Within the Margin

The Big 10 Conference, that is. Our September Senate check-in kicks off in the Midwest (I do not acknowledge the most recent rounds of incoherent and ahistoric expansion that turned the Big Ten into a coast-to-coast league). We’ve perhaps been over-trained in recent decades to think of this region as the be-all and end-all in terms of swing states – but while there are competitive Senate races all over the country this year, it is true that the Midwest will play a major role.

I’ll summarize each race in a sentence first, then link to the longer write-up further down the page. Enjoy. And for a quick overview, check out the Welcome to Senate Week post from earlier this morning.

Read more: Senate Week: The Big Ten

Illinois
Incumbent: Dick Durbin (D – retiring)
2026 matchup: Julianna Stratton (D) vs. Don Tracy (R)
In a sentence: Republicans were unable to build upon their much-improved performance here in the 2024 presidential race, and failed to recruit a competitive candidate. Read more.

Iowa
Incumbent: Joni Ernst (R – retiring)
2026 matchup: Josh Turek (D) vs. Ashley Hinson (R)
In a sentence: Iowa is back on the political map but the gubernatorial race looks to be a considerably easier lift for Democrats than the Senate contest. Read more.

Michigan
Incumbent: Gary Peters (D – retiring)
2026 matchup: Abdul El-Sayed (D) vs. Mike Rogers (R)
In a sentence: Mike Rogers is running like it’s either 2002 or 2024; Abdul El-Sayed is running like it’s 2026. Read more.

Minnesota
Incumbent: Tina Smith (D – retiring)
2026 matchup: Peggy Flanagan (D) vs. Michele Tafoya (R)
In a sentence: Minnesota is ground zero for some of the biggest interwoven and likely offsetting political and governmental stories of the year. Read more.

Nebraska
Incumbent: Pete Ricketts (R)
2026 matchup: Pete Ricketts (R) vs. Dan Osborn (I)
In a sentence: Osborn is attempting to finish what he started in 2024 and prove that an independent can flip a red state Senate seat. Read more.

Ohio (special election)
Incumbent: Jon Husted (R)
2026 matchup: Sherrod Brown (D) vs. Jon Husted (R)
In a sentence: With a race pitting a defeated senator from 2024 against the man appointed to replace the new vice president, Ohio will tell us much about just how far removed we are politically from the last set of federal elections. Read more.

Illinois: After 30 years in the Senate and a lengthy stint as the Democrats’ second-in-command, Dick Durbin is retiring this year. Lieutenant Governor (and former state rep) Juliana Stratton defeated a pair of Chicago-area congressmembers in the Democratic primary, all but securing her election in this safely blue state. Durbin hails from Downstate Illinois and Stratton is from the South Side of Chicago, so her election will represent a geographic shift in the state’s Congressional delegation.

And it will be her election. Trump sharply reduced his losing margin in Illinois the third time around, but Republicans are not poised to mount competitive challenges in federal races here this year. That starts with weak candidate recruitment. The GOP nominee is Don Tracy, a former state party chair and unsuccessful candidate for LG way back in 2010. That year also happens to be the last time Republicans won a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, when Congressman Mark Kirk edged out Alexi Giannoulias to flip what had previously been Barack Obama’s seat. With his decidedly moderate profile, Kirk was probably the only Republican who could have pulled off a win in this state even in such a red year. Tracy does not have Kirk’s skills, nor is this year anywhere near as favorable to his party as 2010 was. Stratton will win with ease.
Rating: Safe Dem (hold)

Iowa: In 2014, state senator and Army National Guard veteran Joni Ernst rode a Republican wave and some talk of pig castration to a comfortable win and flipped this open seat, long held by Democrat Tom Harkin. Polling indicated she was in a competitive race six years later, and she did in fact run a couple points behind Donald Trump – but she was still re-elected comfortably. This time around, it was starting to look like Ernst was really in trouble: Trump’s tariffs were hitting Iowa farmers hard, her own approval ratings were slipping, and she demonstrated poor political instincts. After a constituent told her that the SNAP and Medicaid cuts she voted for would cost lives, she responded that “we are all going to die.” Factually true, but tactless. She then made sure that the controversy was the one thing that wouldn’t die by filming this video in a graveyard. Mocking your constituents’ health concerns is a suboptimal approach to representation – perhaps understanding this, she declined to see re-election.

