Within the Margin

We shall take leave of our college conferences structure for this one. Unless I’m missing something, there are just not any conferences that have, or have had, schools from all six of these states. Believe me, I looked. Instead, the unifying theme here will have to be their breathtaking natural beauty. The region also features one state we’re not used to seeing with a competitive Senate race, and another one where an independent could be putting it in play.

I’ll summarize each race in a sentence first, then link to the longer write-up further down the page.

Previous posts in this series:
Senate Week Overview
The Big 10 (Great Lakes/Midwest)
The SEC (East)
The SEC (West)
The Great Northwest
The America East*
The Sun Belt

Colorado
Incumbent: John Hickenlooper (D – elected 2020)
2026 matchup: John Hickenlooper (D) vs. Mark Baisley (R)
In a sentence: This seat flipped the last three times it was contested – 2008, 2014 and 2020 – but that pattern will not hold in 2026. Read more.

Kansas
Incumbent: Roger Marshall (R – elected 2020)
2026 matchup: Adam Hamilton (D) vs. Roger Marshall (R)
In a sentence: The longest U.S. Senate winning streak in the nation of any state appears to be in legitimate danger this year. Read more.

New Mexico
Incumbent: Ben Ray Luján (D – elected 2020)
2026 matchup: Ben Ray Luján (D) vs. Larry Marker (R)
In a sentence: The Land of Enchantment seems due for a competitive challenge from the Republicans, but they have not pulled it off this time. Read more.

South Dakota
Incumbent: Mike Rounds (R – elected 2014)
2026 matchup: Mike Rounds (R) vs. Brian Bengs (I)
In a sentence: Is this the state where the independent-as-alternative-to-GOP strategy breaks through? Read more.

Wyoming
Incumbent: Cynthis Lummis (R – retiring)
2026 matchup: James Byrd (D) vs. Harriet Hageman (R)
In a sentence: Election nerds of a certain age remember the days of Freudenthal and Trauner with fondness, but we’re a long way from them right now. Read more.

Colorado: John Hickenlooper flipped this seat blue in 2020, defeating one-term incumbent Cory Gardner by a nine-point margin. A petroleum geologist, co-founder of Wynkoop Brewing Company, two-term mayor of Denver and two-term governor of Colorado, Hickenlooper brings a fascinating background to the Senate but often leaves the more progressive wing of the party a bit cold. His voting record is generally without blemish but it’s not really about that these days, it seems. He faced a competitive primary from state senator Julie Gonzales, who happens to represent a part of Denver that I’ve spent quite a bit of time in over the years and which perhaps exemplifies the confluence of the new and old Colorados. Gonzales made an impressive showing, losing by five and a half points (52.8% to 47.25). So we haven’t heard the last of Hickenlooper, who will now cruise to re-election this fall. But at 74 and with the energy in this once-purple state shifting to a younger, more progressive generation, this will almost certainly be his final term. For the same reasons, we have likely not seen the last of the 43-year old Gonzales.
Rating: Safe Democratic (hold)
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Kansas: Lots of folks know the fun fact here: Democrats have not won a Senate election in Kansas since George McGill’s triumph in 1932. There was a close call in ’36 and a razor-sharp escape for Bob Dole in ’74; independent Greg Orman led some October polling in 2014 but ultimately lost by ten and a half points. Redder states than Kansas have occasionally sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate, and Kansas has had plenty of Democratic governors and Congressmembers during this Senate drought – but the streak continues nonetheless. And it probably will continue this year…but this race competitive and trending ever more so. Kansas’ shift toward Trump in 2024 was notably less than the national shift. Demographically, Kansas has a relatively high percentage of the college-educated voters who have moved toward Dems in the Trump era and, crucially, tend to make up a larger portion of the midterm electorate.

So incumbent Republican Roger Marshall faces some structural headwinds in his first re-election attempt, after winning 53%-42% in 2020. The national environment is different this time around – and while party-switching state senator Barbara Bollier was a reasonably solid candidate that year, pastor and author Adam Hamilton starts with wider name recognition in a non-political context. That said, he is not a total naïf, either; he served on a presidential advisory council under Barack Obama and set a Kansas fundraising record during this first two months in the race. He released an internal poll from July showing him within four points of Marshall. Take that with a grain of salt, given the nature of internal polls. But Republicans are already running a negative ad against Hamilton (calling him a “woke megachurch CEO”) so they probably agree that this will be the most competitive U.S. Senate race in this state in more than a decade. And Marshall isn’t going to be immune to attack ads either: the idea of a doctor suing hundreds of patients for medical debts, charging heavy interest and jailing grandparents isn’t going to sit well with plenty of Kansans across the political spectrum.

