in this article, North Carolina does not possess widespread loyalty to the Republican Party, especially in rural areas like it does in states like Texas, Georgia, or in the heartland. The largest metro areas are hardcore Democrat strongholds now, and the combination of these two factors gives Democrats a chance to win despite GOP progress throughout most of the state’s geography.

Key Statistics

• 60.5% White, 20.2% Black, 10.7% Hispanic

III. Market Assessment

Polymarket bettors feel even more confident in Roy Cooper than they do in Jon Ossoff in neighboring Georgia.

IV. History

Republican Jeter Pritchard left the United States Senate in 1903, and with it, so did North Carolina’s GOP influence on the chamber for many decades. It was until 1972 that the Tar Heel State elected another Republican when it sent Jesse Helms to Washington, D.C. He declined to run for a sixth term in 2002, and was replaced by Elizabeth Dole, whose husband was none other than the legendary Bob Dole.

Her opponent in 2008, Kay Hagan, rode Obama’s statewide upset and ancestral Democrat strength to her own victory, and by a large margin:

With North Carolina trending red during the Obama days, Hagan was ousted by Tillis in the 2014 GOP wave in a 1.6% squeaker in which hardly anyone voted:

Tillis was reelected in 2020, and only by 1.7%, after Democrat Cal Cunningham had a late-breaking scandal that most likely shifted things to the incumbent. Tillis then went on to antagonize the Republican base and hamstring President Trump at every turn, leading to Trump making it clear that he could retire or be brutally primaried like John Cornyn or Bill Cassidy.

The other Senate seat, currently occupied by Republican Ted Budd, has had a mix of Democrats and Republicans stretching back to 1981. In short, history shows Democrat competitiveness in the Senate even in recent, redder times, with an incumbent who never won by more than 1.7% leaving the seat open in a year that is supposed to be favorable to Democrats.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

Cooper faced five candidates in the Democrat primary, but bludgeoned them mercilessly in taking 92.0% of the vote. It was decisive, and as a result, there is no Democrat intraparty drama in the way of the General Election.

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I. The Race

Eric Flores (Republican) is a first-time candidate looking to capitalize on recent Republican gains in South Texas. He is an attorney with an accomplished legal career and also a member of the Texas Army National Guard (infantry officer).

Vicente Gonzalez (Democrat) was first elected to represent TX-15 in 2016. Now representing a twice-redrawn TX-34, Gonzalez, also an attorney, seeks a sixth term. As a member of the House Blue Dog Coalition, he will need to create maximum distance from the radical left in order to win in much more challenging electoral terrain.

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II. District Geography

Texas’s 34th Congressional District (TX-34), newly redrawn for the 2026 General Election, stretches from the U.S. border with Mexico along the Rio Grande River all the way north to Nueces County. It includes all of Cameron, Willacy, Kenedy, and Kleberg Counties, and all of Nueces except for the innermost precincts of Corpus Christi. It is truly an expert draw from the Texas legislature. The only question is whether it is ripe for the picking in what is supposed to be a strong Democrat year.

President Trump, thanks to his massive improvement with Latino voters nationwide, won both the newly drawn district (+10.5%) and the old TX-34 boundaries (+5.0%).

Presidential Margins

He won neither the old nor the new boundaries in 2020, but ran these new boundaries 10 points right of where they had been in 2016. A 13 points bump to the right put TX-34 in double digits, punctuating a generational performance in South Texas for a GOP presidential nominee.

Key Statistics

• 90.3% Hispanic, 7.9% White

• 84% Urban, 16% Rural

The newly redrawn district, one of the big GOP targets, cut out a McAllen-heavy portion of Hidalgo County and replaced it with the portion of Nueces County described above.

III. Market Assessment

On Polymarket, Gonzalez is the trading favorite, albeit heavily overvalued.

IV. History

Gonzalez started out in TX-15, winning a +19.6% margin over Republican Tim Westley in a district that ran from the southern end of San Antonio straight south to McAllen. He won reelection in 2018 by +18.9%, but a close call in 2020 force him to reassess his career aspirations.

Facing Trump’s unexpected strength in South Texas, Gonzalez defeated Monica De La Cruz, who now represents TX-15, by just 2.9%. He announced the next year that he would switch over to TX-34; he wound up facing Republican Mayra Flores, who had captured the seat in a special election in March 2022:

Gonzalez rode a much stronger Biden baseline than he had in TX-15 to a +8.5% win over Flores, and successfully defended the seat concurrent with Trump’s massive conquest of South Texas, albeit narrowly:

Mayra Flores (of no relation to Eric) ran 7.6% left of Trump, falling just short of unseating Gonzalez. Gonzalez’s worries stem from TX-34 being redrawn from the Trump +5.0% turf that got him past Mayra Flores by 5,177 votes to Trump +10.5% looping in the most conservative portions of Nueces County.

The longterm trend for the Democrat brand in South Texas looks very bad:

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

Both Gonzalez and Flores had to deal with primaries. Gonzalez won his comfortably while running against a challenger to his left, yet another data point that the future political coalitions of America feature Latinos opposing the emerging DSA:

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I am doing a Substack live for paid subscribers today at 6:30 PM EST.

I. The Race

Jennifer Kiggans (Republican) is a Navy veteran, former nurse practitioner and state senator, and incumbent U.S. House representative of VA-2. She is seeking a third term, having first won the seat during the 2022 Republican House victory.