Three-term congresswoman Ashley Hinson will carry the GOP banner instead. She flipped Iowa’s 1st district in 2020 and has held the seat (now re-numbered as IA-2) since, including a landslide win two years ago. A former news anchor in Cedar Rapids, she has strong name recognition and is generally a more skillful operator than Ernst. But she faces the ongoing Trump-induced headwinds mentioned above, along with an intriguing Democratic candidate in state rep and two-time gold medal-winning paralympian Josh Turek. Like Hinson, he has won in purple territory. But while his bio intrigues, talk is starting to mount of lackluster fundraising and an unnoticeable campaign. The two highest-quality polls in the field are split, with a Fox News poll showing Turek up four points and a NYT/Siena poll showing Hinson ahead by two. It is my strong belief that Iowa in 2026 is going to look much more like the highly-competitive state that it was in the first Trump midterm (2018) than the state that delivered a blowout win for Trump two years ago. Outgoing governor Kim Reynolds is unpopular. Auditor Rob Sand seems well-positioned to succeed her against a flawed opponent. But Turek faces a fundraising deficit and a much stronger foe than Sand does, and for the moment I give Hinson a narrow edge. But Iowa is absolutely back on the board for Democrats up and down the ballot, despite having fallen so far out of reach in recent presidential elections.
Rating: Tilt Republican (hold)

Michigan: I’m not going to dwell on the Democratic primary here: enough gnashing of teeth has taken place in other venues, both from Haley Stevens fans and Abdul El-Sayed fans (I was more of a Mallory McMorrow man myself, but she dropped out before the primary for reasons that might warrant a separate post down the road). The narrow victor was El-Sayed, an epidemiologist who previous served as Wayne County’s Director of Health, Human and Veterans Services; before that he led the City of Detroit’s Health Department and was a Columbia University faculty member in their School of Public Health. He has been a prolific scholar with a focus on public health policy and disparities. His experience in the field has inspired his outspoken support of Medicare for All, part of a longstanding alignment with Bernie Sanders as well as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party – though he does not identify as a democratic socialist. He is also vocal about ending U.S. military aid to Israel – a position he sometimes articulates with nuance and sometimes does not. His judgement can be poor when it comes to those with whom he associates: it took him too long to get there, but he did eventually disavow Hasan Piker’s comments about America deserving 9/11. El-Sayed sometimes seems to think politics is contested in a fin-de-siecle Vienna salon rather than the shorthand vernacular of a country of busy people looking for a quick signal that you’re with them or against them on the issues they deem critical to their lives. And it’s not like he lacks political aptitude: this is a guy who’s quick on his feet. No less skilled a politician than Bill Clinton told him to pursue public service after hearing him give the senior class commencement speech at his University of Michigan graduation. The Pod Save America guys, who are imperfect in their 2020s-era analysis but whose political instincts and speechwriting abilities helped Barack Obama win two decisive presidential elections, have long taken an interest in El-Sayed. Clinton and Obama were distinctive politicians because they matched eloquence with an ability to rise to the moment and meet voters where they were – El-Sayed has the former but still must prove the latter.

In sum, El-Sayed has the ability to connect with an array of voters, yet has provided an opening for Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent and seven-term Congressman who narrowly lost a Senate big in 2024. Rogers generally won re-election handily during his time in Congress but he does not stand out as an especially gifted politician, nor as someone committed to Michigan: he bought a multi-million dollar mansion in Florida in 2022 and only “moved back” to Michigan for his Senate campaigns. He’s anti-choice in a purple state, having co-sponsored a national abortion ban and then endorsing the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling during his, well, abortive presidential campaign in 2023. And after opposing Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election result, he is now interested in re-litigating that election as well as his own Senate defeat two years ago. This doesn’t seem like a Republican profile that could prevail in 2026, when the political winds have shifted against the party. But El-Sayed presents a target-rich environment. So Rogers is making a play for Michigan Democrats whose support of Israel makes El-Sayed an awkward fit – granted, a dwindling subset of the party these days. That effort is itself made awkward, though, by AIPAC’s desire to continue its fight against El-Sayed while Rogers considers them a political liability in the general election. He campaigned recently with retiring Detroit state rep Karen Whitsett, who remains nominally a Dem but left their caucus in 2025 and has more nice things to say about Donald Trump and the wonders of hydroxychloroquine than she does anyone in her own party. Will it be enough for a conservative Republican to win one of the ultimate swing states at a time when national Republicans are faring poorly? I don’t quite think so. Both candidates can point to general election polls showing them in front, with AES leading more often. But only one can point to a national environment showing their party with a commanding lead.
Rating: Tilt Dem (hold)