He’s also one of these senators who sure seem to live in Florida despite maintaining a “rustic cabin” in Kansas as his official residence, and has a knack for getting taxpayers to fund “official business” trips that take him to Sarasota, near his grandkids and $1.2 million “vacation” home. Keep in mind that in the 2014 race I mentioned above, incumbent Pat Roberts found himself in choppy waters in part because he didn’t have his own residence in Kansas – instead claiming a house owned by a couple of his donors as his permanent address. Between narratives and polling, there are plenty of reasons to think this race is getting closer by the week.
Rating: Lean Republican (hold)
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New Mexico: Meteorologist Mark Ronchetti mounted a competitive race for Republicans when Tom Udall’s retirement opened this seat up in 2020. It wasn’t enough, as Democratic Congressman Ben Ray Luján ran several points behind Joe Biden but still triumphed, 52%-46%. Luján had also succeeded Udall in the House of Representatives when the latter first ran for Senate in 2008. He will hold on without much difficulty this year against Larry Marker, an oil and gas man nominated in the GOP primary via write-in after the only Republican who actually filed for the race was disqualified for a lack of valid signatures. That is not an indicator of a party positioned to win a statewide election in a state that already favors the other party. Neither is Marker’s lack of financial resources to build out a campaign. New Mexico is a steadily but not overwhelmingly blue state; the year will come that Republicans match a strong candidate to more favorable political winds in the Land of Enchantment. This is not that year.
Rating: Safe Dem (hold)
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South Dakota: The Great Plains are replete this cycle with independent candidates serving as the de facto Democratic nominee and South Dakota is the last of them for us to cover in this series. Mike Rounds is the Republican incumbent here, seeking a third term in the Senate after previously serving two as governor and five in the state senate. Rounds has been a fairly normal senator by today’s standards – conservative but not bomb-throwing; Trump-aligned but not comically so. His only truly competitive general election so far was his first, when he flipped a state senate seat by about five points in 1990.

His first U.S Senate election was interesting for a bit, though: in the race to replace retiring Democrat Tim Johnson, Rounds faced a former Republican senator in Larry Pressler, who ran as an independent, along with Democratic nominee Rick Weiland. There was some talk that Rounds and Pressler would split the GOP vote and let Weiland win despite a small share of the vote; Rounds was dragged down by his administration’s misuse of funds in the state’s EB-5 visa program. Like any really comprehensive government scandal, it involved conflicts of interest, bankrupt companies, shell companies, tax havens, and a suicide. Some August polling showed Weiland closing in, but in the end Rounds still cleared 50% and Weiland ended up performing terribly in a disastrous year for Democrats nationwide.

What’s different this time? The original Democratic nominee, Julian Beaudion, has dropped out and endorsed independent Brian Bengs – so the opposition is not split. Bengs is a veteran – first the Navy, and then the Air Force JAG Corps after getting his law degree and re-enlisting. He later worked as a professor at Northern State University and as a ranger in the National Park Service. Bengs offers a comprehensive accounting of the problems with the two-party system and with American politics more broadly, including the specific problems exacerbated by the political industry. His platform features many of the things we’re used to seeing from independent candidates – term limits, anti-corruption measures – but he also embraces modern and theoretically non-partisan ideas like the right to repair. Border security is probably a necessity for getting into the conversation in red states, and Bengs speaks of its importance in concert with a point I have long made: we have vast swaths of the country that are depopulating, making nativist opposition to immigration utterly impractical. I’m not sure many Americans are persuaded by that argument, but f any place was going to be, it might be a slow-growth state like South Dakota.

He’s offering a substantive platform, in other words. Rounds hasn’t made major mistakes as a senator, though, and even if he had, the R next to his name would typically insulate him in a state that Trump won by 29 points in 2024. Back in 2014, we saw lots of polling here, even if much of it was from middling firms. As is the case in most of the country, this year we’ve seen very little. So it’s hard to discern if Bengs is breaking through the way Dan Osborn’s independent candidacy in Nebraska did two years ago. I need to see something substantive to move this off of a safe rating, but I’m open to the idea that we might.
Rating: Safe Rep (hold)
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Wyoming: This was once again Trump’s best state in 2024, for the third election in a row. He pulled 71.6% of the vote, passing Reagan ’84 for the largest vote share of any presidential nominee in Wyoming history. The party’s senatorial nominees generally top 70% as well, and the last Democratic senator from Wyoming was Gale McGee for three terms before he was defeated in 1976. The guy who defeated him, Malcolm Wallop, did not exactly have the seat on lock: his 1988 re-election was the closest Senate race in state history. He won by less than 1% with a 1,322-vote margin. Wallop bailed in ’94 and Democrats ran two-term governor Mike Sullivan, a popular fellow re-elected by a landslide in 1990. But 1994 was not the year for a Democrat to win just about anywhere, let alone Wyoming; Craig Thomas defeated him easily. Two years later, former Secretary of State Kathy Karpan (yes, Dems used to win lots of statewide positions here) got 42% against Mike Enzi – a number no Democrat has come close to since in a Wyoming Senate race.

Senator Cynthia Lummis is retiring after a single term. The state’s at large Congressional representative, Harriet Hageman, easily won the GOP primary for Senate. You might remember her from her 2022 primary defeat of Liz Cheney, who had committed heresy by vice chairing the Congressional committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The Democratic candidate is James Byrd, a former state representative. He’s an interesting guy: a fifth generation Wyomingite whose father was the first Black police chief in Cheyenne and whose mother was the first black state rep in Wyoming. Hageman will win, but maybe Byrd can keep her under 70%.

There are plenty of interesting things happening in state-level politics in Wyoming. 2024 saw the rise of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus as they defeated various Republican incumbents in the primaries and took a majority in the Wyoming House. 2026 may have seen their downfall, as the so-called “establishment” struck back and defeated thirteen Freedom Caucus incumbents, while four others failed in their bids to win primaries for the state senate. WyoFile also has a good piece on these developments; their ongoing coverage of Wyoming’s political and legislative battles in recent years has been excellent. Thank goodness there’s something to keep an eye on at that level, because the federal races here are not scintillating and won’t be for some time.
Rating: Safe Rep (hold)
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