Elaine Luria (Democrat) is likewise a Navy veteran (retired); she won the VA-2 seat in the 2018 Democrat House wave and was reelected in 2020, but dropped it to Kiggans in 2022. She is back for a rematch and is looking to chip away at a very Trump-hesitant electorate in an area that has been drifting left for a decade.

II. District Geography

Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District (VA-2) runs along the border with North Carolina and extends onto the Delmarva Peninsula, spanning 8 counties and independent cities - of which Virginia Beach is the most populated and significant. The Tidewater Region is a major military hub, which keeps it from running too far left like most of Virginia’s urban areas have done in the past two decades.

Kiggans is one of the few Republicans still holding on in anti-MAGA districts. Large stretches of “Trump hesitant” precincts are present in Virginia Beach and Suffolk City, and the Democrats have a large minority population from which to pull large margins. Here are the last three presidential margins in the district:

Trump won the current boundaries by +6.4% in 2016, carrying even Virginia Beach (but only with a plurality). When Biden flipped it (Virginia Beach specifically) in 2020, it was the first presidential win of Virginia Beach since Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 national landslide. Trump made marginal improvement in the city 2024, but still failed to carry it. With that shift in margin in the largest jurisdiction in VA-2, the district has become a heavy lift. Although he carried the district by less than a point, Trump ran 3.1% behind Kiggans, who won reelection on the same ticket.

Key Statistics

• 58.7% White, 22.0% Black, 7.5% Hispanic

• 92.6% Urban, 7.4% Rural

III. Market Assessment

Luria is the clear favorite according to Polymarket bettors, and is heavily overpriced.

IV. History

While the boundaries of VA-2 have changed, Virginia Beach remains the leverage point. In 2016, running for an open seat, Republican Scott Taylor decimated his Democrat opponent by a +22.8% margin. Facing Luria two years later, VA-2 then swung an incredible 25 points, giving Luria the upset win:

The classic 2016 to 2018 warning light had been flashing, with Trump underperforming Taylor by 16.4% in the district. The anti-Trump nature of VA-2 voters was evident, and enthusiastically proclaimed in 2018 along with many other suburban districts Trump had won by less-than-usual margins two years earlier.

In a 2020 rematch, Luria held off Taylor by a margin of +5.8%. Her luck ran out as the swingy voters of the newly redrawn district swung with the national pendulum:

Kiggans carried the seat by +3.4%, and held on by a similar margin alongside Trump’s narrow win in the district against Missy Cotter Smasal.

VA-2’s recent history is one that features consistent swings on the political pendulum, driven largely by what is going on in Virginia Beach.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

Kiggans faced no opponent for the GOP nomination.

Luria steamrolled her competition on the first step of her journey to return to Congress:

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I. The Race

Max Miller (Republican), a former Marine Corps reservist, ran for the open OH-7 seat, which was redrawn for 2022; he had initially expected to face incumbent Anthony Gonzalez for the seat, but Gonzalez declined to run again in 2022 after he smelled a primary defeat as the cost for his Trump Derangement Syndrome. Miller won in the General Election and was reelected in 2024. His campaign is plagued by abuse allegations and divorce fallout with his ex-wife, who is the daughter of Ohio U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno.

Brian Poindexter (Democrat) is a 46-year-old union man and former Brook Park city council member. This is his first run for major office, and he’s running a “hard hat” campaign on the populist economic left while seeking to highlight Miller’s personal issues.

II. District Geography

Ohio’s 7th Congressional District (OH-7) was redrawn for the 2022 and 2024 elections, but because Ohio law required new maps for 2026 since the 2022/2024 maps were adopted without bipartisan support, the district underwent yet another makeover.

As it gears up for its first General Election test under the new boundaries, OH-7 consists of the southern portion of Cuyahoga County (dodging core Cleveland), all of Medina (Trump +24.7%) and Ashland (Trump +49.8%) Counties, and the northern portion of Wayne County. The previous boundaries lacked Ashland, but included all of Medina and the northern portion of Holmes County. Trump carried the old boundaries in 2024 by 11 points, closely matching the margin for the new district. Here are the last three presidential margins for boundaries as drawn today:

Trump’s margin sank in 2020 thanks to the swing of the Cuyahoga suburbs, and when they stiffened up for him in 2024, he ran his margin up another 1.5%. The new district is comparable to the old.

Key Statistics

• 86.4% White, 3.7% Hispanic

III. Market Assessment

Polymarket bettors are buying the Poindexter hype big-time. Miller’s unique issues have made him a tremendous liability for his party, but this is a massive overvaluation.

IV. History

There is no previous history for these exact boundaries in a U.S. House race, but since the presidential margins closely match and the district was only nominally redrawn, it makes sense to review Miller’s two previous performances.

In 2022, after notching the GOP nomination, Miller rode a 2022 House popular vote victory to a +10.7% victory over Matthew Diemer.

Miller then secured a +15.0% margin in his 2024 reelection, although an independent candidate skewed the margins by taking a lot of the vote:

Either way, in two favorable conditions (a midterm House popular vote win and a large presidential win), Miller ran closely aligned to the district’s presidential baselines. His seat, with the GOP looking strong in the Midwest, wouldn’t be imperiled this year if not for his very serious personal issues, which I’ll discuss later in this piece. OH-7 would likely be carried by Miller this year by 6-8 points under normal circumstances.

V. Analysis of 2026 Primary Results

Miller, keeping his issues close to the chest, ran unopposed in the GOP primary when in fact Republican voters should have been engaged in choosing his replacement. Poindexter ran in a crowded field for the Democrats and won with a plurality of the vote:

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