Minnesota: The Land of 10,000 Lakes is rarely the bluest state, and yet it has been steadfastly loyal to Democrats over the last forty years. It maintains the longest streak of any state when it comes to voting for Democratic presidential nominees, starting in 1976. It was the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1984, when Walter Mondale eked out a win in his home state to prevent a 50-state landslide. It has defied difficult years for Dems in more recent times, too. Democrats flipped the governorship against the national tide in 2010. Then, in 2014, Democratic Senate seats fell all over the country but Al Franken won re-election here in a landslide. Its outcome in recent presidential races was never really in doubt during Trump’s 2016 and 2024 victories. Other than Franken and Amy Klobuchar, the margins rarely reach double-digits – unlike states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where landslide Democratic wins have been sprinkled in with the razor’s edge defeats of national consequence. But the wins come all the same, with the pattern likely to continue this year.

Tina Smith is retiring after one full term in the Senate; she also finished out part of Franken’s second term following his resignation. That opened the doors for a hotly-contested Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (as it is known here) primary between lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan, occupying the more progressive lane (Medicare for All, universal childcare, and the increasingly-mainstream positions of replacing ICE with a new agency and ending military aid to Israel) and four-term Congresswoman Angie Craig, with a more moderate profile. Both started their electoral careers in the Twin Cities suburbs – Flanagan to the west and Craig to the south. Craig vastly outspent Flanagan in the primary, but the LG won by 20 points. Meanwhile, former NBC Sports sideline reporter Michele Tafoya easily won the GOP primary over a cast of characters that included Royce White, the party’s 2024 nominee who has followed up a reasonably successful career in Canada’s National Basketball League with a mediocre career as a far-right conspiracy theorist. Tafoya manages to avoid White’s truly outlandish behavior but is prone to exaggerations of her own (for example, she likes to say that 30% of the people in her native state of California are homeless each night; the real figure is less than 0.5%). After initially urging Trump not to run again, she now offers a boilerplate MAGA-era conservative profile in a state that has never embraced MAGA – and in a year where MAGA seems poised for widespread rejection by voters.

Flanagan is unlikely to command the levels of crossover support that Klobuchar or Franken did in their Senate elections, and faces one major weakness, even if it is not one of her creation: the fraud scandals that have – along with the state-sanctioned street killings of peaceful protestors – dominated headlines in Minnesota this year. It should be noted that these are in fact intertwined, as the Trump administration has used the involvement of Somali-Americans in the Feeding Our Future scandal as justification for ending protect status for some of the state’s Somali refugees. And indeed, many of the fraudsters were members of Minnesota’s large Somali community, though the ringleader is white. But that is not the only high-profile fraud case roiling Minnesota this year; the state’s Medicaid programs have also been beset with massive fraud schemes taking advantage of previously non-existent oversight. Flanagan has argued that she had no role to play in stopping any of this, but voters may argue she should have, or at least that it means being LG is not really a resume item if the person holding that position is not involved in day-to-day governance.

Despite the ever-present discourse over some of the largest welfare program frauds in recent history, the fundamentals of this election mean the race starts off as Likely Dem. Flanagan would have to stumble for Tafoya to find an opening, as the Republican nominee does not appear to have the messaging skill or instincts to create her own opportunities.
Rating: Likely Dem (hold)

Nebraska: This is one of the 2026 cycle’s Republican-vs-Independent matchups, and it’s the one where the independent is most likely to pull off a victory. To be clear, that outcome is still a longshot: this is a conservative, Republican state and a whopping 2% of current U.S. Senators were elected as independents. But Dan Osborn ran a good race against incumbent Deb Fischer in 2024, polling competitively throughout and finishing only six and a half points back in a state Trump was carrying by more than twenty points. Fischer has long been considered a lackluster incumbent, but first-term senator Pete Ricketts isn’t much more popular.

A former two-term governor, Ricketts was appointed by his successor to serve out the rest of Ben Sasse’s term when the latter resigned to become president of the University of Florida. Sasse was an intellectually-oriented senator with a consistently conservative record but occasionally heterodox tendencies, as well as a sense of humor, a reputation for collegiality and a lack of affection for Trump-style politics. In arguably the most important vote of his career, he was one of only seven Republican senators who voted to impeach Trump following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Ricketts cuts a rather different figure: he’s one of the richest senators, with a net worth valued at over $200 million. He’s part owner of a major league baseball team; his father founded TD Ameritrade. It’s probably not hard to paint him as out of touch when Nebraskans are battling price shocks at the pump and stubborn inflation more broadly.

I wrote about Dan Osborn back in 2024. A Navy veteran, an Army Guardsman, and an industrial mechanic, he became something a national figure in 2021 when he led a strike at Kellogg’s Omaha plant. His Senate campaigns have emphasized economic issues with a fairly progressive bent – raising the federal minimum wage, lowering taxes for small businesses, breaking up monopolies – while also staking out more conservative ground on immigration and border security. One of his 2024 ads noted that “if Trump needs help building the wall, well, I’m pretty handy.” Less than prescient, perhaps, was Osborn noting that he’s “where President Trump is on corruption.” But whether I like it or not, the offer in Nebraska cannot simply be standard fare Democratic rhetoric – if the idea is to win, he has to mix it up. Osborn is the de facto choice for Nebraska’s Democratic voters, but still creates enough separation to draw crossover votes in a place where there is no path to statewide victory without them. He came remarkably close last time, and certainly won’t catch anyone sleeping this year: that said, he’s also getting to try again when Republicans are faring quite poorly compared to 2024. Osborn has released internal polls showing him tied or ahead, but there is no public polling in this race. Deduct the “penalty” for internal polls and dock a few more points for independents, whose results rarely live up the promise of their polling…but not as many in Osborn’s case, because we have proof of concept from 2024. My guess is that sometime in September we’ll see a public poll showing a close race, and potentially shift this rating one step in Osborn’s direction. But let’s see it first.
Rating: Likely Rep (hold)

Ohio: With J.D. Vance’s ascension to the vice presidency, Ohio governor Mike DeWine was tasked with making an appointment to fill the Senate seat to which Vance was elected in 2022. DeWine chose Jon Husted, who has held a variety of elected offices in Ohio since 2000: state representative (including two terms as Speaker), state senator, Secretary of State and Lieutenant Governor. That’s an unbroken run made possible by Husted’s political chops, yes, but also by good timing (2010 and 2014 were excellent years for a Republican to seek statewide office in Ohio) and by Ohio’s steady reddening since the Obama years. The DeWine/Husted ticket held on amid the Democratic wave in 2018 even as Sherrod Brown was winning re-election to his U.S. Senate seat; it was the first time since the 1970s that Ohio elected a governor and senator from different parties in the same election.

How much of that was down to Husted, the second name on the ticket? Probably not much, as LG candidates tend not to be a factor…but we’ll get a clearer picture in this year’s special election to finish out Vance’s term. Husted will have top billing among the state’s federal races this year and will face a familiar name in Brown, the former three-term inhabitant of Ohio’s other seat. Brown’s political career includes some of the same posts previously held by Husted: he started out in the Ohio House of Representatives in 1974 and was elected Secretary of State in 1982. Brown was elected to Rust Belt Ohio’s 13th Congressional District in 1992 and defeated the aforementioned DeWine to flip a Senate seat in the Democratic wave year of 2006. Re-elected with relative ease though not landslide margins in the favorable years of 2012 and 2018, Brown finally faced real trouble in 2024 when Trump was carrying the Buckeye state by eleven points. Brown substantially overperformed against car dealership magnate Bernie Moreno – but still lost by a little under four points. This year’s special election gives him a comeback opportunity in a friendlier year, and raises an interesting question: are Ohioans still interested in the labor-focused message that Brown set forth for decades, or do they simply not buy that the Democratic Party remains in touch with those ideals? Another question: first elected at age 22, Brown is by definition a career politician – but does the 59-year old Husted count as sufficiently “fresh” when he has held elective office since he was 33?

Brown posted back-to-back 8-point leads in the June and August Fox News (Beacon Research/Shaw & Co.) polls along with a 4-point lead in the less-reputable Wedgewood survey last month. The last NYT/Siena poll – which has poured colder water on Dem fortunes in the Midwest this year – found Husted ahead three points in June. Simply shifting the electorate eight or nine points to the left from the 2024 presidential contest – as the nationwide generic ballot suggests – is not enough for here; Brown needs to do even more. But if we’re comparing to his 2024 performance as the baseline, then the national shift suffices. At the moment, we only have one high-quality pollster (Fox, albeit twice) showing a lead for Brown, so I’m not convinced that Ohio has moved quite that much or that Brown is exceeding his 2024 benchmark…yet. I’ll be transparent, though: the moment NYT/Siena records a Brown lead, I’ll make a shift.
Rating: Tilt Rep (hold)